Cole sighed.

Stella could see Trevor creeping up right behind Jose, but she wouldn’t give him away.

“I’m not helping you,” Stella went on, trying to distract Jose from Trevor sneaking up behind him. “Not until you stop pointing your guns at me and threatening us.”

Trevor aimed his gun at the back of Jose’s head, the barrel touching his head. “She’s right,” he told Jose. “Lower your gun.”

“What the fuck, man?” Jose said, and a nervous laugh escaped him. “You’re going to shoot me over this woman?”

“And that kid,” Trevor said. “You heard Cole. We’re not going to kill anyone else. Especially not a woman and a child.”

“But they know something.”

“I don’t care.”

Jose sighed and dropped his gun hand. He shoved his gun into the waistband of his pants, and then he walked away. He shook his head as he stared at Cole and Trevor. “You guys are making a big mistake.”

“We’re going to wait here for the next four hours and see what happens,” Trevor told Jose, his eyes dead on him, his gun still in his hand. “We’re going to call their bluff, just like we all agreed.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Five hours later the afternoon shadows grew longer, stretching across the snow as the sun dipped lower behind the trees.

Inside the cabin, Trevor sat at the dining room table with another hand of solitaire laid out in front of him. His gun was close by, and he was ready to grab it if he needed to.

Everyone was tense as they waited.

Needles looked even more nervous now that their four hours were up. He glanced over at the two metal cases of money on the fireplace hearth like he was ready to grab them and bolt for the door, throw them outside in the hopes that it wasn’t too late. But he didn’t get out of his recliner. He just looked at the front door, and then he looked back down at the rug on the floor. The rug was colorful, full of patterns that seemed to change shape after a while. The more Needles stared at the colors and patterns, the more they seemed to change and move, morphing into something unworldly.

Jose paced from the living room to the kitchen, then back to the living room again. He couldn’t sit still. He looked at Cole who sat at the dining room table with his brother, another cup of coffee in front of Cole.

“What’s our plan now?” Jose asked Cole.

“We sit tight for a little bit,” Cole answered. “See what they do next.”

“It’s been longer than four hours,” Jose reminded him. “Frank said we had four hours, and it’s been longer than four hours. Nothing’s happened. Nobody’s coming for us.”

Cole sipped his coffee.

“We gotta do something soon,” Jose continued. “It’s going to be dark in a few hours. Then we’ll have to stay another night.”

Cole still didn’t answer.

“I don’t want to stay in this place another night. We should do something. Go out there and look around. Try and find these motherfuckers out there.”

Cole glanced at Jose. “Just keep watching out the window.”

Jose shook his head and walked into the living room. He gave Stella and David a sneer as he walked over to one of the windows near the front door. He pulled the curtain aside and peeked out the window. “Nothing going on out there,” he said more to himself than to anyone else.

Trevor stood up and stretched. “I gotta take a whiz,” he let everyone know.

“Check the rooms back there,” Cole told him.

“I just checked them an hour ago. All the windows are locked. Back door’s locked.”

“Check them again.”

Trevor entered the first bedroom down the hall – the guest bedroom. He walked around the bed to the window. He parted the curtains and peeked outside. Nothing. No sign of Frank or anyone else out there. He checked the window. Still locked. He let the curtains fall back in place.

He left the bedroom and walked down the hall, his boots thumped on the wood floor. He checked the back door. Still locked. He entered Tom Gordon’s room and checked the two windows in the bedroom – both still locked. He peeked outside at the snowy field that stretched out in all directions from the cabin. He stared at the line of trees in the distance that surrounded the fields like a wall of woods in every direction. The woods had grown darker with the quickly approaching night, but he could still make out the individual trees, and he still didn’t see any movement anywhere outside.

Trevor left Tom Gordon’s bedroom and walked across the hall and entered the bathroom. He closed the door and walked to the toilet at the other end of the room, the toilet was just under the small bathroom window on the far wall. He took his gun out from the waistband of his pants and laid it on the toilet tank lid; the gun made a loud clinking sound on the ceramic lid when he set it there. He was about to unzip his pants, but something out of the corner of his eye demanded his attention; there was something moving outside the bathroom window in the snow.

He stared out the window, his body frozen in shock. His muscles all sagged at once, like all of the energy had drained out of his body. His bladder let go and the urine ran down his leg inside of his pants. He wanted to scream, but he didn’t seem to have any breath inside of his lungs to do so. He just stared out the window, trying to understand what he saw, trying to understand how this could be possible. His mouth moved as he tried to speak, as he tried to scream. “I … I don’t understand …” were the only words he could utter in a whisper.

Cole sat at the dining room table, the cup of coffee still right in front of him. He had consumed so much coffee throughout the day that there was no way he was going to be able to sleep tonight; he was going to make sure of it. But he had a feeling that at some time during the night, he was going to drift off to sleep without realizing it. It seemed like no matter how much each one of them tried to stay awake, no matter who was on watch, at some point in the long night, they would all fall asleep. Like we’re being put to sleep, his mind whispered. But he didn’t want to think of where that thought came from. What could put them to sleep whenever it wanted to?

Cole glanced over at Trevor’s playing cards spread out all over the dining room table. Then he looked at Jose who leaned against the kitchen counter, still anxious, still unable to sit still for very long. “Trevor’s been in the bathroom for a while,” Cole said.

“Maybe he had to take a shit,” Jose answered.

Cole looked at Stella who sat beside David on the couch as he drew in his notebook. It seemed like David had already gone through nearly half of the pages in the notebook, drawing at a furious pace. Cole figured it was a way the kid dealt with what was going on. It couldn’t be easy on a little kid like that to be held captive in a cabin in the middle of nowhere. And coming from whatever they were running from, from wherever they had been, whatever Stella was hiding from the rest of them, had to have taken a toll on him as well.

Cole’s thoughts were interrupted when David jumped to his feet quickly; the notebook fell out of his hands, open to a page on the wood floor at his feet. He stared at the front door like something was frightening him.

Stella had nearly dozed off when David jumped to his feet. She tried to take every opportunity to nap when she could so she could try and stay awake at night, or at least sleep as lightly as she could.

But she snapped awake when David stood up. She could hear his rapid breathing even before she looked at him, it sounded like he was having a panic attack, struggling for breath. She had seen this happen to him before at the dig site. He stared at the front door.

Something was outside. It had finally come for them.

“What’s wrong with that kid?” Stella heard Needles ask from his chair that he always sat in; the recliner – his talisman of safety that he curled up in, a place where he could rub his crucifix and pray to his God that he would be safe. But Stella didn’t think God was going to listen to Needles this time – they were all on their own.