Page 5 of Hideaway Whirlwind
Elliott
My mind is a mess of static, brief bouts of hysteria bursting through in bright red plumes as I hustle down the stairs and away from the complex, holding the toddler on one arm, curled into my chest. I don’t have to worry about us keeping to the shadows, what with all the street lights having been shot out.
“Left,” I bark to Teagan when we reach the metal fence.
They race toward my rig parked in the lot of an abandoned pawn shop at the end of the street, puffing air loudly, but without complaint, as Teagan urges the kids to run even faster in a desperate, ragged whisper.
I drop the heavy garbage bag on the pot-hole-riddled pavement to open the cab’s passenger door with fingers gone tingly with my rapidly beating heart, which has nothing to do with the exertion of running away. There have been a handful of times when I’ve suffered an adrenaline surge this intense—the first leading to far-reaching consequences I’ve carried like a shroud for over thirty years and have never recovered from. I’ve come close to going over the edge and letting it happen again in recent years, especially where my brother and his wife are concerned, but this is the closest I’ve ever been. If Teagan hadn’t crossed that line in regards to the demon trying to murder her, I’m scared I might have.
No, notmight.Would. I would have done it, but she saved me from it. From myself. Saved me the same way I’ve saved her, only to condemn herself.
She has kids who need her.
No one needs me.
So I’ll bear this for her, and she’ll never have to know.
The little girl in my arms whimpers and struggles to hold onto me when I set her on the cab’s passenger side pleather seat with her teddy bear and throw the garbage bag into the footwell. I turn and heft the boy up, still holding onto his mama’s hand.
“It’s ok, Dustin. Let go,” Teagan says, laboring for breath after their sprint, shuffling her son, who already reaches her sternum at his height, in front of her. He scales the two steep, narrow steps without help, plucking the toddler up. After lifting the older girl into the cab, she pushes Dustin ahead of her between the two front seats into the back sleeping quarters.
Teagan skips two steps away and launches her phone across the pawn shop’s parking lot like a major league pitcher, then smothers a surprised yelp when I lift her straight off the ground and onto the seat.
Without looking directly at her, I tell her, “Get the kids strapped in. I’ll be right back.”
She nods, already twisting out of her seat, even as she asks, “Where are you going?”
I lock and close the door without answering, shutting the four of them safely inside with the thick blackout curtains pulled closed, then jog back to the apartment at a faster clip.
When I return, after locking up the back of the truck and putting the gear in drive, Teagan’s large amber eyes are a brand on my neck. Her unspoken questions are heavy in the air, sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the kids now buckled into their car seats, out of view.
I tune out her bird song as she whispers words of comfort to her kids, diligently sticking to the speed limit as I push through the deserted roads in one of the shittiest areas of Las Vegas, keeping my eyes peeled for any potential threats. A cop up ahead, idling behind a large road sign, has my blood turning to ice. If we were stopped and my truck searched, should anyone who might have been silently watching me from between their blinds call the police, giving them my description, I wouldn’t be able to buy our way out of it like I could at home.
My blood only starts to thaw as the cop car grows smaller in my side mirror and disappears, and Teagan suddenly leans against my seat to lay her hand on my right arm.
“Thank you,” she says in that lyrical voice of hers, “for getting us out.”
I have to swallow twice while forcing my body not to react to her touch before I can say, “You’re welcome.”
Chapter 4
Teagan
In theory, the silver giant might be a man Marigold trusts enough to help us, and so I should be able to trust him, too. But at the end of the day, he’s still a stranger—and a man at that. It means I can’t let my guard down, refusing to let my eyes close for more than a few seconds, no matter how many times they drift shut, my body begging to be laid on the floor with my exhaustion and pounding headache.
The sentiment is echoed in my children, who try their hardest to remain awake, but whose heads bob on their necks in the car seats crudely bolted to the cab’s back wall. They’re no match for the steady motion of the truck luring them to sleep.
Just before dawn breaks, the trucker, whose name I still don’t know and who hasn’t said a word since Vegas, takes an exit off the interstate somewhere in Arizona, winding his way down an old, crumbling highway, and pulls over under a canopy of trees tall enough to conceal his truck. I’m immediately on high alert when he leaves the truck running and ducks to stand over me, blocking the view through thewindshield.
I knew it. I fucking knew it!I knew I couldn’t trust him, and visions of what he could do to me so far away from civilization batter me on the inside. Or he’ll at least try to. He’ll find himself on the wrong end of his shotgun if he does.
But then he says, “Need to wash your hands and patch your face before we get to our next stop. Get rid of your clothes.” His uninterested gaze trails down my hoodie and lands on my sweatpants. “Kids’ clothes, too.”
Taken aback by the revelation that I was wrong about his intentions, I touch my cheek, and my hand comes away with flecks of dried blood where the fight must have reopened the wound. The blood blends with some of Priscilla’s thick makeup on my clothes, leaving too much evidence of our fight behind.
My tension melts, and I would cry if I were ever able to when the bear grabs a brown leather duffel bag and a first aid kit from a compartment hanging from the ceiling above the bed. After retrieving my garbage bag, he turns his massive back, then exits the truck. I don’t know how I’m supposed to wash my hands or face since he doesn’t have a bathroom here, so I follow him to the front.
Wordlessly, he reaches for me like I would Kendall, and he lifts me from the cab with his hands around my ribs to set me on the frozen, hard earth, all while I suppress the shiver that shoots through me at how easily he’s able to maneuver me. It’s unsettling.
