Page 55 of A Very Happy Thanksgiving
“I sure hope so.”
They’d both changed, but she’d changed more. When he stood and stared—because none of this felt real, did it?—she put a hand on her hip and glared right back.
“What did you want me to do? Invite him in to murder me and kidnap you? Was being abducted once already this week not enough?”
Phae scooped up Katie and draped her limp body over her shoulders, somehow managing to keep her gun hand free. Damn, Katie had to weigh as much as Phae did.
“Uh, do you want me to carry?—”
“Hush.”
Phae moved across the doorway, surveying a sliver of their exit route with each step, a tactic Booker had called “slicing the pie” when he’d been alive. Not that Booker had used it to avoid mortal danger. No, he used it to check the coast was clear after they smoked joints in the old barn. Rex Roebuck would’ve tanned both their hides if he’d caught them with drugs.
“Cover us,” Phae instructed.
“Huh?”
She raised her gun hand and pointed to her ear, and only then did Marc notice the clear earpiece nestled inside it.
“Stay close behind me. Do not deviate. Do not ask stupid questions, and do not fucking fall. Got it?”
Was she crazy? Yup, she was definitely crazy. But Marc had little choice other than to follow, his heart hammering, the noise deafening as they sprinted the short distance from the shed to the forest’s edge. Marc was eighty percent sure Phae shot more than one person on the way. He saw a body fall, but no way was he stopping to investigate, not when he risked a bullet between his eyes or worse, Phae’s ire for ignoring her instructions.
Marc stayed in her shadow until she dumped Katie in leafy detritus behind a sturdy tree trunk and took up a defensive position. At least, that’s what the former Navy SEAL who’d coached him for his last big movie role had called it.
“You okay?” Phae asked, still icy cool. As if this were all in a day’s work for her.
“Define ‘okay.’”
Marc’s breathing was ragged as he gasped for air, and he was six steps from a coronary. Was Katie still alive? He knelt to check, but his hands were shaking so much he couldn’t find a pulse, even if there was one.
“Are you physically uninjured?” Phae clarified.
“I think so.”
“You think? Can you make sure?”
Adrenaline pumped as Marc glanced at his body. Yes, there was blood, but it didn’t seem to be his. Where had it come from? Katie? A cut on her arm oozed scarlet, but that was a good sign, right? If she weren’t alive, she wouldn’t be bleeding.
Phae checked her magazine and then loaded a spare, still eerily calm. In a break in the gunfire, Marc heard groans drifting through the trees, a chorus of men singing their swansong.
“Can we leave now?” he asked. “They’re incapacitated, right?”
Injured, dying, waiting to meet their maker. Incapacitated.
“They’re regrouping.”
A chill ran through him.
“What? How do you know that?”
“We have a drone.”
“Then we have to get out of here right now. Before they come at us again.”
“There are too many of them, and they know the terrain.”
“So what do we do now? Tell me we have a plan?”
