Broken (28 page)

He takes out the magazine and dumps it on the concrete and then loads another.

Amos walks toward the tree James is hiding behind.

James fires a wild shot without even looking and hits a nearby building. Amos keeps walking.

James bolts from the tree and scurries over the deck of the pool as Amos unleashes another barrage of fire. This time he hits
James somewhere in the legs as James trips and falls against the patio outside the hotel. He hears James curse and let out
a gasp and then sees him aim the gun at him again and fires.

James’ gun is empty.

Amos finishes off the other magazine that does more damage to the ground and the wall and glass behind James than him. James
gets to his knees and then bolts toward a shredded window of the hotel, pouncing into it shoulder first with a loud crack
and burst of glass.

Amos slips in another magazine and follows James.

He stops over the empty gun that James was using, carefully approaching the gaping hole of jagged glass, glancing inside to
see James running toward a back door.

The MP9 gurgles to life and rips the plaster and the chairs and tables inside the dimly lit room.

Amos breaks off glass with his boot, then crawls through the opening just as he sees a door open and shut.

He fires off another barrage and empties out the submachine gun.

He straps it over his back and then takes out the Smith and Wesson and heads toward the door.

He approaches it slowly, carefully.

•   •   •

Laila runs into the middle of the street wanting to be hit by a car but none are around.

She twirls around and sees the world spinning and she looks upward and then back down. Her hands are covered in blood.

Lex’s blood.

Her brother’s blood mixed with Kyle’s blood.

She knows this is her fault.

That everybody is here because of her.

She wants to let out a scream but she can’t.

She starts to run down the street to try and find a dark, deserted, desolate hole where she can crawl inside and rot away.

Laila wonders why she was let out of the trunk.

Why she was led to the hotel.

Why everything led to this when the outcome turned out this way.

A voice whispers to her that it’s penance. It’s her atonement for what she’s done to herself and to others.

For the helpless life she took that didn’t have a choice or a voice or any clue what she was doing.

This is the punishment for her sins—this is what she gets.

Laila topples over a man and then bolts down an alley between two towering old buildings.

Running toward darkness.

Running toward death.

•   •   •

James knows this wound is a little different than the last.

This one is on his thigh.

The blood is spewing out faster.

The wound feels deeper.

But it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter anymore.

James is a dead man, just like his brother, just like the girl and the idiots that followed her.

This is the way it ends.

This is the way life ends.

But there’s one thing he needs to do.

And if it gets him killed, so what? He’s already dead. He’s been dead for too long.

He’s going to go out with a bang, one way or another.

He knows this for an absolute fact.

Miracles do exist. Because he’s holding one. And chances are he will die holding it.

•   •   •

Amos walks down the hallway toward the lobby of the hotel. In his hands is the heavy revolver that can level any moving thing
coming at him. He gets to the entryway and sees someone approaching from a doorway that leads to the desk. He aims the gun
at the woman and shoos her away, ignoring her gasp as she trips to get out of there. There’s no sign of James. James escaped
into the night.

But Amos knows he’ll find him.

There’s no reason to go back home if he doesn’t take care of the business at hand.

There’s enough damage in this city that he has to tie up loose ends.

First James. Then he’ll deal with the girl.

A thought scratches at him as he walks toward the doorway of the hotel.

How did she get out?

He wants to rub it away, but he can’t.

He knows there’s no way she could have called anybody. No way she could have figured a way out of that trunk. He’s tried that
before himself. There was no way that anybody was around. And even if someone had come around, they couldn’t have gotten it
open so quickly. He had locked the doors.

Amos doesn’t believe in ghosts and guardian angels. He believes in the power of a gun in his hand, the power of fear in the
eyes of a stranger, the power of knowing how to be sensible in the most intense situations.

He steps out on the sidewalk.

There stands the shadow of what looks like a ghost under the glow of the street lamp directly across from him.

Not a hellish creature but rather the outline of a young boy. A boy wearing a cap and holding a backpack over his shoulder.

The boy just looks at him. The revolver in Amos’ hand doesn’t make the boy run away or seem afraid.

Rather, the look on the boy’s face is one of sadness.

Then Amos hears footsteps and turns.

It’s over before he can comprehend it.

Yet he sees it all in slow motion.

James striding toward him deliberately, shoving the revolver against the left side of his chest.

James grits his teeth as he fires two shots.

As Amos falls down to the sidewalk he sees James’ face leering over him.

Amos can’t control his body or his actions anymore, and his head turns to the side facing the street across from him.

The boy stands, watching. Then he looks down the street and starts walking the other way. Not running like most kids would
do, but walking.

•   •   •

Laila leans against a wet, dark wall in a hollowed out alleyway in a shell of a city that used to be. The ghost of New Orleans
that might never come back. A ghost of a woman that will never come back. She puts her arms around her legs, and she shivers
and then finally cries. She cries tears that have been building up for centuries it seems, tears that couldn’t even recognize
her, tears that don’t know how good it feels to finally be released.

She cries and shivers and just wants to die.

She wants this whole nightmare to be over.

The nightmare that started so long ago.

She was young and alone and frightened and there was nothing
she could do or say or think and this wretched life let her down. It wasn’t just family or friends or herself. It was all
of them but ultimately it was her heavenly Father, the one spoken about so often and the one dreamt about and the one considered,
that ultimately let her down. In a hotel room somewhere in the middle of nowhere she was desecrated and left to die. Not die
there but slowly die during the course of another decade.

Laila has tried. She’s done it her way, but her way is over.

Her way is not enough.

She knows there is no hope for her. Not now. Not like this.

She’s too full to ever be set free.

The tears come, and she cries into her hands. Hands that have done evil things. Hands that have allowed evil to be done.

She thinks of this journey. This journey into hell. Perhaps she’s already in hell, and all this will be played out over and
over and over again.

She coughs. Tears wrap themselves over her lips.

Laila thinks of him.

She knows him and she’s dreamt of him and she’s felt him.

Every day since Laila let him go, she has thought of him.

And though she was never told, she knows. She knows the child who would have been a boy who could have been a man. A man who
could have cured cancer or saved the world or perhaps simply loved her the way any child might love his mother.

A little precious life that she took.

She has thought about him over and over and over again, and she can’t undo it.

She will never be able to bring him back.

And the hurt rushes over her like a waterfall.

Laila wants to bleed out the pain and let it go.

She wants to fill that hole inside her.

She wants to go back to the moment where he was created. A mistake, yes. But she wants to go back and change it.

Not change him, but change her choice.

Laila wants to go back and let him breathe. Let him belong.

Let him be.

As she weeps, Laila’s voice says repeatedly a word that is so unfamiliar and so stupid.

“Sorry.”

She wishes the word could be heard. That the word could matter.

As she thinks this, Laila feels something against her back.

Something that feels like a hand.

She feels a soft touch. Then she feels an arm around her back and her shoulders.

Laila opens her eyes, and even in the darkness, she can see.

The small arms of the boy are wrapped around her.

She sees his dark hair just like hers coming out of the sides and the back of his cap.

“It’s okay,” he says.

Laila looks into his face and she winces in fear of seeing those cold black eyes but instead they open with warmth.

She stares into his eyes and she finally sees them and God are they beautiful. They feel like—they feel a way she cannot describe.
They feel—

They feel like home.

There are tears in his eyes too.

She reaches out because she knows this is not a dream. The mother reaches out and touches his cheek and wipes away the tears.

Then the son reaches over and kisses her on the forehead, and he smiles.

It breaks her heart.

•   •   •

But it also fills that hole.

The hat of his father’s favorite football team still on his head.

The backpack still over his shoulder.

He smiles and nods, and then the boy stands and walks away out of the alley and onto the street.

Laila knows that he was real. He was real, and she saw him.

She knows now that he’s in a better place.

All along he’s been watching out for her. He’s been guiding her. He’s been trying to simply let her know that it’s okay.

Spoken in the way a ten-year-old boy might say, “I love you, and I forgive you.”

All by saying it’s okay.

•   •   •

The group gathers in front of the hotel, and he passes them and asks several if they’ve seen her. He describes her, and one
older man says he saw her running down the street and nearly bowled him over and that maybe she’s somewhere down there. He
leaves the group behind and knows that police will be coming soon.

He finds the alley and knows. For some reason he just knows that she’s gone down it.

It’s there that he finds her.

Laila’s eyes are swollen and glistening.

With one hand clamped against his wound, trying to stop the bleeding, he calls out her name. His legs give out, and the alley
starts swirling around him.

He glances up and sees her staring down at him, and he smiles knowing she’s alive.

Sometimes I wonder what she’s like, that bright-eyed fifteen-year-old with the world ahead of her. So trusting. So giving.
Living and loving like it was as easy as breathing.

I wish I could go back and warn her.

I wish I could go back and tell her.

I wish… I wish for many things.

But most of all I wish that I was still her, that I saw with those same eyes, that I cared with that same heart.

Something died that night in the hotel room with the three boys.

It was hope.

And God, if You’re really up there, then maybe You can help me find it again. That smile, that sweetness, that soul.

That little girl that You let go away. That You didn’t save. That You didn’t look out for.

That little girl You allowed everything to be taken away from.

S
o this is how it ends.

Not with the sudden crack of a gunshot or the surprise of a deadly wound but on the side of the road like some helpless heap
of an animal.

James gets out of the car that’s run out of gas and slides his leg along as he stares off at the plains.

He thinks he’s close to the border of New Mexico but isn’t sure. There is nothing around him. Just the empty sky and the empty
field and this empty dirt road he got off trying to be safe.

Things never turn out the way they should. Not for anybody.

His shoulder aches from the gunshot wound he got in the hotel when Laila got away. His leg is useless, so numb in pain that
it almost doesn’t count. But it’s the seeping mess on his side that he knows is the problem. One of the random bullets the
crazed commando back there stuck him with. Initially James didn’t even think it went in him. But the bullet did a little more
than graze him. And it’s that wound that’s the worst.

He turns around and sees nobody. Not a soul. He knows that with the way the wound is bleeding, even with the shirt pressed
against it, he’s going to die.

He’s been driving at least ten hours or more, having gotten gas a couple of times. He doesn’t have any money, but that’s okay
because he knows he won’t need money where he’s going.

James hobbles up to a fence and then leans against the wood holding up the barbed wire. He grimaces as he finds the wadded-up
smokes in his pocket, and he lights one. He takes a drag and sees everything in the calm light of day.

He wonders where Connor is. If this is indeed all they have.

He’s not afraid. In a sense, he’s glad it’s all over.

Life is a mighty damn waste because nobody really gets what they want. The world beats you down and eventually buries you.
And no matter where you end up—in a plot next to your family or in a memorial in DC or a hole in Texas—it’s all the same thing,
isn’t it?

James looks up to the sky and wonders if this is all there is.

Because if it’s not and there’s more, he won’t have a word to say in his defense.

He loved his brother but that’s not enough.