Chapter 15 - Blood and Old Timber
The crimson glare of the road flare cast giant, monstrous shadows against the barn walls. Richard was standing by the cracked hood of the truck, holding the sputtering fire inches away from a pool of ruptured transmission fluid and straw. His face was gaunt, his prison-issue jumpsuit torn and soiled, but his eyes burned with the same tyrannical madness that had compelled him to strike me across the face in front of one hundred and eighteen people.
"You think you're safe up there, little girl?" Richard snarled, his lips curling back over stained teeth. "You think Donald loved you? Donald left this land to you to humiliate me! He despised me because I knew the only thing that matters in this world is control! And you're just like your mother—weak, sentimental, and worthless!"
"Don't speak about my mother!" I yelled back, stepping forward despite Ellis’s outstretched arm, the fury rising from the deepest corner of my soul, drowning out the fear that had kept me captive for twenty-six years. "You starved her of happiness, Richard! You bled Donald dry with your fraudulent loans, and you raised Bridget to be a parasite just like you!"
"Esther, get down!" Ellis roared.
Kyle suddenly charged up the lower wooden treads, swinging a heavy iron tire iron in one hand and brandishing a snub-nosed revolver in the other. He wasn’t aiming; he was swinging blindly in a drug-fueled, panicked fury, desperate to get to the lockbox he believed held the fortune that would fund their flight across the border.
"Give me the keys, Esther!" Kyle shrieked, his face covered in sweat and cuts from the truck’s windshield.
Before he could reach the middle landing, Ellis stepped into the opening. He didn't hesitate. He leveled the shotgun not at Kyle's chest, but directly into the wooden riser two inches beneath Kyle's lead foot.
*BOOM!*
The roar inside the enclosed barn was deafening. The oak step disintegrated into jagged shrapnel. Kyle screamed as the wooden splinters tore through his jeans and calf, his center of gravity collapsing instantly. He tumbled backward, bouncing down the steep wooden steps with violent, sickening thuds, landing heavily on the hard-packed gravel of the ground aisle, the revolver flying from his grip and clattering under an old hay baler.
"Kyle!" Bridget shrieked, rushing toward him.
"You shoot my boy, you hillbilly?" Richard barked, raising the guard's stolen semi-automatic pistol toward the loft.
Before Richard could pull the trigger, the road flare in his left hand slipped as he adjusted his grip. It fell directly into the dry straw pile soaked in leaking motor oil.
A wall of yellow-orange flame roared to life instantly, whooshing upward with terrifying speed, licking the heavy cedar beams of the lower ceiling.
"Fire! The truck's gonna blow!" Kyle wailed, clutching his bleeding leg, dragging himself across the floor like a wounded animal.
The smoke thickened into a black, choking curtain within seconds. The lower barn became an inferno of snapping heat and blinding smoke. The smell of burning creosote and vintage wood made my eyes water violently.
"Esther, the back window! The silo chute!" Ellis yelled over the roaring flames, coughing hard as smoke poured through the loft opening. "The stairs are cut off! We have to drop through the hay hatch into the snowbank!"
"Bridget!" I screamed through the smoke, looking down into the pit of fire.
Despite everything—the humiliation, the theft, the lies, the attempts on our lives—I looked down and saw my sister standing paralyzed in the center of the burning aisle. Richard was scrambling alone toward the smashed barn door, entirely unconcerned with his daughter or Kyle, thinking only of saving his own skin.
May you like
"Bridget, run!" I shouted through the smoke. "The gas tank is ruptured!"
Bridget looked up through the haze, her mascara running in black rivers down her pale cheeks. For the first time in her life, the illusion of her father's protection vanished. Richard pushed through the broken door into the night air without looking back once. He left her there to burn.
