Read Sivene :: No Clean Getaways

I began to squirm and tried to make myself as small as possible. I knew it was my time. “No,” I begged, my mind still foggy from whatever had been used to knock me out. “No, please! Please, I’m not––I don’t want to––please, please, I’m sorry,” I started to sob and my breath left me in huge heaving gasps, but the hands I expected to grab me never came. Instead, the footsteps were interrupted by the sound of a scuffle coming from somewhere toward the entrance of the cavern.

“What is that?” McClinton asked, his voice tinged with fear.

“Dammit, McClinton. I thought you made arrangements to prevent anyone from getting in here,” LeVey said.

“No,” Lilly demanded. “We have to finish. We can’t—”

“There’s no time. Let’s go, now!” LeVey ordered, followed by the sound of shuffling and the heavy creaking of ancient hinges swinging open and closing again.

Down the corridor men were shouting, though their words weren’t discernible. I had never actually prayed before, but I made a solid attempt calling to any benevolent beings in the cosmos that might hear me. “Please let it be Owen!”

A gunshot cracked and echoed against the stone and I jerked at the sudden noise. “Owen?! Owen!” I screamed so loud my throat began to burn.

Three more gunshots sounded, closer this time than the first one. Who was shooting? Who was shot? I was helpless. With my senses dampened I couldn’t do anything but wait for death or salvation to claim me. The shouting changed then to cries of pain, but it wasn’t Owen screaming. The voice I recognized was that of Gerry Priest, the man who had sold me the gun.

“I shoulda known from the smell of rot that you were down here, Priest?!” Owen’s words were sharp and loud. He sounded more sober than I had heard him in weeks. “What the fuck is this?! What are you doing here?”

“Help me, goddammit! Help me! You-you shot me!

“Shut up! Shut the fuck up or I will shoot you again, you son of a bitch.” Owen’s fury was so palpable I could feel it in the reverberations of his words.

“Please, I need a fucking ambulance!” Gerry pleaded. He sounded like he was in excruciating pain.

“Oh, spare me, Priest, you piece of shit! Now talk before I splatter your ass all over this goddamn cave. Who’s down there and what have you done with Kelly?”

“Okay, okay–Christ, O’Connor–!” Priest whimpered. “It was a setup, okay? LeVey was going to m-make me an informant. Give me immunity, freedom to keep doing what I do without the cops up my ass. All I had to do was meet you here. I-I was supposed to shoot you, in self-defense.”

“Fucking coward,” I heard Owen hock something up and spit it out. “Where’s Kelly? Did you kill her too, you piece of filth?” Was that it? You’d kill an innocent woman just so you wouldn’t have to do time for peddling your fucking pills?! And I’d go down for her murder, huh? Was that the plan? You’re going to rot in hell, you bastard.”

I wanted to call out to him, to let him know I was still alive, but I wasn’t sure who might still be in the room with me, so I stayed quite.

“Please! C’mon, you’re a cop! You gotta help me!” Priest pleaded with Owen. “I’m gonna bleed out here! O’Connor, don’t––”

And whatever Gerry Priest didn’t want O’Connor to do, he did. Then there was silence.

But the quiet was broken by the faint sound of police sirens in the distance. Owen must have heard it too. Someone else had opened the door to the basement and I could hear the sound of police shouting, calling for us to come out with our hands up. A single pair of footsteps approached me then and a gentle hand pulled the blindfold away from my eyes.

Owen’s eyes never left mine as he got to work untying the ropes that bound me. “We need to find another way out of here,” he said.

I wanted to throw my arms around him as soon as they were free. It felt so good to be able to see again and to have his face be the first one to greet me.

“Did you see any other exits down here?” Owen asked as he shrugged off his jacket, quickly wrapped it around me, and helped me to my feet. I stood on wobbly legs and leaned into him for a moment to gain my balance. I had never enjoyed the feeling of my body against a man so much in all my life until that moment.

“Maybe. I heard the sound of what I think must’ve been a door opening when the shooting started,” I said.

“Well, we’d better get to finding it quick. Priest’s got some boys waiting outside and they’re bound to storm in here any second. Let’s go.”

Owen led the way, his gun in one hand and a candle in the other as he scoured the room, eventually finding a large wooden door. I could hear the sounds of boots moving closer as Owen opened the heavy door and pulled me through.

We twisted and turned through the underground level until arriving at another stone staircase leading up into an old storage shed behind the meat market. We crawled up through a steel door hatch and crouched low behind several old steel drums and piles of junk. Owen motioned for me to run ahead and take shelter behind some barrels. I moved ahead of him, then hesitated. In spite of all that was happening, I realized that Owen’s jacket wasn’t quite enough to cover my backside as he followed behind me.

“What is it?” he said. “We’ve got to keep moving.”

“It’s just…” I realized how silly it sounded. “Nothing."

“Don’t worry, I promise I won’t look,” he said, but I’m not sure how he couldn’t have seen everything I had to offer down there as we crouched through the storage shed, his nose inches away from my behind.

“Well, what now?” I asked Owen as we sat perched near the door of the shed, peering through a gap in the wooden slats.

“We wait until we see our chance, then we make a run for it,” he said, but just as he finished I slipped back on my heels, knocking over an old rusted shovel which crashed with a clang against the metal drums beside us.

“Damn!” I said.

Owen just sighed and shook his head in disbelief.

Only a few seconds went by before a barrage of bullets began ripping the building. Owen pushed me down onto the ground and dropped down beside me.

Owen steadied himself and did his best to peer outside in search of a clear path to make our escape. Pieces of rotten wood exploded as bullets ripped through the old walls and shattered the windows. Staying low to the ground, Owen crawled quickly over to the small space beneath the empty window pane. He aimed the gun blindly out of the window and began firing. “Kelly, this is your chance. Run!”

I was paralyzed. I couldn’t leave him.

“Kelly,” He growled over his shoulder. “You have to go now!”

“No! Not without you,” I insisted.

He rolled his eyes at me and sank down to reload his gun. “Really? No man left behind, huh?” When he was finished, he sat up just slightly to take a quick look outside. “Oh, fuck.”

“What? What is it?”

“They’re not Priest’s men. They’re cops.”

“Cops? But why are they shooting at us?! “We didn’t do anything!”

Before Owen could answer, a voice called out through a bullhorn, loud and brittle.

“This is Deputy State’s Attorney Jim LeVey!”

He must have escaped, ditched his robes, and joined the police as they arrived on the scene. Now he was in charge and knew where we were hiding.

“I’m here with several dozen members of the Vermont State Police whom you’ve just fire on. This isn’t going to end well. You’ve got one last chance to come out with your hands in the air.”

“Tell them who you are! Tell them you’re a cop so they stop fucking shooting at us.”

“That’s just it. They know who I am, and that I’m not a cop anymore. I slugged LeVey the other day and got myself fired. Now I just shot at cops, so we’re fucked.”

“But I saw what happened, Owen! I’ll be your witness!” I said pleading. “You-you saved me from McClinton and LeVey. We can give ourselves up!”

O’Connor sighed. “Doesn’t matter. Not now. I’m sure I’ve hit at least one of them. They’re going to take us alive now. That’s the way it works. Shoot a cop and you get shot, if you’re lucky.”

The sound of gunfire suddenly tapered off. I was terrified to leave my hiding spot, but I sat up just slightly to see what was happening.

A sudden roar that shook me to my bones filled the air then. It sounded like the growl of an angry lion, but deeper and more terrifying. I couldn’t see what was happening but I had a feeling. That’s when I heard someone scream, “The Hound! It’s the fucking Hound!”

Another volley of gunfire erupted but this time, it wasn’t directed at Owen and I.

“What the fuck,” Owen muttered as he watched the carnage taking place outside the window. “It’s fucking real,” he said, and for a moment he completely forgot that we were under siege. A second later, he came back to his sense. “Okay, now’s our chance. Let’s go!”

“Run away from the scene? Owen, are you crazy?”

“Kelly, did you hear that? Whatever it is you’ve been chasing, it’s here and it’s ripping those guys apart. When it’s finished with them, it’s gonna come for us. And even if they kill it, those guys are so amped up right now, we could throw down our guns, walk out that door waving a white flag, and they would still shoot us both. Do you understand? We have to get out of here. We’ll deal with the consequences later."

I glanced back and forth between Owen and the door a number of times before I finally agreed. I was barefoot and the floor was covered in broken glass, but that was the least of my worries.

“Ready?” Owen said and, with a look that for a second made me think everything was going to be okay, he started counting down. “One, two, three...go!”

I darted out from behind the drums and through the door. Owen let me go ahead of him and we ran into the dark of the unlit street as fast as our legs could take us. I looked back for a split second to see cops scrambling as they tried to find cover from a humongous dog. It was Sivene. I knew it. It had to be. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing or that we were going to make it out of that shed alive. But as we ran a gunshot cut through the air.

I heard Owen cry out and looked back to see him stumble, but he didn’t fall.

“Owen!” I cried out. I stopped and turned to help him.

“No! No, Kelly, keep going!” He screamed at me.

As usual, I ignored him and put his arm around my shoulders. I hobbled with him a few paces, pulling us both into a narrow alley between two buildings. I cringed at every step I took on the bare street.

“My truck...” Owen rasped. He pointed straight ahead. “Behind the diner.”

I guided us as quickly as I could out of the alley to where Owen had parked his truck behind the Cold Hollow Café. It sat alone, the only vehicle in the lot. I looked around before going ahead, but no one had followed. My adrenaline was pumping so hard, I hardly noticed the cold against my nakedness as I crossed the empty lot, opened the passenger’s side door and stuffed Owen inside.

“Keys? Keys!” I nearly yelled at him.

Wincing, he dug into the pocket of his pants and handed me the keys, stained with his blood.

“You’re going to be okay,” I said as we sped away, even though I didn’t believe it.

This content is intended for mature audiences for the following reasons.