The Runaways

Chapter 17

Caleb

You get to thinking when you think you’re gonna die.

Free falling down through the floorboards, I prayed that maybe at the end of things, if this fall happened to split me open, whoever found me would see that I wasn’t like any of my brothers on the inside. Sure, all the blood and everything would be the same, but my head and heart wouldn’t be.

Maybe it’d turn out that I wasn't as messed up or crazy as they said I was, just running by a different set of rules, my rules, and there was nothing was wrong with that.

Ma used to tell me that the most important thing to a man was knowing he wasn’t broken. I believed in that almost as much as I did in her.

When she died, banked on the bad and put my money on things always going wrong. After tonight, bad was all I’d ever believe in—things going from wrong to worse, and from worse to unthinkable.

Everything hurt. Everything. The hollow quiet hung heavier in the air than the diseased smell of dead rats. I blinked through the blackness and waited on a change, but there was nothing to see, nothing but darkness.

Something soft moved around in the rotten hay under my back. Didn't feel like a body but lots of little ones scrambling for their lives. They weren't too different than I was, slipping through the cracks blind and afraid of everything.

The guys upstairs were still searching for us. Every other second, four or five sets of footsteps would clomp against the floor overhead. We must’ve fallen a good ways down ‘cause even the cops sounded far away.

But it wouldn’t take them long to figure out where we’d disappeared to. I needed to stop thinking and start moving before the suits found their way down to the two of us.

I slid my hands over the hay and waited to find another body nearby. I didn’t even know where Hailey’d ended up or if she'd still be breathing when I got to her. I held my breath hoping she would be, ‘cause I’d lost just about everything else.

Maybe Marcus had made out of his fight with Liam alright. They’d gone at it before, but this time felt different. Liam was different. He used to respect Marcus too much to hurt him like he did me.

Maybe he still did. Maybe the cops stepped in before things got bad between them. Marcus would cooperate if they asked him to. He was smart enough to know when to surrender.

Liam always looked for a fight, so I if they shot him dead I’d understand it. But Icouldn’t understand why Cillian had to take the fall out of the four of us. He died ‘cause of me.

If I hadn’t started shit with Marcus in the cold room, none of would’ve been standing in the line of fire. It should’ve been me. I wished it had been, ‘cause I didn’t wanna keep living with his blood on my hands.

I jabbed my fist into the bad side of my ribs, and a fiery familiar pain came roaring back to distract me from thinking too much about what I’d done. I called out for Hailey, hoping no one else would hear my voice.

Stumbling around blind had me feeling small again, weaker and slower than I had any other day in my life. But I wanted to come through on something, I wanted to find her and get her home, ‘cause keeping that promise was the last thing I had to live for.

But how do you keep a promise if the person you made it to dies? I remembered her eyes, her panic, her fear. I couldn’t get the sight of her out of my head, not from the first time I saw her or the last.

She’d turned whiter than paste and fell right out of my sight, like a ghost. What if that was all she was to me now? I held my breath while my fingers grazed across the rotten damp floor, and hoped I wouldn’t find hers cold and lifeless somewhere in the black.