The Tempest by A.J. Scudiere (story read aloud .txt) 📗

Then the old man moved ever so slightly, turning his torso toward Jerry. “I'm sorry, man. They've got my daughter.”

Fuckballs. This wasn't an issue of Paul being an asshole. It was a hostage situation on top of another hostage situation. The phone buzzed, and Paul put it back to his ear. “No! I'm not sending them out. Not until you send my daughter in.”

Joule thought she heard something from the other end of the line, but it didn’t matter. It was too late and the barn doors were creaking loudly as they slid open.

A woman stumbled in, dropping onto her hands and knees as if pushed. “Sorry, Daddy,” she said softly.

Joule wanted to look at her, but she knew it was far more important to keep her eyes on the barn doors. If she could see someone, then she might have an idea what they were up against. But no one showed their face through the slim opening. Instead, they began the process of shoving the heavy door closed.

Did it even mater? She’d never seen the Larkins’ faces. In fact, she didn't even know if they were actually the Larkins. She’d just assumed Jerry had no reason to lie about that.

As the woman began to get up off of her hands and knees, the barn door tapped shut. Joule heard the click of a lock and the sound of a chain dragging along metal.

She would have run to the door, because she was pretty certain they were getting bolted in, but the shotgun kept her in place. She turned back to the man wielding it and registered the expression on Paul's face.

He'd begun to move to hug his daughter, but stopped cold, fear painting every muscle. There were four of them in the barn now, Paul still loosely holding the shotgun on Jerry and Joule. But now he stood still, looked around, and seemed confused.

If Joule had heard right, Paul had offered to trade her and Jerry for his daughter. But instead of trading, whoever it was had simply shoved the daughter inside. That couldn’t be good.

There were murmured words outside, and Joule wished she could hear, but all she could get was the tone—and the tone wasn’t good. Beside her, Jerry stood still, seeming to be equally frozen by the strange and sudden twists of their circumstance. In her hands, Toto remained curled in a tight little ball.

She wasn’t fast enough to outrun a blast from the shotgun. But Paul wasn’t holding it steadily anymore. His eyes flicked to the side, clearly confused about what had changed. Like her, he seemed to want to know what was happening on the other side of the door.

Joule took that moment to be grateful that she had picked up a kitten and not a puppy. She tipped her hand, quickly tossing Toto to the side and knowing he would land on his tiny feet.

She was maybe four good steps away from Paul, and it still seemed too far. As she began to move, she wondered if it would work. It was supposed to. The martial arts classes she taken as a kid hadn't taught her how to do this, but she'd spent enough time watching the black belts practice disarming assailants. She knew the moves, even if she’d never reached a belt level where they had let her practice them. This one wasn’t from muscle memory, it was all brain.

It took forever to cross the short space. Paul's head whipped back and he saw her coming, the barrel of the shotgun lifting and aiming as he did. Only then did she remember a crucial piece. It wasn't just that she had to act the opposite of what was expected—rushing her opponent rather than walking away—she also had to get out of the line of fire.

She dropped low, making it harder to move. It felt like the world was running in slow motion as she maneuvered below the end of the gun and slapped her hands together into a V-shape. Literally under the gun now, and almost barreling into Paul’s torso, she shifted and burst upward, pushing at the gun in his hands in a hopefully unexpected way.

In the perfect scenario, this would allow her to grab the gun, yank it away and turn it on him. In her mind, she whacked him upside the head with the butt of the weapon, dropping him cold and giving herself some much needed satisfaction.

But it didn't quite work out that way.

She didn't think she'd ever seen the moves performed with a shotgun instead of a handgun or maybe a knife. Apparently, all the martial artists were convinced they would be in hand fights, and not caught in the middle of drug running rings with shotgun-wielding farmers.

Still, she managed to catch Paul’s wrists with her movement, and that burst of power aimed the gun upward. The old man was maybe better at this than she was, because she fully expected the retort of gunfire in response to her attack and he managed to refrain from pulling the trigger in either anger or surprise.

“What in the blazes!” he muttered like the old coot that he was: a farmer who, despite offering a hostage trade to drug runners and being double-crossed and attacked by the stowaway in his barn, still wouldn't quite swear.

Joule had the shotgun barrel in her hands, but Paul's hands were also still clenched tightly on the weapon. She was trying to figure out if she should pull or shove when she felt the hit.

60

“Look!” Cage called out, his excitement ratcheting up another notch.

They’d come across another arrow at the side of the road. After crossing the stream and climbing up the other side, they’d found mud tracks left by someone who’d come through a relatively short while before. Cage was still convinced it was Joule’s footsteps he was following.

Another arrow, with another faint JM carved into the back of it, let him know he was