Gone: An Emma Caldridge Novella: Part Two of Three Read Online Free PDF Page A

the garage is loaded with guns, ammo, and enough dynamite to blow up this butte and the one a mile away.”
    Emma fired.
    The shot echoed and bounced across the side of the mountain. The man on the hostage’s left jumped backward and yelled something unintelligible. Emma heard the bullet puncture the aluminum-sided garage wall. Both men let go of their victim and sprinted around the garage’s far end. The hostage knelt, bent from the waist and shook his head until the hood loosened and fell off. A yard of light brown hair cascaded down. Emma could just make out the back of a slender neck that was obviously female. The girl sat back on her heels. The dark and distance made it difficult to tell her age, but she appeared to be in her early teens.
    “Great,” Leon said. “Now we’d better get the hell out of here, because if they catch us we’ll be field-dressed and strung up to dry.”
    Emma fired again. This time she aimed at the corner of the garage.
    “Are you crazy, girl? They’re going to come for you,” Leon’s voice held outright panic.
    As Emma rose, she watched the girl in the yard stagger to her feet. She took two running steps toward the wall, only to trip on the gown.
    “I’m going down there, can you cover me?” Emma asked.
    “Hell no. I’m getting out of here,” Leon said. He was pacing back and forth in agitation. Emma watched as the girl in the yard ran to the stone wall at the perimeter in an attempt to flee. Emma couldn’t see how she would scale it with her hands tied behind her back. She’d need help.
    “You that afraid of them?”
    Leon leaned his face into hers. Emma smelled the scent of tobacco and watched him inhale and exhale in quick breaths.
    “Listen to me. They’re fanatics, not above killing and crazy to the bone. They think they own the county, and so far they do, because they rape and kill and traffic humans and the governor does nothing.”
    One of the two men peered from the corner of the garage. Emma took a quick step, aimed and fired again. Bits of something, presumably aluminum, flew off the garage’s edge, and the man jerked his head back. Next to her Leon groaned.
    “I’m going down there,” Emma said. “She’ll never scale the wall alone. You can cover me or not, it’s up to you.”
    The porch lights came on and four men sprinted out of the house toward the stables. They all held rifles, and each one aimed in a different direction as they tried to determine where her shots were originating.
    Emma took off running, heard Leon say, “Oh hell,” and then came the satisfying crack of his rifle. Dirt flew up in front of the first of the four new men.
    He’s a better shot than I am, she thought.
    The men scrambled backwards in a fast and comical reaction to the shotgun. Two split and ran back toward the house, while the other two increased their pace. When they reached the pool cabana, they dove into it.
    During the last fifty feet to the stone wall, Emma lost her line of sight into the yard. She kept in a direction that she thought would bring her to the opposite side of where the girl was headed. Reaching the wall, she was immediately faced with a dilemma: there was no way to scale it.
    Leaning her back against it, she called upward, yelling to the sky, “Girl, are you there? I’m the one holding them off. Can you hear me?”
    “I can’t climb. I’m tied up. Please help me.” The girl’s voice was high, filled with fear, and so childlike that it tore at Emma’s heart. She mentally readjusted her estimate of the girl’s age down to twelve, perhaps eleven.
    “Keep going to the back wall. I’m going to run parallel to you on this side—”
    Emma’s instructions were interrupted by another two sharp reports from Leon.
    She ran down the wall, keeping her hand on it, searching for a hole or divot, anything she could use to gain a foothold and climb. She found it twenty feet later. A large crater dented the wall, beginning about a yard up from the