Chapter 5 - Ghosts of Pine Ridge
"We can't outrun a Motorola," Roger muttered to himself, watching the flashing lights in his mirrors. "They'll have a roadblock set up in ten miles."
He needed to disappear.
He looked at the GPS. They were only thirty miles outside of Pine Ridge.
Home.
The house he had abandoned five years ago. The house where Helen had died. It sat on twenty acres of dense, private timberland at the end of a forgotten dirt road. Nobody went up there. Not even the mailman anymore.
Roger took a hard, reckless turn onto a gravel logging road. The massive truck kicked up a blinding cloud of dust and rocks, temporarily blinding the pursuing cruiser. Roger killed his headlights, plunging the rig into the dim morning shadows of the dense forest.
He navigated by memory, weaving the massive truck through narrow, overgrown trails that were meant for pickup trucks, not eighteen-wheelers. Branches scraped against the metal like agonizing screams.
After twenty minutes of intense, heart-stopping maneuvering, the trees parted.
There it was.
The old farmhouse. The paint was peeling. The porch sagged. The front yard was a jungle of overgrown weeds. It looked like a graveyard.
Roger killed the engine. The sudden silence was deafening.
He climbed into the back and opened the compartment. The family spilled out, gasping for fresh air.
"Where are we?" Elena asked, looking out the window at the desolate, decaying house.
"Safe harbor," Roger said, his voice thick with unspent emotion. "Grab Arthur. We're going inside."
Roger unlocked the front door. The air inside was stale, smelling of dust and dried lavender—Helen’s favorite. The house was exactly as he had left it. Her coffee cup was still in the sink. Her gardening gloves were still on the table.
For five years, stepping into this house had felt like stepping into a tomb. The silence had always crushed him.
But as Elena rushed Arthur to the sofa, as little Leo ran his hand along the dusty banister, and as Mia cried softly for water, the silence shattered.
The house wasn't a tomb anymore. It was a fortress.
Elena immediately went to work. She boiled water on the old wood-burning stove. She crushed the fever reducers and mixed them with water for Mia. She cleaned Arthur’s wound with the rubbing alcohol, binding it tightly.
Roger stood in the kitchen, watching them.
Leo walked up to him and tugged on his jeans. "Is this your house, Mr. Malloy?"
"Yeah, kid," Roger said softly. "It is."
"It's sad," Leo observed with the brutal honesty of a child. "But it feels better now. Because we're here."
Roger looked at the sink. For five years, he couldn't touch Helen's coffee cup. It was a monument to his failure to be there when she died.
Slowly, Roger walked over to the sink. He turned on the old faucet. He picked up the ceramic mug, ran it under the water, and washed it clean.
He felt a strange, profound warmth spread through his chest. It wasn't grief. It was Helen. She wasn't haunting him anymore. She was smiling.
But the peace was short-lived.
Arthur suddenly gasped from the living room, pulling a burner phone from his jacket pocket. It was vibrating.
"Arthur, no!" Elena screamed. "You turned it on?!"
"I had to text my brother to tell him we were alive," Arthur sobbed. "I just turned it on for a second!"
Roger’s blood ran cold.
The Vargas syndicate had state-of-the-art tech. If a burner phone connected to a cell tower for even three seconds, they could triangulate the GPS coordinates within a mile.
Roger looked out the dusty window, down the long, winding dirt road that led to the property.
May you like
They were coming.
---
