The Big Blue Sky: Chapter Two-Twenty-eight

The girls were down quickly, dressed in jeans and tennis shoes. Coats and blankets were bundled in their arms. Dana cradled an old Alf stuffed animal that had once been Jane’s. Doug took very little. He had his cell phone, a bank ATM and credit card and a single business card he’d kept since that blustery October day at ground zero. Doug took one last look around the house before ushering the girls out the back door. He paused momentarily to consider the pistol one last time before turning away leaving it behind. No doubt he would be considered a fugitive, but the last thing he wished to be considered was armed and dangerous.

They could hear the sirens approaching, out past the low curve of the two lane road. Doug swung Jane’s silver Honda Civic out of the driveway, spitting gravel. Running without lights, he pushed the gas pedal towards the floor. He could see the flashing blue lights splashed across the dark canyon of tall pine. The girls held each other in the back, watching as the lights faded before being swallowed by the night as Doug raced away in the opposite direction.

He hated to think what this might do to the girls. After all they had been through, it wasn’t right they should suffer this too. He cursed Fallahi and the men who brought their violence into his home. Someone would have to pay for that. But now they were running. They were running for their lives, ripped from the peace and privacy of their mourning. Doug fought to keep his rage from getting the better of him. He gripped the wheel until he felt the blood leave his knuckles and did all he could to keep the girls see that he was all but coming apart inside. He turned onto a muddy old logging road, nearly overgrown with grass. It was all Doug could do to stay focused and not pass out again. That he was being tracked through the deep and dark Michigan forest was simply not a consideration at the moment.

Still, Doug felt safe here. He knew these roads well. He’d hunted these forests as a boy, and hiked them a hundred times with Jane and the girls. This is where he came to escape the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the undeclared Pakistani Civil War and the Intifada in Gaza and the West bank. He knew where the roads softened under bubbling springs and where they were rutted the worst. He knew by heart the twists and sharp turns, where they doubled back, where they ran to dead ends, or where they crossed hidden creeks and cut through all but impassable thickets.

In the back Dana and Megan were quiet. They were smart and level-headed girls. Jane had given them the foundations to become competent women. Doug would have liked to take some credit, but felt he had spent too much time away. They were fully aware of the gravity of the situation, and came to it with a maturity Doug was awe by.

He worried, though. He worried what all this would mean to them. He worried about the scars it might leave. Foremost in his mind was the thought that every mistake he made through all of this would be magnified immeasurably in their young psyches. For now his primary concern was in keeping them safe until he could properly sort this all out. Just how he would accomplish that was still open to debate.

Winning the debate at that moment was his injury, which wasn’t critical, but serious enough that he just wanted to close his eyes and be done with the pain thundering in his head. Since leaving the house Doug was holding onto consciousness by threads. Rounding a narrow bend, limbs and branches scraping the car loudly, and skidding along a muddy decline, Doug could feel that tenuous hold slipping away. He pulled off the road into a small. Grassy clearing, and with the last ounce of strength remaining looked back at the girls.

“Sorry,” he said, “ but I have to pass out for a while.”