Page 46 of Hideaway Whirlwind (Big Boys of Berenson Trucking #4)

“Birdie!” Elliott yells, unbearably distraught, and I stop just out of reach of Mom’s knife that’s poised to strike.

I’m fully prepared for it when Elliott loops a burly arm around me from behind between my breasts and belly to yank me back while the other men creep closer, yelling at Mom to drop her knife to no avail.

“It’s time to finish this,” Elliott says, his palm gliding lower to rest over our baby.

“Yes.” I tip my head back, and he drops a kiss on my lips. “I’ve decided,” I say. Those river rocks at Mom’s feet have given me an idea.

“Will it hurt, Mama?”

The tiny nicks on my bottom lip sting when I smile. Yes, it will . I turn that smile on my mom. “Put the rocks in your apron pockets, Mezzarx. As many as you can fit.”

Her mouth gapes open like a fish—how fitting—when she stammers out, “W-Why?”

I roll my eyes. “So you’ll sink to the bottom of the creek and drown, duh.”

Terror-stricken but trying not to show it, she says, “I demand—”

“Child abusers don’t get to demand shit,” Paul shouts, shooting the ground near her feet, the buckshot pitting the earth .

I clutch my ribs, laughing when she screams and dances a jig, closer to the creek.

Elliott is at my back when we move to the pile of rocks.

“Go on, Mezzarx,” I say, picking one up and pelting her with it, making her duck and yelp, covering her head.

“You’ve spent the, what, last twelve years dreaming of the day you’d die and get to fight for Zeraxy?

Your husband is supposedly up there, too, right?

Aren’t you excited to see him again?” I throw another rock, harder this time, and she bows when it strikes her side.

“You’re evil! Infected by the evil of the Gonarfans! You all are!” she screams, twisting to run away, only for Trace to yell at her to back the fuck up!

“Seriously? Do you not hear how insane you sound?” I throw another stone, my voice growing harder as my humor fades.

“If I’m evil, then you made me this way when you chose some lunatic and his fucking fairy tales over me.

Forced me to get married when I was fourteen!

How could a mother do that?” She parts her chapped, bloodless lips to no doubt spew more of her science fiction bullshit, but I cut her off.

“A vile, hateful bitch who doesn’t give one shit about her own flesh and blood. I could never do that to my kids.”

“They are not yours! They are Zeraxy’s!” Mom screams before her hacking coughs take over again, her eyes now bulging out of her head in such a grotesque manner that nausea churns my stomach.

I kick the remaining rocks toward her with the side of my foot. “They are mine! I’d kill for them. I already have. But you would have killed me , wouldn’t you, if Pazcart or the leaders had told you to?” My stepfather’s name rolls off my tongue like moldy slime, wretched and foul.

When I finally managed to kill Guxxer, I was set to become my stepfather’s fifth wife.

Really, I couldn’t have planned it any better myself, gaining unsupervised access to Sydney and copious amounts of evidence within his much larger, concrete block house so I could grab my sister and run the night before the marriage ceremony.

“Now, chop chop,” I say, motioning to the rocks. “We don’t have all night.”

Mom’s eyes flash, and I don’t know if it’s my imagination or not that I see a tiny flicker of doubt or guilt. But then she blinks twice and wheezes out, “Zeraxy will choose when it is my time to die, not you.”

“Wrong.” I lift my gun and hold her gaze. “Put them in your pockets or you’ll go to Zeraxy without your fucking head attached!”

When she begins to tremble uncontrollably, swaying worse than before with her blood loss, and raises her colorless hands to the sky to chant a bastardized prayer of protection, I shoot.

It’s not a direct shot, but I’m sure she felt the wind as the slug whizzed past her ear.

Elliott is a good teacher . I mentally pat him on the back.

“Not so sure you want to join Pazcart anymore, are you?” I ask. “Are you scared it was all a lie, Mezzarx?”

“No,” she says with more conviction than she probably has. She looks behind her at the creek that we’ve all been slowly backing her toward, her hand shaking when she bends to pick up the first rock, hesitating to drop it in her pocket, still gripping that knife of hers.

I laugh. “What about now? Afraid your little galaxy isn’t real?”

“No!” She drops the rock inside her apron with contempt, then picks up another. “I’ll join my husband and be rewarded.”

“You really are a special kind of gullible, aren’t you?” I nod to another rock.

“I see the truth. You will rot in the ground while I—”

“Oh, shut up.” I fire another slug over her opposite shoulder.

Three down, three more to go before I’ll have to reload, though I doubt we’ll get that far, since that cough of hers tells me she’s already knocking at death’s door.

When her pockets are full, the ties digging into her hips with the weight, I tell her, “Now jump.”

Her nostrils flare, and she raises her weak arms again, squinting to see the stars through the canopy of trees and thunderstorm clouds, searching for her make-believe galaxy as she begins shuffling backward.

Storm and I move with her, the men silent as they form a firing squad at my sides.

Mom falters at the swollen, marshy edge of the creek bank, still clinging to the last shred of her galactic brainwashing.

It’s all she has at this point. When Storm barks and lunges to nip at Mom’s ankles, Mom leaps back with a frightened, hoarse cry, and over the edge she goes.

I reveled in the death of Guxxer, Quincy, and even Priscilla when I found out.

But my mother? She’s the worst of them all.

She started me on this path. Wasted what remained of her life in servitude to the worst of mankind.

Turned from the mother she had been when I was a child into this cruel, pathetic shell of a human.

Or was the caring mother of my childhood simply a mask she wore, like Quincy, waiting to be shed?

Is this who she’d always been at her core—the kind of mother who would eagerly justify abusing her own daughters time and again?

And for what? To be the third wife of a disgusting, fanatic pig?

I spit toward her as she flails, gasping for air and choking on muddy water while kicking her feet.

She was never a strong swimmer, and with her muscles atrophied from malnutrition and whatever illness she carries, it doesn’t take long for her energy to deplete.

I smile so hard and wide that my cheeks ache when none of the men go to her rescue like I thought maybe, just maybe, they would with their strict—if not a little unconventional—moral codes.

But it’s like Paul said, child abusers don’t get a pass, and my abuser is too panicked to think to pull the rocks out of her pockets or untie her apron so that she will bob to the surface.

I smile all the more, counting to sixty when she finally fully slips under the water, then start over.

For every year I was forced to live in that cult, I count.

Then I scream, scrambling back, falling into Elliott’s arms when a lightning bolt strikes a fat, old pine tree not ten feet from us, splitting the trunk in half, the smoking branches toppling into the water.

Right. On. Top. Of. Her. I laugh as I rise, then again when she floats to the top, face up in the water, her eyes unseeing, mouth open on an endless, soundless scream, her hair catching on a smaller branch, her pockets empty.

When I can catch my breath, I spit toward her again. “Guess you stopped believing in the end. No reward for you, Mezzarx.”

“This is so fudged up,” Russell says from my left, shifting on his feet as he stares at the water, his gun hanging limply at his side.

“Then why didn’t you stop me?” I ask, cutting him a look. Not that I would have let him .

He shucks the water off his face. “She hurt our family. No one gets away with hurting our family.” Then, almost as if he fears being rejected, he hesitantly claps Elliott twice on his shoulder.

When Elliott doesn’t roll his joint to dislodge Russell’s hand, Russell pulls him into a hug, and the brothers beat each other’s backs, murmuring something to each other that the rest of us can’t hear.

Storm licks my hand when I uncurl my talons and drop my gun.

She spins a circle and sits before me as if on guard in case Mezzarx should rise from the dead, and I scratch her behind the ears.

“Good girl, Storm.” She really is the goodest good girl in the whole wide real world.

She wags her tail, splashing more mud across my feet.

I suck in a breath when a small hand slips into mine on the right, then another on my left, Dustin and Sydney standing wet but calm beside me, each with a puppy at their heels. I study them from the corners of my eyes, their faces stoic, and I squeeze their hands.

Perhaps there is a grain of truth to what Mom said. The evil that has infected me. Am I not infecting my children? Nurturing that same evil within them?

“I love you, Mommy,” Sydney says, tipping her head against my arm, water dripping from the ends of her braids.

“Me too,” says Dustin, turning and putting his arms around me.

Kendall squeals from behind, and when I turn sharply to find her in Cora’s arms on the deck, my sweet little girl claps her hands with delight like we’re playing a game.

Fuck it. Serial killer or not, I’m still a better mother than the crazy bitch who raised me .

Elliott

The relentless buzzing and static I’ve fought for decades is curiously absent as Birdie and I hold hands, our bodies aching and filthy, taking a moment of silence after we finish tamping down the dirt over her mother’s grave.

I was the one who fished the body out of the water, but Birdie is the one who picked her final burial site, right in the center of where we plan to start building the race track as soon as the ground dries out.

Mezzarx’s spirit, if she has one, will never know a moment’s peace.

“Do you feel that?” Birdie asks with a whisper, squeezing my hand that’s gone blistered and raw from the hard work of digging out the dense, waterlogged soil.

“Feel what?”

“The calm. It’s so quiet in here.” She taps her temple.

“Yeah, I do.” I take a deep breath, the rain abated, the land cleansed of what happened tonight.

“I think…I think it’s over. We really found it this time.”

“Found what?”

She turns into my chest, resting her chin on my upper abdomen as she looks up. “Freedom.”

“We did,” I say, carefully cupping her cheeks, smearing a little blood across her soft skin.

“You too?”

I nod, kissing her softly when she rolls up onto her tiptoes.

“I can’t wait to marry you. Just the five of us in a private ceremony.”

“Six,” I say, pushing a hand between us to palm her baby bump beneath her soggy flannel. “What about the reception?”

She smiles. “I was thinking maybe we could have a do-over of the welcome party since the first one didn’t turn out so well.”

I slide my hands down to her thighs, marking her skin with more of my blood, and lift her. “I can think of at least one thing that turned out well that night.”

Though her eyes are hooded with desire in the early dawn light, I start hiking toward the cabin, both of us keen to be home with our babies and clean the filth of this night from our skin and minds before settling back into bed, renewed. We’ll save having sex on the grave for another night.