The World Never Ended novel · Chapter 16 of 24

Chapter 16: The Gate

"That's Dean," Audra said behind me, from the doorway. "He's early."

Shane took one look down the hall and moved.

"Out the side," he said. "The yard. Now."

We ran, me with a child on each arm, down the long corridor and through the fire door at the end.

The night air hit my face, cold and clean.

The yard of the compound was a flat square of gravel inside a high fence, with the gate at the far end.

The van had stopped just inside it.

Its headlights lit the whole yard white.

Two men got out of the front, and a third man climbed down from the back.

The third man wore a camel coat.

"Cora," Dean said pleasantly, across forty feet of gravel. "You're not supposed to be here."

"Neither are you," I said.

Shane stepped forward and put himself between us.

I felt the baby's small breath on my neck, and my daughter's fist in my hair.

"I'm going to be quick," Dean said. "The police are twenty minutes behind me on the county road. I passed their lights."

"Then you have twenty minutes to be arrested."

"I have ten to leave."

He came a few steps closer.

"Give me our daughter, Cora, and I'll let you keep the baby."

"Our daughter."

"Yes."

"You don't get to say that."

"I can say what I like. I've said it for five years."

He smiled at that, because it was true.

I looked up at the corner of the gate.

There had always been a camera over it, in the old days, with a red light.

I looked now, because I looked at every room I stood in.

The lens was black, and the red light was dark.

"Cora," Shane said, very low, without turning. "It's off. I took them all down when I got the drives."

"So nobody is watching."

"No one."

I understood what he meant.

If Dean had a gate with a camera, he would have played it for the crowd.

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