A beam sliced past my shoulder.
“Stop!”
We ignored it.
Then came the crack of a gunshot.
The bullet hit wood somewhere to my left with a vicious smack.
Everything in me went cold.
“They’re shooting!” Cody yelled.
“Keep moving!”
We broke through laurel into denser pine where the ground was clearer underfoot. My chest felt like it was on fire. Behind us, the voices spread apart. One man angling right. One left. Trying to flank.
I grabbed Cody’s arm and pulled him downslope into a narrow gully choked with ferns and boulders. We crouched under an overhang of roots while flashlight beams swept above us.
A man crashed through brush ten yards away. Close enough that I could smell cigarette smoke when the wind shifted.
“They can’t be far,” he muttered.
Another voice answered from uphill. “Find them.”
The man with the cigarette moved on.
We stayed locked in that hole in the mountain for what felt like an hour and was probably ten minutes. Rain began again, soft at first, then heavier. It swallowed sound. Washed tracks. Turned the forest into moving black water.
Finally the voices drifted downhill.
Then farther.
Then gone.
Cody leaned his head back against the dirt wall and laughed once, a broken, disbelieving sound.
“Did they really just shoot at us?”
“Yeah.”
He wiped rain off his face. “Okay. So we’re officially past trespassing.”
We waited another fifteen minutes before circling back through the upper woods, moving wide around the clearing. From the ridge we could see Vernon Pike’s truck gone. The other vehicle too. No lights. No voices.
The cabin looked dark and wounded.
We stayed in the trees until dawn.
When we finally came down, the damage was worse than I’d feared. The front door hung off one hinge. Our packs had been dumped out. Mattresses slashed. Dishes broken. The little cash from my wallet gone. They’d tried to pry up floorboards but hadn’t found the cabin hatch.
Behind the smokehouse, the outer cellar door stood open.
We rushed down.
Shelves were half-emptied. The first-aid kit gone. Lanterns gone. Two sacks of rice and most of the tools missing. But the documents and money from the lower tract cellar—everything important—we had already moved.
Cody looked around at the mess and slammed his fist into a beam hard enough to skin his knuckles.
“Cowards.”
“Easy.”
“No, not easy.” He turned on me, eyes blazing. “We can’t just sit up here and wait for them to come back. Next time they’ll bring more men. Or matches.”
He was right. I knew it before he finished talking.
We had proof now—at least in the plain sense. Pike’s people had broken in, threatened us, shot at us. But proof in the legal sense? That was trickier. Mountain counties had a way of blurring facts when money was involved, and Vernon Pike clearly had money.
“We go to the sheriff,” I said.
Cody stared at me. “You believe the sheriff’s gonna help?”
“No. I believe I want to see his face when I say Pike’s name.”
That afternoon we drove into Laurel Fork in Grandpa’s truck, bruised, tired, and smelling like wet leaves and fear.
Laurel Fork wasn’t much of a town. A gas station, a feed store, a diner with sun-faded Coca-Cola signs, a church, and a sheriff’s office in a brick building that looked older than the county itself. Everybody seemed to know everybody, which was bad news for people like us.
Inside the sheriff’s office, a middle-aged deputy with a buzz cut looked us over like he was deciding whether we were drunks or troublemakers.
“Can I help you?”
“Some men broke into our cabin last night,” I said. “On Hale land up on the north ridge.”
His expression changed slightly at the name. “Hale land?”
“Walter Hale’s place.”
He leaned back. “Thought that tract was abandoned.”
“It isn’t.”
He took his time pulling out a report form. “What’d they take?”
I listed it. Then I told him about the gunshot.
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