Ann followed the sheriff’s orders and ran to check on Chad. He didn’t appear to be bleeding anywhere that she could tell. But his face and hands were pale and he was cold to the touch. She noticed deep bruises around his neck. When he’d heard her voice he’d looked up and smiled weakly.
“Can you walk?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where do you hurt?”
“All over…”
She lifted his arm and flung it over her shoulder and helped him to his feet. His legs were wobbly.
“I don’t know about this.”
“You’re going to have to try and help me Chad. We don’t have a lot of time.”
“Where are we going?”
“There’s a boat down below. It still has a little gas left in it.”
“But the sheriff is here.”
“I don’t think we can count on anything.”
Cyclops watched as the sheriff seemed to expand and contract with each wave of pain, the barrel of the.45 still leveled at his face. He noticed the dogs sniffing hungrily at the sheriff’s legs. The blood that had soaked through his pants now trickled across his boots.
He still hadn’t lain on the ground as the sheriff had ordered. He’d seen something in the sheriff’s eyes that gave him hope that he wouldn’t have to. It was obvious the sheriff was teetering on the edge consciousness.
The dogs raised their heads and whined. As loud and piercing as a railcar crying against steel and causing his ears to ring. He looked down and saw their human faces superimposed like bloodless masks. Men and women whose lives he’d taken. Some deserving and others just unlucky.
Many would want to argue with him at first, especially the traitors. They’d say they didn’t deserve what had happened to them, that it was someone else he should have killed. And at first he would argue back, list each offense that may have conveniently slipped their minds, and this seemed to quiet most of them.
It was the others that he felt bad about, the ones the dogs had forced him to claim. They hadn’t deserved the knife, and every time he saw them his heart would ache with guilt until after the years the guilt lifted and he accepted what he had done and what he would do to others in the future.
The sheriff seemed lost in a daze. Each time he closed his eyes Cyclops took a step closer until Cyclops snatched the gun from his hand and whipped him across the face with it until he dropped to the ground.
“You can have him if you want,” Cyclops told the dogs.
He checked the chamber to see if the gun was loaded. It was not.