Free Primal by D.A. Serra Page B

Gravel asks his brother.
    “So you and Theo can tie them up.”
    “Tie them up? Let’s just do ‘em and be done.”
    Ben smiles nicely at the group at the table, “See, he’s so
impulsive, ever since he was a little kid.” Then, back to Gravel, Ben explains,
“Currently, they are assets. Humor me. Tie them.” Theo jumps up immediately. He
pulls the table lamp from the wall and snaps apart its cord.
    Kent stops him, “Theo, here.” He holds up a spool of fishing
wire. Theo smiles.
    Alison watches her husband and son get up from their dinner
seats and move toward the game table. Over and over in her mind she hears, this
isn’t happening, this isn’t happening. She watches them all sit together on the
floor.
    Theo and Kent unspool fishing line. Kent kneels down next to
Jimmy who presses back against his dad’s chest.
    Hank tries, “He’s just a kid. You don’t need to tie him.”
    “Yeah? How old are you kid?”
    “Nine.” Jimmy’s voice is barely a whisper.
    To Hank, “What are you raising some kind of wimp for the
world to shit on? When I was his age I’d already killed three dogs, five cats,
and the annoying kid next door.”
    Outside, Alison digs her nails into her head with terrified
bewilderment. Her whole body bursts and shakes. Help. I need help. She turns
around in a frenzy. What to do? What do I do? The instinct to find help engages
and sends her running through the woods. The ground is muddy and hard to
maneuver. She loses her footing, slips, and slides down a small embankment. She
stops, looks ahead, realizes she is only a few feet from the edge of a cliff.
She can barely see it in the darkness. A flash of lightning shows her its
depth. She scoots back from the edge on her ass. Sitting there on the ground
the near miss actually calms her. She talks to herself. Stop. Where are you
going? What are you doing? Focus. Calm. What can I do? Think. Plan. Smart. Be
smart.
    The hostages are corralled uncomfortably in the corner. Theo
has pulled over a chair and sits facing them with his weapon in his lap. Ben is
surrounded by tools. He is taking apart the carburetor. Kent throws some logs
on the fire. Gravel lies on one of the sofas with his feet up. He and Kent are
in the middle of a discussion.
    Gravel says, “It’s dandruff.”
    Kent corrects him, “Doctor said it’s stress induced scalp
flakes.”
    “What kind of stress have you got?”
    “Bein’ your brother mostly.” Kent laughs at himself.
    “It’s dandruff.”
    Theo stands suddenly and walks over to the hostages on the
floor. He looks at them slowly. No one moves. No one breathes. His eyes stop on
Mike. Theo bends down over Mike’s feet. He sizes them up. He unties and
snatches Mike’s shoes. He takes them back to where he was sitting and puts them
on.
    Ben asks, “Is there any music in the glorious rustic
hideaway?”
    “Radio over there.” Hobbs uses his chin to indicate the
bookshelf.
    Ben signals to Gravel who gets up and turns on the radio. He
flips through the dials.
    “I can’t believe there’s no TV here,” Kent says and then to
Ben, “Did you get to watch TV in the pen?”
    “Not too much.” Ben concentrates on the carburetor.
    “We were a Nielson family for a while.”
    “Oh, yeah?”
    “Such a cool feeling. If I didn’t like something, I just cut
it off. Bam! Gone.”
    Gravel is nothing if not impatient. He walks over to Hobbs
who sits on the outside of the circle of hostages, slits the wire around his
hands, and says, “Find something good on this fuckin’ radio!”
    “Hard in a storm like this.” Hobbs gets up and walks over to
the bookshelf. He puts his ear close and slowly starts to move the dial.
    Kent continues, “The Nielson thing was kind of like being on
a jury. You sit there and then if you don’t like the guy, bam, he’s history.”
    “You’ve never been a juror,” Gravel says.
    “They don’t take you if you’ve gone down for a felony. You’d
think they’d be wetting their pants for a