Free The Hole by Aaron Ross Powell Page B

of his face and hair dirty and sticky, came towards him, hand held out. Elliot shifted the shovel, tightening his grip, and prepared himself to kill this man.
    Who said, “Thank God we found you. Are you okay?”
    Elliot blinked. The crazies didn’t speak English.
    “ Are you okay?” the man said again when Elliot didn’t respond.
    Elliot shook his head, slowly.
    “You’re hurt? Where?” The man took a step closer, looking Elliot over, but Elliot lifted the shovel. “No, wait, no,” the man said, backing up. “It’s okay, we’re here to help.”
    Elliot didn’t believe him, not really, and so he kept ready to attack, to fight whatever it was this guy and his friends tried to do.
    “Look,” the man said, hands up, “we came here to get you, to help you. Do you understand?”
    Elliot nodded.
    The man continued, “You’re lucky we found you. These people, they’d have hurt you or worse. We’ve seen them before and that’s what they do: they’re mean and evil. But you’re safe now.”
    Elliot, still shaking and still not willing to trust anyone, asked the question that’d plagued him since he’d first climbed out of the overturned truck. “Where’s Evajean?” he said. “Where’s Evajean Rhodes?”

22
    The man looked over his shoulder at an older fellow who’d come up behind him. This latter farmer, dressed in the same simple but well tended style-though his shirt was torn and his left leg sported a painful gash-had a look of leadership about him. His weathered face, deeply lined and leather dark, wouldn’t have been out of place staring from a Depression era photo of sharecroppers. He nodded at the younger man, who continued.
    “She’s fine,” he said. “She’s being taken care of. Evajean got some scrapes and bruises, and she sprained her wrist in the accident, but she’s doing just fine.”
    Elliot did start to cry then, dropping the shovel and falling to his knees, heels of his hands pressed into his eyes. She was safe. That’s all he needed to hear, to know everything that’d happened in the hours since the truck hit the boy and he’d come awake upside down at the bottom of the hill hadn’t been wasted effort. Nothing he’d done had helped her, not if these people were telling the truth, but he didn’t care. She was safe.
    “The dog’s okay, too,” the man said, and laughed. “In case you were wondering.”
    Elliot smiled and coughed on his tears. “I was,” he said. “Thank you.”
    “Oh, nothing to it.” And the young man turned again to the elder and they conferred in whispers while Elliot got to his feet and leaned the shovel against the cave wall.
    “We should be leaving now,” the man said and put his hand on Elliot’s forearm. “It’s safer back in town than out here. We’ve seen a lot of these things.” He nudged the corpse of a crazy with his boot. “There’s probably more out there and we’ve lost men.” This last he said not with the cracking emotion Elliot expected but matter-of-factly, like a coach admitting his team was down twenty-one points at the half.
    “Okay,” Elliot said. “Okay, we should go. Where?”
    “Nahom.” He grinned. “Our slice of heaven on earth.”
    With that, the men began gathering their dead, while the wounded were tended to and patched enough to make the journey back to the town. The crazies had killed four of their number, a fortunately small amount, Elliot saw, as his rescuers waded around the nearly two dozen corpses they were responsible for.
    “You’ve fought them before?” Elliot asked the older man, who’d remained stationary throughout the preparations, arms crossed behind his back. The response to this question was a curt nod and no eye contact and Elliot nodded himself before walking to the mouth of the cave and looking out at the night.
    The dense stars and full moon shown white light over the tiny valley. Men dragged corpses into piles while some, armed with torches, set the bodies on fire. Thick smoke