“What?” they asked in unison.
“You said that you wanted to load the buses and take the kids somewhere safe? Well, if you could use five very well-armed bodyguards, consider us part of your team.”
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED
THE NORTHERN LEVEES
FAYETTE COUNTY
Jake DeGroot realized that he couldn’t hide in a wet hole all night.
They might find him.
The soldiers. And the …
He had no word for the other things. Things like the girls. Like his friends. Like Burl.
Just because they hadn’t found him so far didn’t meant they wouldn’t.
Or couldn’t.
He had no real idea what they could or couldn’t do.
He had to move. To get out of the hole.
Before that.
And before he froze to death.
Jake knew that it wasn’t really cold enough for that, but the water was cold enough to numb him. He remembered seeing something about hypothermia on an old episode of Survivorman. His teeth chattered constantly, shivers swept over him in waves, and he didn’t like the way his heart was beating. No, he didn’t like that one bit. He was a big man, and the last thing he needed now was a heart attack. Or slow feet because his
nerves were in some kind of shock.
But leaving the pit … That was so scary. It made his balls want to climb up inside his body. It made him want to cry. Or scream.
Or go to sleep.
That was the other problem.
Between working hard all day yesterday and last night, and then lying here for hours in the cold, he was getting weirdly drowsy. He kept nodding off and then jerking awake when his face fell into the water.
“Got to get out of here.”
He didn’t know he was going to say it out loud until he’d said it. His voice sounded ridiculously loud and very strange. There was a sharp note of panic in his voice. A whine that was almost a sob.
He didn’t like that, either.
“I’m losing my shit here,” he told himself, trying to make his voice sound normal and reasonable. It didn’t.
The rain was heavy, relentless. The ditch was so completely filled that the whole area was becoming a small lake.
“You’re going to drown here, you dumb fuck.”
There was anger in his voice now. That was better.
Better.
Even so it took Jake another three minutes to will his right arm to rise out of the water. Not because it was so numb with cold—which it was—but because he was numb with terror. There was no light except what flashed across the sky, and all that showed him was water, mud, and the bodies left behind by the soldiers.