Page 84 of Tiny's Testament
For a single stunned heartbeat, I stare. Shock rooting me in place, but survival hits faster.
Everything inside me lunges forward. I shove the door open, using my shoulder to force it wide enough to crawl through.Jagged metal slices my arm, but the pain barely registers. Every second counts.
“Help me, please!” the girl in the next cage cries, reaching through the bars.
I push to her side, gripping the warped lock. The frame is bent from gunfire, loose enough that I can brace my foot and tear the weakened metal. It groans, resists, then snaps with a sharp metallic crack. She collapses into my arms, sobbing, shaking so hard I can feel her bones rattle.
“It’s okay, move with me,” I tell her, steady even as adrenaline floods my veins. “We’re getting out.”
Gunfire erupts again, closer this time. Heavy rounds are shaking dust from the beams overhead. Bullets chew into the walls, sending showers of debris across the cages.
“Don’t leave us!” another woman screams.
“I’m not,” I promise, crawling to her lock. “Stay low, keep your head down.”
The lock is rusted, but desperation gives me strength I didn’t know I had. I wedge my fingers inside the gap, ignoring the burn as metal scrapes my knuckles raw, and yank until the latch breaks free. She crawls out, clutching my shirt like a lifeline.
Smoke thickens around us as the building groans from the impact of bullets and bodies colliding somewhere beyond the corridor. A window explodes high in the wall above us, glass raining down in glittering shards. They patter across my shoulders and arms, cutting through skin with a sting that barely slows me.
I guide the first woman forward. “Follow the wall. Crawl if you have to.”
The others move in a trembling line behind me as I break open one cage after another, sometimes with brute force, sometimes with desperate leverage. Each freed woman crawls forward, another body moving toward the door.
The hallway ahead is chaos. Sirens wailing in the distance, the thud of boots running, the metallic clang of men crashing into each other. Smoke swirls through the beams of emergency lights flickering overhead. The air tastes like metal and burning wires, every breath scraping my throat raw.
“Go!” I shout. “Stay under the gunfire, keep moving!”
I scoop Peanut under my shirt and crawl into the hall. Glass slices into my knees and palms with each movement, hot little bursts of pain across my skin. My hand slips in blood, and I hit the ground hard before forcing myself forward again. The floor shakes beneath me.
Then a roar breaks through the storm. A voice not near, but not far, shouts through the gunfire. “TINY! She’s not here!”
Boots pound against the concrete.
Another voice answers, deeper, rawer, one I've heard in nightmares and daydreams and all the moments in between. “WHERE THE FUCK IS SHE?!”
My breath catches. My elbows buckle, dropping me against the broken floor. Tears sting my eyes, not fear, but overwhelming, aching relief.
And then, my name echoes through the air. “SYVANNAH!” Tiny’s voice crashes through the hallway like a promise.
Gunfire answers him, bullets tearing into the walls.
I crawl faster, ignoring the glass embedding in my skin. My lungs burn, my vision blurs, but Tiny’s voice draws me like a lifeline through the smoke.
“BABY GIRL!” he roars, the words loud enough to shake something loose inside me. “HOLD ON! I’M COMING!”
I choke on a sob, hauling myself toward the faint rectangle of light at the far end of the corridor. The exit, the world outside, the place where engines scream and war waits for me.
“I’m here,” I gasp, voice breaking. “Tiny… I’m right here.”
I push to my feet, almost falling again, but I catch myself on the wall, dragging my body toward the chaos, toward the roar of the RBMC tearing this place apart.
Toward him.
20
TINY
We slow only when the shelter looms ahead of us, our bikes rumbling beneath our bodies like barely restrained beasts. Capone lifts a fist, signaling us into a loose half-circle along the tree line. Engines idle low but hungry, heat curling off exhaust pipes and turning the night thick with gasoline.
