Nowhere to Run

The air in the abandoned bait shop, usually thick with the ghosts of stale minnows and forgotten fishing tales, now crackled with a different kind of tension. It was the kind that made the hairs on your arms stand up and your stomach clench into a knot tighter than any angler’s line. Maya, her heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird, peered through a grimy pane of glass, her breath fogging the already opaque view. Outside, the world had gone from the hushed quiet of a Mississippi dusk to a symphony of chaos.

“They’re here,” she whispered, her voice barely audible above the rising wail of sirens. “Both of them.”

Caleb, his knuckles white where he gripped the splintered edge of a counter, didn’t need her to tell him. The guttural roar of engines, punctuated by the sharp bark of orders he couldn’t quite make out, was enough. He saw the flashing red and blue lights painting the peeling paint of the shop, turning the familiar decay into a strobe-lit nightmare. Silas Thorne’s men, no doubt, moving with the predatory grace of wolves, and Sheriff Brody’s deputies, a more lumbering, but no less determined, pack of hounds. They were a pincer, closing in, and Maya and Caleb were the trapped prey.