Page 75 of Born to be Wilder

A beat of pure stillness.

BANG!

The first shot didn’t sound like a movie blank. To my ears, it sounded like a heavy-caliber crack echoing through a jungle canopy.

BANG! BANG!

The sharp screams I heard weren’t the extras playing their parts. They were memories long forgotten and now rushing back to the surface again. Before I even realized my boots were moving, the world went into a tunnel.

“Get down!” The words ripped out of me without thought.

I didn’t decide to move... I just moved, wheeling toward the widows, both arms out, and I shoved.

Hard.

Sylvie hit the wall of the general store. Doris went sideways into Sylvie. Alice, who was on my left and caught the force of it at a bad angle, stumbled—one heel catching the edge of the boardwalk—and pitched forward, tumbling off the step and into the dirt street.

I launched myself off the boardwalk after her without a thought.

I came down on top of her, both arms around her. I rolled to take the impact and ended with Alice beneath me and my body between her and the street and whatever was coming, my cheek pressed to the dirt, every nerve I had standing at full attention.

“Stay down! Don’t move!” I ground out, my body a shield above her.

Around us, the other extras screamed and scattered exactly as they were supposed to. I barely heard anything.

Just the ringing…

The familiar, awful ringing that lived in a part of my brain I kept locked and didn’t visit.

My entire world narrowed to Alice’s body under mine. And the absolute certainty that nothing was getting through me to her.

“CUT!”

The ringing faded. The set came back. Crew members were moving fast toward us, and Toby was already closing the distance with the expression of a man who was going to string me up the way I’d imagined Buck had strung up many bad men.

I looked down at Alice, blinking as I regained my senses, trying to discern exactly why I was lying on top of her in the middle of a dirt street.

“Marge,” Alice said slowly.

“Yeah?”

“You’re on top of me.”

“Yeah.”

“In the street.”

“Yeah.”

“Get. Off.”

I rolled sideways and sat up in the dirt, kneeling beside her. She rolled onto her stomach and pushed herself up onto her elbows, her burgundy dress streaked with dust, her hair—for possibly the first time in the years I’d known her—genuinely askew.

Toby arrived at a full jog and stopped above us, breathing hard, red eyes bulging. “Townswoman Number Fourteen! What… was… that?”

I opened my mouth.

And for one honest, unguarded second—with the dirt still in my teeth and that ringing still fading from the back of my skull—I didn’t know which version of Marge had pinned Alice to the ground.