Chapter 9 Cassie
CASSIE
I was lost. Hopelessly and completely lost.
I had absolutely no idea where I was under Blackwell Falls, and I had to fight a rising tide of panic that I’d be left wandering down here forever.
On the plus side, I’d managed to evade the voices I’d heard in the tunnels, and I stopped running to catch my breath, scanning the sides of the tunnel for more water, nothing but the sound of my footsteps on the dirt floor and the distant, ever-present drip of water.
I wasn’t cold anymore, but I was pretty sure I stunk. My damp clothes stuck to my skin and I was starting to fantasize about stripping, just to have the cloying fabric of my T-shirt and jeans off my body.
If it hadn’t been for the fact that I was lost and sticky, I wouldn’t have minded being in the tunnels. The truth was, I was used to being alone, something that probably would have surprised anyone who knew me. After all, I had Daisy and Sarai, and Bram, when he was around.
The coffee shop had a steady stream of regulars and tourists, people who made small talk about the weather or the condition of the trails in the Blackwell Preserve or the best place to get pizza in town.
But at the heart of it, where it counted, I was alone.
Daisy had the baby and her Beasts. Sarai had her online exploits. I only had my apartment above the coffee shop.
I didn’t even have a cat.
I froze as a loud thunk sounded from somewhere deep in the tunnels, then turned my attention to a buzzing sound in the ceiling.
At first I didn’t see anything, but then a grate started to glow red.
I’d noticed the grates spaced out every few feet overhead, but I’d assumed they had something to do with ventilation. Now I realized they were something else.
Heating elements.
I breathed a sigh of relief as warmth spread over my damp clothes. The sprinklers had been mean but at least the organizers of the Hunt were making it up to us by giving us heat.
Probably so they weren’t held liable for our deaths by hypothermia, but still.
Except after a couple more minutes of walking I realized something: it was hot.
Like… really, really hot.
Sweat dripped down my back and between my tits, plastering my clothes to my skin all over again, this time with sweat, which was right about the time I realized the heat lamps weren’t a gesture of kindness but another circle of hell.
“Assholes,” I muttered.
I stripped off my T-shirt and stuffed one end of it in the pocket of my jeans. The tunnels were another world, one far removed from the coffee shop and my normal life filled with norms and routines.
I was way past feeling weird about running around in my bra.
I had to force myself to keep walking, past the purple lights and the piles of junk, past one blessed stack of water bottles (I guzzled two of them, tucked one in my pocket, and carried another).
I had the urge to flatten myself against the stone wall of the tunnel, let the coolness of the stone seep into my body.
And then, just when I thought I couldn’t be any more screwed, I heard footsteps behind me.
I looked over my shoulder, prepared to run, and realized it was Julia, the brunette who’d helped me at the start of the Hunt.
She held up her hands in a gesture of surrender. “It’s just me.”
I heaved a sigh of relief. She was in her bra too, T-shirt in one hand, sweatshirt tied around her waist. Sweat dripped from her temples and down her neck and chest.
“You’re still on the loose,” she said, catching up to me.
I nodded. “I heard voices earlier but I managed to move away from them.”
“Good for you,” she said. “It can be hard down here. Sound bounces around in weird ways off these walls.”
“I noticed that.” The voices I’d heard had seemed to come from one direction, then another, until I hadn’t entirely trusted my judgement. I’d forced myself to keep running and hoped for the best.
“Can you believe these fuckers?” She mopped at her forehead with her T-shirt. “Bunch of fucking sadists.”
“I was actually glad when the heat lamps kicked on after the water.” I barked out a laugh. “Stupid.”
“Not stupid at all. I thought the same thing at first. We’re like animals down here.”
I knew what she meant. The tunnels were forcing us into a state of primal survival. There was no room to worry about our hair or makeup, to wonder what other people thought of us or how something would look in a social media post.
We were prey, our prime directive to avoid our predators. When we got cold, we sought warmth. When we got hot, we sought relief.
“Speaking of animals, where are we supposed to go to the bathroom?” I hadn’t realized it until now, but I actually really needed to pee.
She laughed. “Options are limited. I found a dark corner and did a drip-dry. I would have tried my water bottle if I thought I had the aim.”
“Great.”
“Yeah…”
We’d come to a fork and Julia hesitated. “We should split up. We’ll both move faster, be harder to find that way.”
I nodded. I didn’t know her but it had been nice to have company for a few minutes. “Take your pick.”
She looked both ways and headed for the tunnel on the left. “Stay safe. Only twenty hours left.”
Her words echoed in my mind as she disappeared in the darkness.
Twenty hours? I looked up at the digital clock on the wall, one of many scattered throughout the tunnels, usually at the intersections.
Yep. I hadn’t been keeping track of the time, but I’d only been in the tunnels for a little over four hours.
Fuck my life.
I kept walking, looking for a good place to pee before finally accepting that there was no good place.
There was just the stone walls of the tunnel and the occasional pile of old stuff, the pallets of water.
I found a dark corner and squatted over the dirt floor to relieve myself, questioning my life choices every step of the way.
It was humiliating, but I felt better.
I wondered about the other girls, wondered if anyone had been caught.
And then I wondered about the men in hawk masks, wondered if they’d caught someone else, hated that I hoped the answer was no. I could still conjure the smell of the one who’d handed me the clipboard, could still see the anticipatory shine in the gazes of the other two.
It was a shine that promised darkness.
Danger.
It was like a hot stove had suddenly switched on in front of me, and I was irrationally tempted to reach out and touch its glowing coils.
I shook my head. I was thinking crazy. Losing my virginity was a silver lining to getting caught, but I couldn’t afford to get caught. I needed the prize that came with winning, because let’s face it, it wasn’t like I could search the internet for assassins near me.
The irony wasn’t lost on me: my brother was a killer.
I’d resigned myself to that truth a long time ago. Bram did what he did out of necessity, his way of exorcising the demon of our parents’ sudden death. Any other time, I could ask Bram for this favor and he would do it without question.
But not this time.
Because Bram wasn’t a talker, and he definitely didn’t want to talk about the car accident that had killed our parents and scarred him in more ways than one.
He didn’t want to talk about the fact that they’d been run off Mountain Road, didn’t want to talk about the possibility that it wasn’t an accident.
I didn’t blame him. The car had gone over the side of the mountain, had fallen down a steep cliff. It had taken twelve hours to find it.
To find Bram.
I would never be able to share those hours with him because I hadn’t been there when it happened. I would never know what he’d gone through, trapped in the crushed car with our dead parents, wondering if he was going to die too.
He’d shut down the few times I’d dared to bring up the possibility that Travis Dorsey, the guy who’d been arrested for the hit-and-run that killed our parents, had done it on purpose.
As far as Bram was concerned, Travis had been driving too fast, had made the mistake of running.
He’d done a year for vehicular manslaughter.
The end.
But I knew better, and I knew better because I’d spent the last five years digging into the details of the accident that had changed both our lives.
Still, I was determined not to add to Bram’s pain, determined to handle Travis Dorsey myself. Which was why I was here, in the tunnels under the town that had been my home since I’d been born, trying to outrun the teams of men who would become either my captors or my avenging angels.
I turned the corner into yet another purple-lit tunnel and was considering looking for a place to rest when I heard voices again.
And this time, they were right on my heels.