Chapter Seventy-Eight
Jules feels the return of a familiar passenger: complete and utter terror.
But she’s free, for now. She makes her way through the field in the darkness.
She stops, catches her breath behind one of the bunkers.
When the moon briefly emerges from the clouds she can see the shadows of what must be hundreds of the tiny mountains across the field.
Her heart free-falls at the sound, an unusual sound she heard once before. Screeching metal. Coming from one of the structures.
She crouches low, prowling through the field toward the noise.
Then she sees a light. Coming from the entryway of one of the bunkers. A giant steel door stained a deep green to blend into the landscape. The creaking noise awakens a memory. She never understood what that sound was when he first took her: the giant door being yanked open.
Her stomach twists at the shadow of the man—him—disappearing inside.
She stalks closer. This is where he took her. Jules has the urge to flee—to get as far away from this place as she can. But then it hits her. If this is where he took her, it’s where he probably took the others. Where he took Clare.
She steels her nerves, tells herself to be brave, but her entire body is trembling. She moves closer.
She suppresses a scream when she sees him again. He’s outside the cavern now, pacing, one hand on his head, the other pressing a mobile phone to his ear. He must’ve come outside because of no reception in the bunker.
She clutches a hand over her mouth as he scans the field. Looking for her.
The man then runs toward the gravel road where he parked the car.
Jules thinks of her sister’s mischievous grin, Clare feeding their dog waffles, saying something hilariously mean.
She thinks of Lucy and Carrie together at the event tonight looking so pretty, so healed.
She thinks of every girl and woman on her crime walls.
And she resolves she won’t let fear seize her, they all deserve more. She dashes into the bunker.