11. Audrey
AUDREY
I didn’t bother to look back, see if the webbed men were on my trail. I didn’t want to risk slowing myself down if they were close.
The water pouring from the overhead sprinkler system was never ending, dousing the previously sweltering tunnels.
I took every turn I could find, letting the tunnel pull me deeper into its labyrinth, something that suddenly seemed safer than being captured by one of the teams of masked men haunting its stone passageways.
The water soaked my clothes and shoes, plastered my hair to my head. I worried I might slip on the dirt floor, but I kept running, refusing to slow down.
I couldn’t hear anything behind me. I had no idea if the men with the spider had followed me or if they’d given up, no idea if they were ten feet away or twenty. There was just the relentless spray of water, obscuring everything more than a foot in front of me.
I was as shocked when the water turned off as I had been when it started.
I stopped in my tracks, my chest rising and falling as I tried to suck in oxygen, my legs burning from the race through the tunnels.
My pants were still unfastened. I zipped and buttoned them, then walked to the wall of the tunnel and leaned against it with a sigh of relief.
For now at least, it seemed like I’d escaped the masked men and their pet spider.
Water dripped from unseen places, but other than that the tunnel was eerily quiet without the spray of the sprinklers.
My stomach twisted with hunger, and I removed one of the protein bars from my pocket and tore into it. I didn’t know when — or if — I’d be able to stop again. I needed to refuel while I could.
I pulled my phone out of my jeans to check the time and was surprised to find that it was almost seven a.m. It was perpetually dark in the tunnels, and it was hard to believe that somewhere above my head, the people of Blackwell Falls were waking up, businesses preparing to open their doors for the day.
And what about Emma? She would be waking up in Dean’s big house — the house that used to be mine — in town, waiting for Dean to make her breakfast, watching one of her shows on YouTube.
I hoped.
Those were the things she did at home. At the apartment we shared together.
I didn’t really know what her time was like with Dean. I’d tried not to fish after her time with her dad, had been careful not to put her in the middle of our ongoing conflict.
I’d asked her if she had fun, asked what she did, but her answers had been mundane
Until they hadn’t.
Until she’d mentioned the crying woman in the blue dress, a passing mention that had prompted me to search Dean’s things.
A search that had uncovered the key to Dean’s secret storage unit.
I finished the protein bar and stuffed the empty wrapper in my pocket. Then I went pee as quickly as I could, looking around, listening for the sound of footsteps.
I was shivering by the time I finished my pit stop, the cold from the sprinklers seeping into my skin and lowering my body temperature. I wished I had a mylar blanket, the kind we used to warm people who’d gone into shock or those who had almost drowned in one of the many surrounding rivers.
I pushed off the wall and started walking. There was no point lamenting what I didn’t have. Movement would keep my blood flowing to my extremities, and if it was one thing I’d learned from the masked men who’d captured Madison and me at the cattle chutes, it was that I needed to stay on my toes.
I thought about Madison, wondered if she was still free, hoped she stayed that way until the end.
Hoped she’d get her wish, whatever it was.
I passed two more water stops and two more digital clocks marking the time. Every now and then a shriek of terror or diabolical laughter would echo through the tunnels. The sound was unnerving, a reminder that I wasn’t alone, that all around me other women were being hunted.
Were being caught.
I kept moving, passing in and out of the amber light that illuminated the tunnels every fifty feet or so, getting more and more comfortable with the darkness that had started to feel like a friend.
I’d been walking for about ten minutes when something new loomed in the distance.
I slowed my steps, moving cautiously forward, wondering if it was another series of chutes.
But when I got there I realized it was something else: a series of tall metal gates that formed a kind of maze, a labyrinth inside the labyrinth of the tunnels.
I walked the width of the tunnel, studying the new obstacle, trying to figure out what it was, what it did, how it might trap me.
But it was impossible to see beyond the entrance rising in front of me, the walls of metal that blocked off everything beyond it.
I looked back the way I came. Maybe it was better to go back, find another way to evade the masked men.
But every cry for help, every burst of crazed laughter, had come from behind me, and whoever had set up the Hunt was trying to make it harder for us to get to the next phase of the tunnel complex.
Maybe that meant safety.
Of course, it could also mean even more danger, but I could only work with what I had, which was very little knowledge of the Hunt and the tunnels and the logic that had seen me through med school and my marriage to Dean and its aftermath.
I stepped through the gate, then turned around when a metal plate came down behind me, blocking off the entrance.
Dread blossomed in my stomach. Why force me to keep going if the metal gates were designed to keep me from the next part of the tunnels?
But it was too late now. I’d made my decision. Now all I could do was see it through.
Not like I was any stranger to that dilemma.
I started forward, looking around, trying to get the measure of the trap that had been laid.
I’d been ensnared in a kind of metal labyrinth, the walls rising almost all the way to the tunnel ceiling, like the chutes that had trapped Madison and me. It was a maze with only one path forward, and I took slow steady steps, following the only available trail.
I’d been walking for about two minutes when a piece of metal dropped in front of me, blocking the path.
Now I was trapped in a metal box, and I held my breath, panic quickening my pulse.
One of the walls to my prison slid upward, revealing another path forward, this one to the right of the trail I’d been following before the gate had stopped my forward progress.
I took a handful of steps, then startled when another piece of metal dropped a few feet ahead, a new path opening to my left as one of the metal walls was lifted into the air.
And now I understood: the obstacles weren’t trying to stop me.
They were herding me.
I moved slowly forward, wary of the metal walls that dropped and lifted in a pattern I didn’t understand, drawing me through the metal maze to some unseen destination.
I lost track of time. My clothes were still plastered to my skin from the sprinklers, my jeans soaked and heavy, but it was all I could do to stay focused on the path that opened and closed in front of me.
I clung to it like a life raft in a storm even as I knew it was trapping me.
My heart thudded in my chest, my pulse racing, and I had to fight against the surge of adrenaline that told me to run.
I had no idea if someone was watching, manipulating the walls according to my movements, or if the metal maze was controlled by some other kind of mechanism, by weight (more cattle scales buried under the tunnel floor?) or by timing.
The metal walls lifted and fell so quickly, their clang echoing through the tunnels, that I was afraid of getting trapped under one of them, and I forced myself to take slow careful steps, my fear of being trapped under the walls greater than the my desire to escape the maze quickly.
I was beginning to believe I’d never escape, that keeping me trapped in the metal warren was the point, when two of the metal walls moved at once: one lowered and one raised.
And there, through the now open gate, was the tunnel.
I stepped through the opening before it could close shut, but instead of feeling relieved to be out of the steel maze, a fresh wave of dread trickled through my veins.
Because the tunnel didn’t stretch out in front of me, dark and familiar.
Instead, I’d entered a kind of anteroom, a space made by the steel maze through which I’d just navigated and the beginning of a new maze three hundred feet ahead in the tunnel.
In that space a mechanical bull stood, surrounded by hay, strange implements on the walls: ropes and what looked like reins for a horse, riding crops, branding irons.
And leaning against the bull, the men in bull masks from the holding room.
Waiting, it seemed, for me.