Chapter 30
For the record, doing lunges and squats in my cell did nothing to prepare me for the two-story sprint up the stairs. The last time I ran, I hadn’t been carrying around quite so much passenger, or their baggage.
My bare feet smacked the uneven, pine-needled, ground as Three and I dashed through the small clearing.
Though my feet were calloused from the rough cell floor, I really should have gotten Warden White to give us his shoes.
It had been part of the original plan. But instead, I’d used the time to smash the light and shock White.
Time well used, I’d say.
“Keep heading for the tree line.” It was broad daylight as we sprinted, winded, for the forest.
“My feet!”
“Once we reach the bushes we’ll need to keep moving until sundown.” God, it sucked to talk and run. “We need to stay one step ahead.”
“But!”
“Either we keep going or you stay here.” I was already out of breath, and arguing with Three wasn’t helping.
Three huffed, but she doubled down, picking up the pace, arms pumping, as she shot through the bushes.
I knew I needed to keep my head down. To run and not look back. But my curiosity got the better of me.
As I crossed into the forest after Three, I glanced over my shoulder at what we were leaving behind. What we were escaping. I told myself I needed to know what the building looked like so I could identify it later.
But that wasn’t the whole truth. Part of it was morbid curiosity, like looking back at an explosion. I wanted the terrors I faced to look and feel as monstrous as what Three and I were subjected to. But—
The cabin was small and made of logs, in a pleasant sun-dappled clearing. Utterly innocuous. No one would have guessed the horrors lying in wait beneath.
The pebbled driveway twisted out and away from the cabin, opposite our direction of travel.
Good. We needed to stay far the hell away from the road. Anyone coming after us would start there first. Forcing our eventual pursuers on foot evened the playing field, but I wouldn’t go so far as to call it an advantage.
The next twenty-four hours were crucial. And we couldn’t behave in a way that they’d expect.
“What now, Two?” Three’s face was red, her breathing ragged.
“We keep moving.” Taking note of the sun’s placement in the sky, I hoped I’d calculated the time of day right. “We head north.”
?
The forest stretched around us, awash with loblolly pine, tulip poplar, Virginia pine, scarlet oak, and river birch.
Which meant my initial guestimate was right. We were in Virginia or North Carolina.
That, or I wasn’t particularly good at plant geography. I knew what plants they were, yes, but I could have got the mix wrong for the states. For all we knew we could have been in Louisiana, which was a lot further from D.C. than I would have liked.
Did Virginia pine grow in Louisiana? I wasn’t sure. Damn it, we could have been anywhere. No, wait, basements weren’t common Louisiana, were they? And we’d most definitely been held two floors underground. That and—
Stop.
There were more important things to worry about. I decided to choose to believe I was right until other facts presented themselves. Either way, we were headed north.
The underbrush was wet, the forest floor tacky.
With our footprints imprinting at odd intervals in the muck, it must have rained recently.
Bad news was this meant our trail would be a lot easier to follow.
Worse news was that it was mid-October, so the damp would couple with the chill about to descend on us at night.
It wasn’t lost on me that we were two very noticeable half-naked women in hospital gowns in the middle of the forest. And time was running out before our pursuers latched onto our trail.
“How about some good news?” Three held up a branch for me as I ducked under, her question no doubt prompted because I’d been speaking my thoughts aloud.
“Good news, good news. Hm.” My foot slipped and I narrowly avoided tripping over a fallen log. “If the ground is making us slow, whoever they send after us will be slow too?” It wasn’t much but it was all I had.
Three blew a loose hair out of her eyeline. “Unless they have specialized gear.”
Her word choice was more sophisticated than I expected. “I thought you wanted good news?”
“I do.”
“Okay, fine, give me a minute.” There was a significant slice of swamp in front of us.
It was large, nearly pitch black, and opaque.
The shortest distance across was about twenty feet, and from our vantage point, I couldn’t see where it started, nor where it ended, so there was no walking around, only through.
There were no plants dotted along the middle, the swamp was a clean cut through and through, which gave me no sense of the depth, or what may be lurking at the bottom.
It was going to slow us down. But it had a mild current, so the obstacle may have also become an advantage. “Will they have dogs?”
“No.”
“You’re sure?”
“Pretty sure.”
Still, better to be prepared than to take our chances. I tested the swamp water with my toe. Yup, it was cold, and my skin returned coated in a muddy residue.
I hated this so much.
“Come on, then.” I hoisted the gown stuffed with our supplies a little higher, as I stepped into the swamp. Immediately, I was swallowed up to my knees.
“You can’t be serious.”
I didn’t grace Three with a response. Instead, I took another step forward. The water hit my thighs. The bottom encased my toes in a slippery silted slime. Ugh.
“Two!”
Ignoring Three, I kept walking, wading, until I was waist deep. I really hoped the water didn’t go any higher. If it did, the only way the granola bars came out of this dry was if I somehow stacked it on my head and swam across. I hoped it didn’t come to that.
Surveying the banks on either side trying to better gauge the depth, I noticed collected bundles of sticks, fallen branches, the occasional eroded tree trunk.
“Toss me a stick.”
“What?” She looked at me like I had two heads. “Why?”
“Just do it.” We’d only been in the wilderness for two hours, and already I didn’t have the energy to explain.
Three pointed at a mid-sized stick jutting out of the water. “This one?”
“Yes, like that. Toss it to me.” The stick splashed, splattering the damp and decay across my face. My lips. I spat. “Grab more. Keep tossing.”
I rubbed my scent all over the sticks as they arrived, smacking and clapping against the surface of the water surrounding me, then tossed them every which way around the boggy banks.
The majority, however, I sent afloat down the meagre current.
The flow of ‘water’, slow as it was, was consistent.
If we maintained the time advantage afforded by our head start, the sticks should end up a fair distance away.
“What are you doing?” Three asked as she sent me another stick.
“Hopefully, leading our scent away.” Otherwise, I just spent five minutes in the middle of a swamp rubbing wet sticks underneath my armpits for nothing.
“Why don’t we just walk in the water? If they do have dogs, they won’t be able to follow our smell there.”
She’d seen too many TV shows. “That’s not how it works.”
There was a heavy splash in the distance. The hair on the back of my neck stood on end, as I listened for any other telltale sounds. Anything that might give way to a threat.
Being in the middle of a swamp, was probably a bad time to realize that we may be in bear territory. And I was carrying a bag of food around my chest.
I waited a moment, then two.
Nothing but the ambient sounds of the wilderness.
For now, submerged in the water, I’d focus on all the amphibious creatures and reptiles that could possibly be lurking mere feet away, and hope the splash was a tree giving way to the swamp.
“What was that?”
“I don’t know, but let’s get a move on.” I started moving towards the other side of the bank, the water slipping up past my hips, over my belly, just beneath my breasts. But I didn’t hear any movement behind me.
Looking back, Three hadn’t moved. She was statue-still as she stared at the water in front of her. I scanned the surface for signs of wildlife, and came up empty.
If I didn’t know better, I’d think she was doing everything in her power to slow us down. “Come on, Three, we’ve got to go.”
She swallowed. “I can’t swim.”
She’d been locked in a basement her entire life, of fucking course, she couldn’t swim.
I needed to calm my thoughts. My anger could be useful in many situations, but this wasn’t one of them.
“Okay, okay,” I said, as I tried to concoct a plan, and not think about all of the things that could be in the swamp.
Don’t think about alligators, or water snakes, or giant catfish, or snapping turtles, or leeches, or bodies…
I thought about alligators, and snakes, and catfish, and turtles, and leeches, and bodies, as I waded past the halfway point and felt the incline solidify beneath my silt-covered feet.
The swamp was walkable. But the depth, if Three freaked out, would be a problem.
Which meant I needed to go back and guide her across.
I hated this so, so much. Mentally, I added wading barefoot through a swap to my list of very rational fears.
Perhaps even higher on my list than tornadoes, and tornadoes were pretty fucking high.
In fact, I’d willingly opt-in to joining the vamps and partake in their activities involving red syrup, if it meant I would get out of this nightmare of a swamp.
“Take my hand.” Reaching up, I held my hand out for Three. “I’ll guide you across. We can walk the whole thing. We’ll take it one step at a time.”
Biting her bottom lip, her fingers twitching, she sucked in a large breath as she took a hold of my hand.
“Good. Good, you’re doing good,” I said, wishing I had the luxury of looking up at the sky, which was the same course of action Three decided on.
Nose upturned, her face was the embodiment of disgust. I couldn’t say mine wasn’t doing the same.
“Great job, just keep walking and we’ll be there before we know it. ”
We were just crossing the half way point when I spotted a disturbance atop the surface of the water. Eyes.
They were there one second. Then gone the next.
Shit, shit, shit. I plastered a smile on my face, encouraging Three to move. “See, it’s not that bad, we’re already on our way out.”
“I don’t like this, Two. I don’t like it at all. It’s wet, and gross, and,” while Three continued to list off all the things she didn’t like about traversing the swamp, the eyes reappeared. Closer this time, “and it’s cold, and I’m hungry, and my feet hurt.”
“That’s good, what you are doing is good, let it all out.” My attentions were fixed on the nearing reptilian snout.
“And I thought we would be playing hide and go seek, and now I’m scared because what if there are swamp monsters in here with us?” The creature got close enough for me to identify. It wasn’t an alligator. It was an alligator snapping turtle. “And what if they drag us to our deaths. Make us drown?”
“We’d know if there was a monster in here with us.” Well, I did because I was looking at the water, at the turtle, knowing it had a bite capable of detaching fingers, and Three was ignoring all of it as she continued to face the sky. “It’s day time, so the monsters are sleeping.”
A snapping turtle was fine. It was. We were going to be okay. Lawrence had once told me that snapping turtles were generally docile in water. If given the chance, they chose to flee and—
The turtle was following us. That didn’t seem docile to me.
“Not all monsters, sleep during the day.” Though she was speaking, Three’s eyes had closed. Not sure if that was better or worse. “Sometimes the swamp plants come to life and strangle people so they can eat them. And that always happens during the day.”
There were plenty of real things to be afraid of, but I wasn’t about to tell her that. Not when the snapping turtle was closing in, and we were still up to our wastes in muck.
“Well, we are almost out, but I’m afraid I’m going to need you to pick up the pace.” We were ten steps out from the bank, and roughly five away from being knee deep.
Unfortunately, the snapping turtle was only two feet away.
“Come on, Three. A little faster.”
The turtle closed in, it’s neck straining.
That’s when I saw it. The turtle wasn’t attacking. It was reaching. For a pouch that was tied with a bow of string around Three’s thigh. A pouch that must’ve been hidden beneath the hospital gown, until it’d grown waterlogged and soggy, and slid down her leg.
If I was right, she’d been carrying literal bait around her thigh.
I grabbed for the long end of the bow and yanked, loosing the string and letting the bag fall to the water, as we kept shuffling to get away.
The snapping turtle stopped its pursuit, nudging the pouch with its snout.
I kept my attentions on the turtle as I pushed, a now very wide-eyed, Three onto the muddy bramble-covered bank, then scrambled up after her.
Both of us were on our hands and knees panting, when I asked, “What the hell is that?”
“A… turtle?”
I gave her a death glare. “Don’t play dense, you know what I’m talking about.”
“…My snack pouch.”
“What. Snack. Pouch?” I’d never seen her ‘snack pouch’. And she’d never mentioned it. Not once.
The turtle snapped again at the floating fabric bag, dragging it beneath the surface. But not before leaving some of the contents behind. A perfect circle.
A dog treat.
No, no, no, Three, she wouldn’t have done this to me. To us. She wouldn’t.
Barking sounding in the distance, I fought the plummeting in my stomach.
“I thought you said they didn’t have dogs!” I whisper-yelled. A very real fear was alive and well, beneath my skin, far different from the fear of the swamp.
“I didn’t know,” she responded, louder than I would have liked.
“I don’t believe you.”
Her bottom lip quivered.
I was staring down a choice. Leaving Three behind, with the chance she’d continue to live a lifetime of captivity—if that had even been true in the first place—or taking her with me. A woman who had very clearly lied, and wore dog treats around her thigh to ensure we’d get caught by Solomon’s Seal.
But a new and altogether unfamiliar, soft part of me, urged me to give her a chance. It was foolish.
I did it anyway.
“Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t leave you here.”
Three broke into tears, the full-on wailing sob she’d adopted whenever someone brought up One. And I felt guilty.
Shit.