Chapter Eleven #2
Urgency is a noose around my words and it’s as if the asshole yanks on it when he turns the wheel abruptly, slamming us into the door.
The sound of Jade’s temple crunching against the window is loud.
I gasp when the glass splinters, though it doesn’t shatter, and I watch it in slow motion weave its way out in a fragile web.
I’m chasing my breath when he settles his foot on the brake, this time catapulting me forward. My seatbelt catches me in its grip before I can connect with the front seat.
Silence fills the cabin, the music no longer playing.
“What the fuck was that!?” I raise my voice at the idiot behind the wheel, shaking my head as I hold onto my best friend and pop open the door at my side, aggressively kicking it out. “Are you trying to kill us?” I spit.
He says nothing, and it unsettles me further, his silence digging and piercing its way to my core.
I couldn’t ignore this gut feeling anymore.
Something wasn’t right.
Goosebumps are hard lumps across my skin, the kind that you can’t shake.
I stumble to my feet, supporting Jade, dragging her out of the car as quickly as my trembling arms and aching biceps will allow.
“Find your feet, J,” I breathe, urgency grating out of my teeth.
I feel weak and frightened and tears lick at the back of my eyes. And yet, among the alcohol and fear, I latch onto urgency and the desire to fight.
I don’t speak until I’ve guided Jade into the overgrown brush and behind a tree that sits back and away from the road, and most importantly away from him.
My best friend falls to her beat-up knees, and I will myself not to retch beside her when I smell the sour contents of her stomach splash onto the ground and rebound onto her face, pushing the back of my hand to my mouth and turning away.
“Jade, we aren’t getting back into that car.” My words are muffled by my palm. I glance back over my shoulder.
She cuts me off with a whine.
“What, no, I don’t want to walk, my feet hurt.”
I spin around and crouch down, reaching for her arm perhaps a little too roughly. Her blue eyes slice to mine, crimson blood trailing into her long eyelashes from the cut on her forehead. She does her best to blink the stream of pearls away.
Jade drops her gaze to my hand coiled around her bicep, and I know she can feel it, the trembling explosion of my fingers vibrating into her bones.
“There’s something up with this guy. He’s, I dunno, just…” I’m stumbling over my words, anticipating the weight of our next decision, what this could mean for us. “Can you please just trust me on this? I’ll get rid of him, but we need to walk.”
She nods, her eyes never leaving mine until she’s hurling to her side, emptying what she’d left behind.
I stand on shaky feet, stepping toward the trunk of the tree. Sucking in a sharp breath, I corner it, finding the headlights to the sedan turned off.
The dark hole we had carelessly sunk into felt like an omen rapidly closing in around us now.
The only light is a shadow, a pale glow gleaming from the tucked moon above, and the cherry of his cigarette stuck between the hole of his black ski mask.
I raise my voice, it comes out in a croak, “You know you can take that mask off now, right? We aren’t at the party anymore.”
He laughs, taking a hit of his nicotine, and I don’t miss the amused lilt to the sound. It’s unnatural, as if the mask he is wearing isn’t the only one he’d worked to erect.
Nervous, I reach for a piece of bark hanging loosely from the tree beside me. I begin to vivisect it between shaking fingers. “Thanks for the ride, but she’s too sick, we’ll find—”
A gruff exhale cuts me off, then a laugh, something infected.
Malignant.
It hits me like a mallet.
Silence presses heavy, and I know that if this man isn’t a good person he will be able to taste my fear. Bottomless, cold and brittle. He will feast on it. So, I finish what I was saying with as much confidence as I can muster.
“We’ll–we’ll find another ride.”
A tsk. A sharp inhale, followed by a menacing exhale, then a mumble I can’t place.
The crunch of loose rock is what I hear next when the rubber of his boot squashes the cigarette he was pulling on. And when he speaks this time, I don’t miss the malice that lingers behind the mask of his voice.
“What about what I want?”
My stomach sours and a chill creeps down my spine.
I bite the inside of my cheek, try to swallow my fear, offering this asshole something I didn’t have. “Do you want money or something?”
“Or something,” he parrots me, and the way he says it ices me to the bone.
My throat tightens, swelling through the canal, suffocating me. I feel Jade’s fingers lace with mine.
I drop my chin, notice she’s still emptying her stomach and when I lift it again, flaring my gaze back to this guy I didn’t know and didn’t want to get to know—the guy I wanted to just leave us alone—I see him take a controlled step off the road.
Walking into the overgrown brush, he moves toward us, and I swallow, steel my jaw and hope that something isn’t us, but I know that in the wrong male’s gaze, women, girls, have expiration dates.
Cutting my eyes back to Jade, I watch her struggle to pull herself to her feet with the support of the tree behind her and her grip at my knee.
“We walking?” she asks, almost casually, smearing the remnants of her stomach across her forearm.
I begin to shake my head, feel tears building, our world tilting.
“Nah, J.” My voice trembles. I look from my best friend to the guy moving toward us.
Half an hour, or an hour, or two ago, we made a decision together that would alter our lives forever.
I squeeze my fingers around my best friend’s, the sister I chose.
“We have to run,” I breathe. “This guy…” Then, I’m stuttering, whimpering. “I th-think he didn’t want to just drive us home tonight.”
It is all I have to say for Jade to understand.
Being a girl was dangerous.
Everyone knew that, especially in Devil’s Peak, because of what my grandfather had done.
She nods, a tear searing down her cheek. Her eyes flick to mine. “Probably sh-shouldn’t have caught that ride, huh?” she stutters her words, her face solemn.
The sound of leaves and twigs and rocks crunching to my right has me swallowing again. The shuffling soundtrack of him drawing closer.
We were almost out of time.
“Probably,” I whisper, catching her tears with my thumb, then my own in a smear across the bare skin of my shoulder.
I sniff my emotion back before speaking again, “Whatever you do, don’t let go, okay? We run together, or we don’t run at all.”
She nods, then I begin to count.
“One. Two…”
That’s when I see something gut-wrenching race through my best friend's eyes.
The ring of her orbs had always been a dark blue and yet a spark of light has flecked in the center.
I knew it to be hope, that maybe it would bank on our side tonight, that maybe we would make it out of this nightmare alive.
Another crunch draws closer and when I look up, away from Jade, I watch our masked driver stride quickly toward us, malice beating his every step as he mumbles beneath his breath.
I can barely focus, my legs have become numb, a violent shudder working its way through my body.
“Three.”
Our hands are interlaced as we run. Only, something crackles in my teeth, threatening my feet.
The ringing echo of a gunshot pierces my skull.
With a tarnished equilibrium, my spine turns ramrod straight. I spin around and stare at my best friend when she pulls me to a stop.
My eyes are frantic, they search every inch of her, pausing only to latch onto the one single tear that falls over the ledge of her waterline, rolling down her freckled cheek.
My best friend, the sister I never had, the one I chose, the one I’d been velcroed to since we were kids, drops to her knees.
We run together, or we don’t run at all.
My knees hit the ground with her.
Jade’s deep blue eyes are wide, frozen in terror and shock and her mouth, too, and there’s just one beat, a violent, stilted breath before the guttural scream I was hoping wouldn’t follow, tears from her throat.
“My back, Laik, my back!” Jade screams and the sound coming from her is like nothing I’ve heard before.
It’s horrific.
The cadence of death.
Terror claws through my chest, spreads outward. Over my shoulders and into my stomach it grows. I watch it descend my arms, flutter into my fingers.
Everything is shaking.
My bones are rattling inside of my body because that gut feeling I’d had, turns into a wailing siren.
It tells me now that we aren't going to make it out of this alive. We aren’t going to live to see our next sunrise. We aren’t going to have the chance to make another stupid mistake, or to grow old and gray together, to move to New York and leave Devil’s Peak behind.
I tremble harder when I hear it again.
A second gunshot.
This one scrapes past my ear.
I lay myself over Jade’s body. I try not to breathe. My lips brush over her cheek.
“I’ve got you, okay? Just hold on for me, J. I need you to hold—”
A third bullet tears through the air, skimming the top of Jade’s head and clipping the edge of my tricep.
I recoil, moving away from my best friend, forced to let go of her when I feel the weight of the bullet claim my right arm.
A bloodcurdling sound I don’t recognize comes from somewhere deep inside of me.
I bite down on my tongue, look up, and through terrified eyes, watch darkness close in.
Bullets tear through the dirt around me.
I scramble on my hands and knees until I’m behind a tree, until all I can hear is my own breath and the sound of the gunfire fading. The guilt that roars through me for leaving Jade behind and for fighting for my own life, is paralyzing.
Everything falls silent, only for a moment, before my best friend's screams follow behind her pleading, her crying.
My head slams against the trunk of the tree. I do it again and again, squeezing my eyes closed and crying with my whole body.
“Please, god, please, help us,” I beg, and when I hear Jade scream again, realizing my pleas are futile, I stifle my next breath, doing what I can with all that I have left.
I disconnect from the blinding pain that shoots through my arm, frantically working to push my useless limbs into the back pocket of my blood-splattered denim shorts.
Sliding my phone out with trembling, unworkable hands, my pink glitter phone case catching in the moonlight, spearing my eyes, I hold my breath when I flip it over, seeing that I’ve been afforded one single, hopeful, bar of cell service.
My heart slams against my ribs harder.
I slip my torn-up feet beneath my bottom and push myself up with the support of the tree at my back, then I stumble toward a wider, thicker trunk a few feet away, vision blurring and swaying.
I stay in the shadows, making sure not to catch myself in any pockets of light as I move, clasping the only hope I have left in the palms of my hands.
And with numb fingers and rattling teeth, I open my phone and press on his number.
Chase answers almost instantly, his frantic words coming down the line.
“Laik, where are—”
I whimper at the sound of his voice.
A cry threatens to slip from my lips.
“Fuck, Laik, are you okay?” Chase’s voice raises.
I can barely manage a whisper, “Ch-ch-chase, help.”