Chapter 5
FIVE
Tori listened to the beeps from the machines in the busy A Tori had run the other way, the fear too great to help her friends.
Another loud thwack and Scarlett’s screams had been cut off.
Tori’d had no idea where to go or who was attacking her friends, but she had run through the mist, her lungs burning, her legs like jelly, looking for somewhere to hide.
She had never felt fear like it, but had known if she didn’t get away, whoever it was would come after her, too.
So, she’d tried to keep the screams bottled inside, though she was breathing too heavy.
She could run, but she’d never run for her life before and somehow this had made her pick up her pace until she’d found an old overturned wooden boat and scrambled underneath it, then remembering to phone the cops, only to find she had no signal.
Pulling the boat over her, shaking with cold and fear, she’d clasped her hands together and begun to pray, silently mouthing The Lord’s Prayer on repeat – the only prayer she knew; it had been drummed into her at primary school.
A warm hand touched her forehead, and she jumped; her eyes flew open and she let out a high-pitched keening sound.
‘It’s okay, you’re okay, I’m so sorry. You’re safe now, in the hospital.’
Tori stared at the young doctor dressed in green scrubs and clamped her lips together. Two nurses appeared behind the doctor.
‘I thought she was asleep,’ the doctor said to them apologetically, then turned to Tori. ‘I’m sorry, I thought you were sleeping. I was just checking your body temperature.’
Tori tried to move and realised she was under a silver blanket that crackled loudly; she looked like a turkey wrapped in tin foil ready for roasting, she could feel the heat soothing her bones.
She looked at the doctor and burst into tears; this was real.
Her friends were dead and she hadn’t done anything to help them.
‘There’s another woman coming in with severe exposure, jumped into a lake to drag something out.’
One nurse whispered to the doctor, and Tori’s head snapped in their direction. ‘Scarlett’s, okay?’
The nurse shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, sweetheart, there is no news about your friends yet, this is a police officer who went into the lake too.’
The woman stopped talking, and Tori squeezed her eyelids together. She didn’t want to know why the woman had gone into the lake, but she had a good idea and the thought filled the back of her throat with bile.
‘Your dad is on the way. He said to let you know he’s tried to get hold of your mum, but she’s not picking up.’
Tori wasn’t surprised one bit. She lived with her dad, as he was her responsible parent, and he was going to be so pissed with her when he found out what she’d been doing.
Her mum, on the other hand, was a bit wild to put it politely; she had taken off when Tori was six to travel around America and never come back.
Sending cards with twenty dollars in for her birthday and a fifty for Christmas, which had been no use to her whatsoever.
She had that money in an envelope in her top drawer.
One day, when she could afford to fly out to the States, she would use the money to find her mum and tell her what a complete bitch she was and how much she hated her.
Her dad had told her she was a dancer when they’d met, and he’d tried his best to change her, but Tori knew the truth.
She was an exotic dancer and always had been; it was good money and the reason her mum could afford to start a new life out there.
Tori didn’t care about the dancing; she cared that she was selfish and had left her behind when she needed her mum.
Her poor dad had grieved as if the woman was dead, which she might as well have been she had treated the pair of them so bad.
She doubted the woman was going to rush all the way from Las Vegas to come see her because of this and, to be honest, she didn’t want her to.
What she did want was to know that Dawson and Scarlett were okay. That this had all been some bad dream, or hallucinations brought on by how cold and damp it had been up on that fell, and that she wasn’t living out her worst nightmare.
The reality was that whoever had done this to her friends was still out there. What if they came looking for her? What if they attacked some other teenagers stupid enough to go out there?