john murphy, WITCH

12 | Fight or Flight

An outer shell of calm had always been Winnie's defence against anything in her life and this time was no exception. She would address this when the task at hand had been finished. She walked back to the group with her shoulders held high and twisting her knife around in her fingers.

"Let's carry on." She told them all simply.

"I'm going back with-" Atom began to walk away, he was willing to bet on Bellamy's kindness more than Winnie's.

Winnie felt like she was about to burst, like her veins were throbbing against her skin and her head pounded with a headache she only know realised that she had.

"No you're not Atom." Her voice was laced with such poison mixed with determination that the boy stopped in his tracks. He could count on Bellamy's kindness but he could also count on Winnie's revenge plot. He didn't speak again.

"Now, where were we?"

Winnie breathed in and tried to break her own trance but she was still on edge. So when she heard the rustling of bushes coming from the direction of camp, her instincts rushed in before her sense could. Her knife embedded itself in the tree before anyone could make sense of what was going on. And it was only mere inches away from Charlotte's head.

Winnie's breath became shallow and her chest seized itself up, she could have killed the young girl. She could have ended Charlotte's life because she wasn't paying attention, because the revelation had shaken her to the core.

Bellamy would have been like a brother and shouted, the girl shouldn't be out here. It's too dangerous.

"You know," Winnie told her as she retrieved her knife, not looking at Charlotte or anything else, "It's do or die out here."

"I know." She whispered but it sounded the furthest thing from the truth that Winnie had heard today.

"Then keep up or I can't keep you alive." Winnie wasn't in the mood to be nice as she joined the side of Harper.

"You okay?" Harper asked and Winnie couldn't tell if she was genuinely concerned or not.

Winnie didn't want to talk about it with anybody other than her family, "I'm fine. Let's just find something to kill..."

Winnie couldn't finish her sentence before her words were drowned out by a distant echo of a bone chilling horn.

"What on earth..." Harper's voice was shaky as was her finger as she pointed at the mass of green fog that cut off their path.

It reminded Winnie of hell. She turned her hands into fists and didn't realise the blade was still in her clutches. She felt sick to the stomach as crimson blood dropped to the ground as the fog came towards her at astonishing speed. The girl didn't listen to her feet, this time her fight or flight instinct was overthrown by one thing; complete and utter fear.

Winnie let her gaze land on all in her party and as if on cue they all looked at back at her, like deer stuck in headlights. Her gaze finally made it to Charlotte, she was saying something but Winnie couldn't translate the letters into sentences. But one word Charlotte said took all the fear out of her system, "Help."

"Cave, two hundred metres back. Get there now!"

Her voice came out as a scream and the party took one second to comprehend the order before the sound of pounding boots and breath filled the shrinking space between them and the mysterious fog. Winnie held the rear leaving drops of blood like Hansel and Gretel.

Her senses were overloaded, the smell of pine needles and chemical rotting, the sounds of branches splitting in two and breaths that tore away at lungs before they escaped mouths.