The Arrangement

Chapter Twenty-Six: The Hunted

"Wait," Kunj said. "Where's the girl?" 

I opened my eyes. Beside me, Farhan stopped breathing and froze. 

"What girl?" the officer asked. 

"There should be three. Where is the girl? Wasn't she with him?"

Preeti. She had left. I felt a small sense of relief until I realized something. Farhan had driven here, and yet, he had climbed out of the passenger seat- not the driver. 

As the same thought occurred to all of us, we all turned to the car Farhan had arrived in, the engine was still running and the headlights glared at us, blinding us to whoever would've been in the car. 

Farhan inhaled deeply and shouted, "Preeti, go!"

The engine roared and the tires skidded in the dirt, spraying dust in the air. I waited for Preeti to put the car in reverse and drive off, to escape. 

Instead, I watched the car thrust forward and speed towards us.  

She's trying to kill us too, was my first dumb and sad thought  as I stared transfixed into the nearing headlights.  

The men around us, including Kunj and the officer, scattered out of the way. Farhan wrapped me in a bear hug and threw us out of the way, landing below me to cushion my fall. My head banged against his chest and my vision was a blur of grass and sky as we rolled a couple of feet. I lost sense of all direction once we stopped. I was now staring at the jungle before us. 

I heard Preeti's voice. "Get in!"

I heard a gunshot and started to curl up into a protective ball on the ground. Before I could though, Farhan grabbed me again. He lifted me like a sack of potatoes, threw me over his shoulder and limped to the car before putting me in the backseat. Preeti turned in her seat to look at me. 

"Are you okay?"

I stared dumbly for a second before telling her that I needed to be untied, but of course, my voice came out muffled through my gag. 

"Right. Sorry. We'll get that off in a second." 

"We should go!" Farhan cried as he climbed in to the passenger seat. The car jerked forward and we were driving off. Farhan reached behind and began untying me. 

As soon as my mouth was free, I took a deep breath. "What the fuck were you guys thinking!?" 

"Nice to see you too." Farhan was smiling softly, relief clear in his eyes as he worked on my hands. Better to see me shouting than to see me dead, I guess. "You didn't really expect us to leave, did you?"

I stared at him. "When I tell you to leave, I expect you to leave!"

"We knew Kunj wasn't going to let you off that easily. He'd find it easier to get rid of one person than three."

I paused, because that is exactly what Kunj had said to me.  "Well, now they're going to get rid of all of us. You shouldn't have done this."

"If it was one of us, would you have left?" Preeti asked without looking at me. 

I didn't respond to that. The answer was obvious. I sat up and leaned forward. All I could see was grass in front of us. Behind us, I saw the same. "Do you know where you're going?"

"No! I'm just trying to lose them. I figured we'd be harder to follow off the gravel road."

"But now we can't see anything. What if we-." A large tree emerged through the grass right front of us. I was almost thrown out of my seat as we crashed into it. A crack shot through the center of the front window, fanning out in several directions, but the glass remained intact. A bit of smoke rose from the ruin bonnet of the car. I heard a car approaching us through the grass behind. 

"Oh no," Preeti whispered.

"We have to get out." Farhan was already halfway out.

I glanced at his bad leg worriedly, then did the same. I immediately went to his side and put my arm around him. He leaned into me gratefully. His cane had been left behind when we ran away.  

We dove into the jungle, though I wasn't sure if we were going to be able to blend in- my clothes were white and sparkly and Preeti's were red and also sparkly. My full skirt kept catching on branches, pulling threads of sequins and beads. I glanced back at our car left behind, the headlights were focused right on us. 

"We need to get out of the light."

Preeti was running ahead of us, she took a sharp turn left then right, around some trees and bushes. Farhan and I followed and immediately the jungle thickened to a point where we couldn't see a thing. The three of us slowed to a stop, listening to each other pant as we waited for our eyes to adjust to the darkness. 

We stayed quiet and listened. I couldn't hear voices, or a car, or anyone treading through the jungle following us. 

"They didn't come after us," I said softly.

"Why do you think that is?" Preeti asked.

"Look at this place." I glanced up at the black canopy of the trees above us. I wondered what kind of wildlife lived here- tigers, bears, snakes... "They don't expect us to make it out of here."

"We will. We just have to..." Farhan did a full circle in his spot, looking around, "...go back the way we came from." 

"And which way would that be?"

"I... don't know."

"Look, we crashed the car in that direction." Preeti pointed to the thicket of trees we had turned around. "And we were driving from the right. So, we should head that way while staying hidden in the jungle."

"What if we get lost?" Farhan asked.

 I gazed in the direction Preeti had pointed. "We'll stay near the edge, so we can still see where we're going."

"I had seen a house before we arrived to the field where you were. We can call Aarushi there for help," Preeti said. Then she paused. "But her number was saved in my phone, I don't remember it."

The phone that Kunj had taken away. "Then we call the police station and ask for Aarushi."

We all agreed to that and began our walk. It was slower, with Farhan limping. My thin blouse did little to keep the cold away. Ahead of us, Preeti wrapped her arms tightly around herself, while Farhan and I clung to each other. My heels had begun to hurt as we trudged through uneven dirt and I abandoned them by the root of a tree. Some time later, Preeti discarded hers too.

We could see the open field of grass through the occasional gap in the jungle. I never saw the van I had been taken in or the police car, and I wondered if they were still where we had crashed, making sure we didn't come back out.

What felt like two hours later, we found the house Preeti had mentioned. It was a farm, surrounded by fields of some kind of plants, with a tiny house sitting on the side. It was still dark, and all the lights were off in the house, but that wasn't what kept us from stepping out of the trees. A police car was parked at the start of the long driveway leading towards the house. Even though we couldn't see the person inside, we knew who it was. 

"He's waiting in case we came here for help," Farhan whispered as we stared. 

"What do we do?"

"We can't do anything. We has a gun." 

"He can't shoot without waking up whoever is in that house."

"That's not all. Look." Farhan pointed. 

Preeti and I looked back and saw two men walk out from behind the car, they were pacing back and forth, their eyes scanning the trees where we were. The three of us pressed closer to the trunks we were hiding behind. The two were Kunj's men, and with the police officer in the car, we couldn't risk trying to get to the house. 

"What do we do now?" Preeti asked, a note of fear in her voice. 

"We keep going." I took her and Farhan's hand and led them back into the cover of the jungle. "We keep going."

And we pray.