Hailey
I was beside myself—very literally, beside myself.
I didn’t know exactly how it happened; but there I was, Hailey-the-see-through doppelganger, standing next to my pale, unconscious body sprawled out on the slaughterhouse floor.
I’d never believed in spirits, and I’d never believed in ghosts until the shock of the sheriff’s death turned me transparent.
Had I been in my actual body, I would’ve had a full-scale panic attack; but, I wasn’t, so physically blowing a gasket was on hold for the time being.
“Spirit” me was strangely calm, eerily calm—one of the few side effects of being “ethereally detached”. I looked over at my actual body with the kind of tragic pessimism that police officers did when they filed through pictures of deceased kidnapping victims.
I wondered if I’d die before the day was out—if Liam would put eighteen-years to rest with a stolen gun or dip me in a vat of battery acid so my parents couldn’t find me.
Maybe he’d stab me, strangle me, or leave me in a field where the German Shepherds would have to sniff me out. Either way, my odds of getting back home were slimming by the hour.
I didn’t know if God could hear me where I was or if the prayers of missing people went missing along with them; but if He could, I hoped He was listening.
Rusty’s death ate away at my sanity a piece at a time. Ten minutes ago he’d been standing, talking, laughing—alive. He would’ve helped me; I saw it in his eyes and in the way he smiled through the seriousness of our circumstances. He could’ve been my loophole, but Liam destroyed all that.
He destroyed everything. It wouldn’t be long before he destroyed me.
My feet tingled at the tips. The fact that I was feeling again meant the harshness of waking up to a living, breathing nightmare of a day was seconds away. The weaker parts in me wished for death and hoped for the promise of escape it provided. But it didn’t come. Heaven or hell wouldn’t save me from this place.
Pins and needles crept around my ankles, up the back of my calves, washed over my thighs, and spurted out at the top of my spine. My nervous system fired a few warning shots across my body, unpleasantly reminding me of the cuts and bruises blemishing my skin.
I heard Caleb shouting at someone loud enough to steal my attention. I scanned the room from the floor to see who it was, but everything within twenty feet of me looked like shapeless smudges on a windshield.
Someone else was in the room—someone who didn’t want me immediately aware of their presence.
Heavy, hurried footsteps headed towards the slaughterhouse door, and a final muffled exchange between the unnamed stranger and Caleb faded out of earshot.
The room settled back into silence. I blinked until the world blurred into focus and found Caleb sitting across from me. We were alone. The sudden solitude was unnerving.
“Get up.”
His voice sounded harsher than any other time I’d heard it. His eyes darted back and forth between me and the slaughterhouse door.
I sat up and fought through waves of dizziness while my body gained its bearings. The back of my head throbbed from where I must’ve hit it against the floor. My eyes swam in their sockets from the pain and gradually wandered over to Caleb.
His attention stayed fixed on the front door. Rusty’s blood seeped into the slaughterhouse from the outside and shined bright red in the afternoon sun. A creeping sickness crawled across my skin at the sight of it, and I clamped my mouth shut to keep what little was in my stomach down.
I turned away from the door, away from the reminder of a murder I probably caused. If I hadn’t said anything, Rusty would’ve walked out of this place alive without Liam at his heels. If I’d handled things differently, he might’ve made it back to the family he probably had waiting for him.
The weight of his death hung heavier in the air than the suffocating silence between Caleb and I. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know how to react to something I’d only ever seen in news stories.
Caleb hadn’t said a word since his conversation with the stranger. He sat on his heels, balancing his weight on the balls of his feet like he was waiting for something. For what—I didn’t know. I didn’t want to.
A sliver of sunlight refracted through a tear skimming the surface of his face. He cried quietly to himself, like an unspoken grief too weighty to voice had settled on his shoulders.
I inched towards him, allowing blind pity and ignorance to get the best of me, and stopped paying attention to the slow changes in his expression.
I promised myself from the moment he’d forced me on the bus that I’d never let him scare me, that I wouldn’t let him have an inch of control when it came to keeping my cool.
But when he turned to me, eyes wild and raging in the middle of an otherwise beautiful summer afternoon, he terrified me— and no self-made promise made a difference in that fear.
My breaths broke against my vocal chords and spattered out of my mouth in raspy fragments. I backed away from him, hoping to retreat from his unrelenting gaze, but the second I moved he lunged at me and grabbed my wrist so tightly I thought he’d break it from the pressure.
His eyes burned cobalt with a kind of broken rage I’d seen in Liam, the kind of white-hot anger I didn’t think he was capable of. Frantic, I tore away from his grasp and pushed against his chest as hard as I could, trying to keep him at an arms length. He charged forward, breaking my grip and backed me into the bunks lining the walls behind us.
My calves struck the bottom beam of a lower bunk, and my knees buckled beneath me. Caleb latched on to my shoulders, locked his elbows, and tried to stiff-arm me down onto his bed. I reached up and tore at his face with my nails, leaving three raw and bleeding scratches along the length of his cheek.
He stumbled backwards and covered his face with his hands. I took his confusion as an opportunity to escape and sprinted towards the door, my heart beating bruises into my chest.
I heard him dragging the legs of what sounded like a chair across the floor behind me, but before I could turn back, he hurled it straight into my legs and sent me reeling.
The impact rattled through my teeth. The splintered floorboards ripped right through the skin of my knees, leaving gashes as big as quarters just below the caps.
I was feet away from freedom, and I’d scrape all the skin off my legs if it meant making it outside. I needed this chance, and with Cillian and Marcus nowhere in sight, I couldn’t afford to lose it.
As I tried getting to my feet, Caleb bore his knees right into the center of my spine and slammed me down onto the floor a second time. I rolled onto my back underneath him, dazed and desperate to stop him from pushing all of his weight down on top of me.
He slapped both my hands aside and slid his fingers around my neck; choking off what little breath I had left. I buried my nails into the skin of his wrists, scrambling to relieve the pressure he pressed down on my airways.
I pleaded him to stop and searched his eyes for any sign of the boy he’d been at the station, but he wouldn’t look at me.
“That’s enough, Caleb!”
Cillian stood in the doorway with a sizable amount of wire cable hanging over his shoulders. Caleb unlatched his hands from my throat, and I gasped in a lungful of air, struggling to get my wind back between tears.
“Did you see what you wanted?” Caleb asked, gazing up at Cillian like a well-trained dog.
Cillian tossed him the bundle of cable and a roll of duct tape. Caleb sat me up, wound them around me, and slapped covered my mouth to keep me quiet.
“I saw what I needed to. You had me worried earlier. You seemed a little too serious about that tramp in front of Rusty. We can’t have that ya’ know.”
Caleb’s eyes flickered back to normal just in time for me to catch what looked like embarrassment scampering across his face.
“I didn’t know what else to do. The girlfriend act was the most believable thing I could think of," he said.
Caleb’s eyes quickly found their way to the floor.
“I hope for your sake, Caleb, that that’s all it was.”
“Come on, Cillian.”
“Do you know why I asked you to rough her up earlier, Cal?' Cause she needs to understand that you’re the boss in this house—not her boyfriend. That mouth of hers nearly landed the lot of us in prison, and all you did was stand there while she yapped Rusty into an early grave!”
Caleb snatched Cillian by the collar and dug his fingers hard into his t-shirt.
“Liam killed Rusty, Cillian. Not her.”
He brushed Caleb's hands away.
“Suit yourself, kiddo. Just try not to make anymore mistakes at our family’s expense.”
“I’ll swear on whatever you want me to.”
“Swear on your life, then. If you break your word, I’ll kill you for it. Deal?”
Cillian latched on to Caleb’s hand tight enough to drain away the blood. He couldn’t have been older than Caleb by more than a few years, but he took extreme pleasure in what little power that gave him.
Caleb ignored his brother’s threats, picked me up off of the ground, and wound the rest of the wires around me tight enough to sting.
“Forget it. We’ve got other things to worry about. What should I do with her for the time being?“ he asked, piquing Cillian's interest.
“Whatever you like, just tell me when you want me to leave the room!”
Cillian let out a raspy cackle cold enough to freeze the blood. He was an imp of a man, less physically terrifying than Liam, but equally sinister. Between laughs he’d occasionally glance down at me, his eyes gleaming pallid blue in the day light.
Caleb fell silent, choking on his reservations and the remnants of what Cillian had said. Earlier, I might've pitied him, but he wasn't someone to pity—none of them were.
“You’re a Judas after your own heart, Caleb. Don’t worry yourself to pieces. As long as she’s kept in her place, you’re alright by me. Toss her in the cold store for the time being. We need Marcus back before we can do anything else,” Cillian said.
Caleb pulled me off of the ground by the cables and urged me towards a locked metal room in the back of the house. The wires around me tightened, and fresh adrenaline spilled into my bloodstream. They’d kill me here.
They’d take life as quickly as they had Rusty’s and leave me in the company of animal’s ghosts. I let all my weight hang dead in his grip, like resistance would change things. He'd have to drag me to the end of everything with my heels firm against the floor.
I’d make him carry me, cursing and spitting, into the cold store where I’d be no different than the livestock who came here to die.
Death pervaded this house—it lurked in the old, dried bloodstains on the floor and danced around the rusted, abandoned killing machines along the walls. These boys could frighten me, break me, beat me, and bruise me until I was hopeless, but I wouldn’t die helpless.
"She won't move, Cillian,” Caleb said.
I dropped to my knees, and Caleb struggled to get me to step an inch further from where I’d fallen. Cillian lost himself in another fit of laughter. Caleb's face flushed.
"You've gotta learn how to handle a woman Caleb or you'll disappoint down the line."
Cillian moved him aside, picked me clear up off the floor, and slung me over his shoulder. I kicked as hard as I could manage, thrashing my knees around like a madwoman, hoping to hold him back as long as possible.
“Here’s a lesson, Cal. For jumpy girls like this one, lift her up so her diaphragm rests on top of the rounded part of your shoulder and—"
A hard jab from Cillian spilled the air right out of my lungs. I stared out at Caleb while he watched me choke, sputter, and blue in the face. He stood there, stuck somewhere between concern and forced indifference.
As my vision blurred, I locked my bloodshot, bulging eyes with his and watched his conscience betray him. Guilt lingered just below the surface of the chipping veneer he'd put on to appease Cillian, and I cracked a smile beneath the duct tape.
I’d found my loophole.