CHAPTER 47
Fear. It was a term I had become too comfortable with in my days rotting away behind the walls of the building I had been living in. I had felt that fear mostly for Harry. Afraid of what they were doing to him, what he had done, where they were taking him, how he was being punished, what would be the consequences of his actions. But this fear was not about Harry.
This time my heart pounded with the kind of fear that rattles your bones and clears your mind. A strange tingling made the hair on the back of my neck stand up and my stomach sunk. This time the antagonist was calling my name, following my steps. This time it was too dark to see who it was whispering behind me.
"Rose," another quiet voice spoke, but this time it was Harry's. It was cautious, as if spoken too loud the anonymous person would attack. "Crawl as fast as you fucking can, and don't look back."
I was happy to follow his orders. I dug my hands into the dirt and kicked at the ground. I forced my body forward and pushed, which could have been quite literally, for my life. A boiling panic surged through my veins and I could thing of nothing else but to crawl faster.
Harry, too, had immensely quickened his pace. "Keep going Rose," he said in rushed, worried words over the sounds of our effort. He sounded scared and shaken up, a way I have never heard him before. I had to remind myself that he, too, could feel fear.
And knowing he was afraid only amplified what I felt. The woman, I thought it was a woman, had given no further indication of her presence, though. But I knew she was there. If I were to stop and listen, I would've heard that faint dragging sound. But I couldn't quite hear it over my attempt at escape. So for a brief moment I wondered if I had imagined someone calling my name, too, like I had imagined the same noise back in the corner of Wickendale's halls.
But no, this was real. Harry knew it, too, and not only did he share in my observations but also in my fear. Either she didn't exist and Harry and I were both going mad, or she did exist and she was following us. I didn't know which thought was scarier.
I didn't have time for that contemplation, though, and kept crawling forward, heart pumping, adrenaline flowing, and faster than I had ever moved in my entire life. I felt like a wild beast, clawing through the dirt to make a mad dash out of this occupied tunnel. My only sense of comfort, although nothing could be quite comforting in this situation, was the sound of Harry moving in front of me.
But despite that reassurance, I still felt that electric intensity through my nerves and heart like static. I could imagine and almost feel her grabbing ahold of my ankle, her hand inches away, clawing and reaching for me the way I clawed and reached for an end to Wickendale's final horror.
It seemed like millions of surging heartbeats, insanely heavy breathing, and hours of the burning sensation of my muscles later, we had reached a finish. Harry stopped moving. I stopped moving. It was a dead end. Once quiet, I realized she hadn't been inches away like I thought. But we still heard from far down the tunnel that odd scraping; she hadn't quit following us.
"What the fuck was that?" Harry asked in a gasp, frantically feeling the walls for a way out.
"I-" I started, needing a breath. "I have no idea."
"Shit," he said. "Don't let it get close to you; we get out and we run."
I nodded, head turned back in the direction of the strange sounds and whispers. There was nothing separating myself and that woman. Nothing. My heart beat wildly with fear and panic, head not facing anywhere but the direction from which we had come. I drew closer to Harry, looking for any signs of her, which was hard to accomplish in the pitch dark. It was a fear where you cannot think of anything else, and any noise or movement in the dark only added to your jittery nerves. It was the fear that demanded all of your attention until it subsided. And this had not yet subsided.
"Got it," Harry muttered and I breathed out in relief. But I couldn't rid my mind of the thought that she could come at any moment, she could have a weapon, she could have a plan to kill us. She knew my name.
I jumped when Harry slammed his fist on something above us. Something hard, like wood. It was locked, a sealing to this hole in the ground. So he kept working to get it open. I sat there and waited while my thoughts tangled with the coiling flames of panic and fear. Harry's feelings didn't seem to come out in his thoughts like mine but rather in his actions while he banged his fist against the wood with all of the adrenaline and urgency he had flowing through his veins.
And then another whisper. Scratchy and low, saying the same thing as before. "Rose."
She was getting closer.
Another alarming jolt ran through me, and I turned to Harry. With my scrawny arms I shoved and pushed and hit the wood along with him, the both of us no doubt to have bruises tomorrow. If we made it that long.
It was something from a horror movie, as if we had been buried alive and were pounding against the enclosure for survival. We pushed and smacked and punched at the surface but to no prevail.
So Harry tried lying on his back. It was difficult to get in position in the small space, but he managed it. "Watch out," he said. With a force I didn't know he had he kicked upward, using his entire body as both feet hit the wood. With the impact it broke with a shattering crack. The wood had split, and a few grains of dirt fell threw.
We were so close, now we only had to rip the wood free. But what we didn't realize was that during our grueling efforts, she had gotten closer.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw movement. My head instinctively turned to the left, and there she was. Not close, but close enough. Just her silhouette was outlined, lighter than that of the darkness around her. This woman, at her proximity and with the horror she possessed was no longer a person but had grown into a monster.
Suddenly my heart was not beating on its own but my whole body seemed to pulsate along with it. My eyes grew wide, my breath hitched in my throat, and every bone in my body shook with terror.
I rushed to rip away the wood like Harry had already begun to do. I heard her move closer and I began to scream. Tears brimmed my eyes and I screamed. I screamed until the shriek blocked out everything else, screamed for Harry and I, screamed for the monstrosity beside us to stop, and screamed to rid myself of my overwhelming fear. "Go, go, go!" I yelled frantically over and over, along with the words please and stop. Tears fell from my eyes and the chaos of my voice and ripping of wood and Harry grunting with the effort added to a mad, wild, impossibly alarming rush of fear that developed as fast as the tears rolling down my cheeks.
I screamed until a chunk of wood was finally ripped free. Dirt fell between the crack and sprinkled Harry and me. Still, we kept going until there was a whole big enough to fit through while my body shook with adrenaline. Suddenly there was dirt in my eyes, on my clothes, and on Harry. A thick layer covered us but I quickly brushed it off and looked up to the first clear open sky I had seen in a while.
But we still hadn't succeeded. Harry quickly stood and climbed out of the hole, but there were two others.
"HARRY!" I shrieked again when her dirty hand reached for me, just barely missing my arm. Before she could get closer Harry's large hands were pushed under my shoulders and he lifted me out of the stuffy ground, while crumbles of dirt rolled off of me and back into the Earth.
The last thing I saw was a dirty, pale hand reach out under the opening until we turned away.
"Come on Rose!" Harry encouraged immediately after my feet touched the ground. And then we ran. I had already been breathing heavily, but now I was sure you could hear my gasps as I tried to work my lungs to keep up with my pace.
We could not yet celebrate feet on ground and mouths inhaling air that was not Wickendale's. We could not yet find happiness in the fact that we had escaped.
Because there was still a horrid version of a woman following us. Harry and I slowed for a moment, needing to catch a breath. "What the hell was that?" I asked.
Harry shook his head and gulped in some air. "Looks like we weren't the only ones who wanted to escape."
Both of our heads turned, slowly, back in the direction in which we had come. And finally we could see who had been following us. She was tucked behind a tree's shadow in the eerie darkness. But she was moving. Just not walking as a person would but as someone who had something severely wrong with them would move. She was dragging her legs behind her.
Her calves were not as they should be. Rough, horrid stitching separated them from her thighs. Her toes pointed behind her body; like she had cut off her legs and sewed them behind her. It was a disfigured, nauseating, terrifying thing that nobody should see. And her wide, dead light eyes and strand hand movements did not help.
"Rose," Harry whispered from beside me as he stared in the same horror as I did.
"Yes?" I squeaked.
"Run."
And thats what we did. We left her behind in a mad dash as she lingered there, swaying side to side with the effort of pulling her legs forward one by one.
Harry and I tore our eyes away and rand next to each other, his smoking lungs forcing his pace to match mine.
We didn't stop, even when I could not breathe, even when my throat and lungs burned, even when Harry groaned with the effort. The horrifying woman's leg monstrosity was no match for our speed, but still we ran until our adrenaline was all burnt up. We knew that if we stopped we may have been hunted down and put right back into our cells, even after all we had done. So for what had to be one mile, two, three, we ran until we were not psychically capable.
The bags provided by Lori and Kelsey slapped against my back and the strain was felt in my shoulders. I was tempted to drop it and its effect of slowing me down, but I realized it had food and water and money. Plus, they had already lasted us this far.
"Don't stop," Harry encouraged, even though he sounded like he was getting close to needing a break.
But neither of us stopped until we reached something we had not prepared ourself elves for. Far behind Wickendale but still part of its massive property was a sort of cliff. Beyond it was the sound of the water's waves and open sky.
I gasped for any air I could hold when we stopped, trying to keep down the little food I had eaten today. My pulse pounded in my skull and my forehead dripped sweat. And before we even had time to recover, the question of what to do next demanded our attention.
"What-" I gasped, and that was all I could manage. Harry rested his hand on his thighs and bent forward, eyes closed as he tried to regain some oxygen.
Finally able to breathe, I examined the ridge. It curved backward so that any way we ran would lead back toward the institution. There was no way out but forward, off of the cliff and into the unfamiliar water.
HARRY'S POV
I've seen a lot of sick shit throughout my lifetime, but that girl and her fucking backward-legs was something I wasn't exactly familiar with. But one good thing about them was that they made her slow, and we were easily a mile ahead of her. There was no rush to escape whatever that disturbed mind had planned. But there was an urgency, however, to put as much distance between us and the people who, if they hadn't started to already, would chase us. The only option was to jump.
"Do you trust me, Rose?" I asked once I had caught a breath. And my dirt-covered, teary-cheeked, beautiful girl nodded. "Of course."
"Good," I said. "Then hold my hand," I instructed and faced the drop off to the crashing waves dozens and dozens and dozens of feet below.
"Are we going to jump?" She asked, the shakiness of her voice still present.
"Its the only way. We made it this far, we'll make it through a little water." I said. But in reality I had no idea how shallow it was, or whether rocks lied beneath the surface. We could not go back, though. That was not an option. This was the only alternative.
"Ready?" I asked her, and although scared out of her mind, she nodded. Neither of us were ready, really, but there was nothing to do in preparation. Well, except for one thing. "One second," I said. I gently took the straps of Rose's bag off her shoulders, removing my own as well. I threw them over the edge and onto the shore, beside the water where they landed. We would need those later.
I rejoined my hand in hers, holding it tightly in encouragement. "On three," I said. We shared one last sure look before I began my count. "One . . . two . . . three." And with her hand in mine, our feet lifted from the ground. We were in the air, falling together into the unknown. The wind rushed through our hair and I didn't have time to feel. I only had time for flickers of emotion that couldn't be deciphered before I was submerged. My body grew cold with the freezing water and it flowed around me. The wind was knocked from my lungs with the impact and the water stung like a slap in the face. But I was alive. There had been no rocks and it was deep.
Instead of hating the pain I loved the relief, thankful that my heart was still beating in my chest. I welcomed the water as it flowed through my hair and soaked my clothes, engulfing my arms and hands.
My hands. They were empty, Rose's no longer intertwined with them.
I swam the the surface and my head broke through as I gasped for a breath. My hair stuck to my forehead and my thick uniform made it hard to stay afloat but I didn't care. I had to find Rose before those trivial worries could be addressed.
"Rose!" I screamed out. She was nowhere to be found along the dangerous waves of the dark blue water. My heart sunk as I spun around, desperately searching in all directions. "Rose!" I screamed again.
I was overwhelmed with relief when her head finally popped out of the water. She gasped for air and coughed, but she was okay. "Come here," I breathed, swimming toward her as she moved to me. "Grab onto me, baby, hold on to my neck," I said. She wrapped her arms around me and I wrapped mine around her frail, shivering body. We managed to stay afloat for just a few minutes, kicking as we swam until reaching the water's banks. Once my hand touched land I hauled Rose up while she pulled herself, collapsing onto her back once out of the water.
I did the same, climbing onto land and laying beside her. With our quick movements and persistent running, we had bought ourselves a minute or two. Just a couple minutes, and then we had to run again; but we needed a rest. My eyes shut closed for a brief moment, wondering where to go from here. But the smile that spread on Rose's face, despite the things we had faced, let me just take in now. I forgot about the next move and thought about the previous ones.
"Harry?" She asked.
"Yeah?" I wondered, already smiling with an idea of what she might say.
"We're out."
It was those words, those two simple words that made me feel . . . happy.
"Holy shit," I said. And then I began to laugh, and Rose giggled from beside me and I had never felt such an overwhelming joy.
"We're fucking out!" I yelled, my stupid fucking grin only growing wider. I stood from where I sat and for a moment I forgot about the crazy woman approaching the edge of the cliff, the awful Warden no doubt sending a search party, and the man whom a had just killed.
Because right now, it was only about me and Rose. I leaned down to wrap my arms around her waist and picked her up. She giggled and laughed and so did I, as I spun her around in my arms. Her legs wrapped around my waist and we just laughed, more powerful than the huge waves crashing beside us.
We would have to keep running soon and we would have to find somewhere to sleep, and we still had many difficulties that lied ahead of us. But right now, in this moment, none of that mattered.
Because we had fucking escaped Wickendale.