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Chapter Three
REESE
"Are you getting tired?"Sin asks.
"I'm fine," I lie. I'm exhausted. We haven't slept in what feels like days and I don't even know what we're walking toward, other than the sounds that are starting to freak me out. The bits of food we both ate yesterday have been replaced with an emptiness gnawing at my insides. At least as a prisoner, I was being fed once a day. My energy has depleted but I don't want to complain. I know what it'll get me with him. I feel like I'm walking in dizzying circles when I've done nothing but walk in a straight line for the past several hours. The sun is flirting with the horizon line and I hope that means we'll stop soon.
"We're almost there." Wherever there is. At least the sounds of cries and static have stopped over the past hour.
"We've walked all this way so you can teach me how to shoot a gun?"
"No, we've walked all this way so you can see what those noises are. And so we can possibly find something to eat." While the thought of food should be making me drool, I've learned well enough to know food does not just appear and that we will likely have to fight for it. "I haven't been down this far in a while. Years, actually."
I pick up my speed as I try to make out what I'm looking at—could be a mirage at this point. Is that—oh my God. It's water. Water! I've dreamt of submerging myself in a pool of warm water. I've dreamt of it for so long. Feeling the coolness cover my skin and my hair turn to silk against my back, is something I never thought I would experience again. Sin is on my heels and as I approach the edge of the water, my focus locks onto something else. A wall. A wall short enough to climb. Is this the way out? Please, God. Let this be my way out. I begin to take my boots off, but Sin's hand grips around my arm. "No," he says quietly.
"No? Are you kidding me? Get away from me. I'm going in whether you like it or not." Sin grips my arm a little tighter and yanks me away from the water this time. He pulls me down alongside the water to the other side where he points at the water. "What? It's water. I need water, Sin."
His hands cup around my head and he adjusts the angle in which I was looking. "Look through the water." It's murky and swirling around, but I concentrate on looking beyond the surface, and I can't make out what I'm looking at.
Unintentionally, I gasp when I come to the unfortunate conclusion of what I'm seeing. I force my focus down the length of the water, seeing more and more. Breathing heavily, I turn around and look at Sin. His eyes are straining and his forehead has wrinkles I've never seen before. "Those are bodies, Reese."
"I know." I turn back and look again at what must have been a massacre at some point. "Who did this to them?"
Without skipping a beat, he says, "They all did this to themselves. I was dumb enough to almost become one of them once."
"I don't understand."
He squats down in from of the water and pulls me down with him. "Give me your finger."
"What? Why?" He takes my hand in his and bends all of my fingers down except for my pointer finger. "What are you doing, Sin?" He tugs my hand toward the water, forcing the tip of my finger to touch the water. A deep burn runs through my finger hand, causing all of my muscles to twitch. I jerk my hand away from him, falling backward onto my butt. "What the hell is wrong with you?" I slap his arm with force, but he laughs.
"The water is poisoned with a cocktail of deadly flesh eating bacteria," he says.
"And you couldn't just tell me that? You had to infect me with it just to get your point across? Why do you have to be such a goddamn—"
"Say it for me, baby."
I groan loudly and pull myself up from the ground. Turning in circles for a brief moment, I feel like a crazed lunatic right now. I have nowhere to run and I feel like imploding from the amount of anger building up within me. "I can't stand you," I grit. "You dragged us all the way down here so you could burn me?"
"I think we've already been over this. Yes."
"Screw you, Sin!"
"We've been over that, too," he smirks. That smirk I want to slap. He reaches into his back pocket and retrieves a gun. "Here you go."
"You're handing me a gun when you know how pissed off I am?" I return his little snide smirk.
"Yeah, because I know you're not dumb. Being alone here is way worse than having a hot stud tagging along. And by the way, touching the tip of your finger to the water won't do any permanent damage, so quit freaking out."
"You like to tempt your fate, don't you?" I ask. No, I wouldn't shoot him. Being alone here would be worse than falling into the pits of Hell. Although there's no reason he needs to know I feel like that. I take the gun from his hand and point it in the opposite direction, looking through the sights, pinching one eye closed. "What'cha gonna shoot over there, princess?"
Keeping my fingers off the trigger, I turn around, pointing the gun at Sin's head. "Call me princess again, and you'll see."
"Hey now," he says, walking toward me. "Joking or not, we don't point weapons at people's heads unless we intend to kill. And we both know you don't want to kill me." He presses my hand down so the gun rests against the side of my leg. "Hold on one second," he says, walking ahead of me over to a nearby tree and pulls a branch down, snapping it so it dangles lower than the rest of the branches. He points at the one single leaf hanging from the end and looks back at me. "You're going to shoot this."
He walks away from the leaf and moves around behind me as I lift the gun back up and aim it toward the leaf. "I got it."
