I didn’t go far. I couldn’t. I had no car. And I damn sure wasn’t leaving Sugar behind. So I ran through the complex and down to the storage shed that was never locked because the groundskeeper was a raging alcoholic who was always too smashed to remember his keys.
“I know, baby,” I said once I got the doors open and started to pull her inside. “But we have to do it.”
I tugged the leash a little harder, and she stepped inside far enough for me to close the doors.
There was a mini window on the roadside, but the night had come in dark, the moon hidden behind clouds. I couldn’t see anything once we were closed in.
Inside, it smelled strongly of weed killer and gas from the tractor.
I worried about the chemicals inside, about Sugar and her curious nose. “Sorry about this, baby,” I said, reaching to close my hand around her snout so she didn’t try to eat anything dangerous. “We’re going to be okay.”
I wasn’t sure if I was talking more to her or to myself.
They weren’t going to come look for me. Not in the shed. They’d look too conspicuous. Someone would call the cops.
I just had to wait them out.
I would hear them leave.
I could watch out the window to make sure all of them left.
Then I could climb out.
And, what?
I couldn’t stay here. Not anymore. Not now that they’d found me. They would come back eventually. They’d kill me. They’d do worse until I was begging for death.
I had to go.
Start over.
It was over an hour before I heard the bikes purr to life.
“Come here, baby,” I said, pulling her with me to the window, keeping one hand on her snout and leaning up to watch out the window, seeing all three of them pulling off. “They’re gone,” I told Sugar, as if she had any idea what was going on. “We’re just going to wait a little bit longer before we go back.”
That ‘little bit’ ended up being almost an hour. Until I had a wicked headache from the fumes and had walked into at least a dozen clinging spider webs.
My heart was in my throat as we crept back to my apartment. But there was no one lying in wait. Just a slightly ajar door and a completely wrecked apartment.
“Fucking assholes,” I growled, spotting my kit in the kitchen.
They took my freaking syringes. Every last one of them. And, yep, my damn insulin as well.
Great.
That was just fantastic.
Just what I needed.
My pulse was throbbing in my temples as I zipped up my test kit and took it with me into the bedroom.
“Of course,” I grumbled when I realized they’d raided one of my stashes of money. The biggest one.
“Girl, this is so bad,” I said when Sugar came up next to me with one of her toys in her mouth. “We have to go. Now.”
I guess there was one perk to having completely started my life over just about a year ago. I didn’t have much. I wasn’t attached to anything that I did have. All the furniture was from secondhand shops or on clearance at a box store. Nothing was quality. Very little had to come with me.
Wherever we were even going.
