“I was actually glad when the heat lamps kicked on after the water.” I barked out a laugh. “Stupid.”
“Not stupid at all. I thought the same thing at first. We’re like animals down here.”
I knew what she meant. The tunnels were forcing us into a state of primal survival. There was no room to worry about our hair or makeup, to wonder what other people thought of us or how something would look in a social media post.
We were prey, our prime directive to avoid our predators. When we got cold, we sought warmth. When we got hot, we sought relief.
“Speaking of animals, where are we supposed to go to the bathroom?” I hadn’t realized it until now, but I actually really needed to pee.
She laughed. “Options are limited. I found a dark corner and did a drip-dry. I would have tried my water bottle if I thought I had the aim.”
“Great.”
“Yeah…”
We’d come to a fork and Julia hesitated. “We should split up. We’ll both move faster, be harder to find that way.”
I nodded. I didn’t know her but it had been nice to have company for a few minutes. “Take your pick.”
She looked both ways and headed for the tunnel on the left. “Stay safe. Only twenty hours left.”
Her words echoed in my mind as she disappeared in the darkness.
Twenty hours? I looked up at the digital clock on the wall, one of many scattered throughout the tunnels, usually at the intersections.
Yep. I hadn’t been keeping track of the time, but I’d only been in the tunnels for a little over four hours.
Fuck my life.
I kept walking, looking for a good place to pee before finally accepting that there was no good place. There was just the stone walls of the tunnel and the occasional pile of old stuff, the pallets of water. I found a dark corner and squatted over the dirt floor to relieve myself, questioning my life choices every step of the way.
It was humiliating, but I felt better.
I wondered about the other girls, wondered if anyone had been caught.
And then I wondered about the men in hawk masks, wondered if they’d caught someone else, hated that I hoped the answer was no. I could still conjure the smell of the one who’d handed me the clipboard, could still see the anticipatory shine in the gazes of the other two.
It was a shine that promised darkness.
Danger.
It was like a hot stove had suddenly switched on in front of me, and I was irrationally tempted to reach out and touch its glowing coils.
I shook my head. I was thinking crazy. Losing my virginity was a silver lining to getting caught, but I couldn’t afford to get caught. I needed the prize that came with winning, because let’s face it, it wasn’t like I could search the internet for assassins near me.
The irony wasn’t lost on me: my brother was a killer.
I’d resigned myself to that truth a long time ago. Bram did what he did out of necessity, his way of exorcising the demon of our parents’ sudden death. Any other time, Icouldask Bram for this favor and he would do it without question.
But not this time.
Because Bram wasn’t a talker, and he definitely didn’t want to talk about the car accident that had killed our parents and scarred him in more ways than one. He didn’t want to talk about the fact that they’d been run off Mountain Road, didn’t want to talk about the possibility that it wasn’t an accident.
I didn’t blame him. The car had gone over the side of the mountain, had fallen down a steep cliff. It had taken twelve hours to find it.
To find Bram.
I would never be able to share those hours with him because I hadn’t been there when it happened. I would never know whathe’d gone through, trapped in the crushed car with our dead parents, wondering if he was going to die too.
