Chapter 6: Escape

Another tidal wave was brewing in my stomach the moment we’d entered the kitchen. The commotion had come from there. Neil, Hanz, and his mother— all willing participants.

With those three people in different corners of the room, Audra stopped me before getting closer. Neil, who was armed with a kitchen knife now, shook his head in fright. “She attacked me!” he said. “Audra, Olivia attacked me!”

“She’s my mother!”

Audra and I turned to Hanz. Partway to Neil, partway to his mother, his face was dripping with sweat, his whole body shaking uncontrollably. Gritting his teeth, he pointed to Neil. “I’ll kill you!” he said. “Nobody hurts my mother!”

Again, I didn’t know entirely what was happening. But Audra, quick to catch on, raised her hand, tried to improve the situation nonetheless. “Calm down,” she said. “And tell me what happened from the start.”

“No!” Hanz said. “How about I break Neil’s neck, and get it over with?!”

“P-please!” I whispered, trying to pitch in too. “Let’s all calm down.”

That seemed to do the trick. To me, Hanz seemed to recognize that we were all supposed to be allies here. His eyes went to me pleadingly. “But. . .“

“Pax Leighton?” Olivia remarked. From her corner, it was as if she had only awoken when she’d heard my voice. Looking at her, I saw that her right arm was bleeding, a shallow gash cast upon it, no doubt from Neil’s knife. Olivia’s unexpected smile right then totally creeped me out. “Where’s Emily?”

“I-in your room.”

At that, Hanz’s face slowly turned into a frown again. He must be remembering something unpleasant, something that happened back in the room upstairs. Crap. “You. . .” he said just recalling. “All of you! What the hell are you doing in my house?! You’re ruining everything for us!”

“You invited us in!” Neil responded, matching Hanz’s tone, which I wished he didn’t. “Your mother is psycho!” He continued. “And so are you!”

“We’re not!” Hanz hollered.

“Oh darling, we are!”

Olivia attacked so fast that I barely had time keeping up with the situation, much less jumping to Neil’s defense. But what was I to do when Olivia pounced and Neil retaliated? Of course, Neil would hit the woman. Of course, the woman would collapse. Of course, Hanz would rage because it was his mother. In just a few steps, he was choking Neil to death. Audra and I rushed to stop him.

“Please!” I said. “Let go!”

“Hanz!” Audra shouted. “I don’t want to hurt you!”

“I’ll kill him!” Hanz snarled. “I’ll kill him!”

I’d never tried to stop a six-foot something guy before, and to be honest it felt like I was going against a wall.

I yelped when he almost hit my face in order to swing a fist to Neil.

“Ack!” Neil sounded pathetic as he tried to slap Hanz away. But my attention was no longer on him, or Audra, who equally looked like she was having a difficult time subduing Hanz. It was on the yard now, in plain sight because of the glass walls, seemingly busier than it had ever been before.

My stomach dipped even lower. “There are people out there!” I yelled. “People in black!”

What timing they had, and how did they know we were even here in the first place? Had they tracked us down? Of course they did.

Looking back at Hanz and others, the three were still at it.

Until a loud crash sounded.

“Shit!” Neil said, as glass shattered and rained on us. I quickly covered my face.

The knife, I saw, was being picked up by Audra from the floor. It had fallen from Neil’s hand, and so would we, if we didn’t get out of her immediately.

Hanz, who was also stricken with surprise, looked around the uproar. “What are they doing here?!” he said, as if he’d just woken from his stupor. “Why are those men destroying my house?! What had we ever done to them?!”

I could understand his agitation, as it had more than reflected mine. But what I didn’t understand was how the men in black were now positioning themselves in a good vantage point, possibly to subdue us.

We were barely adults. Why would they want to harm us?

I quickly raised my hands. “Don’t hurt us!” I screamed. “We’re not here to fight!”

Neil, fury on his face, shoved me away. Murmured disgust under his breath, telling me how much of a useless oaf I was. But surely, we could end this in peace? Not everything should be laced with violence.

“No, we can’t,” Audra said, as if hearing what was inside my mind. “It’s just useless at this point, Pax.”

“O-of course, it’s not!” I defended. “We’re just high school students! Why would they do this to us?!”

“Not to them we’re not.” But I barely heard a word Audra had said. Someone from the floor was rising like the dead.

I gasped when Olivia attacked again. “I’ll finish this!” she said. “For Emily!”

“Audra!” I shrieked. She was the target of Olivia’s psycho this time.

Hanz, who standing in the middle of the commotion, covered his face, didn’t know what to do. But Neil did. He was more than willing to punch Olivia away. Again, to Hanz’s alarm.

This was turning into a zoo. Plus the men in black were almost in the house now. I could see their guns, taking aim at us. At Audra, who didn’t have the slightest clue.

Her eyes met mine, just when a guy in black was about to squeeze the trigger. At the same time, something from the floor pushed me forward.

“No!” someone shouted, as a shot tore through the air. There were a couple more screams. It was one of the messiest days of my life. But I hardly seemed to notice because right then my leg was struck with the hottest sensation, then I was falling straight to the ground, groaning.

Hanz, Neil, and Audra rushed to me, but already I could feel the pain swallowing me up. I couldn’t believe I was shot. I had never felt anything like it before. Like I would die on the spot.

Someone picked me up from the floor. “The back!” There was a yell. And then I could feel myself being cradled by the heat. Whether good or bad, I closed my eyes to rest. Until the chaotic world around me dissipated.

Everything was a blur from then on out, like snapshots of a photograph, pictures that were hardly developed.

Screams.

Running.

And what’s more, a protective hand bringing me forward, taking me to the unknown.

“To the left!” a guy’s voice instructed.

“No, the right!”

“Are we going to the right place?!”

“Mom!” Someone sniffled in the background, followed by a tough reprimand.

The voices were in and out of my consciousness, drifting and twirling, like I’d taken a new kind of drug.

It was in the back alley of a building where I partly regained awareness of my surroundings, and even then it felt like everything was burning down.

Someone prevented me from reaching out to me leg, though, before I could touch it out. “No,” that someone said firmly. “You’ll hurt yourself more, Pax.”

“Audra?”

“Yeah. . .”

“How come you’re the one carrying me?”

I chuckled a little. The pins and needles on my leg were turning into huge ass snakes. Like the ones they’d stick on a vampire. No, wait, that was a stake, not a snake. Add to that, my voice was sounding kind of weird. Was I dreaming all of this? Would I wake up any second?

In the near distance, two boys were arguing, telling each other how to break into a building. “Let’s kick the doors down!”

“Absolutely not! Don’t you see the alarm line? It signals directly to the police.”

“And how did you know that?”

“Stop arguing! She’s losing a lot of blood!”

Silence. Then shifting. Whoever were bickering had decided to stop. But then so were my eyes. They just refused to open.

“I’ll just. . . I’ll just take five minutes before I go to school,” I mumbled. “See you later, dad.”

Audra was about to turn her head to look back at me, but already, I had drifted off to another uneasy sleep.

I was awake.

I didn’t know how. I didn’t know why. But suddenly, like a splash of cold water was thrown over me, I was sputtering and gasping, pulling myself up.

God, I had a nightmare. And the nightmare didn’t look like it was about to stop anytime soon. I looked around to the darkness of a room— a single, strange beam of light pointing towards the ceiling.

And then my bitch of a leg drew me back to reality. “Argh!”

“You’re awake.”

“Of course I’m awake!” I snapped. “What does it look like?!”

God, my leg felt like it had been hit by a baseball bat twice. Thrice. No forget that. A couple of times until it had numbed down, but it was still uncomfortably heavy. Kind of like it would just detach from me any time.

Turning to my right, it was as if someone had slapped me, when I saw that it was Audra, sitting beside me, the one that I’d been talking rudely to.

“I-I’m sorry,” I stammered, embarrassed. “I-I thought. . .”

Audra shook her head, a sympathetic look crossing her face. It was gone in a second though, replaced by a new kind of worry. “Don’t worry. I’d be sorry too if I were you,” she whispered. “I mean. . . With your leg cut off—“

What?

Now wait a minute. WHAT?!

I took a deep breath, but it was too labored for me to get anything down besides a strangled choke. Slowly glancing down, I was prepared for the worst, when I saw the bandages on my calf.

Beside me, Audra was starting to chuckle. “I’m sorry,” she said.

Really? Really?! Did she have to pull that prank on me now?

Yet the relief in my chest was something I’d never felt like before when I turned to her again. I did not lose my leg. I was shot. But I did not lose my life. And here I was, laughing beside her.

Well. . . It was more like she was chuckling a while ago, while I was still in shock. Now, she was silent, staring at the floor. Audra, for all intents and purposes, had a weird ass sense of humor.

I’d almost told her that before she cut me off. “The others are in a convenience store in the next room. Hanz took us here right after you were shot.”

“I-Is that so?”

“Yeah.”

I tried to bite off the sudden nausea that washed over me then, but it swept like a wave. It must had been due to the amount of blood I’d lost.

Audra, holding a flashlight, pointed the beam of light on the room. And dizzy as I was getting by at the second, I saw that we were in an office. A backroom, perhaps. Something that had a white desk and a swivel chair, a couple of metal drawers, two doors, and two windows with blinds. The lights overhead were shut.

The flashlight that Audra was holding was then pointed down. “It’s almost nighttime,” she explained. “You’d been sleeping here for quite some time.”

I figured. But how did they get me inside?

“We snuck in,” she continued. “Hanz told us where to go after we escaped. His mom’s. . .” She paused. “He was forced to leave them behind after what happened.”

“His mom’s were like possessed,” I croaked.

Audra nodded her head. “Hanz might have seen that too. Especially after Olivia pushed you.”

“I see. . .”

That was my only answer. Everything from this morning up until this point had felt surreal like I was having an out of body experience. But what was most shocking of all wasn’t the fact that I’d been shot. Or one of us could have died. It was that Audra was right here beside me. It was like I’d stepped into another world, one where we were talking.

The reality of the situation hit me like a freaking truck, though, when the door to the right suddenly creaked open. “Eew! It smells like blood in here.”

It was Neil entering through the door, quickly followed by Hanz, whose eyes were still puffy, so much so when he glanced at me. “Hey, Pax,” he rasped. “You’re awake.”

“No thanks to your bawling, Peterson,” Neil replied. “And the sound you’ve been making could lead everyone right back here. I swear, I’ll kill you if they find us.”

Hanz gave me a weary smile, ignoring Neil like I did. In fact, all of us including Audra decided to do just that. But Neil, knowing him, wasn’t someone who liked to be ignored.

“Did Audra take you up to speed, Leighton?” he said.

I nodded, trying to hold back the dizziness.

Neil grunted at me, looking like he wanted to say something inappropriate, but at the last second, decided to feature where we were instead. “We’re trapped,” he said, matter-of-factly. “People in black are looking for us. God knows what they’ll do. I mean, they already tried to kill us. . . We can’t stay here. Definitely not.”

“Pax is wounded,” Audra piped up. But her best friend, going to the table, followed closely behind by Hanz, who himself looked liked he was still dreaming, shook his head, glared at us.

“So?” Neil said. “We should probably leave her behind.”

“Hey,” Hanz said, albeit gentler than back at his house. “I’m still shaken by what happened, and I still don’t know why my mom’s were acting that way, but I did not go with you all just so you can ditch someone in our group. That’s incredibly bitchy of you, Neil. You know that?”

“Why, yes.” Neil didn’t look nonplussed though. Or embarrassed. Or regretful. Instead, he looked practical to me. Especially when he turned to Audra. “You know we can’t stay here. We’re all going to die.”

“We can’t leave her either.” Audra’s response was low and short, but had been sure and clear. A small bit of me, though confused, cheered and wanted to celebrate.

Until the nausea started attacking again, and I was forced to focus my eyes on the floor.

Neil, from his shadow casted everywhere, shook his head adamantly. “We don’t even know what’s happening,” he said. “We can’t contact anyone. For all we know, there is a purge going on out there, and we’re sitting ducks in here doing nothing. You know what I think?” He raised his chin. “We should escape at midnight, say adios and get on our way. All who vote with me, raise your hand.”

There was an uncomfortable silence in the room, but no one did as he’d said.

Neil dug his fingernails on the table. “Really?” he spoke. “Really?!”

“Can you just calm down for a second? We’re very confused and scared ourselves.” The table creaked when Hanz stood up and surveyed the room, his eyes falling on me. “She’s hurt,” he said. “We’re tired. Hell, I’m freaking tired. This is all too sudden.”

“So?”

“So don’t you have any pity?!” Hanz was standing taller now, glaring at Neil. “Why are you only looking out for yourself, man? With everything’s that happened, we should be sticking together.”

Neil didn’t have any answer to that. But he had a word for me. In fact, it wasn’t a sentence at all. It was a freaking statement.

Going to Audra, he pulled her up, said something low to her ear. After a second, scowling, he turned to me, said, “You’re dead weight, Leighton. You’ll just hold everyone back. So after Audra and I had some rest for a while, we’re leaving this place, with or without you.”