Hailey

I woke up in the middle of somewhere—somewhere I didn’t recognize. But then again, I guess being able to recognize anything after catapulting out of a car window was unnaturally lucky.

Nothing hurt—well, not too badly.

But then again, I read somewhere that shock does that to you—makes you think you’re fine for a few seconds, and then bam! You look down and your legs are gone.

I checked my gams.

Fortunately, they still were there, but God were they ugly. The bruises looked worse than the cuts, which weren’t stitch worthy, but gross nonetheless. The giant bluish patches on my thighs were changing colors, which worried me, but didn’t keep me from trying to get to my feet.

This was a mistake.

The second I stood up another round of vertigo hit me so hard I keeled over backwards. Before I thought to put my arms out to catch myself, I slammed into the ground and the whiplash sent my head crashing into the dry packed dirt.

Ignoring the urge to panic was harder than ignoring the pain. Trying to breathe in this heat was like sucking a milkshake through a coffee straw. I didn’t know how to calm down, and the longer I tried to convince myself that I’d be okay, the less I believed it. I’d never been alone like this, and I’d never had to think about keeping myself breathing. Conservative private schools don’t teach you how to survive outside of the stock market. The most they tell you is to pay attention. I was paying attention now—only six hours too late.

Something snapped within earshot of where I was sitting.

The cicadas’ broke into a panicked frenzy. Their hissing exploded into loud, panicked, deliberate chaos, and spread through the husks nearby like a warning system.

They knew something was coming, I prayed to God it wasn’t Liam.

I stayed low to the ground, hoping I could spot whoever it was before they could spot me. I’d lost my glasses during the accident, so my chances of clearly seeing anyone coming weren’t looking too good. My eyes hardened against the darkness, and I scoured the shadows between the faded husks for a face. Eighteen years of nearsightedness painted terrifying illusions in the half lit space around me. My blood slowed to a freezing point, as I waited for an unknown fear to present itself.

The stalks rustled again—this time the snap-crackle-crunching sound of dead husks was much closer than before. If it were Liam, he’d catch me faster than I could sprint. If it were Caleb, at least there would be something standing between Liam and I.

I broke into a sprint in the opposite direction, and followed the smoke trails in the air back to a clearing.

The crash set fire to the air. Billowing tufts of jet-black smoke and ash towered above the crumpled red truck, turned belly up, with it’s wheels still spinning. I covered my face to brace for the heat, but it oozed from the fast flames burning under the hood in waves. Caleb was hanging upside down in the driver’s seat.

I took off the shirt he’d given me and wrapped it around my hands. Sweat tumbled off the sharp edges of my bangs and into my eyes—I blinked away the sting. Despite the pain, I grabbed hold of the handle and the door didn’t budge. The impact from the crash must’ve crumpled it shut. Choking wasn’t an option. If I couldn’t open the door the two of us would burn along with the truck and I wasn’t planning on dying today.

All the spit in my mouth went dry with the kind of panic that kicks your adrenaline into fourth gear. I dug my heels into the dirt, yanked the handle back, and listened while the rusted metal screamed as it split in two. The door burst open and the heat from inside the cabin rushed out like liquid flames, hot enough to melt my skin off if I wasn’t quick.

C’mon Hailey.

Smoke poured in from the windows and stained the air black, but I could beat the flames to Caleb. He was stuck in his seat belt, and unconscious. I didn’t think to check for his pulse I just needed to find where he was strapped in so I could—

Click.

Caleb crashed down from his seat headfirst. The sound made me sick—so did the smoke. I gasped in a mouthful of gas and burning debris and all the clean air in my lungs burst into flames. I wrenched my arms underneath Caleb’s and spattered out what little oxygen I had left trying to pull him out into the clear.

He wasn’t breathing. Criminal or not I couldn’t let him stay that way. If he died, I was as good as dead, so I had to give it a shot. His pulse was measly but there, and from what I remember, CPR had something to do with pumping on a person’s chest to keep their blood running. I should’ve paid attention in Health class. You never think you’re gonna use what they teach you, though. Trying to keep his heart beating seemed ridiculous. His lips were bluing, I wasn’t a superhero, and the most I could do was mouth to mouth.

His lips were warm. Warmer than I thought they’d be.

I slammed my eyes shut, over thinking things wasn’t making the process any easier.

Still not breathing. Maybe I’d done it wrong, maybe he’d—

Caleb’s eyes fluttered open and he burst into a coughing fit.

I did it.

I couldn’t believe I did it. Seeing him breathing on his own was about as discouraging as it was relieving. I wasn’t sure why, but something that looked a lot like fear had his pupils a mile wide. I figured it was a natural reaction to nearly dying.

The car crash was far from the real problem. He tried mouthing something inaudible to me, but his voice still mute from the smoke he’d taken in. I stared at his cracked and bloodied lips and tried to make out what he was saying.

“—am”

“Li—“

“Liam”

Every single sound in the field went stagnant. The air didn’t even breathe. Nothing moved except for the snap-crackle-crunching of cornhusks beneath the feet of a predator. Liam appeared blacker than ashes out of the smoke, his beady blues ablaze with the thrill of the hunt, and a grin wide enough to tear his lips at the seams.

Run.

I couldn’t. I couldn’t move, or breathe, or do much of anything but watch him step closer to me. What do you do when you’re staring death in the face? Before I could react or retreat, Liam snatched me by the hair, grating his nails against my scalp until I screamed. I shut my eyes and waited to feel Liam’s knife against my skin.

He jerked my head to right abruptly, and then let me go.

The same sickening thud of bones against dirt I’d heard earlier when Caleb fell from his seat in the truck, rattled the ground next to me.

Caleb had Liam pinned, I don’t know how he’d managed to get both his knees around that guy’s torso, and two hands around his throat, but he looked angry enough to kill. Seeing Caleb that way made him seem small all of a sudden, frail, a starving artist compared to Liam. I didn’t know what to do, but I knew that he wasn’t in any shape to fight. My limbs cemented into the ground and I felt my chance at freedom billow up towards a charcoal sky along with the smoke. Caleb turned to me, his eyes wilder than they were back at the station.

“What are you—”

Before he could finish a word, Liam flipped Caleb onto his back, slammed him into the dirt, and trapped him under the sheer weight of his upper body. Without hesitating, he sent his fists crashing into Caleb’s temples one after the other. Caleb was gone in seconds.

I don’t know what happened, then.

The same surreal rush of anger and adrenaline that I’d first felt standing in my kitchen with a handgun, set my blood on fire.

I rushed at Liam, my legs suddenly lethargic and clumsy underneath my weight, but I sunk my nails into his back nonetheless, clawing hard enough to tear away the skin through his shirt.He whipped around and snatched me by the wrists, trapping me in a gridlock grip I couldn’t break.

He smiled at me, mocked me, just like that blonde, taking some kind of deranged pleasure out of seeing me suffer.

God I wish I’d had that handgun, but there were no rabbit holes in this place.

“It’s best to let dead dogs lie Hailey. We haven’t got time to mourn strays.”

Liam dragged me through the dirt across the remaining length of the field until we reached the main road. Blood and grease lined the length of his face as he walked but he seemed numb to his pain, motivated forward by a nervous desperation. Each time I fought to free myself, he tightened his grip, and pulled me towards abandoned rotting wood building in the nearing distance.

***

Liam shoved me through the worn wooden archway of what looked like the front door and the inside of the place smelled of ammonia and old blood. It looked like the condemned slaughterhouses left over from the early 1900’s I’d read about. The interior was thick with dust in the air and sparsely furnished, a hollowed out hallway laced with makeshift lights and amateur carpenter’s work. Some sort of commonplace was set up at the far end of the house, complete with mismatched handmade chairs and tables with a steel kitchen space behind.

There were others who lived here; the walls were lined with bunks and mostly empty bookshelves.Steinbeck'sGrapes of Wrath waslying open on a lopsided nightstand. The margins were black with what looked like the scrawlingsof a modern madman. The people who’d made a home of this place clung to words of dead men like manifestos, and I'd somehow become a part of their creed. Icouldn't remember much of the plot in Steinbeck's book; only that most of it was about desperation and the dying American dream.

Dizzy and delirious from the heat and shock, I found myself staring up into the high arches of the rafters, finding an odd sense of freedom in the spaces where the light came in. I surprised myself with my sudden artistic attention to detail; I guess the stress of the day had turned me into a savant.

Lines of dust-speckled light drew my mind out from the shadows.I was starting to think like my mother, the effervescent artist, who absorbed every nuance of the world into her pallet. I missed the eccentric familiarity of her home, the lingering smell of jasmine incense, the sculptures of me during my dancing days, and the impressionist portraits on the walls she’d painted during mypre-teen awkward phase instead of ordering yearbook photos. With an imagination like hers, she'd probably worried herself halfway to Wonderland by now.

I kept picturing how her face must’ve looked while she waited for adaughter-lesstrain to arrive at the Charlottesville platform; flowers in hand, day adventure at heart, only to have me turn up on the news. By the books, I’d probably already earned my place in the annals of potentially dead people—another one down on my bucket list. In about four days or so, I’d show up plastered on scotch-taped jars in grocery stores my parents would never go to. Alms for theguilty, pocket changefor the dead.

Oddly enough, I hoped my sex-addicted father and my small circle of fake high school friends would dedicate whole digital posts to me. When it came to those people, I was perfectly satisfied being classified as AWOL, missing in action, or even kidnapped for dramatic effect. Maybe then my CNN status would inspire them to give a shit and a half about the situation's outcome. They probably wouldn’t even read about it.

There’s a lot of things you want when you have the least amount of options. As far as my Mom went, I wanted her to know that I wasn’t missing, just misplaced for the time being, that I’d catch the next train home to her, be back for brie and crackers by five, and not to worry if I came in a few minutes later than usual.

Fantasizing is the best solution for most kinds of pain. This was a new kind, the kind that only took a few hours to break me down physically and mentally to the point where I’d started imagining that I could somehow fulfill empty promises topeople who were too far away to reach.

I’m not too sure when it started, but I’d ended up in tears again. Given how bad things had gotten, I didn’t mind the mascara trails. Crying hard enough for my tears to turn black isn’t a usual thing for me, but today was different. Maybe I was mourning the death of daydream or maybe I was mourning my could-have-been future—I don’t know. The worst of it was, aside from the dusty light in a decaying slaughterhouse I only had myself to blame.