Branches tore at Hannah’s face, and the sharp hooks of thick vines raked her wrists and tangled her feet. She was exhausted. Her frantic scramble slowed from a run to a walk. Her leg throbbed where the shotgun pellet had lodged in her calf, and the limb felt like a load she had to carry. The rain had eased, but heavy drops fell like cold pebbles from high, hidden leaves onto her neck and scalp. The paring knife was wet and threatened to slip from her grasp. Her breaths came in hurting, inadequate blasts—deep, greedy sucks of air. But she had no idea which direction she was running—to the pipe, to the river, in circles. She let out a sob. She knew she had to stop before she stumbled and hurt herself even worse, but the memory of the dead child in his ancient gray cocoon spurred her on. Her leg felt like it was on fire, and tears poured from her eyes.
Then, a thought bloomed in her head like a black flower: What about Mr. Close?
The dark was thick, but her hours of peering in the cellar had allowed her pupils to widen to their fullest and she could make out the barest outlines of trunks and logs. She saw a fallen tree a few steps ahead, and sank, gasping, onto it, unmindful of the cold that clenched her buttocks as the wet soaked instantly through.
It felt both long hours and mere minutes since she had threaded the leather thong up the gap between the doors, watching it fold and flop over the barrel bolt. The moments she’d spent carefully pulling down on both ends of the thong—slightly more tension on one end than the other—had been the most stressful of her life. Each time the bolt slipped too far under the wet leather and clacked, her heart had hammered as she waited for the door to fling wide and something petrifying to grab her. But, finally, she’d found the balance and turned the bolt upright, then carefully pulled to the side, and the bolt arm had cleared its stay.
Nicholas would have saved her if he could have. She knew that. Which meant he was dead already. The thought made her throat tighten and her lips shake.
Run home! She yelled in her mind. You’ll be dead, too, if you don’t run home!
She got to her feet, but her wounded leg, now numb, slipped out from under her. She fell onto hands and knees, and rocks hidden under spongy rot tore at her palms.
She cried out in frustration and pulled herself to her feet. She wasn’t going to die. Not after getting out of the cellar. She wasn’t going to—
The noise froze her still. Every hair on her neck turned to a tiny icicle.
It was a sound like distant surf, only close by; a rain hiss where rain had stopped. A whisper of eight thousand thousand inhuman limbs slowing, ticking, poising …
Hannah turned.
The woods behind her were black. But not entirely black. The weak, almost-nothing light falling between the dark leaves glistened of eight thousand thousand round, unblinking eyes.
And everything fell silent. Until they leapt.
She screamed.