Survival of The Fittest | Book 2 | Shallow Graves

by Fawkes, K. M.

Chapter 11

  I didn’t even bother trying to sleep. I couldn’t have done it if I tried, anyhow. Beyond the fact that I was on-edge about escaping, I was also imprisoned in a room that had once belonged to a little girl who may or may not still be alive, whose mother might have also died a horrible death, and whose father had been shot in the head by a group of street thugs intent on robbing his house.

  I didn’t like sleeping in other people’s beds, on principle. I hated sleeping at someone else’s house. Too many unknowns. Too much risk when I was at my most vulnerable. In my house, I knew exactly where everything was—and where the exits were, if I needed them.

  In someone else’s house, I didn’t have any of that. It had always made me nervous, even as a kid.

  And now, I added one more item to the list. I didn’t sleep in dead people’s rooms. Too creepy. And I was sure it would come with bad karma.

  On top of that, I didn’t have a clue what was going on below me, and I’d never been good about not knowing things. Particularly when those things might include the chances of me surviving the night. Every sound I heard made me jump; every creak of the house felt like it could be someone coming up the stairs to kill me. I had the lamp, which meant I was at least sitting in a circle of light rather than absolute darkness, but that only went so far in terms of making me feel better.

  No matter how scared you might be of the dark, light can only fix so much. It turns out it doesn’t do much for being terrified that someone is going to come barging into the room and shoot you at any moment. After all, I would die just as easily in the light as I would in the dark.

  When the damn clock tower finally did start to chime, the first boom made me jump about three inches up off the floor and nearly yelp out loud.

  “Goddammit,” I hissed, hand to my chest, my breath coming hard and fast.

  I had known that was coming. The sound was completely familiar to me, something I’d heard every single night for the last year.

  But hearing it now, while I was actively fearing for my life—and that of the person who was supposed to break me out of here—was something entirely different. The loud, booming chime of the clock had run right through me and jumpstarted every single nerve ending in my body.

  As I listened to the clock cycle through the twelve chimes, I got myself ready for what was about to happen. I didn’t know how Will was going to show up—by door or by window—but I expected him to be there at any moment. And yeah, I would have felt better if I’d known the plan, but it was probably better that the person who actually knew the house, and was able to actively look at it while planning, was the one coming up with our escape route.

  Hey, he was even already a criminal. Didn’t that mean his mind was probably uniquely educated for that sort of thing? Maybe he had some underlying talent for just that, and he had come up with something so brilliant that it would impress even me.

  As long as he was still alive. As long as they hadn’t put poison in his water or injected him with some sort of chemical or something.

  As long as he hadn’t changed his mind, too worried about what they might do to him to follow through on what we’d been talking about.

  My heart sank right into the floor at that thought, because I hadn’t had it before, and I took a deep breath, trying to calm myself down. He wouldn’t have approached me at all if he wasn’t serious about doing something, I told myself firmly. Besides, the fact that they might kill him at any moment was one of the reasons he wanted to escape.

  I believed he would follow through on that.

  As long as he was still alive.

  That thought echoed through my head again, and when ten minutes or so had passed and he still hadn’t shown up, I started to get well and truly nervous. Not only about my potential escape, but about his safety, as well.

  I hated having to sit here and wait for someone else to come up and rescue me, and the thought that the someone doing the rescuing might have met a bad end was even worse. Because without him, I was going to have to come up with another plan. A better plan. And given my situation, that was going to be really freaking difficult.

  I also didn’t take people into my circle of confidence often—or easily. When I did, I gave them a part of myself that I generally didn’t hand out. So, if something had happened to the man I’d just decided could be my new ally, I was going to be very, very upset.

  I was also going to be screwed.

  I was just talking myself into full-blown panic mode, thinking for sure that Sally and her goons had killed him and that I was trapped up here, waiting for them to come shoot me too, when someone tapped at the door.

  Chapter 12

  I completely froze, and stared at the door.

  Yes, this was the time Will had told me to expect something. Yes, I was relieved if that was him. No, I wasn’t certain that it actually was.

  I therefore wasn’t certain whether I should answer the door… or not.

  What if it was Sally or Bruce or Jameson? What if they were here to take me out into the woods and shoot me—or check to see whether I was in fact awake and waiting for someone (Will) to break me out of my room so we could escape?

  But if I didn’t answer the door, was it really going to make any damn difference? They’d just bust it down and shoot me or interrogate me anyhow. It wasn’t like I had any control over the situation.

  “Stupid,” I hissed at myself, getting quickly to my feet.

  This whole prisoner thing was making me downright paranoid. I’d never questioned myself this much before—and I didn’t have time to be doing it right now. I was trying to escape, for God’s sake. I didn’t have time to leave my would-be rescuer standing at the door.

  This was not the time to play hard to get.

  By the time I reached the door, I was ready to go. My skin was tingling with the need for action and I could feel my breath quickening as my body’s adrenaline picked up.

  I threw open the door, the lantern held behind me so that it cast only a small amount of light into the doorway.

  “Really, the door?” I asked sharply, taking in Will’s half-open mouth. “Sally caught you here once already tonight and you couldn’t think of something a little more, I don’t know, subtle for arriving to collect me? And also, what took you so long? That clock tolled forever ago! What are you doing, trying to get us caught?”

  He reached in, grabbed my arm, and yanked me through the open door.

  “We will definitely be caught if you don’t hurry up and keep your voice down,” he hissed. “I had to wait for Jameson and Bruce to clear out of the kitchen and go on their lookout walks, and then I had to watch them to figure out which routes they were going to be taking. Without Sally seeing me watching them, because if she saw me and figured out what I was doing, she’d have shot me in the head without thinking twice about it. We have ten minutes before they’re back in the house. I plan to be long gone before they enter these doors again.”

  I yanked back at him though, confused, and gave his hand a significant look.

  “Aren’t we taking anything?” I whisper-shouted. “Don’t we need, you know, supplies or something?”

  “I’m not risking the time it’d take to gather anything, and we don’t need the extra baggage,” he retorted. “I don’t know about you, but I’d prefer speed and getting the hell out of here to snacks for the road.”

  Right, well that was a good enough explanation for me. I shut my mouth and hustled along, falling in behind him when he shoved me there and told me to stay as hidden as I could.

  We glided down the hallway outside of my room, both of us pressed up against the wall like we were trying to become part of it, and though Will had a flashlight in his hand, I noticed he wasn’t using it. He’d also snatched the lamp out of my hands and left it in the room before we started down the hallway.

  The darkness was our friend, now. The longer we could keep it, the better off we were going to be. It also wasn’t the only thing working in our favor. Beca
use everyone had to be getting tired and blurry-eyed. It was the middle of the night, and I doubted Bruce and Jameson actually wanted to be out doing patrol work.

  Hell, there wasn’t even a good reason for them to be doing patrol work. There was no one in this town to bother them. From what I’d seen, the people left were already scared of this gang of bullies—and there couldn’t be that many people to start with.

  So, they both had to be not only fatigued but also—if I was going to guess—angry that they’d been called on to do it.

  But at least it got them out of the house. So that was two down, and one to deal with. Unfortunately, the one that was left was the most dangerous of the crew.

  Which was why we were sneaking around like our lives depended on it.

  At that moment, though, I stopped and wondered if my assumptions were actually correct. Was there a reason to be out doing patrol in the middle of the night? Sally didn’t strike me as someone who demanded something that took manpower or energy if it wasn’t important. So… had she seen something that made her think it was necessary? Had she seen something that indicated that there were other people out there?

  We were in a rich neighborhood, where a bunch of rich people had lived. Hell, they probably all had the exact same sort of life, and they’d probably been in some sort of unspoken competition when it came to who had the bigger, fancier house with more toys in it.

  If the CEO who had lived here had put in a panic room—and then tried to use it—what were the chances that someone else had done the same? What were the chances that everyone in this neighborhood had done the same?

  And if they had… then it might mean that there were a whole lot of people alive and kicking in the houses around us. It might mean that we had other allies out there, just waiting to be found. It might mean that there were people out there who would help us—hide us—if we got out of this house and into the wild.

  Unless Sally and her goons had already found them all and killed them. Unless that was why she’d been insisting on going into the houses around us, rather than going to the restaurants in town to raid their kitchens. Because if there was food to be had, and in the same spot, people you needed to get rid of…

  For now, though, I put the idea that there might be live neighbors around us on the list of things to keep in my back pocket, and hustled after Will, my eyes straining through the darkness.

  We passed the staircase we’d come up on earlier in the day and I glanced down it on my way by, worried that I would see someone coming right up, gun in hand. But there was no one there. Just a pool of shadows at the bottom, barely lit by what had to be a quarter-moon, at best.

  I wasn’t in the habit of sneaking around in the middle of the night. But if had been, I guessed I would have wanted just such a moon. Because I was thinking it would give us just enough light to see by, without highlighting our escape too specifically. And even then, someone would actually have to be looking for us outside, in the night.

  Someone would actually have to be expecting us to try to escape out into the darkness.

  I was hoping against hope that no one was even thinking about the possibility.

  We got past the stairwell, both of us pressed against the wall and staring down it, and then came to a dead end, where the hallway we were in suddenly ran right into another one.

  “Stay here,” Will mouthed, leaving me about three feet from the end of the hallway.

  I shrank back into the shadows and did my best to become completely invisible as he crept forward. At the edge of the hallway, he leaned very slowly around the corner, moving until one eyeball was peeking into the opening.

  After a long, breathless moment, he moved to the other side of the hall and did the same thing on the other side, his footsteps so freaking quiet that I was starting to believe he’d learned how to levitate like Sally, too.

  He must not have seen anything, because a second later he was gesturing madly at me to join him and I was rushing forward, taking his offered hand, and being pulled around the corner toward the left. We moved quickly, then, rushing right down the center of the hallway on our way to whatever our destination was, and I thought vaguely that we must be moving away from where Sally’s room was.

  At least, I hoped that was what this meant. Because if it was more like ‘we’re screwed and we better move quickly or we’re going to be in really big trouble,’ then I thought Will had probably better tell me. Because I deserved to know if we were going to die.

  Within ten steps, though, I was yanked into yet another stairwell, and this one was completely different from the one that led from the kitchen up to the hallway where the bedrooms were. While that one was relatively open, this one was closed in and almost claustrophobic. The walls were directly to my left and right, and I could feel the ceiling right above me. And I wasn’t a tall girl. In front of me, Will was having to crouch as he sped down the stairs, the walls actually brushing against his shoulders.

  All this told me something:

  This was a servant’s stairwell.

  No, I hadn’t known that this staircase existed at all—though I didn’t know the house that well. But I wouldn’t have even seen it if it wasn’t for Will, I didn’t think. It had been completely hidden. And that, I thought with some excitement, meant that the exit below us should be hidden as well. Because God knew rich people didn’t like to see their staff doing stuff. They wanted them… hidden.

  Which was pretty much perfect when it came to doing something like escaping.

  I suspected that this particular route also meant that Will had been doing some exploring of the house himself, with this exact thing in mind. Because surely this staircase wasn’t on the regular patrol routes.

  I increased my speed to keep up with him and barely paused when we shot out of the stairwell and right into another room I’d definitely never seen before. It was incredibly industrial compared to the rest of the house, with no adornments on the walls and what felt like a purely concrete floor. One look around told me that there wasn’t even any furniture in here. The place was empty.

  Except for on the last wall I looked at, where I saw two washers, a dryer, a fridge, and freestanding freezers.

  These people had had extra freezers and refrigerators, but they hadn’t had a well-stocked kitchen? That didn’t make any sense.

  Though that thought was overrun immediately by the next. Where did people keep things like extra freezers and washing machines if they were lucky enough to have such things?

  “The basement?” I whispered. “This place has a basement? Is there a way out from here?”

  He chopped his hand through the air, demanding that I be quiet, and I zipped my lips again. So, evidently it was the basement, but we weren’t yet out of danger.

  And the next logical conclusion was that we were close to either Bruce or Jameson right now. They were outside, patrolling the grounds or some such thing, and that meant that as soon as we were outside, we ran the risk of running right into them.

  Shit.

  My empty hand flexed, wishing I had some sort of weapon. A gun. A knife. Hell, even a crowbar would have done. Something—anything—to give me some sort of defense if one of those two saw us. Because they’d already been willing to kill us; I was sure of that. And if they caught us escaping, our death was virtually guaranteed.

  We rushed through the basement, our footsteps echoing against the empty walls as we went, and came to a huffing stop at the bottom of a set of three stairs. Those stairs led to a door that had a tiny window at the top, and I could see the moon through the glass.

  It was indeed a quarter moon, or something very close. A little more than a sliver, and definitely less than half full. Enough light to see by. As it turned out, I realized, a little too much light to make us safe.

  Darkness would have been better. But we couldn’t wait the weeks it would take to get there.

  Will darted to the top of the steps and ducked down low, then gradually raised his head enough to
be able to look out the window. His head snapped to the right, to the left, and then straight ahead, and I saw him stiffen. At his side, his hand motioned for me to get down—which was rich, I thought, when he was the one looking through the window and I was the one three stairs down from any opening.

  Then, after a tense several minutes, he gestured madly for me to come to him, grabbed my hand, and threw open the door.

  My mind snagged on the fact that the door hadn’t been locked, but then I was rushing through the doorway and over the grass of the yard, my feet flying as I followed Will toward the rose garden on the other side of the green, my lungs heaving as I took in the fresh, clean air of the night.

  We’d done it. We were out. My God, we were actually out of the house and about a hundred feet away from being free!

  And at that moment, a light suddenly appeared from behind us, shining right at Will’s curly hair, and someone shouted at us to stop.

  Chapter 13

  Maybe it would have been smarter to keep right on running. Ignore the man shouting at us. Do our best to get the hell out of the light immediately. Zig and zag and do whatever it took to get away from him, and count on his stupidity and our head-start to save us. But it turns out, humans are too well-trained to disobey a very precise command—at least, not in the moment.

  We both froze, our hands in the sky, and whirled around as if it had been choreographed.

  And there, standing on the porch, was Bruce, one hand holding a flashlight and the other holding a gun. Both were aimed in our direction. Though I wasn’t certain whether he was actually aiming at us or just pointing it in our general direction.

  Honestly speaking, I didn’t think he could actually see us that well. Yes, there was a sort-of moon and yes, he had a flashlight, but we were also standing in a spot where we were semi-sheltered by the shadows of the walkway. And the sudden existence of the light had to be messing with his eyes, which had been in total darkness seconds ago.