She looked around. The darkness was not as dense as the room from which she’d been removed, and the blinding torchlight was no longer being shone in her eyes.
She blinked furiously as shadows turned to shapes in front of her. At first she doubted if they were real or shapes burned onto her retina from the torch.
In her mind she was trying to run, but her legs were not following the command. And where to? She had no idea of the best direction to go.
In the distance she could hear voices; a chant. Her body turned in that direction as her mind cried ‘Help’. She took two steps forward and paused. It was a count.
‘Ninety-three, ninety-two, ninety-one…’
What was being counted down, and why had she been freed right now?
The two questions merged in her mind as she heard the chant of ‘seventy-eight’.
She stepped forward and found herself swathed in the glow of a street lamp. She quickly stepped back out of it, feeling more vulnerable in the light.
‘Sixty-six.’
‘Sixty-five.’
Would they be expecting her to run? Was that her best opportunity for escape? To just run as fast as she could? Her mind reasoned that, if it were possible to escape that easily, they would not be giving her such a head start.
‘Forty-nine.’
‘Forty-eight.’
‘What do I do? What do I do?’ she whispered into the darkness.
Her instinct was to shout for help but the only people here were trying to hurt her.
Please, someone help me, she prayed silently as her knees began to tremble.
The numbers were disappearing too quickly.
‘Thirty-two.’
She had less than a minute to work out how to save her own life.
She took another few steps forward. Her brain had numbed with fear. No decision made sense to her. Nowhere felt safe.
‘Twenty-three.’
She jumped as something rustled beside her. Bloody wildlife. Something was scurrying around her. A mechanical snap sounded to her left. Metal cracking. Something howled in pain, filling the silence between chants. Stacey wondered if some poor animal had been caught in a trap that had been meant for her.
‘Nineteen.’
She realised that she couldn’t step too far away from the lights for fear that she’d be caught by one of those traps.
‘Ten.’
She had to think quickly. Had to work out what to do, where to hide.
Three successive shots rang out in the distance.
And she had just run out of time.
ONE HUNDRED TWO
The main building loomed up in the distance as the shots rang out.
Kim guessed that meant they were on the move.
She lowered herself to the ground and crawled towards the building. One single light illuminated from the second window along.
Kim wondered if both Fiona and Stacey had been held in this building. Fiona had chosen to run as quickly as she could and had somehow managed to get one hundred metres away from the perimeter fence before being snared in an animal trap.
Kim moved carefully, wondering how many of those things were lying around.
She surveyed the area as voices began to disperse in different directions.
She pushed her back against the wall, forcing herself further into the shadows, to think.
If Stacey had been set free from the building and she’d heard the countdown in the distance, would she have chosen to run as fast as she could, or hide?
Kim tried to put herself into Stacey’s mindset and adopt her logical, pragmatic approach while factoring in the terror her colleague would be feeling. If Stacey understood the situation and knew the reason for her presence, she would also understand the countdown. Would she realise there was no possible way to get to safety, leaving little reason to run? Or would panic and instinct have taken over, causing her to move quickly?
Would she also consider that beyond this collection of buildings the dense blackness would be no friend to her?
‘Stacey, what did you do?’ she whispered, moving towards the doorway of the building.
A shadow moved across the open window. Just a head. Kim considered storming in and putting her hands around the throat of the first person she met. But that wouldn’t help Stacey. Not when there were bastards armed with guns trying to kill her.
She ducked and moved away from the window. They’d keep.
Kim crawled slowly. The whole area was awash with shafts, traps and hazards. Each move she made, she expected to feel the teeth of a trap clamp around some part of her body.
She crawled past the open mouth of a tin building shaped like a semicircle.
Her left hand hit something protruding from the grass.
It was leather.
She looked closer.
It was an ankle boot.
She picked it up.
It was Stacey’s.
Damn it, Kim thought. What if the bastards had already got her?
Kim raised her arm to launch the boot in frustration and then paused, as she had a sudden thought.
ONE HUNDRED THREE
Stacey rubbed at her arms furiously against the terror and the cold. She had tried to keep count since the three shots had sounded. She was guessing it had been just a couple of minutes.
Her only chance was to buy time ? for what, she still had no idea, but the thought of running around the place with a target on her back sickened her. If she was going to die, she wasn’t going to provide sport for a bunch of cruel, despicable racist bastards first. They could find her and shoot her on the spot. She would not be their fucking animal.
In an effort to get out of sight as quickly as possible she had ducked into a corrugated iron structure formed into a semicircle. She had quickly moved through its tunnel-like interior towards the thick blackness at the end.
The wet grass was soaking through her woollen tights and her skirt but she couldn’t stand. She could only make herself smaller if she was on the ground.
She brought her knees up to her face and looped her bound wrists over the top.
Her cheek rested against her knee, and she closed her eyes. There was no change in the level of darkness.
Had it only been today that she’d stepped out of the station to retrieve a laptop she’d had no business having in the first place?
If she’d thought there was a case there, she should have passed it on to real detectives. They would have put it all together much quicker, and they wouldn’t be sitting here curled in a ball, waiting to die.
She hated the self-pitying thoughts that were filling her mind but she knew her one little attempt at being clever would go completely unnoticed. She had left the simple sign in the vain hope that anyone was looking. Her one ankle boot pointing to her location. Realistically she knew no one would find it, but it had helped for just a second to do something.
She cursed herself for hiding but her brain had offered no other solutions. Hunters with guns put her at a definite disadvantage.
She cried out as a sudden gust of wind caught a loose piece of the corrugated metal roof. It flapped three times, raising her heartbeat with every rap. She pulled her arms tighter around her legs to still their trembling.
A hand grabbed her stockinged foot.
The terror rushed to her mouth and she let out a scream.