Total pages in book: 128
Estimated words: 120230 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 601(@200wpm)___ 481(@250wpm)___ 401(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 120230 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 601(@200wpm)___ 481(@250wpm)___ 401(@300wpm)
Deciding I should conserve the battery power for the barn itself, I made myself switch it off.
I was blind.
Bile burned my throat, but I’d come too far to crumble now. But at least if I died out here, whether from a panic attack or the weather, I wouldn’t have to do it watching my friends die one after the other.
A good trade.
What about her?
I can’t think about her. Not now.
Breath sharp and hot in the folds of the scarf as I fought not to listen to the manic voices in my head, I zipped the flashlight safely in my jacket, then stepped out into the slush and sleet proper. One hand over the other, never losing total contact with the rope. My feet threatened to slip on the wet snow multiple times, and the rain that was partly ice and all frigid pounded at me from all sides, but I refused to let go of the rope.
As I refused to look at the dark.
I closed my eyes. This way, I could pretend that I’d be able to see when I opened them.
One more step.
Bea’s voice, the words those she’d spoken on that snowy hike. I could imagine her ahead of me, holding back a hand to help me up. “Come on, Nae-nae, don’t be scared. I’m here.”
Her voice was so vivid that I wondered if I was having an aural hallucination. If I was, I didn’t want it to stop, didn’t want to be alone in this brutal landscape where the dark surrounded me on all sides, a crushing embrace.
Just a little farther. You’re almost there.
My foot twisted to the right.
I corrected myself before I did serious damage, still wasn’t fast enough. The area throbbed. But it held when I put my weight on it.
One hand over the other. One foot in front of the other, shoving against a wall of cold wetness. Nothing but ice. I thought I was crying, but the grit in my eyes told me I wasn’t.
Frigid droplets against my skin. Ice tears gifted to me by the sky.
Fucking poetic, Luna. At least you’ll die making good use of your life of art and poetry.
So many evenings we’d spent in the flat drinking cheap beer and wine. At some point, one of the others would inevitably ask me to read poetry. I didn’t know why. It was just a thing we did. Never while sober, only while drunk. Bea and I alone had enjoyed poetry while sober.
I loved the form for its clean precision, while Bea loved listening to me read it.
She’d lie with her head in my lap, her eyes sparkling up at me and her hair a caress of rich chocolate brown across my legs, and she’d listen. No one in my life had ever listened to me as Beatrice did; as if I was the center of her universe.
I had loved her with every breath in my body.
I would still love her on the day the undertakers put me in the earth.
There was nothing I wouldn’t do for her.
Why hadn’t she told me she was still alive?
I literally ran into the barn. Would’ve probably done so with my face if I wasn’t wearing a heavy jacket and reaching forward to grab the next part of the rope. As it was, with my momentum, I took the hit on my arms and part of my chest.
“Oof.” Rope in a death grip in my left hand, I searched with my right for the door handle.
Oh, bless Ash and Aaron.
They’d tied the rope around the door handle itself, leaving just enough slack that I could push the door partially open and slide in. Shutting the door behind me the instant I was out of the relentless assault of nature, I just stood there for close to a minute, so cold by now that I couldn’t tell if there was a difference in temperature or not.
I was also still blind.
That panic subsumed by the bigger panic facing me, I went to grab my flashlight, but my fingers were numb despite the coverage provided by Kaea’s gloves. The metal cylinder slipped out of my hand to land with a thud on the invisible ground.
A dry sob caught in my throat, I dropped to the ground on my knees, began to scrabble around . . . and remembered my phone just in time. Forcing myself to stop my frantic search, I took off my gloves as I fought to breathe air that was too black, too heavy.
Tiny lights sparked in my damaged eyes as I shoved the gloves in one pocket, then took extreme care in removing my phone from the other pocket.
The glow of the screen was a beacon in the dark.
Air filled my lungs, my brain able to function again, the jolt of fear a hard reset.
I didn’t allow myself to think about a future in which I wouldn’t be able to use light to search for an item I’d dropped. I just grabbed the fallen flashlight, turned it on, then put away my phone. At which point, I began to swing the flashlight in wide arcs while walking in a straight line.