Page 242 of Things We Hide from the Light
“Shit, yeah. Listen, I’m trying to distract them, but Nash can’t come here, because they’re setting a trap for him. He needs to go to your house and make sure you’re safe.”
“Where are you?” Waylay demanded.
“It doesn’t matter. Just tell him that I love him.”
“She’s at Red Dog Farm,” Brecklin’s snotty little voice announced.
“Shut up, Brecklin!” I hissed.
Two shots rang out.
“Ready or not, here I come,” Hugo sang as the door smashed open.
I chose a stall at random and yanked the bottom half of the door closed behind me as quietly as possible.
“Listen, I gotta go. Duncan is coming. Tate Dilton is with him,” I whispered, easing deeper into the stall to duck behind a stack of plastic tubs. “Tell Nash I love him.”
“Wha—”
“Break—up…”
Crap. The Wi-Fi signal was weakening. I crawled forward on my hands and knees toward the stall door.
“You’re supposed to say AFK,” Brecklin’s snooty voice crackled in my ear. “It means away from keyboard.”
“I don’t have a goddamn keyboard,Brecklin!” I hissed.
But there was only silence in my ear as the signal dropped again.
Great. I wasted my last words yelling at a child. Oh well. She’d deserved it.
“You can’t hide in here forever.” Hugo’s voice echoed eerily through the space.
I flattened myself against the wall and realized it was cool and smooth. Like tile.
Memories of my short-lived experience at summer horse camp surfaced. I was in the wash stall, essentially a shower for horses.
As the soles of Hugo’s shoes scuffed against the brick, my fingers found what they were looking for. Horses were bathed with a hose and nozzle, but some stables had pressure washer wands installed for cleaning the stall itself.
A loud crash scared the bejeezus out of me. It was the sound of wood and metal crashing into stone. I fumbled the hose and smacked my elbow off the faucet. Pain radiated up my arm.
A flashlight beam cut through the dark. “Not in this one,” Hugo sang to himself.
There was another crash, this one a little closer.
He was yanking open stall doors one by one until he found what he was looking for.
My heart was doing its best to explode out of my chest.
I crouched down, trying to calm my breath. I needed to stay alive, stay hidden. In that order.
Silently, I whipped off the headset and tossed it toward the front of the stall, hoping it would reconnect to the Wi-Fi signal. I really didn’t want to traumatize a bunch of kids with making them listen to my death. Except Brecklin. She seemed terrible. But hopefully one of them was smart enough to record the audio so Duncan wouldn’t get away with this.
I closed my hand over the faucet handle and held my breath. The door to the stall next to me smashed into the exterior wall, and I used the noise as cover to give it a good twist.
Please let there be water. Please let there be water.
He was close enough that I could hear his heavy breathing.
