by Lexie Ray
The stench was putrid, sour, and seemed to cling to her nostrils. Breathing through her mouth didn’t help, in fact it caused her stomach to twist, churning with disgust. Molly tore a garbage bag open and began rifling through. It contained mostly papers and waste commonly found in the bathroom. She moved on to the next bag, this time getting lucky. She plucked out half eaten protein bars and a few muffins that seemed mostly untouched. After tossing the morsels into her canvas bag, she climbed out of the dumpster, careful not to catch her jeans or tee-shirt on its sharp lip.
Molly was smiling to herself. Devon would be thrilled with this. The muffins didn’t look too stale. She was so excited about her findings that she forgot to stay cautious, alert to her surroundings. Molly turned, coming face to face with Travis, one of the worst men from the farmhouse.
Panic sliced through her as she stood, staring wide-eyed in disbelief that he was there.
Travis was grinning menacingly down at her. The creases in his face cracked, furrowing deeper, as his mouth twisted up in a wicked smirk.
She couldn’t believe he had found her. Her mind began racing a mile a minute and her heart pounded hard in her chest. A voice in her head kept telling her to run, but Molly couldn’t. She was petrified and unable to move as dread rose up inside her. She realized she was trembling. Finally she took a step backwards, but immediately struck the dumpster. If she ran, he would easily grab her. If she fought, he would quickly win.
“Leave us alone,” she said, praying that she had sounded strong, but her cracking voice betrayed her.
“Where’s Hunter?” he asked coldly, his eyes turning dark, clouding over with soulless hatred.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know anything about Hunter. None of us do. Now leave me alone.”
Travis began to laugh in a low chuckle saturated with ridicule for Molly’s precarious position.
“No one wants you, Molly,” he said after his dark laughter died down. “You’re too old. You disgust people. And you’re too weak to be of use. We want Hunter, but we’ll take you until we get her. Now, do you want to be taken? Or do you want to tell me where she is?”
Molly pressed her mouth into a hard line. She wasn’t going to play into his sick logic. She wasn’t going to buy into his proposition either. She had already answered him and nothing more could be added.
“We have Devon,” he said.
The information hit Molly like a ton of bricks. She could feel her expression sink into a frown, even though she begged herself to keep it together, pleaded with herself not to cry, not to give him the satisfaction. Her thoughts were racing, but she tried to remind herself that he could be lying, trying to get a rise out of her.
“I’ll kill her if you don’t help us, Molly, and you’ll be next.”
“I told you,” she said yelling through tears that sprang uncontrollably from her eyes. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen Hunter since the farmhouse.”
Travis grabbed Molly, violently yanking her thin body towards his. He was huge by comparison. His grip was threatening. “I’m only going to ask you once more, and then you’re going to sink to the bottom of the river. Where is Hunter?”
Molly screamed, clawing at Travis’s face, and kicking wildly.
“Molly!”
It was Devon. Molly knew that voice anywhere. She turned and saw her friend struggling against the tight grip of Dale, who held her by the arms from behind.
“You lied,” screamed Molly.
“It’s only a matter of time,” he said. “She will be dead.”
“Let her go!” shouted Molly. “We don’t know anything! I would give Hunter up if I knew where she was! I don’t give a shit about her! But we don’t know anything! Let Devon go!”
“Where’s Thomas?” Travis yelled in her face as he held her in his stone grip.
“I haven’t seen anyone!” she screamed.
Without warning, Travis began dragging her down the alley. It was no use resisting, though Molly tried. Dale dragged Devon in the same manner until the men had brought them to a dark sedan. The men dragged the girls around to the trunk.
when Travis popped the trunk lid open, black dread erupted through Molly, claiming every ounce of her sanity,
“Get inside.”
* * *
It was unmistakable even from a hundred yards away, even from across the intersecting street. In the back alley past Smith Street, far across the way, Travis was wrestling Molly and Devon into the trunk of a car, as Dale stomped around front and climbed in the driver’s seat.
The girls gripped each other’s hands, gasping breathlessly in shock as their friends got taken in broad daylight right before their very eyes.
“What the fuck? What should we do?” asked Jenna in a panic, as she tugged on Andy’s arm.
Andy squinted, eyes glued to the dark sedan. “I don’t know,” she said,“Why the fuck are they here?”
“Everything must be falling apart up there,” offered Margot. “Maybe too many of us escaped. Maybe they’re coming back for us.”
“Don’t even think that,” said Andy authoritatively. But Andy had already been thinking it herself, and the thought made her blood run cold. She took a deep breath, and sensing her friends were terrified, reminded them that their only objective was to stay alive. “Remember the second rule,” she said.
“Never give up on a girl,” said Margot.
“But we don’t even know where they’re taking them, Andy, or what they’re planning on doing to Molly and Devon,” said Jenna.
“Don’t focus on that,” said Andy. “Don’t give up on Molly and Devon. They’ll survive, and we’ll find them. We will.”
But Andy didn’t know if the shadow house rules applied here on the streets of the Gowanus like they did up north in New Hampshire at the farmhouse. She had no way of knowing if a child’s rules for staying safe in the camps could save them now or if death was fast approaching.
* * *
The girls walked towards the alley, carefully crossing Smith Street. They would comb the area for any clues as to where their friends could’ve been taken. It seemed like a futile effort, but they had to do something.
Jenna spotted Molly’s canvas bag lying on the pavement. She ran to it and picked it up, discovering the muffins.
“Eat,” she said to Margot and Andy as she passed them the muffins. The girls devoured the food, taking huge bites and not bothering to chew. There had been so many sleepless nights of starvation. Andy couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a whole muffin.
“Andy?” said a woman’s voice. Andy didn’t quite recognize it.
She looked up and immediately identified who had called her name. Jenna and Margot turned as well, lowering their muffins in shock at who was there.
It was Hunter.
She walked towards them.
The girls froze, unable to chew or swallow their food. Jenna and Margot looked to Andy, unsure of how to respond. Andy had become their leader in a sense. They stepped back, allowing Andy to speak to the woman they had hoped they’d never run into.
“What do you want?” asked Andy. Her voice was raspy and confrontational.
Hunter widened her arms, outstretching them to invite a hug, but the girl turned cross and threw her arm up, blocking Hunter’s effort.
“I asked you what you wanted,” said Andy in a harsher tone.
“Are you girls okay?” asked Hunter, confused by Andy’s reaction.
“If we’re not, are you going to kill us? Put us out of our misery?” she said in a dark and challenging tone.
The statement was shocking, and Hunter was immediately taken aback.
“We don’t want any trouble, Hunter,” said Jenna. “The city’s big enough for all of us. We just want to be safe, that’s all. Please don’t make us leave.”
Hunter grew confused. Why would they think she would ever want them to leave? She looked from one girl to the next, searching their expressions for any sign that this reunion m
eant something, but all she saw in their eyes was fear. It was heartbreaking.
“I would never want you to leave,” said Hunter. “I missed you guys.”
“We’re not stupid,” said Andy. “We know what you did.”
Hunter lowered her gaze as shame washed over her. “It was hell up there,” she whispered. “No one can judge me for how I reacted. They broke me. They broke all of us.”
Jenna and Margot exchanged a glance. Their eyebrows raised with a hint of sympathy, but Andy wasn’t buying it. She never thought she’d run into Hunter again. She never thought she’d see the day when Hunter would look her dead in the eye and act like murdering one of their own wasn’t her fault.
Hunter knew what they were thinking. She knew the girls thought she had turned into a monster. Maybe she had. That’s what the farmhouse had done to her. It had done it to all of them. There had come a time when Hunter had snapped, she knew it. She had lost it. She had reached a point where she couldn’t bear to hear one more girl screaming in the darkness of night. The anguish, the misery that had been carried in every cry, every wail of horror, was unbearable. Hunter had made it her business to protect and restore all of the girls as best she could, just like they had protected her when they could and put her back together after her long nights of torture in the barn. But the fact was that Hunter had reached a breaking point where everything had been unbearable, even the painstaking recovery that each girl went through after returning from the barn. Hunter had reached a point where she would rather end the pain than hear the terrible cries for even one more second. So one night, when one of the girls had been screaming herself to sleep after many hours alone with the men in the barn, Hunter had found her. She had placed a pillow over the girl’s head and taken her life away.
Hunter had been just barely thirteen. She had acted on impulse, driven by insanity. She hadn’t been able to believe what she had done after it was over. And she hadn’t done anything like it again for years after. But then, eventually the darkness crept back in and she did it again, and again. And that’s when she had known they’d really gotten her.
Deep down Hunter knew that’s why the men had come back for her. Because she had become the same kind of monster they were. And they needed her to control the girls.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, making herself glance up to meet their gazes. “That’s not who I am. I would never hurt anyone.”
When Hunter looked at Jenna, she seemed to appear sympathetic. She had missed Jenna. Hunter was so glad to see that she was alive and well, and that Andy and Margot were, too.
“Dale and Travis were just here,” said Jenna, who continued even after Andy smacked her arm. “They took Molly and Devon. Can you help?”
Hunter stared intensely at the girls as a torrent of emotions flooded through her.
Finally, she answered, “Yes.”
Suddenly, Hunter noticed the girls had become distracted by something behind her. She turned around and saw Ash and Twitch walking over. When Hunter turned back, she noticed Andy seemed to be staring at Ash with a great deal of recognition and familiarity as though they knew one another. It struck Hunter as peculiar.
Then Andy said something to Ash that made Hunter’s heart skip a beat.
“What’s the plan?”
Chapter Seven
Hunter had been sitting in Ash’s bathroom smoking a cigarette near the open window for way too long, while the girls, Ash, and Twitch regrouped in the studio. She was hoping the cigarette smoke that was wafting under the door would give everyone a clue of what she was doing in here and they’d leave her alone. She needed to be alone. She needed space.
Ultimately, Hunter knew she should be involved in their conversation, she needed to be a part of the plan, and voice her opinion on exactly what should be done about the New Hampshire men, and how they should get Molly and Devon back, but Hunter simply couldn’t handle it. Ash had forbid her to go off alone. He had even forbidden her to return to her own apartment, so the bathroom had become her only option.
It blew her mind that Ash knew the girls from the farmhouse. She couldn’t believe he knew Carolyn, aka Twitch who had been her closest friend throughout her darkest years.
She needed to understand how it was all possible. She needed answers, but Ash had shut down in the alley. It had been the type of reaction she would have expected from someone who had done something wrong and knew they had. Had Ash done something wrong?
The fact of the matter was that Hunter knew virtually nothing about him. How could she have been so stupid as to trust him? And now she was tied up in him, attached. There would be no way to get away from him. She had relied on someone she hadn’t known at all, and was now finding out he had been nothing more than secrets and lies.
What other secrets was he hiding?
What scared Hunter was that she was beginning to realize that Ash had kept himself hidden from her, and she had done the same. Was there any hope of a real relationship between two people who refused to show each other who they really were?
Deep down she knew she would never really want Ash to know the details of what had happened to her at the farmhouse, in the barn, how she had escaped, or her darkest days, the nights when the screaming had been too much to bear and she executed the screamer to save her sanity. How could she have any hope of foraging a real connection with him, of having a real relationship, when they were just two people who cared more about hiding themselves from everyone else than allowing each other in?
She was hiding even now, wasn’t she? A normal person would probably demand answers and try to reinstate their connection. They would force themselves and the other person into the hard conversations, knowing that on the other side they would be closer to one another, and stronger. She didn’t know how normal people did it. She was too scared to do anything but finish her cigarette. She blew smoke out the window and tried not to hear the scared and arguing voices on the other side of the door.
The smell of smoke clung to her hair and seemed to stick to her salty skin. She could use a shower. Gazing out the window at the busy avenue, Hunter wondered what the lives of those people outside were like. Where had they come from? What secrets were they carrying? Whatever it was, she had a feeling it was far better than her own personal history. A young woman dressed in a floral sundress was arching her head back, laughing, and holding the arm of a guy. Her date, probably. They didn’t seem to have a care in the world. Why wasn’t that Hunter’s life? Could it ever be? Probably not. Part of her always wanted to live like that, carefree and bubbly. But the other part, a much larger, darker part of her wanted to kill, had always wanted that.
If no one from her past existed anymore, if they were all killed off, would she finally be free? Could she become whoever she wanted?
There was a quiet knock on the bathroom door. Hunter turned her head, eying the lock, making sure it was in place. She made no motion to step away from the window and let in whoever was standing out there. She figured one of the girls had to use the bathroom. They could wait.
“Just give me a minute, okay?” She called out through the door.
“Let me in, Hunter.” It was Ash. His voice sounded gentle, less commanding than she would’ve thought considering the circumstances.
In a lot of ways she would’ve rather jumped out the window than deal with whatever secrets Ash might choose to overwhelm her with by revealing them.
“You can’t hid in here forever,” he said, lowly in a whisper, respectful not to let anything he said be audible to the girls in his studio.
“I’m not hiding. I’m smoking,” she said, but she managed to unlock the door and let him in.
It was impossible to look him in the eye. Hunter kept her gaze down and only allowed herself to get a sense of his shape by glancing over at him every so often.
“I know you better than you think,” he said.
“You don’t know me at all,” she countered, nearly interrupting him. “And I don’t know you.”
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Ash lowered the toilet seat lid and sat on it, looking up at her, catching her eye. Hunter was noticeably shaken up. There was something about her demeanor, her expression, the way her shoulders slumped forward and her face hung long and white, that reminded Ash of a scared animal, the way dogs looked huddled and shivering in the corner as soon as their abusive owner returned home. He had seen that reaction more times than he would’ve liked to. It was the look of someone he knew he had to help. The posture of someone he knew he needed to kill for. He would do anything to reverse the damage.
“So what,” he said, lightly. “How well should we know each other by now? How well do you usually know someone a day and a half after having met them?”
Hunter didn’t have much to say to that at first, then finally, “Considering what we’ve gone through and what we’re up against I would think you’d come clean about everything. Why didn’t you tell me you knew all the girls out there? And Carolyn? I didn’t even know any of them were here in the city. But you all seemed to know that Dale and Travis had come down to do some kind of harm to me, or them, or all of us, and you said nothing.”
She had his full attention. He held his gaze steadily on her and nodded at times, agreeing with her points. Hunter was met with zero resistance from him, and as she finished all that she had to say, she found that she felt slightly stupid. Had she overreacted? She hated this. She hated the way she would beat herself up for feeling her feelings. Didn’t she have a right to be mad? He seemed so unaffected. He wasn’t reacting at all. It seemed like he might not be taking her seriously.
“I’m beginning to think I was better off on my own,” she said.
The notion scared him. If she attempted to go off on her own, to leave him, Ash wasn’t sure what he would do. It would be heartbreaking. He had wanted nothing more than to spend the day in bed with her, to venture out only in efforts to protect her. Everything had gotten so fucked up, but no matter how messed up things were, he wasn’t about to let her walk out of his life.
“That’s not an option,” he said.
Hunter stared him down, searching his eyes for a reason, any indication of why he would want her to stay. She couldn’t tell what the draw was for him. That morning when they had begun touching, caressing each other, when he had pulled her on top of him, was something she couldn’t get out of her mind. It had meant the world to her. She had thought it was the beginning of something real. She had thought something was solidifying between them, but now she wasn’t sure. Was she some kind of trophy? Did he even really care about her? His expression looked flat, neutral, or was it downright cold? His blue eyes seemed dark, calloused perhaps.