Chapter 79

• A whizzing whistle of air that skids past my left ear and inflicts a searing pain with the high-pitched velocity it passes me with makes me jump sideways and crash into bushes as I run at speed. I almost swallow my tongue; my stomach lurches and jumps out of my body with the scare. It gives me a near heart attack, and I scramble in stinging, scratching bushes to fight my way out. I get caught up in heavy thorn vines and trip over my unsteady legs.
• The fall makes me tumble and roll, knocking my shoulder on rocks, and stops my scrambling for a second. I take a moment to look back at the surging, bright sunlit area I left behind, gasping as I see the outpouring of men dressed in black coming from a concealed ground-level hatch near the main door. Four, maybe five, bodies appear on the ground above. There are already two outside the gates, and both are facing this way, looking intensely into the trees where I ran and pointing big ass guns with their sights trained in here.
• I don’t know what flew past me—I don’t think I want to know—and the doubt that I was in any kind of danger dies an instant death. The blood drains from my body, so I turn cold and statue-like as it sinks in: they are looking for me. I don’t stop to wait for even a blink longer, terror once again ripping through me at speed and activating my ‘run like shit’ button. They all face this way and come thundering after me as soon as they see the rustle of the bushes I dart from.