The Tens, Vanessa Jones [i like reading books .TXT] 📗

a few metres away. A single nod let Abigail know she was ready.

‘Now what?’

They both looked around them desperate to find something to light the fuel. Suddenly, Sophie gasps and reaches into her pants. The matches that she found near the bird were thankfully hidden deep down in her pocket. She pulls the thin packet out triumphantly.

Abigail held out her hand and Sophie lobbed them straight into the centre of her palm. The first match struck out and went nowhere. The second took but didn't light the jumper. There were two remaining matches and both didn't like their chances. Abigail crossed her fingers and held them up to Sophie and lit one of the remaining matches. The movement slowed down, slower than time itself. In a perfect arc, Abigail shot the lit match through the air and into the mouth of the jerry can. Sophie watched it, mouth agape. At first, nothing happened. There was a horrid, empty second where despair fell out of both their bodies. But all at once, the can exploded into a perfect cylinder of fire. And then it met the gunpowder and it cracked as it ricocheted off the shed wall.

Through the sluggish smoke, they watched a hole appear before them filling with inviting twilight. It was small, so they would have to crouch but they could get out.

'Go!' Abigail demanded.

Sophie rushed forth, eyes squeezed shut against the smoke and launched herself, hands first, at the opening. Searing agony shot through her hands as they hit the hot iron and then the scalding ground and she screamed into the makeshift mask. When she could manage to open an eye, she saw trees in the distance. That was the first thing she noticed. Greenery, beckoning her away from a place that did nothing but, if Abigail was right, poison her from an early age. She scraped her belly along the hot concrete and felt the sharp lip of curled iron scrape across her back, through her clothes. Wiggling her hips through the opening, she crawled out onto the dirt outside, her legs unsteady and her lungs closing in on themselves.

Rolling to the side, to make room for Abigail, she used her elbows to push herself up and looked around, terrified that Clive or Carla would see her. But there was no one around and so she bolted towards the closest set of trees.

Sophie pressed her back against a Mallee gum and ripped her mask down with her injured hands as parts of her body battled for attention in their agony. Struggling for breath and with eyes full of clouds, she arched her head around to see if Abigail had followed her.

Sophie screamed into her hands when she saw what was unfolding at the shed. Abigail was halfway through the hole and Carla had grabbed her by the neck shaking her roughly. Even through the whining of her ears, she could hear Carla's admonishment. She had yanked Abigail all the way through the shed's hole and to the ground, where she hunched over something small cradled in her arms. Abigail looked so tiny, like she could have disappeared into the ground. As Carla yelled at her, fury pouring from her mouth so much that her head looked like it was going to jerk clean off her body, Abigail stood purposefully.

Proud of her defiance, Sophie willed her to run towards her, so they could escape together and she could fulfil her promise. But Abigail didn't run. Or even walk. She turned to the direction where Sophie was hiding and Sophie watched her mouth 'run' as she poured the contents of the red container over her head. Amid her confusion, Sophie stood still. Had Abigail changed her mind? Was she going to stay? Carla held up her hands and quickly walked backwards and it was then that Sophie realised what the tiny scarlet thing pulsating in Abigail's hand was. The last match.

Sophie whipped her head around, back to the comfort of the green trees, before she had to witness Abigail being completely ravaged by flames.

Gasping as she ran faster and harder than she ever, her lungs burned and her head swam. The shock of Abigail's sacrifice spurred her to run further and faster than she knew herself to be capable of.

CHAPTER THIRTY TWO

Pumping her numb legs into the ground, Sophie kept expecting to reach the fence, the same one that lined her safety. That was the threshold from crossing over from a woman whose husband had left her to one that had stumbled upon a cult that had enslaved her, her whole life.

But the fence didn't show up and she had no idea where she was going. The shock pumped through her and the woodland turned into obsidian silhouettes against the dusk sky. It wasn't just the looming night that was scaring her. What had been a breeze had started to develop into a promise of a sinister wind. The trees rustled so much that they sounded like monsters or waves of infrequent TV static. The wind quickly became an animal.

Sophie could have stood at the top of the rise and not hear anyone shout her name over it. It howled and emptied its lungs and roared to a crescendo and then died off like it never existed.

A whoosh of of air whipped all around her, simultaneously pushing her down and lifting her up. It felt so windy that her hearing was washed out and her hair flapped in her face, like she was plummeting down an endless slippery slide.

Suddenly, the space around her seemed to expand, she felt like she was being sucked backwards. Everything around her turned midnight blue punctuated with streaks of electric white. Terror tugged at the nape of her neck through the chill of the air. Somehow, Sophie knew what she was approaching.

A beast stood on a small rise in the ground. The