He went down hard, his face hitting the ground with a crack. He did not move.
Evan pulled the ice pick from his neck, and she barely registered the squelching sound over the noise of the fire and her pounding heart.
They heard the other man’s running footsteps. He’d taken a different route, but he was close. And coming closer. He called a name that sounded like Mo or Joe, but the fire was roaring loud; the sounds of beams falling made it all but impossible to hear.
“Yeah!” Evan answered, deepening his voice as he pretended to be the guard he’d just killed responding to his friend’s call. Then he took the dead man by one arm, and Noelle took the other. Together they pulled him around the corner so he couldn’t be seen from the main hallway. Then they waited again, their panting breath loud but mixing with the other noises as the footsteps drew closer, the man with the red shoes coming around the bend and stopping just as the first man had done. Noelle saw the hatred in his expression, and then it morphed into shock. And fear. Evan brought the ice pick down again, the sharp end going directly in the man’s eye. He screamed, bringing his hand up and firing the gun he held. Noelle felt the bullet whiz by her cheek, and she screamed, too, throwing herself against the wall.
It all happened so fast. Evan knocked the gun out of the wounded man’s hand, but the man succeeded in getting his hands around Evan’s neck, and they both went down, Evan underneath the man with the pick in his eye, blood flying into the air around them.
Noelle screamed, circling behind the man and using the rope to wrap around his neck. She pulled with every ounce of strength in her body, his head bending backward but his hands remaining on Evan’s neck, whose face was a ghastly shade of crimson.
It was not going to end this way, and especially not with this man who had led them upstairs over and over to be used and degraded. She gritted her teeth and let out a yell, pulling once and then again, the man making hideous wet grunting noises as blood spurted from his eye socket.
He almost took her with him when he fell, toppling over and landing on his back. Evan scrabbled from beneath him, his good hand going to his throat as he coughed and wheezed and worked to regain his breath.
Was the man dead? She had no idea, but she hoped so. Rest in hell.
No time. There’s no time.
Who knew how many more were behind those two?
She pulled on Evan, and he stumbled along with her back to the main hallway, where a piece of falling ceiling barely missed them. They jumped over it and then dodged a fiery section of wall as it popped and crackled and burned.
A loading dock. There was some sort of loading dock ahead, a pulley next to the garage-type door. Noelle dropped the rope and used both her hands to pull on the chain. The door rose with a creak and a groan, and when it was open enough that they could scoot under, they both did, rising to their feet on the other side, standing on the edge of a dock.
Outside. They were outside, and it was night.
“This way,” she said to Evan, pulling his shirt as she bolted to the concrete steps that led to the ground. They practically flew down them.
And then they ran.
She had no idea where they were headed. All she knew was that it was away. And they were free.
Behind them, the building was a wild inferno. She glanced back, just once. The building appeared to be a giant factory or some old warehouse, and the entire thing was going up in flames, sparks shooting into the nighttime sky like fireworks. If she weren’t so petrified, fighting for each breath that came into her burning lungs, she might have thought it beautiful. It might have looked like victory.
Instead, she sobbed with fear and pain, grabbing Evan’s uninjured hand as they raced into the night.
They ran until they couldn’t run anymore. The terrain was desertlike, the earth hard packed and cracked from the sun. The light from the fire faded, but the moon shone down, lighting their way.
Her legs gave out, and she crumpled to the ground. Her body had done all it could for her after being virtually immobile for weeks, if not months, brutalized, half starved. It would not go on.
“Noelle,” Evan wheezed. “We have to keep going.”
“I can’t,” she said. “I’m sorry. I just need to rest. Just for a little while.”
He looked like he might argue, but then he sat down beside her, lying back, both of them staring up at the twinkling stars.
She heard only movements of the night, a soft breeze that stirred the brambly bushes dotted here and there, the faint scurrying of some small animal. She had no idea where they were. Had there only been two henchmen in that building with them? Had the men who had raped her traveled to be there? You’ve been rented.