Rules of Survival(11)

He managed to shimmy out an inch at a time, right hand awkwardly hanging out the window while the left was above his head, still in the room trying to keep him steady. His feet touched the ledge, shoulders slipping past the sill, as the bathroom door crashed inward.

“Grab them!” someone shouted.

I tugged on his right arm as a tall man with an angry scowl and a buzz cut came forward and yanked hard on the left. Shaun leaned toward me, but he was at an odd angle—torso still between the ledge and the room—so it didn’t do much good. Slowly, inch by inch, we were losing and he was slipping back inside. If they dragged him in, then I was right behind.

Giving another, harder pull, I teetered to the left, almost losing my balance. For a second, everything froze. I hovered on the rim of the ledge, not off it—but not on it, either. The only thing that kept me from toppling over the side was Shaun. He’d jerked back on his arm—the one I was attached to—and I shot forward, face smashing hard against the building. The brick bit into tender flesh, stinging my lower lip as my head bounced off the corner of the sill. My eyes watered.

“Son of a bi—” The rest of Shaun’s curse was cut off by a smashing sound. A hollow echo that reverberated through my bones. “Pull!” he yelled—and I did.

Only I pulled a little too hard.

With my help, Shaun managed to free himself from the window, but the momentum didn’t stop there. It continued forward, sending him—and me—over the edge.

Into the water.





Chapter Four


The fall was fast—seconds—but there was still plenty of time to freak. We only needed to miss the water by inches and we’d end up cracked wide open like Humpty Dumpty. On the other hand, we only needed to clear the water by inches to end up underneath it.

In my mind, it was lose/lose all around.

The falling sensation came to an abrupt stop, replaced by an all-over sting and fierce burning in my lungs. Going against every impulse in my body, I forced my eyes open and tried to see which way the surface was, but everything was blurry. Floating colors and shapeless blobs. Panic evicted common sense and I sucked in a lungful of warm chlorine water, which, of course, made me panic even more.

I flailed my arms—or, at least I thought I did. It was hard to tell. Everything was getting heavy. My chest hurt and my eyes felt numb. This was it. I was going to die. Never having been to Italy. Never having known what it was like to hold down a legit job. Never having sex… Drowned like a rat in a swimming pool that was open in October.

But just when I felt like my body couldn’t take any more, my head broke the surface of the water and an entirely new pain bloomed as I greedily inhaled good old-fashioned oxygen.

Shaun dragged me to the edge by the chain, both of us coughing and gagging on the foul water. He pulled himself from the pool, barely standing upright before fishing me from the water.

Above our heads, people gathered at their windows. One in particular caught my eye. He was standing in the window of our room, looking down at us. The hood of a dark-gray sweatshirt concealed his face, but I could see his fingers. On the pointer of his right hand, wrapped around the edge of the sill, there was a large blue ring. It was familiar, but as hard as I tried, I couldn’t place it.

“Move,” I huffed through chattering teeth. The cold air against my wet skin was almost painful. If I didn’t start moving soon, I would freeze right there on the spot. With one final glance up at the man, I shoved Shaun forward.

He whirled and dragged me toward the gate, stooping low on the way out to grab his jacket, which had miraculously missed the water.

When we got to the sidewalk in front of the hotel, I expected Shaun to slow down so we could catch our breath, or at least stop to think for a second. We couldn’t go running off without a plan. I needed a plan. Mom always had a plan. It was one of the rules.

Shaun, though, as it turned out, wasn’t a plan type of guy. He pulled me along without a word, stride never slowing. We got six blocks from the hotel before I couldn’t stand it anymore.

I stopped short, wrenching his arm back as I dragged him into the alley beside a small café. The smell wafting out as people came and went, the breakfast rush under way, made my mouth water. I was starving.

The cool metal cuff dug into my wrist, but I didn’t feel it. I was too busy trying to control the shivering. Forget about the food. If I didn’t get out of these clothes soon, the guys from the cabin wouldn’t get a chance to kill me. I’d turn into a block of ice long before that.

“I’m not going another step until I know where the hell it is we’re going to.” It didn’t seem like there were a lot of options. Wherever we were, it didn’t seem like a big city. There was an apartment building across the street, and the strip mall that housed the café on our side, and not much else. Without a car, we weren’t going to get far.

“Away,” he said as though I was an idiot. “Or did you want to go back and try to reason with them?”

“Away is good, but away where?” A spark of hope ignited in the pit of my stomach as I remembered how curious he’d been about the contents of the letter. “Someplace warm and dry? Because I’m about to ice over here… And does this mean you believe me?”

His expression faltered, then hardened. “I believe something isn’t right, but I don’t know what yet.”