Running Shoes (The Shades of Northwood) (10 page)

“Not exactly a
social butterfly are you?”

“More of a
moth.”

“Gotcha.” Jaye
slotted her titchy backside into the gap between Katie and the
wall. “But you’re up for a laugh, I give you that. Last year’s girl
wouldn’t get on the tower so yay you.”

“Yay me,” she
echoed, not entirely sure what she was cheering for.

“Adam said you
pulled a Roadrunner when he got up. I don’t know why – that’s your
business – but he’s a good guy. A little crazy but, trust me, that
helps around here. He’d never let anything happen to you if he
could stop it.”

“I know.” And
she really did. “Ad’s a sweetie. I just have this gut reaction when
men grab me. Especially if I don’t know them that well.”

“I was in a
relationship recently. Maybe last winter. Or autumn. I forget.
Anyway, that ended…abruptly. Everything was going great and then
suddenly he stopped talking to me. I thought he’d just snap out of
it and start loving me but one day I woke up and there was no-one
in bed beside me. All his stuff was there but no him. I waited and
waited but…”

“He just up and
left you there?”

Jaye nodded
sadly and Katie saw a hint of shadow cross her face and then it was
gone, a moment so brief it might well have been a trick of the
light. Katie didn’t think so. Katie thought she had seen that look
somewhere before. “I heard a rumour he’s in prison. Point is, I
never thought I’d trust a man again.”

“But you don’t
run screaming from them.”

“There was
screaming? Well, the dirty bugger didn’t tell me that bit,” Jaye
said and waggled her eyebrows. “A little bird tells me you copped
an eyeful last night.”

It took her a
few seconds to send her memory that far back – 24 hours or 24
months. “Oh, yeah. He came into the kitchen with no shirt on.”

“Lucky you. Bet
that’ll keep you warm this winter.”

“Jaye!” Katie
ran a finger around the collar of her t-shirt. She’d never realised
before that the phrase ‘hot under the collar’ was so literal.

“Seriously,
there are good men out there. Just don’t go looking for one. He’ll
find you when the time’s right.” With that Jaye got up and elbowed
her way through the crowd to the bathroom with more strength than
seemed quite natural for a girl her size. Lifeguards probably had
to do loads of weight training to drag people through water. Maybe
she’d go speak to someone about a job guarding the pool. Katie got
up and stepped down every step slowly, preparing to lose herself in
the crowd. Which she did for over an hour. An hour of dancing,
chatting and hollering at Dina to put some clothes on. Dina had
decided to go as the person Katie and Jaye should be saving and had
plumped for a bikini and wet hair. Strangely she was not getting
much attention. After a while, when Adam and Jaye had tagged each
other by the front door, he came over to Katie and tried to
apologise for scaring her. “It’s not your fault.”

“I feel like I
crossed some sort of line.”

“Most girls
would say no but since my line is about here…” she drew a finger
line inn the air between them. “Don’t worry.”

“Dance with
me?” When she hesitated, Adam promised “no touching.”

They danced, or
something vaguely resembling it, to something repetitive and dull
and then he wandered off to find Lainy. Half an hour more of being
touched and leered at by guys with breath that could light gas
fires was her limit. She finished the drink she’d left on the table
as she danced and slapped away a final hand away, which sent her
scurrying for the place she now thought of, for some reason, as her
happy place.

Her safe
place.

CHAPTER
SIX

There were
things out there.

Standing in the
middle of this wasteland, this pre-historic desert, there was
nothing to be seen for miles and miles. Sand, rock, dried grasses,
stretched out to meet the horizon and then a sky so bright and
cloudless it looked white and searing. The sun baked the parched
and cracked earth. And Katie stood there. Her feet felt as though
they were blistering on the ground. She was barefoot. No protection
between her sensitive sole and the heat. The sun set her skin
sizzling beneath her clothes. Sun stroke cruelly stayed just out of
reach and she was horribly aware of her burning flesh, almost
cooking. It hurt to move even an inch. Katie looked down. Thick
ropes bound her wrists together at her back. A chain linked the
rope to the ground, driven in deep.

She wiggled her
hand, knowing somehow that she would not get free of these things
holding her still. Each knot or twist in the ropes felt like a
knuckle, calloused and unrelenting. Every twist of her wrists
carved another angry, red abrasion across her wrist. Tears welled
up and a few snuck out of her eyes and rolled down her cheeks.
Katie stuck her tongue out and tried to catch those few drops of
hot, salty moisture before this terrible heat made them evaporate,
knowing she could not afford to waste a single drop of liquid on
tears that no-one would see.

Then something
yanked on the chain, pulling her unsuspecting arms down and
wrenching a hearty scream from her. Then the chains released and
Katie resumed her straight and limp pose, using as little energy as
she could. Then it pulled her again and let go. Then nothing for a
few minutes. Precious time to wonder why she was out here, how she
had got here, whether she would get home before the sun fried
her.

“HELP ME!
SOMEBODY HELP ME.” There was no answer for a very long time. Katie
imagined that some-one, even some-one very far away, had heard her
cry for help and was springing into action as she waited. But,
after a while of nothing but heat and a horizon that hurt to look
at, she accepted that help was not coming. Knowing that made it
easier to stand here and not try to resist anything else that
happened. “Where’s a hero when you need one?” Then she stopped
speaking because her mouth was dry and her throat scratchy.

The chain sank
deeper into the earth and tugged Katie down towards the ground. He
crouched as low to the ground as she could without getting down on
the ground, and tried to hold onto the ropes – wrapping her hands
around whatever slack there was and pulling. The unseen hands at
the other end – she could tell it was a set of hands pulling her
down by the start-stop motion – were stronger. She screamed again
as the rough ropes bit into her. “No, you’re not taking me down
there,” Katie ground out at the earth. And then the chain
disappeared almost completely and stopped pulling. Katie’s wrists
were touching the ground but she was being tugged no further, just
held there. Katie scrunched herself up into a hot, sticky, sore
little ball trying to make herself as small as possible. She kept a
careful watch on the chain sure that it would start moving and take
her under the moment she took her eyes off it. Watching so
carefully that she did not notice a breath of breeze stir up dust
behind her. Something – not quite the rough and tight hands of the
rope – latched on to her ankles and yanked them from under her,
twisting hard enough that she corkscrewed in the air and thudded
down on her back, screaming as she felt at least two layers of skin
peeling away from her back, with her wrists bound above her head
and her feet near immoveable and feeling like they weren’t actually
hers.

Forget about
conserving energy – what would she need energy for anyway – or
keeping her wet tears inside a dehydrated body, Katie screamed and
cried as long and loud as she could. Tied down and unable to turn
her head enough to focus on something solid, the only thing to look
at was that shiny sky and the sun like a gold disc reflecting
itself down on her over and over again. Katie closed her eyes but
the vista had burned itself so indelibly on her retinas that it was
just like having open eyes. Her already tight skin was stretched
even more – slices and lesions in her skin opened up and the raw
flesh beneath started to sizzle and smell. It was a relief when
enough slack crept into the shackles to allow Katie to turn her top
half over to the hot soil, knowing it would hurt just as much but a
different kind of hurt. One that was constant, true, but one which
would not happen time and time again whenever a layer of skin was
seared right through. And what would happen when their was no skin,
no flesh left? Muscle? Bone? Would it end there? But the back… skin
there was faster to heal. That could break and burn and yes it
would hurt and yes she would scream and cry as she was doing now
with the scraps of energy left in the tank, the tiny bit of her
that still resisted this death by sun, but it would repair without
her breaking it apart with every breath.

Katie watched
her tears soak into the hard earth, staining it a darker red. The
colour was reminiscent of dried blood. The comparison cam unbidden
and thoroughly unwanted but so easily. If she stopped crying – it
was serving no purpose but tiring her out - stopped turning the
ground that awful colour then maybe the though would go away. But
that wasn’t the way it worked. A thought like that was like a scab
or a paper cut – once you knew it was there you can’t stop picking
at it. And making it worse.

It was in the
middle of these thoughts that Katie became aware of the sound. A
distant hissing. How long had that sound been there? All the time
while she was contorted over here? She opened her mouth to yell for
help but found she had to take a deep breath and try to work some
saliva into her mouth first. As she concentrated on that, the
slices across her body momentarily forgotten in favour of the hope
of rescue, the hissing sound seemed to track around her in a wide
circle. It was watching. The sharp memory of that blinding sky and
a neck so fried it had practically seized up kept her from turning
once more to look around her. It really mattered none what might be
out there. Katie thought, in some far off part of her mind that was
not really hers, that she had seen the human race at its’ most
depraved and primal and nothing more could frighten her. It was
sunstroke talking – had to be. But everything still seemed so real,
so present.

And then the
hissing got louder, they – it? How many were there? – got closer
and morphed seamlessly into whistling. Just a high, thin, constant
whistle like Moms old kettle. No. it was getting closer, not
whistling but still hissing. The whistling was in her head, she
knew – a trick the counsellor had taught her to distract herself,
to take herself away from scary situations. Pity that really only
worked in her head when the real danger was out here. The technique
was probably designed for imagined danger. Externalise. That had
been a buzzword. If she sang the rhyme she was silently whistling
then maybe she’d scare it away. Very maybe.

“Jack and
Jill,” she began and started coughing after those three words.
Every breath was dry and dusty, filled with the fetid dirty stench
of the ground. It was so much easier to focus on remembering the
words to this little rhyme Dad had confused her with until she was
10 and which Dan had suddenly understood just three months ago. It
was a shame, Dan should have enjoyed at least a few more years of
mud pies and climbing trees before learning that the world could
hurt innocent people at every turn but there had really been no
choice. Not when she too had seen people suffer for no reason. No.
this train of thought was definitely not easier.

“Went up the
hill.”

The hissing
sound was close. It seemed high up ad she sent silent thanks – to
who? – that it was not a snake. Then an imaginary hand shot out and
snatched them back. Whatever was hissing must be bigger, badder
than a snake. Bizarrely, she pictured Leo and the drawings of
demons covering his walls. The thing wasn’t quite close enough to
cast a shadow over Katie.

“Though they
knew they shouldn’t oughta.”

She bent down
as far as she could, feeling the skin on her neck cracking right
across and not even feeling it. The heat was so intense and had
been pounding down on her for what seemed like so very long that
she was numb to any sensation, unable to process it. She pressed
her head to he hot ground for a second and whispered down into a
crack that might have gone straight down to hell for all she cared.
“Please save me.” Above her, the hissing was replaced with the
gruesome crunch of bones popping, flesh folding in on itself,
muscles ripping and twisting and reforming. A huge shadow fell
across her and Katie shivered. Whether it was because she had
gotten quite cold or because the outline she could see resembled
nothing she knew – human or animal.

“God knows,”
she managed before a glob of something hot and wet and viscous land
at the top of her spine.

“What they did
up there.”

This shape
hanging over her, slobbering over her like the juiciest chop in the
window, was big. It was tall and hulking and had lumps and bumps in
places no man should have them. It looked like Predator from that
film she’d seen on the school trip last year. It breathed in and
out as raspy as if its throat was coated in sandpaper. It just
stood there some invisible-to-the-naked-eye laser glare boring
holes into her head. And it just stood there. Katie took a deep
breath.

“But now
they’ve got a daughter,” she spat out and threw herself onto her
back all in a rush. The thing, a dark shape against the bright sky,
stared at Katie for a long second. Then it flexed its’ neck, or the
flab of muscle that attached the head to he body, and she grimaced,
listening to more unnatural cracks and crunches, but could not look
away. He own curiosity demanded she keep watching this strange
figure. And then it leaned down until it was so near her face that
she could see dull blue spheres that might be eyes, a ragged slash
that dripped and drooled and probably was the most refined mouth
such a creature needed. And then it was close enough that she could
feel its’ warm, sweet breath on her face. Katie blinked her sore
eyes, longing to itch them but lacking the energy to move her arm
even if it hadn’t been tied down, and wondered if she had the will
to open them again.