I thought the sun was at it hottest when it was overhead, I was wrong. I could see it in front of me, and it still burned like a motherfucker. I was unraveling, all my hard work at the monastery, all my effort and the years I spent to turn my life around and all it took is...whoever this guy is, to set me back all the way.
My throat was parched, my skin felt sizzling, I'd had to have sweated all the water out of my body. It had to be four in the afternoon. The bright ball in the sky looked roughly two hours away from the horizon.
I think maybe this was his new plan. For some weird reason he couldn't kill me, but he said he had to, he didn't offer me any water or food and it didn't help that he smelled like cinnamon rolls. Perhaps he wanted to wait me out, the sun, dehydration, hunger, let nature take care of me. But then he didn't drink or eat either, he probably didn't think he was going to be out here this long.
He hadn't tied my legs, he was sitting on the ground a little more than a foot away, watching me and with his gun in his hand. He clearly didn't have conflicted feelings about hurting me. If he shot me in the leg, that wouldn't count as killing me but bleeding will only speed up nature's process.
The keys to the car had to be in his pocket, he wouldn't leave them inside if the engine was off, then he'd be trapped out here just like me. I had no idea where this forest was, I didn't know if he drove me away from the city, the state, the country.
I wondered how long it would take for him to catch up to me if I made it into the woods with the zip tie around my wrists. The trees around looked old but there was a pattern in rows, so there was no chance of it being natural, in other bad news, the clearing we were in had fallen trees instead of cut, so there wasn't any chance of lumberjacks passing by.
Also, for running to work, I had to make sure he couldn't get to his gun long enough for me to make it the full sixty meters to the beginning of the woods.
"Don't do it!" He said, startling me from my idle thoughts and the silence that had extended in the past hour or so.
"What?" The rational part of my brain dismissed what he said as to mean something different and not in synchrony to him reading my thoughts.
"I see you looking around for a way out. I've seen that look on so many of my targets before... It never ends well for them."
I felt my heart skip the moment he said that, there was some sort of strange enigmatic, nitid in his eyes. He looked like he felt sorry and regretful but not for what he did to them but rather the improvisation he had to make to his original plan.
Who the fuck was this guy. I had to figure out whatever it was that held him back from killing me. He did mumble something like why did it have to be a nun when he strangled me earlier and he did say he didn't like killing nuns. But he wasn't some religious nut with nun fetishes because this was a hit man job sent by a member of the Givens family.
I know who they are, everybody in Huntsville knows who the Givens are. They were Alabama's since ancestry family residents. They were the head of the continent's leading VC firm, the firm also extended into south America.
Adam dying had to be huge news, but I hadn't heard anything from Sister Gladys's radio. She was the one in charge of the only radio, the source of outside news in the convent, there weren't any televisions. It had to have been broadcasted everywhere.I didn't hear about it even in the city, while I was out doing shopping before he kidnapped me.
Dear mother Veronica, had to have sent everyone out looking for me when I didn't make it back, she would have involved the police by now_wait a minute... I hadn't thought about it before, but if this guy had taken me far, like out of state far, this means, I don't know the date either, we weren't in the same day. But if he didn't, I was close, really close, because it was almost nine in the morning when I stopped by the display window at the thrift store. This also meant there was a chance.
"I thought you had a problem with killing nuns?" there was a clog in my voice but I didn't bother with it.
"I'll get over it... eventually." He cringed in an almost shy manner before he averted his watchful gaze from me.
Oh my God. Of course, it was right there how did I not see it before.
"You are afraid of nuns." I phrased it like a sure diagnosis, focusing my glance at him as keenly as possible. He was excellent at hiding his emotional giveaways under very subtle gestures.
He scoffed before he looked back at me. He wanted to say something but not as fast as he usually responded.
I chuckled. "I've heard about sphenisciphobia before, but I thought it was a myth." probably why I didn't notice it sooner, the trembling, the abrasive eye contact. There it was! A weakness, my way in. A chance.
"So you've been trying to get over it this entire time. Figured, you'd throw yourself in the deep end and learn how to swim soon enough!" there was light at the end of some tunnel I didn't know I was in and it reflected a grin on my face that won't go away, because I knew what to do, I finally saw a path_
"Why are you amused I'm still going to kill you." He pertly dangled the gun in his hand looking a bit self-conscious
And all I had to do to get to my path, was agitate the scary man with a gun enough for him to make a mistake.I masked the fear coursing through me behind every ounce of false bravery I could master.
"How exactly are you going to that. You tried and every time you chickened out." that was another thing my father taught me. The number one thing that hurts all men almost every time you attack them is their ego.
"I know what you're doing_"
"Calling you on your little bluff. Yeah, I am. What are you going to do about it!" I could feel my head getting bigger by the second as my heart did laps around it. I was running around a vast frozen lake and the audience was beating on it with sledge hammers, the audience being my conscience and instincts.
He smiled "Don't do that!" he said firmly gripping on the gun. "I may not be able to kill you, but you know I can hurt you... don't make me hurt you."
He was pretending too, I could see him pretending. He was slowly cracking but smiling, there was frustration behind the facade of a calm guise he wore on his face.
"I don't think the one who sent you knew you were a little bitch." The hammers kept striking the ice, I could taste blood in my throat.
He chuckled, bitting his lower lip before he pulled back the safety. "Enough."
"Did you tell them, you're a grown man afraid of nuns. I bet all your victims are women and children. Little bitches like you don't have the spine_"
"I said ENOUGH!" He got up from the ground, closing in while pointing the gun at my face again. Savagery in his eyes, far agitated beyond reason.
"You still haven't figured out if I'm Adrian or not, have you?" I sieved my words so they wouldn't shake from the panic rising in my floating chest but fortunately I'd reached the edge of the cracked lake, and the chance I was waiting for, had presented itself.
"It doesn't matter_" He couldn't finish what he'd started. He'd reached close enough for me to lift my foot to reach his balls.
I was sitted, so I was at a great force disadvantage but it was enough. He'd haphazardly let his guard down thanks to the frustration, so he didn't watch his feet while he moved the threat closer to my face. I sprung my leg up with every ounce of effort I could spare, and the sole of my foot landed on both gonads.
He squealed latching on to his crotch with both hands but his firm grip on the gun didn't waver. He bent over low enough for me to throw one side of the loop my hands were tied into around his head, my under-elbow resting on the back of his neck, then I swang on him with my entire body like a koala hugging a tree.
My weight caught him off guard and made him topple forward towards the now heavier side of his body. He lunged head first into the metal door of the car my back had been leaning on. Thanks to my hands being tied, I couldn't remove them around him fast enough, my forearms broke his barely a foot fall to the ground straining my elbow in the process.
"God!" I cried out cringing as the painful judders ran up and down my arm. Of course this was far less painful than when I was twelve, but it brought back familiar memories. My ass took all of the impact as we crashed back onto the ground but my mind chose to prioritize the strained elbow.
His head had dented the door near the bottom, knocked him out cold. He laid bottom up, the gun resting in his now open hand between his legs. But I knew it would be for just a few minutes, probably ten...or less. A man like him, in his line of work, he wasn't new to contusions like that.
I wasn't even sure it would work. It was a gamble that I wasn't prepared to handle the ramifications if it failed, but I couldn't live with my self if I didn't take it.
I started counting seconds, so I wouldn't get lost in the adrenaline and panic and end up running ahead of my thoughts. I've always counted seconds when I was high on feels. Sister Veronica scoldings came across the point that most of man's mistakes happen in spurs of moments when emotions cloud judgement.
I grunted and moaned as I pulled my injured arm from under his body. The salient thing to do, was to look for his keys and drive away, but I had no sense of where I was and the last time I drove in the woods without a sense of direction bad things happened. So I knelt beside him patted around his clothes, favoring my better hand for the job, there was no phone or cinnamon rolls in his pocket, but my middle fingers hit little jingling pieces of metal on his front right pocket. I scrambled inside, took the keys and got lost around the side of my habit looking for my pocket.
My hands were still trembling a little despite my efforts to calm myself during the whole thing. I could obscurely see my chest rising and falling as I workshoped through the mounds of half-baked fretful ideas in my head. Time wasn't on my side but is it ever really on anyone's. I took the gun next before I finally got up. My bad knee crackled when my weight fully adjusted upright, but I had gotten used to it doing that for me to pay much attention to it in this situation.
The knee was mostly screws anyway.
I took off the safety and placed the gun in the rear-side of the fender edge. I sticked it hypotenuse to the small pocket angle that always fills with mud. I would have shot him in the legs and made it almost impossible for him to follow me and probably make him bleed out to death, but I hadn't committed a sin I couldn't come back from yet.
So as per my daddy's wise teachings, the gun served as a just in case he caught up to me and reseted my escape to where we began. After all, he chose this spot to kill me for some reason, at which point he would be mad enough to push though his sphenisciphobia.
I flailed around a few times, to adjust my feet into circulation, I'd been off them for quite a while, and the rest of my escape depended on them. I sprinted into the woods, towards the sunset since it looked like the easiest direction to follow.
My hands were chaffing under the zip tie but I had to put a pretty decent distance between us before I tried cutting them with the keys, some looked serrated enough for a great deal of traction, and if I was depending on friction to cut through plastic, I needed time.
I had to follow one direction, west, but also keep my path as irregular as possible, zigzagging among the trees. If he could track me, he'd hot-wire the car, and catching up would be real easy, but it won't be if my foot prints kept disappearing around trees.
Inside the woods was shade and it felt amazing on my skin compared to the sun. I couldn't count anymore and because I had to focus on my pace, my body was mithering from all this extensive sprinting and jumping over roots that were too big, I had to hold up my habit for that. Since I joined the convent there wasn't really a reason to exercise as much as I used to.
But I was being hunted, couldn't help but wonder if this is how the Bob's felt. Bob is the name my father used to give the deers before we hunted them. He gave them a name just to make things harder for me, he always liked to make things harder for me but never for Mathew.
I had to stop soon to try and cut the zip tie. It felt like it would be much easier if I tightened it around my wrist and forced it to break but that debate was for later, something in the pit of my stomach kept telling me that I wasn't far enough.
I felt a sudden rush of despair. I knew that I had forgotten about something. How the hell far could he have brought me away from civilization. Please God just one person. Daddy was probably laughing in his grave listening to me beg some supernatural being for salvation, another reason I joined the convent.
My body was burning inside, fresh air was hurting my nose, my heart felt toxic, my mouth tasted metallic, my ears were cold, and my feet were numb and painful at the same time. I was sweating again but it wasn't the sun's fault this time.
I was about to stop running and catch my breath for a while but I heard a faint crackle by my side. I stopped running but my racing heart didn't, it was too loud and I couldn't really hear anything that well outside of it as I scanned around.
My scared thoughts consumed me in the moment. All I could think about is what I might have forgotten to do that led him to find me so fast. I focused on my sight, panting like a scared bunny. A tree behind me, it was always harder to target the Bobs when they hid behind trees, I hoped it worked for me too.
I kept looking but there wasn't anything out there. I was ready to dismiss the noise when I came out from behind the tree. I immediately saw a faint shadow of a flying object from the corner of my eye, I turned to look but I wasn't fast enough.
A really hard, really heavy, forcefull and unexpected smack landed across my cheek bone and temple. I lost control of everything in my body in that split second, it came crashing down hard, my hands couldn't do a damn thing to stop it. Even my receptors were dead, there was no pain, no sound and the color of the trees in the forest was fading.
I saw his leather boots advancing towards me, I couldn't lift my head or eyes, I felt like a faulty computer, hanging before a shutdown. He crouched when he was near my face, and looked into my eyes but I couldn't make out anything, my mind was just blank and empty, nothing made sense, then everything was all dark again.