Haven

Haven

In the first few minutes of Catherine Talbert’s escape, she did her very best to be as quiet as possible. She thought he was gone, but she wasn’t at all certain of that, and in her terror she just wanted to run.
But she crept instead, out into the darkness, not daring to take the time even to look for something to cover her naked body. If there was a moon, it was hidden behind a heavy cloud cover; either way, Catherine had no idea where she was. Strain her eyes though she did, she couldn’t see any sort of artificial light anywhere that might have meant a house nearby.
Stupid. Of course there’s no house nearby. Someone would have heard you screaming.
Surely someone would have.
She was dizzy, faint with hunger and exhaustion, and sore to the bone with bruises and internal injuries from the beatings, but all she felt was the desperate drive to escape. She chose a direction at random and struck out from her prison, moving as quickly as she could manage and still remain quiet. With no road to be seen—or, more accurately, felt—beneath her bare feet, she just made her way toward the deeper darkness of the looming woods, instinctively seeking the closest cover in which to hide herself from him.
There was a shallow stream she splashed through as quietly as she could, beyond worrying about snakes or mud or anything else the girly girl she used to be would have concerned herself with. She wanted to live. That was all.
She just wanted to live.
Past the stream, the terrain changed, and she realized she was working her way up into the mountains. Mountains that had seemed so pretty to her when she had come to admire them. But now . . . Her bare feet were bruised and scraped by the granite jutting up unexpectedly here and there, and rough roots exposed by the heavy spring rains weeks before caused her to trip and stagger. Sometimes she fell.
But she kept getting back up.
Branches tugged at her as the undergrowth resisted her efforts to move through it, and she was vaguely aware that fresh wounds were being added to the cuts and bruises her body already bore. The night was almost unbearably still and quiet, with not the slightest breeze to relieve the oppressive heat, and all Catherine could hear for what seemed a long time was her panting breaths. Then a brittle fallen branch cracked loudly beneath her foot, panic rushed through her in a surge of adrenaline, and she threw caution to the wind.
He might not have left. He might be right behind me. And this is his place, his home; he knows it, I’m sure . . . Oh, God . . . HAVEN
Faster. She had to move faster.
As fast as she could.
As far as she could.
Her eyes had adjusted to the darkness just enough that she was able to keep from running headlong into a tree, but otherwise all she really saw were varying shades of black.
Still, she climbed as fast as she possibly could, grabbing rough, knobby branches and leafy bushes and stinging brambles to help herself along, at first not even feeling the slashes of thorns or the raw friction of bark and spiky leaves sliding through her fingers. Her breathing came in sobbing gasps now and her legs burned as she climbed and climbed and climbed. There was no path; there was just an unyielding steep incline studded with granite boulders and towering trees whose roots snaked out far and wide to anchor them to the mountain, and when she wasn’t tripping over the roots, she was fighting her way through the thick underbrush.
She reached the top of a ridge, clung dizzily to a sapling for a few moments, then pushed herself onward. Downhill should have been easier but wasn’t, because now she could feel the pain of her bruised and scraped feet, the hot pain all over that told her just how much the thorns and branches had torn at her naked flesh, and still she had to push on, through even more of the treacherous undergrowth.

Copyright © 2012 by Kay Hooper.