BORDEN 2 (19 page)

Emma

I ran into the forest as the gunshots continued behind me. I heard Graeme shouting, but I couldn’t understand what he was saying. I turned around and dropped to the ground, staring at him as he fired his gun over the top of the car before ducking back down. He was still clutching his chest with one hand, and even in the dark, I could see the blood pouring out of him, pooling his shirt.

“Keep running, Emma!” he screamed at the top of his lungs, his voice desperate and pained. “RUN!”

I didn’t run, though. I couldn’t leave him behind. I wanted to help him. He was bleeding and they were still shooting, whoever they were. I couldn’t see any of them, or where they were coming from. The other men lay dead in a pool of their own blood, their guns feet away from their bodies. If I could just get to a gun…

A bullet whipped past my head, and I dived flat to the ground, my chest pressed against the earth. My heart thundered like never before, and I sucked in breaths, trying to get myself to calm down. I felt paralysed, completely stricken with fear. More gunshots whizzed by, and then I heard Graeme cry out. It took everything in me to lift my head up to get a look at him, and when I still couldn’t see him, I forced myself up even higher, until I was on my knees.

My hand shot to my mouth as I saw him drop to the ground, another bullet burned through his chest. He barely looked like he was breathing, but his mouth still moved, over and over again repeating the word “run”. I sobbed against my hand, my body breaking out in tremors as I realized he was dying – as I realized, when he stopped moving moments later, he was
dead
. I felt something deep within me break, and I clutched my chest with my other hand, feeling the tears burn my face at the loss I felt.
Graeme. Graeme.
It couldn’t be real. He was pretending. He had to be.

The guns stopped firing immediately after that. Nothing but silence followed. I didn’t know what to do. My body begged to be still while my brain shrieked to keep moving and to get as far away from them as possible. I looked around, trying to find a hiding spot, but the sound of voices broke through my thoughts. I watched a couple men emerge from the forest on the other side of the road and I dropped back to the ground, staring through the opening between the trees at them. They stopped by Graeme’s body, and one kicked at his lifeless form, chuckling.

“Find the bitch,” he said, bending down to pick up Graeme’s gun. Pocketing it, he looked up in my direction. My heart lurched for a moment before I realized he couldn’t see me in the dark. “She’ll be around here. She won’t have gone far.”

I backed away, every inch of me shaking, and turned around. My body felt stiff as I stood up and forced myself to run. My feet crunched along the hard frozen ground. I could hear every footstep I took like it was exploding in my ears, and I cried in the open air. They would find me in a matter of minutes. I didn’t know what to do, and I didn’t have time to figure it out. Either they would find me, or I would be running endlessly into the forest, getting more and more lost. It was freezing, and if they weren’t going to kill me, the cold would.

Minutes later, I stopped by a large tree and pressed my back against it. My hands moved up and down my arms, forcing friction against the goose-bumps. I needed warmth. I was in nothing but a t-shirt and jeans.

The sound of a branch snapping behind me forced me to still. I held my breath, pressing my back against the tree. I stood tall and didn’t move, listening intently on the sounds around me. Another snap sounded and I squeezed my eyes shut. My teeth were chattering and I was on the verge of throwing up. The anxiety and fear were too much on my small body. At this rate, I would pass out long before they found me.

Breathe. Breathe. Breathe.

Out of reflex, my hand shot to the top of my shirt. I dug into my bra and searched for my switchblade. I didn’t find it. I fisted my hand, digging my fingers into the flesh, and banged my head against the tree. I didn’t take one in my haste to leave the apartment.

How Emma?
HOW
could you forget?

I was back to being too scared to move. I felt empty and completely alone. Nobody would help me. After priding myself on never being that damsel in distress, I was now praying for some form of help. Slowly, I pulled my phone out of my pocket. I took a few deep breaths, uncertain of whether to touch the buttons. If the men were around, they might see the glow of my phone, and I’d be done for. I waited for what felt like an eternity. Maybe they wouldn’t search this way. Maybe they passed and the sounds I heard were them moving away. I was so goddamn cold, and all I could think about was warmth and finding help. After a while, I heard nothing but the wind against the leaves and my heart beating inside my ears. There was that feeling of stillness, of aloneness, and it unsettled me. Everything frightened me: the tall trees, the swaying branches, the wind that howled every now and then as it whipped against my face, stinging my eyes and freezing my tears.

Just do it. Do it. Do it. Make the call before you freeze to death.

I pressed the button on my phone and quickly dialled 911. The light of the screen blurred my vision, and I rapidly blinked, adjusting to it as I navigated to the number screen. With shaky fingers, I pressed the phone to my ear and not a ring passed before the operator sounded distantly, “911, what is your emergency?”

A sudden snap sounded, and it a sent a dagger-like feeling to my heart. It was close. Too close. Something darker than the night flashed to my side, and I screamed as a hand darted out to my arm. I wriggled away just in time, and the phone dropped in my panic as I took off again, running hard and fast.

“Here!” screamed a male voice behind me. “She’s over here!”

My body buzzed with adrenaline as I moved in all directions. Branches whipped past my body, stinging my skin as I shoved through heavy bush. I heard footsteps gaining behind me, and I didn’t turn to look. I kept moving, stumbling over fallen wood and rock. A hand wrapped around my arm and my heart leaped to my throat. A scream sounded out again as the man’s other arm closed in around my waist. He picked me up from the ground and I cried out, angrily twisting my body in his grip. I would never stop fighting. I would never let him win. He grunted and shoved my head into a nearby tree. I fell to the ground, my head aching. I felt a hard kick to my side, and I twisted my body into a ball with my arms over my head.

“You’re going to make this difficult?” the man said.

He kicked me again with his steel-capped boot, and it landed against my spine. The most excruciating pain tore through me. I immediately went on my knees to get away when his hand wrapped around my hair. Before I could think, he pounded my head again into the unbearably hard tree. I saw stars and my head spun. My body went sloppy after that, sagging in his grip as he continued to kick me until I was practically lifeless. With a loud grunt, he picked up my limp body and flung me over his shoulder.

I felt like I was going to throw up. I might have even. I didn’t know. I was too out of it. My head pounded, my body hurt, and my vision continued to spin in rapid circles. I was so cold, my flesh had gone numb from head to toe. I lost consciousness, and as I slipped away, I heard the man triumphantly shout, “I got her!”

Emma

This stabbing pain in my head woke me up. I opened my eyes and saw darkness. Blinking, I looked around, staring at the figures moving around me with purposeful strides. I opened my mouth, grunting and licking at my cold, numb lips.

I was still outside, still in the forest somewhere, still freezing my tits off. Only I wasn’t running. I was on my side, against the cold damp earth. The trees overhead wavered with the wind, and for several moments I just stared at the black insipid sky, waiting for it to swallow me whole. Part of me hoped I’d just die already. That the cold would consume me and the last thing I would remember before fading away was the uninspired sky, a blatant reflection of my uninspired life before meeting Borden.

Slowly, my body stirred, and it was a difficult task to do considering every inch of me felt stiff as a board. I realized very shortly that my arms and legs wouldn’t move at all, and I panicked for a fleeting second until I knew what was wrong. My arms were bound behind my back, and my legs were bound by the ankles. The rope was tight, too tight to wriggle out of if I tried – and I fucking tried with everything inside me.

“Mulligan said it’s all going down tonight, which means getting this thing done, which means doing your fucking job and digging that goddamn hole! I don’t want to hear you bitching about it. I don’t want to hear how the ground is hard. You’re not a bunch of pussies. Just fucking do it already so we could get out of this shithole and get paid.”

The voice belonged to the same man that ordered the others to find me on that road. I turned my face to him and watched him carefully. He was large and bald, wearing black clothes like all the others. There were five of them all up, I counted. I couldn’t make out their features. I couldn’t see a damn distinguishable thing – not that it mattered or anything. Anonymity wasn’t important if the person was going to their death.

If they knew I was awake, they didn’t care. I was practically part of the scenery. They just walked around me like I was the most non-threatening thing to ever walk this earth. They were right. I felt it. Logically, there was no way out. They would do whatever they wanted to me, and I could either cry about it like I did as I belatedly ran away from the gunfire, or I could go down trying to at least fight, however pathetic that fight might be.

“Borden is going to kill every last one of you,” I weakly said. I sounded quiet, but I knew they heard me the second the last word fell out of my mouth.

They ignored me, and I felt this strange hysteria bubble within me. I laughed, and it sounded crazy. What came out of my mouth next was even crazier.

“He’s going to hunt you down like he hunted those brothers down. You know what he did to them, right? He tortured them and cut them up. He said they begged for their lives to end, and he didn’t give them a shred of mercy. He just tore them apart, piece by piece, until they were a pile of white bones in a pit of fire.”

I’d made most of that up, but what the hell did it matter? All it took was one to fear the wrath of Borden because, at the end of the day, my death would make him unstoppable. He would hunt them all down and probably do far worse than I could ever imagine. Even the deepest and darkest parts of hell would cringe at his capabilities. If I died, Borden would burn alive every soul that stood in his way.

This time, heads turned to look at me. The four of the men stopped what they were doing, which I couldn’t see. If I’d unnerved them, I didn’t know, but they looked to the bald man obviously in control. He glanced my way, and I waited for him to come bounding to me to deliver more kicks to my nearly broken spine. Instead, he scoffed and said, “Ignore her. She’s literally going to her funeral. She’ll say anything to scare you.”

The men resumed what they were doing, and I continued to fight the rope around my arms. The posture I was forced into made my shoulders ache, and with my hands behind my back my spine curved unnaturally. I remained on my side, grasping at the sticks on the ground, hoping one might be sharp enough to cut through the rope. It was an impossible hope, but I clung to my last shred of it with everything inside of me. I would not die. I couldn’t die. I didn’t live this long to get put out by a bunch of money hungry men who were digging a fucking hole to stick me in.

No, I couldn’t go out this way. I had too much left to live. There were too many oxygen thieves in this world. Goddammit, I deserved a chance to make something out of myself! To nurture my relationship with Borden. To change him before he became a true monster. To prove to Granny there was more to him than meets the eye.

I didn’t want to cry, but every second that passed, I felt this debilitating kind of horror run through me. I was full on panicking. This was an official countdown to the end of my life, and I didn’t want to face it with tears in my eyes. I wanted to fucking fight.

They grumbled something about being done, and then the bald man came for me. I rolled away from him, flailing whatever part of my body I could. I must have looked like a caterpillar, slithering away, jerking my body upwards, going absolutely nowhere anytime soon. I heard their laughter, and as I made another roll, a heavy foot crashed down on my back, pinning me breathlessly to the cold earth. I dropped my head to the ground, my lips brushing against damp soil, breathing through the pain in my bruised back.

“You’re not going anywhere,” the bald man said, the smile alive in his voice.

“Fuck you!” I spat.

“I’d definitely fuck you, but we’re pressed for time, and it’s a fucking shame too, because I’d have liked to have been the last person to put my seed in Borden’s little slut as a giant fuck you to that prick.”

He turned me around and bent over, his arms grasping my shoulders. I glared at him, leaned forward, and spit at his face with the last of the saliva in my mouth. He responded swiftly with a punch against my right eye. My head snapped back, and more stars clouded my vision. My already aching head intensified with bolts of pain running through my skull like a lightning storm inside my head.

“That’s for being a bitch,” he grunted to me.

He picked me up and I tried thrashing in his grip, but every move made me nauseous. I dry heaved over his shoulder, throwing up bile from my stomach.

“Get the fucking casket ready,” I heard him say, completely unfazed by my vomit.

Casket?

Uncaring of the nausea, I jerked again, screaming as loud as possible into the night. Nothing could silence me. I would scream until my vocal cords gave out, until I took my last breath. My hair fell over my face, more vomit spilled between my lips, and still I struggled no matter how hopeless I felt.

Roughly, he threw me off his shoulder and into a hard box. I hurled my legs up and one of the men grabbed at them, forcing them down. Screaming with hysteria, I stared around the wooden casket they put me in. It was shaped in a long rectangle, longer than my own body, and it smelled of pine wood and dust. I screamed over and over again, gibberish flooding out of my mouth. I may have begged them to stop, or I may have cursed them to hell. I didn’t know. My mental state was slipping. I was losing my sanity the closer to death I was getting.

“Keep her shoulders still,” the man ordered.

I felt another pair of hands on my shoulders, and I stared wide eyed into a stranger’s face. Vapid eyes looked back me. A soulless gaze for a soulless murder. I saw something flash, and I blinked back at the bald man, who held a phone in his hand. He aimed it in my direction and another flash went off.

“Picture is done,” he declared. “Nail the top on.”

Two other men moved toward us, carrying the top of the lid to the casket. I screamed again at the top of my lungs as they lowered it over me. The hands around my shoulders and legs disappeared, and by reflex, I raised my legs and kicked with the front of my feet at the top that was suddenly shrouding me in a film of black darkness. The pressure of the lid was too hard to kick away. The sounds of the night dulled. Their voices were muffled, and moments later, I heard something pounding along the box.

They were nailing me in.

Panic swarmed my insides. I shrieked, but nothing happened. I tried to kick my legs up, but it hit the top of the box and again nothing happened. I never even had the opportunity to fight. I crumbled and sobbed. I couldn’t help it. I let the tears run freely because it truly was over. I was going to suffocate and die. There was no doubt about it.

The box jerked suddenly, and I tumbled around. They were placing me somewhere. Probably the hole. God, this really was my funeral. And then I heard it… The soft sounds of soil hitting the lid.
They’re burying me alive.
All my worst nightmares had come true. I panted, but I could hardly draw any air in. Was I suffocating already? Had I sucked too much air into my lungs in such a short amount of time? No, I tried to reason, that wasn’t possible. I was having a panic attack. I went lightheaded, and for a second, I welcomed the dizziness, hoping I’d just fall unconscious and be put out of my misery.

I shook my head at the feeling, determined to stay awake. I screamed again and tried pounding on the wood around me with my shoulders and even my head. I was exhausting myself for no reason. I didn’t understand why I was fighting when it was futile. It was like my will refused to die.

The sounds of soil hitting the box ended minutes later, and I couldn’t hear anything else. My ears swallowed nothing but my loud frantic breaths.

“No, please no,” I whimpered. “No, I’m not ready. I’m not ready.”

My mind was already firing images of my grandmother, of my own mother, of Borden… I shook my head, frantically pushing the images away, unwilling to accept the truth. But they came at me anyway.

Grandmother’s voice. Random memories flashing through my mind.

8 years old:
I found these rollerblades and I bought them with the last of my money. Try them on. They’re pink!

10 years old:
You’re my princess, Emma, no matter how old you are. You will always be my Princess Emma.

13 years old:
Don’t blame yourself. Your mother’s death wasn’t your fault. I love you. I will always love you, and I will never leave you.

14 years old:
If you’re going to be leaving the house often, take this knife here and put it somewhere nobody will find. Always arm yourself. It’s a dark world, and you’re too beautiful for it.

16 years old:
Let’s talk birth control.

18 years old:
He’s a fool to cheat on you. Only a fool would let you go.

20 years old:
I didn’t ask you to come over for a specific reason, but now that you’re here, I’ve set you up on a blind date. He’s a very handsome man.

22 years old:
I’m so proud of you, Emma. Just for being you. No other reason.

I shook my head again at the images.
No!
But even as I said no, my body stopped moving. I was exhausted both emotionally and physically. I closed my eyes, relishing in the small circulating air around me. How long did it take for somebody to die in a coffin anyway? It was cruel really. Facing death like this with no way of stopping it. I was going to have to confront my life and all my failures and all I’d leave behind in the time it took to consume every litre of air around me.

I cried so hard, my eyes hurt and the tears stung along my raw cheeks. My nose blocked and at some point more bile rose up my throat. I dry heaved and coughed and cried some more.

And then I was completely and utterly spent.

The weight of the soil created stress, and the wood above me strained and groaned, splintering it. It made the experience all the more real. I felt like the walls were closing in on me, and I sucked in more air, seized with sadness so heavy it hurt.

Maybe I could just fall asleep instead. Maybe I wouldn’t feel my soul slipping away. I kept my eyes closed and imagined Marcus holding me, running his hand through my hair, kissing me with those luscious lips. For some reason that eased the pain in my chest. It gave me something to cling to.

It’s all your fault, Marcus.