Hideout by Jack Heath (iphone ebook reader txt) 📕

‘You know,’ she says instead, ‘my life is just as fucked up as yours.’

A dark chuckle bubbles up my throat.

‘I mean, I endured the same bad things,’ she clarifies. ‘My parents died, too. I grew up in the same group home. And I don’t feel the urge to … do what you do.’

‘Lucky you.’

‘But … why?’

I’ve thought about this a lot. Bad things happen to everyone, but they seem to make some people stronger and break others. Maybe it depends how strong you were to start off with. Thistle was tough, I was weak.

‘Maybe it’s genetic,’ I say.

‘But—’

I hold out my hand, stopping her. There’s a camera in one of the dogwood trees up ahead. One I hadn’t seen before. It’s not pointed at us, but it’s facing the direction we need to go.

‘We can go around,’ Thistle says.

‘No time.’ The sun will rise soon, along with the early-morning-yoga-loving killers. ‘And there are others. Hang on.’

I creep up behind the camera and slowly twist it to face a different patch of forest. Hopefully the gradual movement doesn’t trigger an alert on anyone’s phone. Or if it does, they won’t notice that the camera is now monitoring a different group of trees.

We keep moving.

‘Do you want to eat me?’ Thistle asks carefully.

The hungry half of my brain interprets this as an offer rather than a question. ‘No,’ I say. ‘Part of my condition—’

‘Condition,’ she echoes dully.

‘I don’t see people as people. They’re just walking, talking meat. But not you.’

‘Why not? I’m trying to understand.’

‘Maybe because I knew you from before, or because we’ve been through so much together.’

‘Can’t you just … stop?’

‘I’ve tried.’

The crickets scream around us as we walk. She’s slow, because of her bare feet.

‘I can’t believe I fucked a cannibal,’ she says finally.

‘Sorry.’

‘My old roommate, Julie—she used to say … heh.’ Thistle starts to laugh. ‘She used to say I had terrible “taste” in men.’

I start laughing, too. I can’t help it. Neither of us has slept properly in at least forty-eight hours. It’s not the joke itself—it’s the whole situation. It’s so far from funny that it’s somehow hilarious. Like those jokes you hear about dead babies, or about 9/11. Laughter is the worst reaction, so it becomes inevitable.

Thistle speaks in between giggles and gasps: ‘Stop! They’ll hear us!’

‘You stop!’

Eventually the guffaws die away.

I wipe the tears out of my eyes. ‘Come on, we’re almost at the car. Can you drive?’

‘Why me?’

‘Because you might have given me a concussion.’ It’s hard to be sure in the darkness, but I think my vision is still blurred.

‘Sure, I can drive.’

I toss Thistle Fred’s keys. The throw is way too wide. The keys hit a tree nearby.

‘Yeah, you should definitely not be driving.’ She picks up the keys. Her voice goes serious. ‘Blake, when we get to Houston …’

‘You’ll have to arrest me. I know.’ Thistle’s moral compass might actually be the real reason I don’t see her as food.

‘I’m not like the old director,’ Thistle says. ‘I can’t let you keep doing this.’

‘Reese, it’s okay. I’ll come quietly.’ And I will. As long as she’s alive, that’s all that matters.

She nods slowly. ‘All right. Glad to hear it.’ She looks at the lightening sky. ‘How long do you think it will take those creeps to realise we’ve escaped?’

‘There’s a motion sensor at the end of the driveway,’ I say. ‘They’ll be alerted as soon as we cross it. We’ll just have to hope this pick-up can outrun their van.’

‘Excuse me?’ Thistle lowers her voice—we’re not far from the house. ‘If that’s true, they’ll be long gone before I can get a SWAT team back here.’

‘I know.’

‘They’ll just set up shop somewhere else.’

‘Probably. I think they already have a second location—the website says they’re holding a paedophile there.’ I don’t like the thought of the Guards escaping justice, but I don’t see a way around it.

‘And what about the other prisoners?’

‘What about them?’

‘The perps will kill them as soon as they realise we’re missing. How are we supposed to get them out of here?’

I shrug helplessly. ‘I don’t think we can.’

‘We can’t just let them die.’

‘They’re murderers,’ I say. ‘Terrorists. Klansmen.’

‘You eat people,’ she says.

I throw my hands up. ‘What do you want me to do? It’s nearly dawn. We don’t have time to go back for them. Even if we did, the racist ones won’t trust you and none of them will trust me.’ Especially not after what I did to Ivy, I think. ‘As soon as we let them loose, they’ll scatter every which way, and we’ll all get caught.’

‘We can call for backup,’ Thistle says.

‘I don’t have a phone, and there’s no cell service out here.’ ‘The perps are running a website. They must have computers and internet. Send an email to the FBI.’

‘They have someone in the FBI, remember? That’s how they found you. Plus, I don’t know if you heard, but the old FBI director was supplying corpses to a cannibal. We shouldn’t trust them.’

‘What about the county police?’

‘I can’t email anybody. I’m sure the Guards track all the data coming in and out. I addressed a package to Dr Norman, but they haven’t even mailed it yet—’

‘You sent an SOS by mail?’ Thistle looks incredulous.

‘It was all I could think of, okay?’

‘All right.’ She chews her lip. ‘If they send it today, it’ll probably arrive on Monday, or Tuesday at the latest—’

‘Thistle, they’re going to kill you on Sunday. We need to go, right now.’

‘I’m not leaving without the others.’ She clenches her fist, like she’s willing to beat me unconscious and go back for