“Here’s how it will work,” the man continued as he circled around us. His friend still held me down, and while Josephine was free to move, I knew she wouldn’t leave me. “I will give you a five minute head start. You hear me? Five minutes. After that, game on. But you should know that we love to play rough. We don’t care if you’re shifters. As far as we’re concerned, why save the world when they didn’t want us around in the first place?”
The man holding me down must have received some signal from the leader because he let me up. I scrambled to my feet and held out my hand for Josephine, but she didn’t take it. She pulled herself to her feet and looked at me. I looked back.
We were screwed.
“Well, what are you waiting for? Five minutes started thirty seconds ago.”
Chapter 12
I couldn’t keep up with Josephine. She was so damn fast. The girl could take state, or maybe she already had. Can’t say I was up on the track and field happenings at Shepherd High. I was pushing my legs like my life depended on it because I was pretty sure it did, and I still couldn’t match her speed.
I simply followed.
I didn’t know where we were going, and there was no time to talk over a plan. Josephine seemed determined, and so I followed her. Every so often she looked back to make sure I was still behind her.
When we turned onto Jenna’s street I wondered if maybe I had been mistaken about Josephine’s focused state. Maybe she had no idea about what to do either. I couldn’t hear or see the survivors, but they were survivors for a reason. Which meant when they wanted to find us I was pretty sure they could. When Josephine finally stopped it was in front of Jenna’s house. I was about to question her when she turned her back towards Jenna’s house and jogged across the street.
I remembered her telling me she used to live there.
With astounding ease, Josephine lifted her body up and over the fence into the backyard. I was not as graceful. My chest was burning. I made a silent promise to myself to take up running in the mornings if we made it back. By the time I got in the backyard, Josephine was digging furiously into a flowerbed. I didn’t question her and began to dig alongside of her.
My body was humming with adrenaline, and I knew we were running out of time. I dug faster. The dirt wedged itself underneath my fingernails as it flew up into our faces. My hand collided with metal at the exact moment the survivors began to cat call and throw out insults to let us know that our five minutes were up.
Gotta love how timing works out sometimes.
I wrapped my hands around the bulky metal. With a loud grunt, I yanked it from the ground. Once the box was out of the ground, Josephine pushed my hands out of the way.
“Come out, come out, wherever you are,” one of the men called out. He sounded awfully close.
“If the future is only full of clichés, I am certainly not going to help save it,” mumbled Josephine as she pulled something dark from out of the box. Her back was towards me, so I couldn’t see what the treasured object was. Josephine stood up and I followed.
“What do we do now?” I asked, still struggling to catch my breath.
“We wait.”
“Um. What?”
“They’ll come to us.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” I replied.
We didn’t have to wait long. Two of the men jumped over the fence and stalked towards us. My heart began to pound once more. I looked over at Josephine. Her calm façade from earlier was back.
“I expected a little better from a pair of shifters. It wasn’t hard to find you at all,” said the man who not five minutes earlier had been pushing my face into the cement.
“We’re just kids,” I replied.
We were. We were just teenagers. This wasn’t right. Why us? What kind of world was this that we lived in, and how much darker was our world destined to become?
“Boy, the moment you shifted your childhood was over,” the man replied. “We’re going to kill you, and then we’re going to play with her. Unless we make you watch first.”
Before I could reply, a loud noise busted through my ears. It sounded hollow, but coursed along my veins causing my teeth to rattle together. The face of the man in front of me contorted in pain. His eyes widened and a strangled scream issued from his lips. He crumpled to the ground and grabbed onto his leg, which was now bleeding profusely. His companion, the one who kept repeating the nonsense about the light one, charged towards us.
He didn’t get very far. The loud, jarring sound rang through the air again followed by a metallic smell that began to burn my nose. Like his friend, the man crumpled to the ground holding his leg. I looked over at Josephine.