Deadeye by Meredith Doench

Author:Meredith Doench [Doench, Meredith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781635552546
Publisher: Bold Strokes Books
Published: 2019-06-02T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

I followed the frantic sound of footfalls that couldn’t have been more than a few hundred yards in front of me. I came upon snapped branches with their exposed white wood still seeping. I squinted to protect my eyes from the swat and sting of the trees while I attempted to hold my weapon in front of me, ready to take aim, but it bounced around in front of me with the uneven ground.

My heart slammed inside my chest. It was a feeling I recognized, a combination of panic and pure oxygen tearing through my system. It had been a while since I’d felt this kind of a rush, and it always brought me back to Marci and the run I’d made out of the wooded quarry to phone for help. We didn’t have cell phones yet, and I believed Marci still had a chance to live. It was a couple of miles back to where I found Marci in one of the limestone caves that pockmarked the land around the water. I couldn’t carry her back to the car, but I could run for help. I whipped along the wooded path that day, my feet sometimes feeling as if they didn’t touch the ground. I’d gotten about a third of the way out the woods when I felt it—the presence behind me. The killer chasing me.

Now, I slipped into that space somewhere between the past and the present, a dreamlike state that tossed me back and forth into the run to try to save Marci’s life. I looked down and actually saw the Tretorn tennis shoes I’d been wearing as a fifteen-year-old, the frayed edges of my cutoff blue jeans. I blinked hard and saw it was actually the steel toe tips of my Frye boots that kicked through the underbrush and hurled me forward. Before I knew it, I was once again back in the wooded quarry, certain the man would catch me as he closed in the space between us. I heard his grunts with each step, the slap of his shoes against the earth, eventually feeling the edges of his fingertips reach for my shoulders but instead only graze the fabric of my shirt. My breath completely stopped with the phantom feel of his touch, and my heart seemed to stand still for a few seconds.

I so clearly remembered—it was the thing I didn’t see coming that saved me that day—the quarry so far below. I leapt off the edge of the path, my arms windmilling through the air on the way down, and I waited for him to plunge into the water beside me. He never did. Instead, he vanished back into the woods.

The thing I didn’t see coming. The water of the quarry saved me that day, but it just as easily could have killed me.

What couldn’t I see coming now? The figure running from me now had the speed of Bennett, and I struggled to catch up. We were well within

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