The Fear by Spencer Hamilton

Author:Spencer Hamilton [Hamilton, Spencer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Nerdy Wordsmith
Published: 2020-08-02T00:00:00+00:00

There was another reason they couldn’t leave.

But Ash didn’t like to think about it.

The reason kept waking her up in the middle of the night. The reason crept up on her and burst into her memory, sounding just as clear and as world-endingly loud in her head as when it had happened. The reason made her cry more than she’d cried in her life.

It had happened just a week after their imprisonment inside the apartment. Ash had exhausted every option of escape she could find, went over them again and again in her mind, and still kept coming back to the one fact that she couldn’t leave Jack. But that didn’t mean someone else couldn’t come get them, take away from here—maybe even bring Jack somewhere she could get proper help. Somewhere that could help her get back to the Jack that Ash had fallen in love with. Ash didn’t think she’d given her mother their new address after that second move last year, but wasn’t there a fire department just up the road somewhere?

Ash had screamed for help quite a bit. The apartment complex was fairly secluded, wedged in by hills and busy backroads and a small tributary that nobody traveled because it hit a dead end a little past the apartment. Her neighbors had been unusually quiet—even Melanie had seemed to finally be content with the arrangement of her picture frames and put the hammer to rest—but, then again, maybe it wasn’t so unusual. Maybe they were all dead. But that hadn’t stopped her from screaming herself hoarse—swearing at the men who had done this to her, at fucking Doug; then screaming for help from someone, anyone, from God . . . and then a voice had answered her.

Not God.

Mo.

“You girls all right in there?”

Ash had rushed to the far wall of pocked stone and called out his name.

“Yes, it’s just me. How are you, Ashley?”

She’d had to stifle a laugh at the question, afraid it would morph into a sob. How was she? Only Mo, their stolid kindly grandpa of a neighbor, would ask something so mundane during such a clearly fucked situation. A pandemic, a state in lock-down, and now a landlord who had effectively imprisoned them and left them to die, and here Mo was asking how Ash was doing today and isn’t the weather nice.

“Did I lose you, Ashley, dear?”

“No, I’m here,” she called back. She had to raise her voice substantially to be heard through the solid rock, and it hurt after all her screaming. Mo would have had to as well, being normally so soft-spoken. She imagined this might be the loudest Mo had raised his voice in years. “I’m not doing very well, Mo,” she said. “Yourself?” She smiled at herself, at the absurdity—she’d taken on his neighborly small-talk tone, just moments after screaming herself hoarse about dying here and how all landlords should rot in Hell.

“I’m just fine, thank you, all things considered,” Mo replied.

“Were you . . . ?” She couldn’t finish the words.

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