The Girl in the Rabbit Hole by R J Law

Author:R J Law [Law, R J]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-05-15T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

In the morning, she awoke to a beautiful silence, the real world crystallizing slowly as she lifted from her dreams. Soon, a hard knocking shattered it all apart, and her heart picked up as reality seized her mind. She put on her robe and answered the door. A soldier stood before her, his face unfamiliar and very young.

“You have one hour,” he said, before turning his back.

She shut the door and hurried to the bathroom for a quick shower. Without delay, she dried and dressed her body in clothing that seemed appropriate enough for a diversity of outcomes. As the soldier pounded the door, she quickly applied enough makeup to give her pallid face a touch of life. Then she left the room and joined him in the hallway.

They made their way through the appropriate passages and elevators until they arrived topside, where they met more soldiers, who guided her out of the facility and into the open air. High away in the pale blue sky, the sun flared brightly, its forgotten warmth so nourishing to her ivory skin. She looked at it for an instant, and it seemed to look back, a floral wind kicking up to celebrate the reunion.

“Hello,” said Dominic Betancur. He wore safari gear and he approached wearing the smile of a lunatic. “Please, join me in the lead vehicle.”

She nodded politely and followed him, Romero watching them the whole way before climbing into a separate truck.

They left the compound and drove out into the surrounding flats. Claire studied the landscape through the open window, the grasses low and wispy, the horizon mostly bare. After two hours of this, they crossed into a strange and wasted land, with black skeletal trees that stuck from the ground like the curled ends of burned matchsticks.

Claire glanced out her window at the desolate scrub and contemplated the scant chance of life in all that dirt and sparsity. But before she got far, a family of little rabbits shot out from a distant bur shrub, their tiny footwork kicking up faint puffs of white sand that rose up in the clear air and then vanished, like little explosions of powder on some enormous expression of still life.

Dominic smiled.

“I've seen amazing things in this area,” he said. “Mother Nature finds a way.”

By the time the great wall of jungle flora appeared on the horizon, the sun had pulled near the earth. As its burn dulled, all makes of orange light shot through the flowing tree tops, while great birds circled like giant insects above them. Together, the birds moved in perfect agreement, congealing into enormous black halos that swelled and undulated in some sort of ancient unanimity, which seemed sinister to Claire at such as distance for reasons that were beyond her will to understand.

As they approached, the wild thicket seemed to grow before their eyes, and soon they saw the dark gape that tunneled into it. They followed the road forward, the trucks like motorized toys before the flora's girth.

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