Her Final Words by Brianna Labuskes

Author:Brianna Labuskes [Labuskes, Brianna]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781542005968
Published: 2020-07-31T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

MOLLY THOMAS

Two weeks earlier

The box hadn’t been a coffin.

Molly only truly convinced herself of that once she was taken out of it.

She didn’t remember when that had happened. One moment her hands had been bound behind her back, the wood tight against her sides, her breathing shallow. The next she’d found herself on the floor.

The darkness was the same. Deep. Overwhelming.

But she was sitting up now, her hands tied in front of her. There was room to move.

A basement. Not the normal kind. There were no windows. But she was underground. She could feel it in the pressure of the air. So maybe a bunker? Like the ones built by that old Armageddon prepper Crazy Gus. The ones she and Eliza had explored in the woods near the cemetery.

Those had been stocked full of tin cans and ammo, though. Those were big enough for a person to live, had spared a thought toward comfort.

This one was a slightly bigger coffin.

This one hadn’t been built for survival. This one had been built for death.

Molly’s breathing stuttered, her blood rushing past her eardrums.

No. Don’t panic. Don’t panic.

It’s not a coffin. It’s not a coffin.

She scrambled back until her spine touched the cool cement wall.

Blink. Open, closed.

Molly breathed in. The air smelled of her. Her fear, her body, her urine. Nothing else.

With awkward hands, she felt on the floor beside her hip. The ground was smooth, just like the wall. Bunker. She was almost certain now. Tears threatened to spill over then, any hope of being found stamped out with ruthless precision.

Her nearly numb fingers knocked into something, and she skittered away from it, a wild animal braced for a snakebite.

When no fangs sank into vulnerable flesh, Molly inched forward again. The space wasn’t big enough for her to have gone very far in her panic. Slowly, so slowly, she crawled with her fingers over the floor once more until they bumped into . . . plastic.

A water bottle. A plastic water bottle.

Something like a laugh or a sob or a mix of both ruptured the unnatural quiet, and it was quickly absorbed by the hungry cement walls.

Water.

Why would they give her water?

Drugged. Maybe.

At this point she didn’t care. There were three bottles, tipped over on the floor, their labels peeled off, so she could feel the grooves and divots.

She opened one, drank half of it down before she realized her mistake. Her stomach heaved, startled after having been deprived for so long.

The water came back up, along with bile that burned behind it.

Now her coffin smelled of her vomit.

The next attempt was slower, more careful. Rationing out the only thing that seemed to hint at the possibility of survival.

She cried as she put the lid back on with three-fourths of the bottle gone. The tears and snot dripped off her face, crawled along her neck, pooled against the collar of her shirt. She cried until her throat hurt and her muscles ached and her eyes had become sandpaper and there was nothing, nothing, nothing left.

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