Page 3 of Unhallowed

Where am I going? Why is he taking me outside?

Is someone meeting him here?

Footsteps sound closer to us, not Jonah’s since he’s standing still now, and my lower lip trembles. What did he get me into? Where am I going?Where?

“Hold her tight,” a man says, and Jonah grips me harder. “Now.”

Jonah grabs my face with an iron grip, and the fight comes back to me. My hands reach for his face just as I force my eyes open. I’m seeing blurry and my aim is all wrong, but I manage to find his eyes and scratch. Blood immediately bubbles up, and my eyes begin to adjust. I flail in his arms and they give way, almost dropping me. I claw at him again—just as I promised—and I land on my back, a wail coming from deep within his throat and a moan coming from mine. The light is still too bright, but I manage to crawl away as far as I can make it before I’m dragged back by an ankle.

Just as I’m turned and flipped over, a different man wearing a suit straddles me, jabbing me with a needle in my right arm. I feel pain as he injects me with mystery liquid and my body goes limp.

I’m in a place between waking and sleep, some sort of twilight zone, as I’m thrown into the backseat of a car. I whimper in fear as my body jolts and bounces off the seat, causing me to become nauseous again. Everything about this screams wrong, wrong,wrong. Why would they do this to me? And what exactly are they doing? I don’t know where I’m going, but it doesn’t seem like I’m having better luck than being trapped in a basement. The sound of the door slamming shut startles me out of my thoughts, but my limbs aren’t responding so there’s no outward reaction.What did they give me?!

Surely, they’re going to kill me.

At least, I hope so.

The gentle rumble of the engine keeps me distracted, as well as my thoughts spiraling out of control over what my life will be like in the next second, minute, hour. But the ride is short, at least it seems that way in my mind, and the car stops abruptly. By the time a stranger opens my door, I can feel my legs again. I canmoveagain.

Everyone is wearing suits. The driver, the man who opens my door, and the man in the passenger seat. They look important somehow, I just don’t know why they would want me. An orphan who got taken in by an adoptive family just to be shoved in a basement for being disobedient. For not wanting to comply with their expectations of me. The truth is, my mother was never religious, and of course she didn’t raise me to be. And how would she even make it to church? Most days she was too doped up on pills to even get out of bed. Sometimes the hunger in my belly felt like it was eating me alive. So yeah, no time for religion. Only time for survival. When I made it to my adoptive parents, I was rebelling against everything they said to do. Mostly because I didn’t believe in it; I didn’t want to believe in it either.

“Consequently, he who rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves.”

Or so I’ve been told half my life.

It’s been five days since I made it to this house after spending months in foster care. It’s a surprise I was even adopted due to my age. I’m eleven now. But I’ve been told they’re good people, God’s people. I don’t know what that means, I’ve never really learned about it. But they want me, and now, as I sit in this house, I think about how much it would please them to change my ways, but that only makes me nauseous.

“It’s time for Sunday School,” my foster mother says, her blonde hair and blue eyes looking like mine, and if you didn’t know I was adopted, you’d think I was her biological daughter. Her blood. It’s almost comforting, but it makes me more nervous than anything that she’d try to treat me like the rest of them. Have the same expectations of me that I will never be able to abide by. I won’t ever be what they want me to be, I can’t even be what I want me to be. “Let’s go.”

“No,” I say defiantly. I raise my chin and square my shoulders. “My mom never made me do that.”

“Listen here, brat.” She grabs my cheeks forcefully, causing me to bite the inside of them, crushing my jaw. “You will do as we say or there will be consequences.”

“No,” I repeat.

My foster mother lets go of me and takes a step back, but just when I think she’s going to walk away, she punches me in the face. Blood pours down my chin, from a split lip I’m sure, and I whimper, clutching at my jaw which feels like it’s on fire.

“You,” she says through her perfectly white gritted teeth, “will obey. For disobeying me is an insult to the Lord.”

Where is God now? They just gave me over to these people, no questions asked? Aren’t they supposed to be nice and pure and all things good?

The tall, suited man at the door—at least six feet tall, with rugged features and black eyes—grabs me by the arm and all but drags me out of the vehicle, causing me to stumble and trip on my own feet. I guess that means I’m not as mobile as I thought. He half carries, half drags me toward a massive airplane, and I try to plant my feet in a futile attempt at a refusal to move.

He doesn’t even notice it.

My eyes widen as we ascend the steps that lead to the top, and because my legs feel like putty if it weren’t for his tight grip on me, I’d be face-planting. Fear crawls down my spine like a thousand little spiders, biting and tickling, and I realize one thing: I’ve never been on a plane. Where the hell are they taking me?

It doesn’t matter because as I walk in, I notice a bunch of other girls sitting down next to each other. They’re all different races, and none of them look like me. Their clothes are tattered and dirty, and so are their faces. They look like they’ve been kidnapped, taken somehow. Like they’ve seen better days. And when a brunette with green eyes looks at me, all I see is sadness in her eyes. My heart hurts for her, constricting in my chest with a vice grip, and I swallow hard. I think this is what will become of me. No—I’m sure of it. And that knowledge doesn’t make me feel any better. Right now, ignorance would be bliss.

There are four rows of seats, and three girls per row. Me? I guess I’m sitting alone because he drops me off in the row behind all of them. No one turns their head to look at me either after the brunette looks away, and I guess everyone is going to fend for themselves. They don’t even make eye contact with each other.

The lightly humming cabin begins to purr, then whine. The plane starts to move, and I look around at the spacious and luxurious interior. It’s impressive—everything is. Down to the brown leather seats at the very front, facing us. After a while the plane begins to move faster, as if it’s driving, and it shakes violently the further we go. I wish I had someone with me, that I could hold a hand, as it stands this may be the scariest thing I’ve experienced. Maybe I don’t like planes.

My stomach dips and I groan as we ascend. My ears begin to ring, then they start to pop. It’s freaking miserable. The window seat at least gives me the ability to look down and see how far off the ground we are, which—bad idea.

Oh, God.

My stomach turns violently and I breathe in deeply, trying to not think of how far up in the air we are and how we could fall down to our deaths. Maybe that’s how I’ll die. Maybe I really am dying today.

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