Page 11 of Not This Night

"Get it together," he muttered to himself, eyes narrowing. The anger simmered, mixing with a bitter taste of defeat.

He couldn’t end it. He didn’t have the courage…

But that meant someone else would pay. Someone else needed to answer for it all.

Eyes flint-hard, he scanned the horizon. Dust devils danced in the distance, but it was movement of a different kind that snagged his attention. Two figures—dark silhouettes against the bleached sky—were moving steadily towards him.

"Hell," he whispered, the word barely a puff of air in the stillness. They were just specks in this vast emptiness, but they were too purposeful, too direct. His pulse quickened.

He ducked instinctively, even though the cliff's edge offered its own concealment. The figures continued their approach, oblivious to his watchful gaze from above. His mind raced with possibilities and dangers. 'Not now, not yet,' he thought.

Another involuntary curse slipped through clenched teeth. He couldn't let them find "it" before he had the chance to act.

Muscles coiled, he turned on his heel, a spring released. The desert floor was unforgiving beneath his boots as he sprinted away from the precipice.

"Can't let them..." The rest of the thought lost to the rush of wind in his ears, the thunder of his heartbeat drowning out all else. He needed distance, time, a plan. The stakes were too high and every second mattered.

Sand billowed behind him, a smoky trail of his frenetic escape. Every step was a punishing slap against the desert floor, a desperate bid for more distance. A low moan escaped his lips, woven with threads of frustration and despair. His breath came in ragged gasps, his body pushed beyond limits by the sheer force of adrenaline.

"Can't stop," he panted to himself, the words dissolving into the arid air as he propelled forward.

His thoughts raced in tandem with his sprinting form, images flashing like a strobe light in his mind.

"Got to... get away..." he muttered, the syllables broken by exertion.

She deserved that much, didn’t she?

They deserved the end… it all had to end.

The sun hammered down without mercy. The figures, the cliff, the beads—they all blended into the blur of his flight.

And his anger returned.

The rage he felt at himself. The rage that made him want to leap off the cliff… But now the rage was redirected, turned toward a new face, his resolve hardening in that moment.

Not it. The two strangers in his desert were about to find it.

So he’d leave another corpse.

And another.

And another…

CHAPTER FIVE

The sun baked the barren landscape, casting a relentless heat upon Rachel and Ethan as they trekked across the desert. Dust swirled around their boots with each step they took. The trail before them stretched out, marks in the sand, the dust, the dirt.

Rachel’s eyes tracked the fading trail.

Whoever had left the old, dilapidated farmstead hadn’t tired. For nearly half a mile, they’d trekked in rough and ragged terrain. The ground turned mostly to stone in the basin of a rising cliff face, and Rachel’s eyes strained to discern the tracks as the ground shifted from soft sand and earth to hard, unyielding rock.

"Rachel," Ethan's voice cut through the dry air, "you still got the trail?"

She barely nodded, her gaze locked on a distant cliff that thrust upwards from the flat expanse like a giant's jagged tooth. She could feel him watching her, but didn’t look away.

Movement. She’d spotted movement.

"Hey," he prodded again, his concern edging into his tone. “Did we lose the trail?”

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