Page 125 of Amnesia

“Nowhere to go now,” he intoned and started his climb up the tree.

Frantic, I looked around, trying to figure a way out. But there was none. I was trapped. He was coming for me, and the spark of hope I’d felt only moments ago extinguished.

A tear tracked down my cheek, and I wished for death as I had a thousand times before. Death would be far better than the existence I was sentenced to.

I was young, though, something he loved to taunt me with. As if my age were a weapon. He liked to remind me I still had decades before my body even thought about giving up on me. Decades to be nothing but a prisoner, a slave to be used and abused.

No more. If my body refused to give up on me, then I would give up on it.

He crested the ladder and hoisted himself onto the platform. His dark hair and eyes made him look like Satan. He was practically salivating, and I swallowed back the urge to vomit.

“Stay back,” I warned, throwing out a palm to shield myself.

He laughed. “You’re mine. Mine to do with what I will.”

“No,” I said, rallying from my bone-deep exhaustion to put up a final display of defiance. “Never again.”

He must have seen the look in my eye, or maybe he smelled the death already clinging to my bare skin. He gasped and started forward, but it was too late.

I took a running leap off the high stand, plummeting into the rocky coastline of the lake. Cold water slammed into me, enveloping me. It slid down my throat and into my nose. My body wanted to rise back up, but I forced myself down and found a moment of pure peace, something I hadn’t known in so very long.

Maybe drowning was a peaceful way to die. It was quiet down here. The water didn’t hurt me, but sort of cushioned my body as I waited to die.

I’d daydreamed about killing myself, about dying, so many times. I lived in fear, though. Fear of everything around me, of everything done to me. I had even been afraid of dying.

But now I knew. I knew death wasn’t scary. It was freedom.

My lungs seized, breaking into the peace I reached for. My body began to fight what was happening, and I surged toward the surface. Even as my brain shouted, No! my body took control.

The closer I got to the surface, the clearer the dark figure became. He was here. Of course he was. He couldn’t even let me die in peace.

I hated him.

My head broke the surface, my lungs gulping in giant drafts of oxygen.

“You’re mine,” he yelled, reaching for me.

I kicked and fought, slapping away his hands.

“No!” I went back under, but he grabbed a handful of my hair and yanked.

I fought him again. My wet body made it easy to slip away. I started to tread backward, though my limbs were sluggish and heavy.

I watched him pick up the oar he used to row out to where I’d been. “When you wake up, your punishment will be waiting,” he growled, swinging the wood down.

My body sank with the force of the hit, the dark, cold water claiming my body as unconsciousness claimed my mind.

In the end, it hadn’t been a bad way to die. Life had been far, far worse.

I didn’t die.

I’d merely fallen unconscious, carried away by the overzealous current, then floated to the surface where I bobbed and drifted to where Eddie had been walking.

He’d been trying to knock me out so he could tow me back to shore. He hadn’t tried to kill me.

I did. I tried to kill myself. I actually prayed for death.

All this time, I’d been running from a killer, terrified they’d come back to finish the job.

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