Page 89 of Nocturne

In our hurry to escape them, we have taken the wrong turn and ended up in a place which would make it easy for these thugs to bury us.

“What’s your genius plan? To get on a boat and row?” I scream in frustration but don’t stop running.

If anything, I hold Ivy’s wrist tight in my grip and pull her along with me at an alarming pace.

“You are the fucking genius out of us two. So if you say that’s the plan, then that’s the plan.” Ivy retorts.

Both of us cry out when a bullet misses my side of the head within inches.

“This way,” I rush us towards the area where all the shipping containers are placed.

Walius has a tremendously large dock area that is noted in many encyclopaedias. If we manage to get lost inside them, it would give us a chance to escape. We can hide in between the containers, which are larger than a small apartment and run when our chasers are confused. I am great with directions, and it would be a piece of cake to remember every turn we take, especially with my brain running on adrenaline.

That is, if they won’t have enough brains to appoint one of them to guard the entry gate. I don’t know if this place has any other entry, and I do not have enough time to figure it out.

When I look back after making it halfway towards a blue container, I turn around, and much to my pleasure, none of those men lurk back at the gate.

Maybe they are too confident about catching us.

With a new zeal, I rush us into the labyrinth of containers, taking a sharp left, then a right and a left and so on, until I can no longer hear those darned thugs breathing behind us. Commands are flying around in the air about finding us, but the voices sound too far away and opposite from us. But to be on the safe side, I make another few zig-zags until my heart temporarily relaxes.

My legs fail me as I lean on a green container behind me, and I sink into a sitting position on the asphalt ground. My legs scream in pain, and I try not to take in a greedy amount of oxygen into my lungs because that acts counterproductive after a sprint.

I refuse to look at my overused feet, sacred about what kind of gross garbage I would find on them. The obsessive need to fish out my sanitiser spray and clean my legs is weighing down on me, but a measly spray wouldn’t be enough. I need to douse them in a tub of sanitiser or peel away the present skin and wait for the new layer to grow back. It would be hurtful weeks of wait, but they would be clean this time.

“Did you call someone for help?” Ivy asks while she looks around.

She, too, is breathing hard, but instead of sinking onto the floor like me, she is looking around for an escape or a hiding spot. Hopefully, it is the second one because I don’t think I have enough stamina left inside me for another sprint.

“No.”

I do not need water.

I do not need water.

I do not need any water.

Fudge biscuits! I’m thirsty now.

“Why the hell not?” Ivy gives me an incredulous glare.

“Excuse me for not making a pit stop to make a call while seven goons were chasing my arse.” I snap.

“There’s no signal here,” Ivy announces.

I don’t even have the energy to recheck as I am trying to organise the directions we need to take to run back towards the entrance.

“Ara, follow me,” Ivy orders after a few minutes of intense searching.

It looks like something is going my way on this dreadful night.

Ivy signals me to crouch low and follow her while she crawls into a tiny hole which was made into a black shipping container. It is covered by wooden crates and is hidden in the dark that it would only be visible if one paid a lot of attention to this exact spot. And the only way Ivy must have seen it is because the wooden crates did not cover it fully right now.

Ivy crawls into the dark space while I follow her and turn to close the mouth of the hole as silently as possible. It takes a few amounts of wiggling of my butt to get inside, and there is no way in hell those men could fit in through this tiny hole.

Even then, I am not taking any chances of them finding us. I am just a few inches from hiding the hole from view with the crates when-

“Holy fuck!” Ivy squeals right behind me, which causes me to startle and topple the wooden crates.

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