Hourglass → Ace; Nancy Drew [1]

iii. the forewarned death

THE FOREWARNED DEATH
CHAPTER THREE

Olivia gulped down her breaths to stay quiet although her heartbeat was pounding loud enough to grasp attention. Something felt incredibly wrong, enough to make her limbs tremble and her bottom lip quiver, but there was nothing in sight. With her feet attached to the ground, her wide, glassy eyes searched through the darkness for any form of life. Still, all she saw was blackness.

She inhaled a slow, shaky breath before mustering up the courage to turn around. Her hands flew to her mouth to stop the desperate scream from escaping her lips as she watched before her in horror. She kept her hands glued to her mouth, not trusting her extent of terror as she took a step closer to get a clearer look of what were merely silhouettes to her.

Furrowing her brows, she narrowed her eyes to get a fixed image of what was several feet away from her in the darkness. Her frown deepened when she saw an unfamiliar Jeep. While she walked toward it, she scanned the area around her for any signs of The Claw. But when her eyes returned to the car, her heart dropped. "Oh my God," she whispered to herself. Her eyes brimmed with tears and she stopped walking, struggling to fathom the sight before her.

Plastered against the car window was a hand, motionless, and as Olivia began to trudge toward the car once more, she recognized the face glued similarly to the glass. The judgy waitress from The Claw, she thought, and her bottom lip started to tremble again. George. Her hair was floating wildly in the water that filled up the car. And while her eyes were wide, almost seemingly alive, her pale face and limp body confirmed otherwise.

She squinted her eyes to get a clearer view, mentally praying that she was seeing it wrong, but as she focused her vision, Olivia noticed another limp arm floating in the water. It was thicker and darker than George's, attached to a buff torso, but with his immobile head facing the other way, Olivia couldn't identify who it was.

As the realization settled that there were two helpless dead people alone in a car, a loud gasp brushed past Olivia's lips. She pushed herself onto her toes to force herself to move faster until she found herself in a hurried jog. She was all alone, lost, and trapped in a black box that she didn't know how to escape with a dead girl in a flooded car. As the thought crossed her mind, her breath hitched and her eyes blurred with tears. Her heartbeat raced faster than it ever had as her desperation for getting to the Jeep increased. George was dead but all Olivia wanted was to get to her, to free her from her suffocating doom. Yet, the faster she ran, the farther the car appeared to be. It grew farther and farther at a rate that Olivia's lungs began to clog with cold. She found her tired legs betraying her, bringing her to a gradual stop as they slowed down and as much as she tried to urge them to keep going, it was as though she had lost complete control. Of her legs, her body, her mind. Her body shook with exhaustion and terror and she found herself bending forward and propping her hands on her knees for support while her mind tortured her with a spindle of thoughts. Her body twitched and shivered with pain while her mind twisted and turned with unending thoughts until it felt like they were consuming her and all she could do was scream.