Fear (A Gone Novel)

Five

44 HOURS, 12 MINUTES

ASTRID PACKED ALL her perishable food into her backpack. It wasn't much, but she might be gone for a while, and she couldn't tolerate the idea of letting anything go to waste.

She checked her shotgun. She had four shells loaded and five more in her pack.

Nine shotgun shells would kill just about anything.

Except Drake.

Drake scared her deep down. He had been the first person in her life to hit her. To this day she could remember the sting and force of his slap. She could remember the certainty that he would quickly escalate to closed-fist punches. That he would beat her and that the beating would give him pleasure so that nothing she could ever say would stop him.

He had forced her to insult Little Pete. To betray him.

It hadn't bothered Petey, of course. But it had eaten at her insides. It seemed almost quaint now when she recalled that guilt. She'd had no way of knowing then that she would someday do far, far worse.

Fear of that psychopath was part of the reason she had needed to manipulate Sam. She had needed Sam's protection for herself and even more for Little Pete. Drake wasn't Caine. Caine was a heartless, ruthless sociopath who would do anything to increase his power. But Caine didn't revel in pain and violence and fear. However amoral, Caine was rational.

To Caine's eyes Astrid was just another pawn on the chessboard. To Drake she was a victim waiting to be destroyed for the sheer pleasure it would bring him.

Astrid knew she couldn't kill Drake with the shotgun. She could blow his head off his shoulders and still not kill him.

But that image brought her some sense of reassurance.

She slung the gun over her shoulder. The gun's weight and length, along with the pack that was loaded down with water bottles, made her a bit slower and more awkward than when she was running free down the familiar trail.

Astrid had never measured the distance from her camp to Lake Tramonto, but she guessed it was six or seven miles. And if she was going to follow the barrier so as to avoid getting lost, it would mean traveling over rough terrain, up steep hills without trails. She'd have to keep up a pretty good pace to get there before night and see Sam.

Sam.

The name made her stomach tense. He would have questions. He would make accusations. He would be angry. He would resent her. She could deal with all of that. She was strong.

But what if he wasn't mad or sullen? What if he smiled at her? What if he put his arms around her?

What if Sam told Astrid he still loved her?

She was far less prepared to deal with that.

She had changed. The sanctimonious girl with so many certainties in her head had died with Little Pete. She had done the unforgivable. And she had seen the person she truly was: selfish, manipulative, ruthless.

She was not a person Sam could love. She was not a person who could love him back.

Probably it was a mistake going to him now. But whatever her failures and foolishness, she still had her brain. She was still, in some attenuated way, Astrid the Genius.

"Yeah. Right. Genius," she muttered. That was why she was living in the woods with fleabites in her armpits, smelling of smoke and carrion, hands a mass of calluses and scars, eyes darting warily to identify every sound in the woods around her, tense, practicing the smooth unlimbering of a shotgun. Because that was definitely the life of a genius.