gold rush [the wilds, toni shalifoe]

chapter 27

Current Day

Things got pretty chaotic pretty quickly for the two girls. Leah had launched into a frenzy about her suspicions about the plane crash being fake, while Hunter had found herself lost in the clips on the screen - especially the ones of Hudson and Riley. She didn't want to look at them for too long, afraid that it would make this nightmare feel even more true.

Her hand went up to her jaw, tracing the healing scar as Leah continued to squawk and flap her arms around, the blaring alarms falling on deaf ears. Hunter knew that in another time she'd have pushed Leah off her when the girl started shaking her by the shoulders, but her eyes were too focused on Hudson and how he was slamming his fist repeatedly against Riley's face. A taller blonde boy was wrapping his arms around Hudson's shoulders and pulling him backwards, his muscles clenching as Riley scrambled across the sand away from her brother.

"Hunter, WE NEED TO GO!" Leah yelled, snapping Hunter out of her gaze as she blinked for a moment, aware of Leah's hands gripped tightly on her shoulders. She moved her own hands up, lightly pushing Leah off of her before swallowing the saliva in her mouth and nodding slowly.

Leah took that as confirmation that Hunter was ready to follow her. The brunette took off, with the younger Boyd twin hot on her heels. While Hunter knew she was fit, she hadn't quite realised the speed that Leah could run at until that moment, and had she been in a better mindset, she would have made a mental note to tell the girl to join a sports team if they ever got back to school.

Unfortunately for Hunter, Leah was just too quick and too high off her discovery to notice that Hunter had lost her a few corners back. Leah took a sharp left, and when Hunter came to that same intersection, she took a natural right. She didn't have a keycard the way Leah did and instead found herself pressing her body tightly into an annexe in the wall as she heard one of the doors in this new corridor open.

Peeking her head around the corner, Hunter was quick enough to catch the back of Dr Faber's head disappearing from sight. She had never been a quick thinker but the adrenaline of their discovery and getting caught had begun to set in, and her body moved quicker than her mind. She barrelled towards the door that Faber had just exited out of, noticing that it was slowly closing.

Slamming her shoulder against the door with milliseconds to spare, Hunter gasped in relief as it pushed open. She spun around instantly, slamming her hands against the door and pressing it closed with a force that she didn't even know she possessed. With a small sigh and a lot of heaving to regain her breathing, Hunter placed her head against the cold metal of the back of the door for a moment.

"When I told them I wanted candy, I didn't mean eye candy," a voice called out, causing Hunter to let out a scream of fright and spin around. Her eyes were wide and she was instantly defensive, the red marks on her hands from scraping them along the walls as she ran were noticeable as she raised both hands in front of her face. Her eyes flittered around the room quickly as she tried to assess the situation.

An almost soothing, cooing noise erupted from the owner of the voice. His hands were raised in the air to mimic hers, his eyebrows now furrowed and all humour was gone from his face as he looked at the state of the girl in front of him. He stayed where he had been sat, his back against the metal headboard of the uncomfortable bed that he had been resting on for a while now.

"Who the fuck are you?"

"Me? You're the one who just fucking burst into my room!"

There was a pause in the air as Hunter looked around and took a deep breath. The room mirrored her room - and the fact the boy had similar sunburn marks and cuts on his body to what herself and the girls had sported, made her wonder if he was one of the boys on the screen she had just discovered.