Sever - A Wattpad Featured Story

Jade - Chapter 28 - Now

'What are you doing?' Belinda stammers.

'Get in the driver's seat and wait for me. If you see anyone, press your foot down on that pedal and floor it out of here, do you understand?'

Rather than wait for her answer, I nudge the driver's door open and creep out as quietly as I can. If they've spread out searching the forests behind the dorm building then I have time.

I hope.

I run towards the first garage door, fumbling with the remaining keys in my hand. The shutter is open three feet or so off the ground, enough to navigate under without smacking my head. I run into the congregation room, which is empty but for several trestle tables, which are lined up along the far wall, covered with plastic plates, cutlery and bits of food: breakfast cereal boxes, half eaten toast and jam with knives sticking straight out.

I will myself to leave, to do what I've set out to, but the far wall catches my eye. It's covered with maps, diagrams and charts, each lined with thick red marker pen. Dots. Crosses. Lines. There are other illustrations too: blueprints of buildings.

Although I'm bitterly aware I'm treading on borrowed time, one blueprint is familiar. I rip it off the wall, and then I race out into the damp corridor that runs behind the lock ups. The first room was my prison. Its door is wide open with ad hoc graffiti markings over the walls. 'Thousands!!' is scrawled across the metal shutters. I shudder and run past Belinda's room.

At room three, I force the Chubb key into the lock. The dark-skinned girl is cowering in the corner, her arms wrapped around her baby bump. When she sees me run in, her eyes go wide.

'Come on. We're getting out of here.'

She gawks and scrambles up. Out in the corridor, barely halfway back, a figure in a wheelchair crosses our path. Ridley.

One of his legs is bound in plaster up to his thigh; his face is swollen like a shiny aubergine with one eye bruised so heavily it won't open. Now I know why I hadn't spotted him earlier amongst the crowd.

'Hello sweet'art,' he says, blocking our exit. Then he shouts, 'She's here!'

He has no obvious weapon, but like a nettle, every square inch of him oozes poison.

The route behind us feeds back into the hospital where the others went. I glance back. It would be suicide to run there.

Ridley starts rolling his wheelchair down the corridor towards us. Though its wheels are rubber, the wheelchair moves with a slicing noise like metal on metal. With every rotation I imagine an executioner from the olden days, with thick lips and round eyes, staring out from a balaclava and sharpening his guillotine with shears that click.

'Come.' I grab at the keys in the door to the girl's cell and push her back in.

'We can't get out of here,' the girl says. Fear pinches at her full lips and shakes her cockney twang.

I run to the shutter, a stupid move in hindsight. How am I to know if the one remaining key on the bunch will work the shutter's lock? All I have is blind faith in Blue, and by now I should know better.

In my cell there had been a padlock attached to a bolt in the floor, and I search for one now. Please, Blue, don't fail me again.

From inside her cell, the girl slams the door against Ridley's wheels, which chimes against the spokes.

'He's got a knife!' she shrieks.

The executioner's image resurfaces. This time the slayer is gaunt to the point of skeletal. His lips are thinner, his teeth stained the colour of whiskey. When he cracks a sneer, I imagine his foul breath.