Chapter 83. Darted

A whizzing whistle of air that skids past my left ear and inflicts a searing pain with the high-pitched velocity it passes me with makes me jump sideways and crash into bushes as I run at speed. I almost swallow my tongue; my stomach lurches and jumps out of my body with the scare. It gives me a near heart attack, and I scramble in stinging, scratching bushes to fight my way out. I get caught up in heavy thorn vines and trip over my unsteady legs.

The fall makes me tumble and roll, knocking my shoulder on rocks, and stops my scrambling for a second. I take a moment to look back at the surging, bright sunlit area I left behind, gasping as I see the outpouring of men dressed in black coming from a concealed ground-level hatch near the main door. Four, maybe five, bodies appear on the ground above. There are already two outside the gates, and both are facing this way, looking intensely into the trees where I ran and pointing big ass guns with their sights trained in here.