Girl, 11 by Amy Clarke (grave mercy TXT) 📗

girl even though they never had before, he leapt across the bed, straddled her body, and tried to cover her mouth with his hands. She bit him, and he yelled, then grabbed the pillow both girls shared and shoved it down on her whole face. She kicked and writhed and screamed with a kind of intensity Natalie had never heard before. Finally, after several long minutes, she was still.

The man left her in the basement and ran up the stairs. Natalie could hear him pacing back and forth, footsteps creaking the boards above her head. When he came back, he did not look at her. Natalie stayed where she had sat since Amanda threw the bowl, face buried in her knees, until he was gone. Amanda was no longer on the bed when she finally opened her eyes again.

Natalie was alone now.

She sat up in bed and listened closely again, waiting for the telltale clomps of his feet. Nothing. He was so angry when he stormed away yesterday, and he hadn’t been back with food or water. She was pretty sure he wasn’t even in the house. If he didn’t come back, if Elle didn’t show up soon, she would die here.

Now was her chance. There were no windows and the door to the basement was firmly locked, but there was a vent up high near the ceiling.

Natalie shoved the bed across the room, metal screeching against the concrete floor. She picked up the large bucket Amanda had used to throw up in when she was too weak to get out of bed and tipped it into the toilet. There was no sink to rinse it out, so she turned it upside down on top of the mattress. She wouldn’t be sleeping here again anyway.

The bucket wobbled when she stood on top of it, but if she held her palms flat against the wall, she could balance. One of the bedposts was broken, its sharp, splintered point jabbing at the ceiling just to her right. If she fell on that, she’d be dead. Once she was stable, Natalie reached up and pulled at the grate over the air vent. At first, it didn’t budge. She banged her fist against it, sharp pain shooting into her skin. It had to come loose.

Then, with one final smack, the metal sprang free and fell, bouncing off the mattress before clattering to the floor.

Natalie held her breath, eyes trained on the ceiling. No footsteps sounded above her.

Again, she reached up, this time to grip the inside of the vent. It felt dusty and slippery under her sweaty hands, but she managed to get a good grip. But how could she hoist herself up? She didn’t have any leverage, any footholds in the smooth surface of the wall.

The wall.

Heart crashing in her chest, Natalie jumped down and picked up the bucket, doing her best to keep her hands dry as she swung it toward the wall. It thunked uselessly three times before finally taking a chunk out of the plaster. She hit it twice more before a decent divot was formed, enough for a couple of toes to squeeze in. Setting the bucket down on the bed again, she climbed back up. This time, when she got a grip inside the vent, she swung her left leg up and put the tip of her foot in the divot. Then she tensed her muscles and tried to pull her body weight up the wall.

She slipped, holding in a scream even though she had already been making a racket. She’d been practicing holding in her screams for days. Her feet landed back on the bucket. The scent of urine filled the room, and at first she thought it was coming from the bucket before she realized she’d just wet herself. Tears blurred her already dim vision. She felt like a baby, or an animal, or both. She should be stronger than this. She had an advantage Amanda didn’t have. She’d read the books. She’d learned about monsters. She should be braver than she was.

After saying a quick prayer, Natalie took a deep breath, reached up again, and this time didn’t stop to think. She scrambled like a kid climbing a fence to get away from a bully, and it worked. The muscles in her left calf and her shoulders twinged as she shot herself up into the vent, but she was there. She landed on her belly and panted for a moment. Only a moment.

This vent wasn’t for heating. The ones in the floors did that. She hoped that meant it was for ventilation and would take her outside, to the cold winter air and freedom.

Crawling through the vent proved much easier than getting into it was. Using her elbows and knees, she wriggled her body along the bottom, stopping every now and then to listen for any sounds besides her own harsh breath. The vent came to an abrupt stop, and panic surged through her, but she realized it had changed to a right angle leading upward. She stood up and waved her hands around in the dark until she felt the edge of another bend around chest height. She pulled herself up and into the next tunnel.

A few moments later, she felt icy fingers of air dance across her sweaty face. She was getting closer. The first smell of snow made her crawl faster, whimpers escaping her mouth beyond her control as the air got colder and colder.

And then she was there, banging against the grate on the outside of the house, whatever house this was, and she had forgotten about the noise, about keeping quiet, because the air was here, and it was fresh and clean and better than the death and sewage and vomit that had been stuck in her lungs for days. She launched through the broken grate and tumbled into the snow, lying still for a moment as the brightness of the outside world burned her retinas. Snowflakes drifted around her