The Safe House

Emily stared at the waves lapping the shore. The rising tide inched closer, and she had to avoid contact with the toxic water. Soon the passageway would close, cutting her off the mainland. With no food and only a two litre bottle of clean water left, she had to leave the island where she had hid since the discovery of their safe house.

Plates of green toxic waste floated on the surface of the ocean. Their poisonous glow lit the ever darkening night. Emily hastened across the passageway and reached the mainland before the tide closed in on her.

She scrambled her way through the rotting sea-life littering the beach, further in and towards the canopy of the forest. She blessed the tide. Soon it would wash away her footsteps, leaving no trace of her on the beach. If anyone was still on the lookout for her, the tide would make their job harder.

Most likely the regime that had attacked the safe house assumed her dead. Maybe her compatriots did, too. She prayed she wasn’t the only survivor from their unit.

She wouldn’t know until she made it to their second safe house in the national forest outside the city. Breathing into her belly to silence the voice which whispered, “How do you know they haven’t attacked that, too?” she crept up the sandy dune and into the shadow of the trees.

“Breath into your belly to find calm in times of confusion and chaos,” her meditation teacher come mentor had told her in their first session. Little had they known the chaos that would soon overturn their lives.

When branches of a brutal regime had seized control across the globe following the toxic rains that had poisoned land and waters, her mentor had asked Emily to join the fight against the regime. She and her partner Melody had not hesitated to pledge their allegiance to the resistance.

At first they had defied the new laws and rules openly, but when members of the resistance force began to disappear, they moved underground. Emily and a dozen others had operated from their safe house in the city until a few days ago when they had to evacuate.

“We have to leave immediately,” her mentor, Anthony, had told them when he and two others returned from food-finding mission. “They nearly caught us and we couldn’t cover our tracks properly on the way back.”

He began throwing their meagre possessions into a hiking rucksack and others followed his example. Emily’s eyes met Melody’s, and she reached out to wipe a tear from her face.

“We’ll be ok.” She briefly held Melody’s face in her hands and planted a gentle kiss on her lips. Melody nodded and smiled, though Emily could read the fear and doubt in her eyes. “Now is no time to doubt. Just follow the plan and we will meet in the forest safe house.”

With that, Anthony had ushered her into one of the many tunnels that led out of the house. Before crawling deep into the darkness, she had glanced back one last time and seen Melody crawl into another tunnel.

She had just spotted a pinprick of light ahead of her when the earth shook. Rubble fell from the roof of the tunnel and she sheltered her head with her arms. The ringing in her ears sent waves of nausea through her.

She knew exactly what had happened. The regime had blown up their safe house. She held back the tears and the burning desire to go back. To return would be a suicide. She needed to push ahead. She couldn’t do anything else for the others except to pray they had made it out safely before the explosion.

A sudden searing pain on her left hand brought her attention back to her own situation. Another charge of pain followed as a droplet of water fell on her hand. The explosion had cracked the tunnel’s ceiling and poisonous ground water was seeping through. She had to get out before the crack became wider and more water leaked through.

Pushing with her feet and pulling with her arms, she crawled closer to the light. She pushed her head out through the opening and gasped for fresh air before squeezing the rest of her body through. For a moment she lay there, listening for sounds of the attackers, but all she could hear was the whispering of dead leaves in the trees.

In the sunlight she had inspected her hand where the droplets had fallen. The back of her hand had blistered, but the pain had subsided. The damage wasn’t too bad, and she had pushed herself up, needing to get further away from the house.

She had made her way to the island where she had hidden, as Anthony had instructed her.

That had been two days ago. Having run out of food and the poison spreading in her left hand, she had needed to leave the safety of the island. She glanced at her damaged hand that hung limp by her side. The blisters had disappeared, but a black and purple bruise had spread from the back of her hand to her fingers and was now creeping up her wrist. She could still move her arm, but had lost any function of her fingers as the poison spread to them.

Judging from the speed it had spread, she had about three days to get to the safe house before the poison had spread to the whole arm and could reach the rest of her body. She knew they would have to amputate the arm once she reached the safe house, but better an arm than her life. Shaking the grim thought out of her head, she sped deeper into the forest, using the stars twinkling through the dead branches to guide her.

Her good hand found the heart-shaped locket she wore around her neck. It had been Melody’s present to her on their first anniversary.

“I put pictures of us both inside.” Melody had blushed, knowing that Emily was not the sentimental type. “You probably think it’s corny, but…”

“I love it.” Emily had interrupted Melody with a kiss and to her surprise she had meant it, too. She had changed so much since Melody had entered her life.

Melody… She couldn’t think of her now. Not the past, nor whether Melody had survived. The sooner she made it to the safe house, the sooner she would know. She broke into a run as the path widened. The regime hated the forests since the resistance had ambushed many of their soldiers in the overgrowth. Now they avoided entering the forests as much as they could so Emily calculated the chances of her being caught were slim.

She travelled on, only stopping to rest for short naps and taking small sips of her water. It was all she had, and it had to last until she made it to the safe house. She refused to think what would happen if the safe house was no longer there.

What if the resistance had caught someone from their group and tortured them until they had revealed its location?

“It has to be there. It has to be there.” Emily said it over and over again like a mantra. The closer she got to the safe house, the more frantic the words became.

The Earth had turned twice on its axis when Emily stopped, exhausted. By her calculations she was only an hour, maximum two, away from the safe house. They had all spent weeks memorising their escape routes from the city house. She crossed her fingers as she swallowed the last remaining drops of her drinking water.

Putting the empty water bottle back in her rucksack, she pushed forward. A current of pain passed through her poisoned arm. They were more frequent now as the dead cells reached past her elbow. Her dead arm was a reminder that if she had calculated the distance wrong, she would most likely meet her maker in the forest.

She hastened her step again. Hope and fear fought for mastery like the good and evil in old cartoons from her childhood. Before long, she glimpsed something different between the trees. An old ramshackle log cabin.

This must be it. An old hunting lodge that had once belonged to Melody’s grandfather, but they had never got round to visiting. Emily crept closer, hiding between the trees as she scouted the surroundings of the house. No light escaped from the windows or the door, nor any smoke from the chimney.

She pressed her good hand on her heart and forced oxygen all the way down to her belly. But no amount of belly breathing could subdue the panicked pounding of her heart. Gathering her remaining strength, she staggered from beneath the trees into the open and up to the door. She knocked on it and waited.

Did she imagine it, or did the curtain flutter in the window next to the door? Emily was so tired, she wondered if her mind was playing tricks on her. It must have been her imagination as seconds ticked by and nothing else happened. She tried the door, but it didn’t budge.

They must have abandoned the house. Bitter tears of surrender rolled down her face. She was done. There was no fight left in her. When she turned to walk away, to find a comfortable place to die, the door handle moved, and the door opened an inch.

“Emily,” a familiar voice gasped, and then the door flung open. Exhausted, she collapsed into Melody’s waiting arms.