North Oak, Book 1 - BORN TO RUN

Chapter 1: Run Baby Run

RUN BABY RUN

A thread of smoke wafted from the barrel of the gun. Alex's foster mother crumpled before her. Alex stared, hand trembling, ears ringing. The gun tumbled to the floor.

"Alex, what have you done?"

Alex rounded to see her eldest foster sister, Carrie, horror-stricken in the doorway. Their other foster sister, Ashley, lay lifeless near Carrie's feet. Two bodies too many.

The acrid stink of gun smoke filled the room. A piercing breath stuck in Alex's throat. She looked around the room, staggering. I have to get out.

The window.

Alex threw it open. Cool, fresh air buffeted her face. The light of an October dawn streamed in as Alex leapt out the second story window.

She landed on the top of a parked van a few feet below and slipped on icy dew from last night's thunderstorm. The force of her fall popped her spine, igniting firecrackers in her ears. The purple Tennessee horizon flew up as her jaw smacked against metal.

A sudden numbness throbbed in the side of her tongue. Sputtering with the raw taste of iron, she rolled to the muddy ground, and swallowed back the blood in her mouth. She staggered to her feet and ran.

The slick grass chilled her tempered, bare soles. A clump of damp, black bangs stuck to her forehead and blocked part of her vision. She pushed them away, along with what had just happened.

Whether the cold humidity was choking her or the fear that police were about to find two lifeless bodies at Haven Point right behind her, she did not know.

Ashley was dead.

This was not how Alex wanted to spend her thirteenth birthday. She hadn't expected it to be perfect with the way their foster mother had been treating them at Haven Point, but why did it have to be this? She and Ashley were going to run away together. They were going to have a life of their choosing. All they needed was each other.

The image of her best friend bleeding in her arms, watching life leave her like a candle snuffed out, burned on Alex's conscience. I should have stopped DeGelder sooner. Why didn't I stop her?

Alex skirted the local high school and scaled the chain link fence behind the baseball diamonds. The spikes of the fence caught her t-shirt and scraped her stomach. When she kicked and swung against the links, trying to free herself from its teeth, her shirt gave way with an audible rip. She fell backwards and rammed the ground so hard her breath rushed from her.

Don't stop, she thought, hugging her ribs with a cough. She wheezed and hacked, rolling to her knees. Each breath came in a ragged, sharp wave. She crawled toward the thicket of trees ahead, and braced against a tree trunk before clawing herself to a standing position.

There was a hard knot in her stomach. The world swirled for a moment, blurry around the edges, bright white in the center. She shut her eyes against it.

Ashley...

She had been taken away like everything else in the world.

Alex swallowed back bile. Blood roared in her ears while her heart hammered against her ribcage. She placed a hand over her heart as though that would slow it down. Her eyes opened to a smear of blood across her partially torn shirt.

Police sirens wailed a mile away. She did not want to go back to Haven Point. There was nothing left for her there. She tried to wipe the blood from her hands against her shirt, but it only made her clothes more gruesome. Carrie's words rang in her head, "What have you done?"