Total pages in book: 100
Estimated words: 94048 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 470(@200wpm)___ 376(@250wpm)___ 313(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 94048 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 470(@200wpm)___ 376(@250wpm)___ 313(@300wpm)
Rage flows into me as I land on the other side. This is too fucking far. Even if my dad thinks I’m trying to overthrow him, the asshole could just have a conversation with me instead of invading my home. I know he’s a mess, but I don’t know how I can possibly start to forgive him for this.
“Uh, Simon?” Emily’s voice comes from my right. She’s standing a few feet away, staring at something straight ahead in the yard. “What the hell is all that?”
The grass is long and scruffy like it hasn’t been cut in a while. The beds are strewn with overgrown bushes and weeds. And lying in the middle of the yard in patches of bare dirt where the plants have been destroyed over time, are enormous wooden hands.
They’re big, around four or five feet tall, and a few feet wide. Some of them are whole, sculpted in extremely fine detail down to the little hairs on the back of a knuckle, while some of them are dismembered, missing fingers, making rude gestures. There are eight of them in total, plus a dozen or so severed fingers with little stubby knots of bone sticking out and strange, oozing layers of blood.
“Laura’s an artist,” I say, dragging Emily past the big hands.
“But, what the hell are they?” She can’t stop looking at the sculptures, and I can’t blame her. They’re fascinating, actually very beautiful, ranging from divine to grotesque, and somehow, they represent the full range of human expression. One hand is angry, another is sad, another is joyous. They’re evocative, some of them insanely detailed and realistic, others more like the impression of a hand, blocky and cartoonish.
“Hands,” I say and gesture at the fence. “Come on, one more.”
Emily hesitates. I can tell she wants to ask more. But unfortunately, even if we had an entire week to stand here and gaze on my sister’s works, there’s no fucking way I’d ever make sense of them.
Some things have no meaning. Sometimes, a hand’s just a giant hand with lots of blood and scattered fingers.
She gets up and grabs onto the top. This time, I give her a little push to help her legs swing over, but she makes a yelping noise as she loses her balance, and she plunges down to the other side and hits the ground hard.
“Oh, shit,” she says, cursing loud enough to make my skin crawl.
The noise in my back yard softens for a second. Then there are more shouts, indistinct but excited.
I mentally stab myself in the eyeball a million times for being such a dumb motherfucker before leaping up and grabbing the lip. I scrape my arms on the wood as I throw my leg over and basically fall to the other side, hitting hard and staggering. Emily’s sitting on the ground holding onto her ankle and softly cursing, tears in her eyes.
“Are you okay?” I kneel down at her side. “What happened?”
“I landed weird and turned it. Shit, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to yell, it just hurt so fucking bad.”
“Come on.” I help her up, but the second she puts weight on the ankle, she groans and nearly falls down.
Fuck this. Fuck my dad and fuck my family. I scoop her up in my arms and sprint to the far side of the empty guest house, aiming for the gate that’ll lead to the street.
“What are you doing?” Emily gasps as I shove my way through.
“You can’t go over like this,” I say, making a break for the sidewalk. “It’s just next door. We can make it. We can—”
But the words die in my throat. There are already four guys sprinting for us with more coming behind them. I’m barely six feet from the porch, but they’re coming on fast and there’s no way I’m going to make it.
I try anyway. I growl with effort, running hard toward the stairs. If I can just reach the door, if I can just get inside—
But I can hear the guys coming after me. One’s broad and tall with a crooked nose and a buzz cut. Another’s young, almost too skinny. Neither speak but it’s obvious what they’re trying to do, as the bigger one starts to dip his shoulder, coming in for a tackle that’ll take us all to the ground. If that happens, I won’t be able to stop them from taking me or Emily or killing us both. There are too many of them and only one of me.
“Hold on,” I grunt to Emily in my arms, preparing to take the brunt of the fall so I can protect her.
But the big guy suddenly pulls up and staggers to a stop, nearly toppling over only a few feet away from me.
I don’t know why, and I don’t question it. I throw myself at the steps, take them two at a time, and that’s when I notice the men standing around the porch.