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~ PROLOGUE ~ 

His heart pounded as a he ran faster than his legs could keep up with, momentum and gravity doing most of the work.  The pounding in his chest matched with the pounding in his head.  His mouth was sandpaper dry and his nose scorched by the cold air. 

The all-encompassing darkness was broken only by slithers of light.  Not enough to make out the obstacles.  The branches and the trunks snatched, scraped, and sliced as he battled through, and his footfall could barely make out a thin track leading its own route.  No choice but to obey it.

  But then it vanished.

  He felt a sensation of turning, twisting weightlessness, followed by a crushing blow to his side.  That’s when he noticed he’d stopped breathing.  He’d hit something the darkness had hidden as a trap.  But he had to get up and keep going, keep running. 

The shouts and voices all around were still chasing and he thought he saw a beam of light cut its way through the darkness like an electric sword, vanishing as fast as it appeared.

  Scrambling to his feet, falling from one foot to the next, over and over, stabbed by the rough surface, he continued his escape through the woods and down a slope.  The adrenaline was rushing and pain had yet to set in, so he kept going. 

The noise of his heavy, rasping breathing and the pounding drum of his heart were masking the sounds of traffic and chasing voices. 

  He had to keep going.

  The pitch black fingers and arms of trees spread out and reached higher into the sky.  Thicker bushes clawed away at the skin of his arms.  Adjusting to the changes in light, his eyes began to make out more shapes: buildings, a road, but too hard to tell accurately.  There was no time to stop, and barely enough time to turn and look back at his pursuers.

  It took one final push to break through the edge of the woodland.  The final bush scratched viciously at all the exposed skin on his arms and legs, bursting into a flourish of heat through his body.

  Within a moment, that heat turned to freezing cold as he felt the ice wind hit his face and body.  The chase was still behind, and although his instinct had been to run, his body now cried out to stop for just a few moments.

  Scanning the opening as quickly as possible, he could just about make out metal shards, wooden panels, and wire fence.  It looked like the kind of ground that in daylight might resemble rubbish, but at that moment gave him a chance to hide.  Battling through a small, low twist in the fence, he crawled his way through and found refuge behind a pair of rusted steel barrels.  He followed a split-second thought to move a few pieces of wood and hide more from view before the voices caught up.

And then he just sat.

  The voices were a distance away: they’d taken a different winding path through the trees.  His breathing began to slow and his muscles began to tighten…

…and the pain set in.

  He tried not to cry out, knowing that he couldn’t afford to be discovered.  So he bit down on the pain and clenched his fists.

  That’s when he felt the oozing wetness trapped between his fingers.

As he looked down in the faint cold moonlight, he saw the dark crimson blood covering his ten year old hands.

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