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I looped it through and tried to cinch it close to the bottom as best I could.

Five.

“Hurry up, Wes,” I urged as I saw one of the hounds leap toward us.

Four.

Wes glanced up as he pulled out a third tie.

Three.

He looped it through fast, twisting the tie to cinch it.

Two.

“Wes!” I screamed as I watched the beast fly through the air at the fence.

One.

“Done!” he yelled as the creature slammed into the fence, the zip ties stretching, but holding against the force of impact.

We only had three of those stupid, plastic things in place when the pack of mutated dogs slammed themselves into the fence, causing the whole thing to bow out toward us. We leaped backwards out of instinct, and I felt as my foot hit the edge of the cliff, slipped, and caused me to fall to the ground as my foot flew off the ledge.

Oh my god…too close. Way too close.

I scrambled to my feet as the beasts kept piling up against the fence, causing the entire thing to lean toward us, consuming more and more of the very little precious space we had left.

“Fuck,” Wes growled. “This thing’s going to give any second.” As if on cue, one of the zip ties snapped off, creating a big enough hole that one hound got its entire head through, snapping its jaws at us.

I tried to take another step back, but there was nowhere left to go. Nowhere left to run. And those yellowed teeth were only a few feet away.

“Get your harness on,” he scowled as he grabbed one off the floor to the side of him, barely missing the snapping jaws as he did.

I turned to see the other set, and grabbed it, making quick work of slipping my legs through the straps and shimming it up to buckle everything in place. Wes started attaching the safety anchors, doing the best he could to find suitable spots in the rock. With my harness in place, I grabbed the lengths of rope and began attaching them to the safety anchors. Wes snapped his carabiner to the main anchor, and then attached the opposite end to his harness just as we heard another snap.

I turned to look, but I really wished I hadn’t. The second zip tie holding back the hound snapped, and the nasty thing lunged through, maw open wide, right at my face. I lifted my arms up instinctively, trying to keep the red stained teeth from biting my face, but it wouldn’t matter in the end. His teeth sunk into my forearm as the entire weight of his massive body—all 150 pounds or more of him—slammed into me, throwing me backwards through the air and into the night sky.

I heard Wes yell. Heard him call my name. But it all sounded muffled and far away. All I heard with perfect clarity was the steady beat of my heart as I fell into the night. The hound released my arm, falling past me as I watched Wes grow smaller and smaller.

It was then that I realized one thing… One fatal mistake.

I attached all the ropes to the safety anchors, but…

I never attached them to my harness.

66: Wrong

Cold water wrapped itself around me like a deadly blanket. All of me was surrounded by the darkness. I was lost. Blind. Disoriented. I felt the wounds sting with the salt, an agonizing burn that begged for relief. I kicked hard, trying to find the surface as I held my breath, time ticking away. All the while, I kept thinking about everything I had done wrong. The mistakes I would never get a chance to correct.

I had broken Wes’s heart.

I had taken a wounded boy, forced him to come out from beyond his guarded walls, only to shatter him into a million pieces.

What kind of person did that?

What kind of person earned someone’s trust just to break it?

I didn’t do it to hurt him. I did it to protect him from a fate that seemed worse than this broken hell I had cast him into. But I broke him all the same.