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Derek pushes himself off the ground with a groan.
He’d laid still as the rumble of the engine grew fainter and fainter, laid still until he couldn’t hear it and couldn’t hear anybody else left around to mess with him, because he’s sick of their games.
The floor is sticky with a film of blood and his knee sickens him: the skin is puffy and swelling around the joint, stretched like a water balloon, darkening with deep bruising. His ribs protest as he rolls over. Though his ankle on his other side throbs with a dull pain, he thinks it’s just a nasty twist.
The rest of his body is a wreck of bruises and blood and a haze of pain so generalised it’s hard to pinpoint the real injuries. Derek had been grateful for the reprieve when they gave up on beating him: it was easier to draw blood than answers.
He had been. Until the hammer.
He tugs his pants back down his leg to hide the nauseating sight. Out of sight, out of mind – it can’t make it worse.
Derek uses the corner to heave himself up to his feet, a pained cry slipping through gritted teeth as his knee takes weight. He tests his left leg. His ankle throbs in protest but it can take him walking on it – and his right is all right for short, light steps. It has to be.
Their little hideout is, as he suspected, temporary: barren and draughty, it’s the kind of place quickly evacuated and never missed. He’d heard them talking about leaving him here; it would probably take quite some time for someone to discover his body. Too bad for them Derek has no such plans.
(They hadn’t even checked. Just saw him lying, breathing but unresponsive, and decided that was good enough. Derek has to wonder how some of them never got caught years ago.)
His gait is a faltering thing, one footstep and one boot clunking against the floor, knee just too bent to step properly. A trail of blood spatters behind him. Derek sniffs, wipes blood from his lip and blows his nose with a sharp pain.
His breath clouds and disappears. Derek clenches his fists, numb fingers pressing cold indents against his palm, until the blood rushes back with painful cramps. They’d taken his jacket and he’s torn between staying to find it before he leaves or just going.
Derek’s head throbs and running a hand over his head finds a burning sensitive lump starting to swell. That answers that question—if they’re out somewhere random in the sticks, he doubts there’d be a significance to this place. His best bet, he thinks, is following roads until somebody stops or he finds civilisation.
The good news is he can see the road. The bad news is it’s covered in mud and slush and grit. Snow piled on the verges spills over.
Biting cold wind whips around him.
He’d stay here, hunker down and wait, if not for his knee. The pulsing pain grows worse with every passing minute and so must the damage. Derek’s seen knee injuries, seen how they wipe out collegiate athletes like a star blinking out before it ever gets noticed – and it isn’t just limited to football. That damage is permanent. Hell, ‘good’ injuries are pretty fucking awful.
Sticking to the roads is as good a plan as any – if they do manage to deduce where they’ve taken him, the team or law enforcement would be driving right past him regardless.
Snow crunches beneath his boot with his first careful step. The grit helps combat the slippery ice. Derek lowers his right foot and near screams as fire rolls through the joint. His foot bears his weight for long enough to plant his left foot.
Good shoes only go so far. His feet aren’t wet but the toes he can still feel are prickling with pins and needles. He might not get trench foot but frostbite is still a real possibility.
Derek shivers. His ears and nose burn. He alternates between rubbing his hands up his arms and balling up his fists, keen to keep the blood flowing, to ease off the pain.
The pain becomes a rhythm in tandem with his walking: ankle-feet-hands-face, one long drone, short burst as his right foot goes down. Left, quick right. Don’t think about the pain. Left, quick right. Don’t think about the cold.
And so it goes.
Backache joins the list, an insistent ache by his kidney. His right leg starts to cramp, thigh and calf twitching, knee frozen stiff.
He leaves tracks in the snow. Foot by foot the building grows more distant, leaving him with a watery picture of pine trees extending spindly fingers into the grey sky.
Roads start to splinter off. Derek tests the terrain with his bad foot, trails his shoe along to find gravel or asphalt or mud; he doesn’t take those side routes. Too small.
Despite his best efforts, his fingers have succumbed to the temperature: pale and stiff, he’s got just enough sensation to feel the deep cold sinking in. His ears prickle and that same numbness is beginning to blot out the tip of his nose.
Frostbite.
Derek folds his arms across his chest and keeps his hands in his armpits, but the icy chill is hardly worth the meagre warmth. His pants are wet at the cuffs, dragging against his skin with each step. Though his thin t-shirt ripples easily in the breeze, it’s at least dry, offering him some modicum of protection from the cold.
Some. Not enough.
He limps on to the sound of his own heavy breathing, clouding and dissipating into thin air; it’s hard to believe there’s warm air left to exhale. The road remains a dreary grey, coated in melting dirty slush. And the quiet – god, the quiet lends it an eerie quality. Trees rustle and birds flap their wings flitting from branch to branch. Snow swallows the smallest sounds.
His jaw tremors as his teeth clash violently.
Derek keeps going. In part, turning around and going back will have achieved him a net total of nothing, and because he can’t let the cold get to him, can’t give in to the tired temptation to stop, to slow down and rest and sit down to wait.
The cold is omnipotent but the shivering hits in waves, prickling goosebumps up his arms, a dull pain soaking into his bones and taking root there so surely Derek can’t believe he’d ever be warm again.
As he gets further out, the snow grows deeper, slanting over old tyre tracks from a fresh layer. Derek shakes out his hands. Only a vague mockery of sensation returns.
Complacency begins to creep in like frost.
He puts his foot down and it scrapes on black ice, slides underneath him. Derek throws out his arms to balance but his stomach swoops and he knows, the split second it happens, he’s falling.
Derek’s knee explodes in a white-hot agony and he wheezes, breath knocked out of him. He brushes his palms free of grit, melting snow dripping off his pants. Hot blood trickles down his leg.
He can’t walk.
Even hauling himself up against a tree doesn’t work, because his knee buckles at the mildest pressure: Derek lands on his elbows, cold stinging raw skin, the inside of his cheek ragged and bleeding.
He can’t stay here, collapsed by the side of this road. He can’t walk. He just has to keep going. The hypothermia’s going to set in whatever he does but Derek can’t let it reach the stage where he gives in to it.
Derek’s good knee sinks into muddy slush and he braces himself for the freezing shock as he leans on one of his forearms, seized with an instant flash of burning cold. He pulls his weight forward as he plants his other and brings his knee in.
His shoulders strain, balancing himself on just one knee, but the threat of landing fully in the cold spurs a steely determination. Derek crawls in an undignified sort of army crawl, gritting his teeth when he moves his leg and his bad knee flares.
Instead of numbing, his arms stay painfully cold. Bile rises up the back of his throat with each ragged breath, straining from the effort. His muscles tremble. He can’t tell whether it’s cold or exhaustion or blood loss—and Derek supposes it doesn’t matter.
He doesn’t look up.
Snow and cold and pain blur around him until all that is left is his pulse beating in his throat and the repetitive motion. Derek’s fingers twitch.
Left, right.
Vision blurring around the edges, he pushes through the drowsiness.
Left, right.
Blood rushes in his ears.
Left, right.
Snow crackles and the low thrum of chains scraping breaks him out of his trance and Derek pauses, palms smarting. A powerful engine drowns out the ringing in his ears and his panting turns into a weak laughter.
The car rolls to a stop, its side emblazoned with the local police insignia.
He’s never been more grateful for heating in his life.