Chapter 6

Chapter 6

      She ended up driving to Canada, it was close to Minnesota but it was a big place. Claire tried to keep an eye out for people following her but she didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. She only stopped twice, once by a wooded area. She had parked her dad’s car under several trees and covered it with some branches she broke off of a tree nearby. Claire ended up finding a couple rabbits near where she stopped and ate them quickly and was back on the road within 10 minutes. She was too scared to stop to sleep. The second time she stopped was to get gas. She had to go into the convenience store to use some of the cash she found to get gas but she kept her head down the whole time, just in case word had gotten out. When she made it to the border of Canada she didn’t know what to do. She had no ID, no nothing. There was no way to prove she was a U.S. citizen, that she wasn’t a refugee. So she had to rethink her end game.

      Claire knew where ever she ended at she wasn’t going to be able to stay, or if she did, she wasn’t going to be able to settle down anywhere. With no phone she ended up driving aimlessly on the highway until she saw a sign that she was entering Oregon. She figured it would take them a while to find her here so she booked a motel for a few nights. She needed somewhere to think about a plan. After settling in she started to think about her options. She could keep driving around the United States until her car broke down and just stay put wherever her car died. Or she could stay where she was now and try to settle in here. She knew that settling down anywhere would be risky. But Oregon was far from Minnesota, how long were they going to search for her, if they were even still looking for her. Sure, her blood was valuable, or so they were told, and she knew too much. But who was she going to tell, the police? They wouldn’t believe her, especially about her disease. They also wouldn’t be too pleased to hear that she bit her doctor’s neck out because he was trying to chop off one of her body parts because he was trying to see if it would grow back. She didn’t know anyone else either. No one in Minnesota wanted to be her friend because they found her disgusting. Her parents were dead. Who was she going to tell? They had to have realized that, or at least considered it.

      Deep down Claire knew they would never stop. Something told her that they were going to be trying to hunt her down until they found and killed her. The way how the two men searching for her spoke made her feel like running was impossible. They saw which way she turned but after that they didn’t see which exit she took or where she went from there. They were running back to their car after she turned right at the stop sign. If they were chasing her they must have been having a hard time tracking her. A scary thought came to Claire than, what if they were tracking me? They could have implanted something into her after she was knocked out. It made sense. Why else would those two men turn around without bothering to look which direction she was going, unless they already knew the answer. It would also explain how they knew that she was at her parent’s place. Depending on how accurate the tracker was, it also explains how they knew which tree she was in, in the woods. That had to be it. But where did they implant it?

      She started to feel around her body to see if she could feel it. She rubbed her arms, legs, her feet, especially the one Dr. Crane cut off. She was rubbing her back when she felt something on her neck. She got up from the motel bed and went to the bathroom to look in the mirror. She saw a bulge of some sort in her neck. This must be where they put it. She started to anxiously look around the motel room for something she could cut it out with. She couldn’t find anything so she took one of the lamps and broke the lightbulb. She took a shard and went back into the bathroom. She turned around and looked at her neck in the mirror and took the shard and started to scrape at her skin to try and pry out the tracker. Her neck was bleeding a lot and she was having trouble seeing what she was doing. She took one of the towels off the rack and blotted the wound. She saw something metal now, she was almost there. She was grinding her teeth to keep from making any noises from the pain. After ten minutes or so she was able to carve the tracker out of her neck. There was blood everywhere; it was dripping down her back, all over the sink and on the mirror. She wasn’t trying to be careful when she was taking it out. She just wanted it out.  She was looking at it when she had an idea.

      She didn’t want to destroy it because they would know she found out about it. This was the trick up their sleeve, what they thought she wouldn’t find out about. So she decided to play a little trick. With the tracker in one hand, and the shard of lightbulb in the other, she walked to her car. She had the motel for 2 more nights but she didn’t want to be disturbed. She went into a wooded area that was nearby. After wandering around for a while she found a rabbit. It was slow but she knew it work. She picked it up and took the shard of lightbulb out of her pocket and made a small incision into the rabbits back. She made it deep enough to keep the tracker in place. She put the tracker into the incision and stroked the rabbit to calm it down a bit before letting it run free. She walked back to her father’s car and drove back to her motel. When she got back she opened the door and looked around. There was no one there, no one that she could see, but something was off. She slowly looked around the room. She saw that someone picked up the lamp and cleaned up the rest of the glass. She walked over to the bathroom and gasped when she saw a maid cleaning up the blood on the floor. The maid looked up at her and started to speak in Spanish. Claire had no idea what she was saying, but she was clearly unhappy. “I’m sorry for the mess! I will clean, I will clean! You can go, please! Por favor?”

That was the best she could do and lucky for her, the maid must have understood some of it, she nodded her head, gave Claire’s shoulder a rub, and left Claire’s motel room.           

      Claire had been extremely pleased with herself. She stayed at the same motel room for a couple more nights after the maid incident. She ended up speaking with the manager to see if she could get a job, any job. He said he had an opening for a maid and she took it, no questions asked. She was running low on cash and she needed to make money somehow. She worked in the daytime so the messes weren’t that bad. She was able to hunt in the woods at night, being careful with every rabbit she caught. She checked to make sure it didn’t have a scar on its back so she didn’t accidentally eat the tracker. She hoped it had gone somewhere far away. With her first paycheck she went to get some hair dye. Claire was worried her red hair would attract too much attention so she colored it black. She was starting to get used to her new job and her new life. Not only that, but no one knew what she was. She had befriended the maid she had encountered on her first night at the motel. Months had gone by and she finally felt like she didn’t have to be terrified of them finding her.

      One night she was hunting and she heard some rustling of some leaves, preparing to pounce she froze. The rustling was too loud to be an animal; she quickly and quietly climbed the nearest tree and saw someone in camouflaged clothes. Someone else was hunting which was odd since she had never seen any other people in these woods. Quietly she watched this unknown hunter. He climbed a tree and waited for a while then all of a sudden she saw him leap towards another tree. Claire watched as this person devoured a squirrel, just as she did, and lick their fingers clean. As they jumped down, Claire jumped down too. Not sure of what would happen, or why she was doing it. But she needed to speak to this person. He was like her, he had to be.