Free March by Gabrielle Lord Page B

charged at it and thankfully the door flew open wide. I raced inside, kicking the door closed again behind me.
    I’d have to find another way out—a window, a vent, a fire escape, anything. But it was as black as night in there. While fumbling in the dark for the light switch, I tripped over a metalwaste paper bin and crashed straight into something hard. Glass shattered and smashed all over the floor around me, as loud as a torrential hailstorm. The pain of the impact on my side shot right through me.
    Breathless and probably bleeding, I found the light switch …
    To my absolute horror, I saw that I’d smashed open one of the cases; a glass case housing snakes! The floor was alive with them!
    The label lay crooked on a shard of glass on the floor: death adders.
    Two things happened simultaneously: the lights flashed on and off overhead, and, from somewhere in the building, a piercing alarm sounded. The writhing mass of brown serpents seemed to swarm to me. I froze, not knowing what to do … One snake came dangerously close to my foot … and then it happened … it reared up and struck at my jeans.

    I had to get out of there! I knew that death adders were about the most venomous snakes in the world, and the room I was standing in was alive with them. After the lion attack at the zoo, and now this, I was convinced the vicious world of nature had it in for me.
    The internal alarm continued to blare through the building, and I ran across the slithering beasts and back to the door, flinging it open. Security would be here any minute. I’d pick security and even Sligo’s thugs over a room full of death adders any day.
    I hoped that the fangs hadn’t penetrated through my jeans and into my skin, and that the sound of the alarm had scared off Sligo’s men. I couldn’t feel anything strange yet, but the alarm had done nothing to scare my enemies—at the other end of the corridor, the two thugs were heading straight for me!

    I looked around in despair. Behind me, the snakes. Ahead of me, Sligo’s thugs. I had nowhere to go.
    The two thugs suddenly stopped halfway up and I saw looks of horror on their faces.
    Death adders, excited by the lights in the corridors, slithered with devastating speed right past me and straight for my attackers!
    For once things were going my way. The thugs turned and ran, while I desperately back-tracked and looked around for somewhere to hide.

    I was hiding in the dark under a sink in a small bathroom not far from the snake room. The security team had arrived and they were checking doors and talking on their portable radios. At one stage, the door to the washroom was opened and someone flashed a torch around, but luckily they withdrew, satisfied with their minimal efforts to investigate the disturbance.
    I waited anxiously for time to pass so I could move on.
    Everything had been quiet for a while. It was time for me to come out of my hiding place and try to get out of this maze of corridors and levels.
    Silently, I climbed out and crept to the bathroom door. I peered out into the moonlit corridor, and right at that moment, a blinding headache hit me. It was so strong and so violent that I fell against the wall. It wasn’t just a headache—my eyes felt pierced by splinters of light that came from somewhere inside my own head. And there was a weakness in my legs that I couldn’t understand.
    A powerful nausea doubled me over. Pain throbbed in both of my legs.
    Dreading what I might find, I rolled up my jeans.
    Two tiny red wounds on the side of my calf, left by the death adder’s fangs, oozed pinkish fluid.

    I staggered from door to door, trying to find the room that Jennifer had earlier shown me, with its row of fridges and its store of antivenom. Half-blind from the headache, and doubled over by the waves of sickening nausea, I fought on and continued stumbling from room to room.
    Nothing.
    If I didn’t find it quickly, I knew I’d have to ring for an ambulance and that would end in