This is a barn, complete with bales and a tractor and the farmyard smells. There’s a constant drumming noise that I can’t place, but I can’t see any movement. We run to the wooden doors, fling them open, and we’re outside. Fresh air. The rain hits us like a roar. It is pelting down, and I’m instantly soaked and gulping for air. I do a 360. There’s a farmhouse almost directly in front of us and a couple of outhouses behind. There’s a chain-link fence surrounding all of the buildings, with a gate to our right, through which I can see a road winding down a hill. A thick white mist hangs heavy over trees that I can just make out in the distance. But beyond that, nothing. I don’t know what I was expecting, but I think it was something more than this. “Where to?” Russ yells over the sound of the downpour. “The gate — the road,” I shout back. We run, grit skidding beneath my boots, water splashing up my bare legs. This is it, I realize. I could be on the run through Scotland with cold-beaten, ruddied pins poking out of Alice’s ridiculous skirt like two boiled hams.
