Tears infuriated her eyes. She could touch freedom. She just couldn’t get to it.
“I hope you’re fucking happy,” she screamed, before amending it. “Except I don’t, because you’re an asshole. And you’re miserable, and you always will be, and that’s your fucking problem, not mine!”
Her ears strained again, but the forest didn’t give anything away. Where was he? What had he done to Neena? What would he do with her? She shrieked into the echoing night.
Preserve your energy, the voice said.
Josie was short of breath again. Her rash actions were undermining her efforts.
One thing at a time. Always do the most important thing first.
Grimacing, she twisted her body to root through her pack. The best that she could find was Win’s Swiss Army knife. The longest blade was only three inches of feeble steel. She gripped the weapon with her remaining hand and awaited the man’s return, her animal heart beating with vengeance.
NEENA
NEENA PICKED UP her headlamp and shone it onto the body. She covered her mouth in horror. A strong wind swept through the trees, and a gust of bodily odors assaulted her: oniony perspiration, blood like iron nails, the pungent stench of ammoniacal piss.
It was a young woman. She was splayed out on the forest floor, faceup and eyes open, wearing a long-sleeved button-down and nothing else. The shirt was undone. Her white skin was dirty and dehumanized, scraped with heinous scratches, obliterated with pounding bruises. Ragged red marks ringed her ankles and wrists. Her hair was plastered lankly to her neck, where brutalizing, fingerlike blotches still grasped her throat. She looked older than Neena and Josie but only by a few years. Maybe the age of their brothers. And she was dead. She had to be dead, but Neena also had to be sure.
She didn’t whisper the words. She breathed them. “Are you okay?”
The young woman did not respond.
“Shit,” Neena said quietly, crying as her voice rose. “Oh my God.”
Bending over, her arm reached outward for inspection but then retracted. She forced the arm back out. With one trembling finger, she touched the skin. It was warm, barely. Though the muscles were still soft, it was clear that the person who had once lived inside this vessel was gone. Neena released a wretched moan. How long did it take for rigor mortis to set in? How long had this body—this woman—been dead?
She turned off her light, petrified, as her mind raced through possible scenarios: The man and woman were camping here together, and he’d murdered her. Or, this was the woman’s campsite, and the man had stumbled across it, and then he’d murdered her. Or, maybe he had brought her here from someplace else as his captive. The two chairs and significant amount of equipment suggested they’d come here together willingly, but the only thing Neena knew for certain was that the man was responsible for this depravity. And she didn’t doubt that he would return.
Total darkness eclipsed the campsite. Fear swallowed her. The flames had died, but the fire smoldered. Coils of acrid smoke wrapped around her throat in strangling, choking eddies. The eyes of the forest fixed on her again as she began to run.
JOSIE
HER STAMINA HAD succumbed, and Josie was back on her ass. Her bad foot was propped up on the pack. Goose bumps barbed her bare left arm. The damp sinkhole was cold and static, but her headlamp was at the ready, draped around her like a necklace.
The knife was still in her hand.
Another unforgiving object, hard and insistent, jabbed into the back of her thigh. When she mustered the energy, an oddly shaped pebble dislodged from the mud. Its surface was slippery-smooth. Tracing the C-shaped curve, she recognized it as a shard from her friendship ring. The shotgun blast had destroyed this, too. Had Neena made it out of the woods? Josie would give her bad foot to be in Neena’s living room right now, snuggled together on the squashy couch and watching videos on their warm phones. She rubbed the sawtoothed edge before tucking the shard protectively into her pocket.
In a prolonged state of stress and fatigue, she drifted in and out of consciousness. Leaves shuffled in auditory hallucinations. Branches snapped. Once, she smelled his rancid breath. But whenever she startled awake with a fiercely pounding heart, it was always nothing.
* * *
• • •
Until it wasn’t.
* * *
• • •
She didn’t know when the man reappeared. It was the dead of night. In her mind, the hour was exactly halfway between sunset and sunrise.
The first twig was sharp, its dry crack unmistakable. It jolted her into alertness. The man walked straight toward her. No games. His stride was so purposeful that she knew some sort of decision had been made. She clambered onto her good foot. This time, she wouldn’t greet him lying down. The small blade trembled in her clenched fist. The heavy footsteps stopped at the sinkhole’s edge. Before she could make out his figure, a blinding light fractured against her crooked glasses and seared into her eyes.
“You’re up,” he said. A touch of surprise.
She squinted, refusing to block the light with her good arm. She brandished the knife like a sword.
“What’s that?” He snorted. “You gonna stick me with a toothpick?”
Yes. And then she would drag his body down here and use it as another stepping-stone to get out.
“Put that down,” he said.
“Come closer,” she hissed.
In one fluid but unhurried motion, he tossed the flashlight to the ground and lifted the shotgun. His lower body revealed itself in ghostly, blurry form. The metal barrel winked in the light. Unlike the man, the barrel was sharply in focus, inches away from her forehead.
Ashamed, she dropped the knife. It landed with a dull thump. She felt young and frightened again. The gun had stripped away any last trace of bravery.
“It’s time to join the others,” he said.
Her heart constricted. “The others? Do you have Neena?”
He grunted and set down the gun.
“Where is she? What have you done with her?”
The man slithered onto his belly, and the smell of rotting teeth and diseased gums poured into the hole. She coughed and retched as he extended a meaty hand. Grime lined the creases of his skin. His fingernails were thick and ridged and plugged with dirty crescent moons. Maybe he was homeless. Or maybe these woods were his home. He seized one of her braids and yanked so hard that rooted follicles ripped from her scalp.
She made a sound between a gasp and a yell.
He let go and offered his hand again. “Take it.”
Josie knew it was one of the golden rules of survival: Never go to a second location. Fight with everything you have from getting into a stranger’s car, house, territory.
But this stranger had a gun. And she was powerless inside the hole.
The intensity of his voice changed very little. “Take it, or I’ll blow you away right now.”
He’d already proven that he would. “What are you gonna do to me?” Her left arm trembled as she reached up. “Where’s Neena? Where are the others?”
“The others ain’t alive anymore.”
He grasped onto her with sandpapery hands and pulled. She screamed. Her good foot scrambled against the dirt wall for purchase, frantic to prevent her arm from being ripped from its socket. Her bad foot fizzed with bolts of lightning pain. Winded, he panted for breath, blasting her with the full brunt of his halitosis and the reek of her own dried urine as her body lifted over the edge. She rolled and toppled away. Her legs accidentally swept into his, and his footing slipped. Her eyes widened with the unforeseen opportunity. Her good leg reared back like a horse. She kicked his buckling frame with purpose, and the man yelled in surprise as he toppled into the sinkhole.
Everything had happened so fast. Her senses reeled and stuttered.
The others ain’t alive anymore.
Her glasses were gone, lost in the transaction. Her gums were bleeding as she spit out the dried leaves from her mouth. She didn’t know how they had gotten there. Missing a hand and deficient a foot, she had no chance of escape if he could climb out and follow her. He seemed tall enough and strong enough to be able to lift himself out.
She scanned for the gun and located it within reach. Belly down, she scooted and dragged herself into place, positioning the double-barreled shotgun against the ground at the edge of the hole. The stock was heavy and bulky and clumsy in her nondominant hand. Assuming he had reloaded, it contained two shots.
Grunting movements issued from below. A dark figure rose.
Josie pulled the front trigger. The shot was deafening, and she was no match for the recoil. Because she was unable to balance the gun against her body, it kicked straight back and jolted from her hand. Her eardrums rang in the furious silence.
Grabbing arms reached upward through the billowing clouds of dirt. The man was still upright and unharmed. She hustled the gun back into place. Channeling the training on her uncle’s rural acres, she took a deep breath—just like he’d taught her—and exhaled as she squeezed the trigger.
It clicked. Nothing happened.
Panic fogged her. It appeared that the man hadn’t reloaded, until her finger found the rear trigger. The shotgun kicked and blasted back out of her hand.
She scrabbled forward to peer down. It was too dark and dusty to see anything. His flashlight lay on the ground nearby, turned on and pointed at nothing. Its aluminum body was heavier than she’d expected as she picked it up and aimed the trembling beam.
This time, she hadn’t missed. The man was sprawled at the bottom of the hole. Her pack was still under his feet as if he’d been standing on top of it when he’d been blown backward. It was impossible to tell where she’d hit him or how badly he was injured, but the mounded heap of his body was motionless.
Josie searched for something to throw at him, to test him. No other objects or stones were within reach, but her headlamp was still around her neck, and she would need the full use of her hand to get out of the woods. She threw the flashlight, hard. The tumbling light captured a flinch in his eyelids before making contact with a squelching thwack. The hit wasn’t square, but it struck the side of his head. The white beam streamed upward into the sky. The light was unearthly, reminiscent of alien encounters and hostile spaceships. But the man was only human. And he wasn’t moving.
She had no time to feel relief. She had no time to waste.
The effort to stand was tremendous, but adrenaline gave her strength, a staggering mixture of fear and euphoria. She collected the shotgun and tucked it underneath her left armpit as a crutch. Balancing and hopping and lurching away, the mangled foot dragged behind her. It bumped and popped across the earth as it caught on rocks and sticks, but she hardly felt the pain. Black spots kaleidoscoped her already hazy vision.
The others ain’t alive anymore.
She fled from the light, back into darkness.
NEENA
SHE RAN UNTIL the campfire was a distant orange smudge. Her skull was swollen with shock. Terror pulsed through her bloodstream. Even without a closer look, she sensed that the woman had been tortured for a long time, perhaps days.
Dark terrain hurtled underfoot. Sweat soaked Neena’s underwear, and her jeans chafed her thighs. The forest entangled her in a thicket of tendrils and saplings, prickles and briars. She cleaved through them in a splintering crash. Blackberry thorns zipped and stung her hands, snagged and tore her clothing, but she was already deep inside the brambles with no choice but to push through. Her lungs pumped, sucking the moist and bestial air. Gulping it. She wheezed in puffs that intensified into hacking coughs.
Her foot struck something hard, and she smashed to the ground.
The indifferent trees gazed down at her. The moon continued on its slow nightly path. Feeling for the object, she discovered a trifling nub of root. Tears spilled over her burning cheeks. She had run away without thinking, without a plan, and now she couldn’t even hear the stream. She was lost. She had to find her bearings. The man was still out here, somewhere, hunting her. Hunting Josie.
Her mind thrummed with hectic calculations. Assuming that earlier he had been trying to lead her to his campsite, she could reorient herself by coupling this information with the position of the westerly moving moon. It was only a guess, but a decent one.
She waited for her breath to regulate. When it was as good as it was going to get, she got back up. Her knees yowled in protest. Her thighs ached with stiffness. She turned on her headlamp but clutched the light to dampen it. Her glowing fist lit the way.
Steadily, Neena trekked northeast toward the Wade Harte. To have any hope of getting out, she needed to locate familiar territory. Fear churned her bowels as she slogged past the musty toadstools and stagnant pools, the dusky groves and pockets of absolute silence. Had she picked the wrong direction?
Unseen critters tussled with the fallen leaves. Bats swooped like startling apparitions. Every minuscule sound jackknifed her heart. Her ears were exhausted from listening so hard. Freezing and traumatized, she shivered uncontrollably. Time plodded by, but, no matter how long or how far she traveled, she was always still in the woods.
Until—
A yellow-gold dome rose over the horizon. Elation swelled inside her as warm as daylight, but the beacon wasn’t the sun. It was the tent they’d camped beside the previous night. No sight had ever filled her with such hope.
Opening her palm, Neena allowed the headlamp to fully illuminate her path. She scrambled up the slope and through the underbrush. Branches grabbed, but she no longer felt their claws. Rocks scraped, but she no longer felt their abrasions. She burst into the campsite and shone her light onto the tent. And then she gasped and staggered back.
A single, violating gash had lacerated the rear, creating a new door from the outside. The nylon had been split into two gaping flaps. The distressed fibers rippled in the breeze. Though the intrusion didn’t appear to be recent, she spun in an anxious circle. But her shaking light revealed nothing more than the surrounding pines.
The hair rose on her neck.
This was the dead woman’s tent. It had to be. If only she and Josie had inspected it more carefully that morning, none of this would have happened. They would have gone home and reported the crime, and Josie wouldn’t have fallen into the hole. Neena wouldn’t have been chased. The woman might even still be alive. The imprint of her screams from the moment when she had been wrenched from slumber and safety resonated throughout the mountains.
Uneasily, cautiously, Neena peered between the flaps. A hideous face leered back at her.
JOSIE
AS NEENA WAS still stumbling away from the first dead body, long before she found the second, Josie was staring at the woods ahead. They were as black as a cast-iron skillet. Propping her body against the closest tree, Josie wrestled the headlamp from around her neck, yanked it to her forehead, and turned it on. She did not look behind at the light issuing from the sinkhole. Squinting, she swept her lamp back and forth, back and forth—there.
She staggered toward a pair of bottle caps, untethered. Her face felt naked where her glasses used to sit. Her eyesight had smudged into a terrifying blur, but her other senses seemed heightened, sharpened, as if her pain sensors had shut off to provide strength for other operations. Had she killed the man? Injured him? She did not feel conflicted about having shot him. His actions had empowered her to protect herself.
The others ain’t alive anymore.
He hadn’t been talking about Neena. She couldn’t let herself believe that. A great dam of grief quaked, threatening to crack and rupture.
There. Her desperate squint managed to locate the next pair of bottle caps.
Josie was traveling forward—not backward, the way Neena had gone—because she co
uldn’t risk the additional time and mileage. She prayed the remainder of the blazes would be there. If even one blaze was missing, she was done for. Had the man pried off the bottle caps from the tree beside the sinkhole? It seemed plausible that he might have set a trap, but it didn’t actually matter. Putting distance between herself and the man was all that mattered now. She hoped his wounds were severe enough to prevent him from giving chase, because otherwise her bloody, dragging trail would be easy to track.
She hobbled toward Frazier Mountain. Her injuries thumped hot. Blood weltered inside her shoes. Every step was an endurance test, a toddling balancing act between her good foot and the shotgun. The terrain was uneven, and her awkward grip on the gun was sweaty, tight, and strained. The stock dug an abusive trench into her armpit.
With agonizing slowness and feverish determination, the light from the sinkhole grew fainter. But even when it disappeared completely, she still saw it. Her heart pounded helter-skelter, deranged, and she was in danger of passing out.
She tripped over a bulging rock and smacked into the ground. Her bad foot screamed with the onslaught of pain. Gasping, tears flooding, she was unable to think. Several minutes passed before she recovered enough energy to push up against her remaining knuckles. With another cry, she struggled back into a standing position, purposefully not looking at her missing hand.
The gun crutch wobbled. Her chest spiked with the panic of falling again.
One step at a time, the voice said. Just take it one step at a time.
Was it the voice of the living or the dead—or something else entirely? From blaze to blaze, Josie clumped and tottered. The work was taxing, and she was at the mercy of the bottle caps. It wasn’t clear which way was north or south or east or west. The forest isolated her in confused turmoil. Whenever she couldn’t find a blaze, she shambled in dwindling circles, knowing this was the end. This was the dark place where she would bleed out and die. But then the blaze would manifest, and she would be saved.
The Woods Are Always Watching Page 15