Page 2 of Hunted By Them

“Get a grip,” I said out loud, because sometimes my voice was the only thing that cut through the stories of my mind. I forced my feet to move, and the eerie moment broke.

Stop being stupid, Sage.

The sky dimmed as the ridge swallowed the sun, and the first low growl of thunder rolled over the valley. It didn’t sound close yet, just a warning passed from peak to peak. The smell of rain sharpened in my nose.

I walked faster. The trail climbed, and my thighs burned in a good way. Heat rose off my skin. I drank to stay hydrated. The water was cold enough to sting against my throat. Capping the bottle, I wiped my mouth on the back of my wrist.

Like destiny was pushing me forward, the forgotten path appeared as a faint ribbon of darker ground just ahead. I stopped at the mouth and looked between the pine needles and underbrush to the wide, clear path.

Someone had dragged a stick along part of it at some point, a scratchy line that looked like a childish map. I smiled when I spotted it and stepped off the main trail. Just like old times.

Immediately, the temperature dipped. The trees grew denser, and the ground held on to the chill. The light changed, too. It went greenish, as if I had stepped into a glass bottle. Green was bad. It indicated anything from a severe storm to a tornado.

The path curled and narrowed, brushing my calves with ferns. Another swell of thunder reached me—closer this time, and I picked up my pace.

A flash of timber beams peeked through the trees, then another. Rooflines. The cabins waited like they had always waited, stoic and unembarrassed by their decay. Relief flowed over me, and I laughed, almost giddy. I had made it before the sky opened. The world expanded as I stepped through the tunnel into a large clearing in the thick trees.

There were four structures here if you counted the outhouse listing at the edge. Two cabins had roofs in recognizable shapes. The third had collapsed into a heap of gray boards. The fourth was a shed or had been, its door hanging by a single hinge. Someone had also carved initials into the trunk of the big pine standing proudly in the center. The old fire ring was still visible, stones blackened.

The first fat drops of rain struck my forearms and the top of my head. They felt cold enough to be an assault. I jogged to the nearest standing cabin, the one with the door that sagged but still latched. I slid my pack down, propped it against the wall under the overhang, and reached for the handle.

Something moved in the treeline.

I froze with my hand on the metal. It wasn’t a dramatic kind of movement, not the kind that left proof behind. It was a shift. Nothing more than a suggestion. A dark shape among the trees and the shadows they cast. I didn’t breathe for a count of three. Rain ticked on the roof like impatient fingers.

“Deer,” I whispered. “Or wind. Or me being me.”

I cocked my head and listened anyway. The forest gave me nothing back. I felt my pulse in my throat. The sensation of being watched slid down my spine like beads of cold water. I thought I’d felt it on the trail and distracted myself with a story to keep calm, but here it was again, persistent just like Connor and his texts.

What if it’s a man watching me and not an animal at all?

For just a second, that thought flickered through my mind, and maybe I liked it. After months of being overlooked at work and a boyfriend who had been cheating on me for just as long, the idea of a gaze that didn’t ask me to perform felt shocking. It surged through my body like electricity. Did that make me broken or honest?

Maybe both.

The rain fell harder in the space of a breath, and the sky must have decided it was tired of waiting for me to get inside. It let go, and the clearing blurred with the torrential downpour. I shook myself and shoved the door with my shoulder. It complained but gave, then swung inward into a dark, dank shadow.

The smell hit first. Old wood, dust, the faint ghost of smoke baked into beams that had watched a hundred winters and could tell just as many stories. I took a step inside, and the floor creaked like a warning under my boot.

Light slid through the gaps between boards and striped the room. I pulled the small flashlight from the side pocket of my pack and clicked it on, the beam slicing through the dim interior.

It was just a single open space, exactly how I remembered. Grabbing my pack, I set it down, closed the door behind me, and proceeded to inspect the rundown cabin. A window on the far wall had been boarded, and another was open to the elements, the screen gone. A rusted cot leaned on two legs against the far wall like a drunk unable to stand without help.

Shelves ran along one wall with the detritus of other people’s storms. There was a cracked mug, an empty matchbox, and a pencil whittled to a nub. I liked that pencil the most. It felt like proof that someone else had come in from the rain and decided to write something down. It didn’t matter what it said, just that others had been like me.

The sound of the rain softened, transformed from an assault to a grumble. The wind moaned through the cracks in the wood, and the door rattled before falling still. I stood a moment and let my body register the shift from flight to shelter. My breath evened. The knot between my shoulders eased.

Ding.

Connor…again. I didn’t have to look to know it was him. I took my phone out, slid it into airplane mode, and put it deep in the pack beneath my spare socks. I would not let him follow me out here. I did not want to picture his face again. Instead, I envisioned the trail and how it made me feel calm and whole.

I unrolled my sleeping pad in a clean rectangle of floor and sat. My thighs hummed in a good way. The kind of tired that said you had earned your hunger. I took off my boots and wiggled my toes, then set them near the door to dry. Pulling out my thermos, I made tea in my small tin cup with the last of the morning’s hot water. The scent of peppermint turned the air minty fresh. I dug around in my pack and found my pen, twirled it in my fingers, then fished a small notebook from the front pocket.

On the first page, I wrote three lines.

I am not going back for him.

I am not begging for what I deserve.