Chapter 18 Shay #3
I crashed through it anyway. Branches whipped my face, leaving lines of fire across my cheeks.
Thorns caught my clothes, tearing fabric.
But I kept moving. The darkness was actually an advantage—if I couldn’t see, neither could Tom.
And I knew he was behind me. Could hear him entering the woods, hear him cursing as he fought through the same obstacles that slowed me.
“Shay!” His voice echoed strangely among the trees, bouncing and distorting.
My foot caught on something—a root, a rock, I couldn’t tell—and I went down hard. My palms hit the forest floor, sinking into a carpet of rotting leaves and damp earth, the smell of decay filling my nostrils.
I scrambled back to my feet, my hands covered in mud, and kept going.
But I was slowing down. Could feel it in the way my lungs burned, the way my legs trembled with each step, each breath coming shorter and more desperate than the last. My body was giving out, pushed past its limits.
I needed to hide. Needed to let him pass, to give myself time to recover, to figure out what to do next. Running blindly wouldn’t work forever.
A fallen tree loomed out of the darkness ahead, materializing like a gift.
It had fallen long ago, and the forest had begun to reclaim it.
Mushrooms sprouted from its bark in pale clusters.
Vines crawled over its surface like veins.
The root system had torn up a huge section of earth when it fell, creating a hollow beneath where soil met air.
I dropped to my knees and crawled underneath it, wedging myself into the space between earth and wood. The hollow smelled of rot, and I pulled dead leaves and debris around me, trying to camouflage myself in the darkness, trying to become part of the forest floor.
Then I held my breath and waited.
Tom’s footsteps approached. I could hear him moving through the underbrush, slower now, more careful. Searching. Hunting.
“Shay.” His voice was closer than I’d expected.
Maybe twenty feet away, maybe less. “I know you’re scared.
I know you’re angry. But you need to think about this rationally.
Where are you going to go? You’re in the middle of the woods in the dark.
You’re weak. You’re hungry. You could get hurt out here. ”
I pressed myself further into the hollow beneath the log, a root digging into my spine. Something crawled across my hand, and I bit my lip to keep from making a sound.
“Please just come back. We can talk about this. I’m sorry—I know I pushed too hard. I shouldn’t have made you do that. That was wrong of me. I just wanted you to understand, but I see now that it was too much too soon.”
Tom spoke as if there would have been a right way to force me to commit murder. As if the problem was timing, not the fundamental horror of what he’d made me do. As if we could rewind and try again with better results, like a failed experiment that just needed adjustment.
He was moving slowly, checking behind trees, peering into shadows, searching with the patience of someone who had all the time in the world. Someone who knew his prey had nowhere to go.
He stopped maybe ten feet from where I hid.
I could hear him breathing, ragged from exertion and his broken nose. Could feel his presence like a physical weight, like gravity had shifted to orient around him.
I could hear my heartbeat in my ears, so loud that I was certain he must be able to hear it too. Each beat like a drum announcing my location.
Then he moved on. His footsteps receding, his voice calling my name growing fainter, swallowed by distance and trees.
But I didn’t trust it. Didn’t trust that he was really gone, that this wasn’t a trick, that he wasn’t waiting just out of sight for me to reveal myself.
I waited. Counted to one hundred, then two hundred. Made myself stay still even though every instinct screamed to run, to put more distance between us.
When I finally crawled out from under the log, my entire body was shaking—from cold, from fear, from adrenaline crash.
The night air had a bite to it that I hadn’t noticed while running, and I was wearing only thin cotton pants and a t-shirt. No shoes. I’d been barefoot in the basement, and I was barefoot now, my soles already torn and bleeding.
I looked around, trying to orient myself.
The woods were pitch black, no moon visible through the thick canopy. I couldn’t tell which direction led deeper into the forest, or which might lead to civilization.
I picked the one that felt most right and started moving. Slower now, placing each foot in front of the other, trying to make as little noise as I possibly could.
The forest floor was treacherous, soft in some places where leaves had piled deep, hard and uneven in others where roots broke through.
My bare feet were already cut and bruised, each step sending sharp pains shooting up my legs.
The cold seeped into my bones, making my muscles ache.
The darkness pressed in from all sides, heavy and suffocating.
The fear that Tom was still out here, still coming for me, refused to loosen its grip. Every sound snagged my attention. A twig snapping somewhere nearby. Wind rushing through the leaves.
My foot came down on something that moved—something alive, coiling and writhing beneath my heel. I jerked back instinctively, and pain exploded in my ankle.
There were two points of fire where something had bitten me, two burning pinpricks that flared hot and immediate.
I stumbled backward and fell hard, landing on my ass, scrambling away from whatever I’d stepped on. My heart was hammering so hard I thought it might break through my ribs, might tear itself free from my chest.
In the darkness, I could just make out a shape slithering away, disappearing into the underbrush.
“For fuck’s sake,” I whispered, grabbing my ankle.
Was it venomous? Were there even venomous snakes in this area? Did it matter? I was in the middle of the woods in the dark with no idea how to get out, being hunted by a serial killer. Snake venom was almost beside the point. Just another problem added to an already growing pile.
I forced myself to breathe. In through my nose, and out through my mouth.
Keep moving. I had to keep moving.
I pulled myself up using a nearby tree, bark rough against my palms, putting as little weight as possible on my bitten ankle. The pain was immediate and bright, radiating up my leg.
I started walking again, limping now, using trees for support.
My vision was starting to do strange things—or maybe that was just the darkness playing tricks, the absence of light making my brain fill in details that weren’t there.
Shadows seemed to move independently. They stretched and folded in on themselves, detaching from the trees that cast them, slipping across the forest floor like something alive and hunting.
I blinked hard, more than once, but it didn’t help.
The edges of the world felt unstable, as if reality itself were just slightly out of sync, like a film reel skipping frames.
I kept walking. One foot in front of the other. That was all I had to do. Just keep moving forward. Distance and time—they were my only allies now.
I heard Tom’s voice again, calling my name. But it came from everywhere and nowhere all at once, impossible to locate. Maybe he was close. Maybe he was miles away. Maybe he was in my head.
My foot caught on something and I fell again.
This time I lay there for a moment, cheek pressed against the damp ground, tasting soil and rot.
I considered staying down. Just letting the forest take me, let it pull me down into the earth until I became part of the soil, until I dissolved into the ecosystem and ceased to exist as Shay Sawyer.
It would be so easy. So much easier than continuing to run, continuing to fight against impossible odds with a body that was falling apart and a mind that was fracturing.
But somewhere deep in my brain, a voice spoke up—small but insistent, stubborn as a weed.
Get up, it said.
I listened.
The trees began to thin. I noticed it gradually, as more of the sky became visible between branches—dark and vast, scattered with stars that looked impossibly far away.
The ground was changing too, becoming more even.
Less wild. The underbrush wasn’t as thick here, wasn’t clawing at me with the same desperate hunger.
I broke through the tree line and stumbled onto a road.
Pavement, solid and human-made.
I stood at the edge of it, swaying on my feet. My vision was swimming, the world tilting and blurring at the edges. I couldn’t feel my hands anymore, couldn’t tell if I was hot or cold, couldn’t distinguish between shivering and shaking.
I looked down at myself. My clothes were torn and filthy, covered in mud and blood and things I didn’t want to identify. My feet were shredded, leaving dark prints on the asphalt where I stood. I looked like something that had crawled out of a grave.
I turned my head, scanning the road in both directions. Behind me, the forest stood silent. Watching. Waiting.
And then I saw them.
Headlights.
Piercing through the darkness, blinding.