Caught in Blackwood Woods

Chapter One

The adhesive tape took half a layer of skin with it when Lucas pulled. He balled it up, the white zinc cloth gray with cinder dust, and tossed it toward the metal trash can across the locker room floor. It hit the rim and dropped in.

The room smelled of damp chlorine, wet floor tile, and the sour tang of unwashed singlets piled in the laundry bins. Everyone else had cleared out shortly after the team debrief. The shower drains were still gurgling under the concrete benches, sucking down the last pools of gray suds.

"You let him dictate the second mile."

Coach Miller didn’t look up from his clipboard. He was leaning against the steel equipment cage near the exit, a red dry-erase marker wedged behind his ear, wearing the same salt-stained windbreaker he’d had on since morning course inspection.

"He was clipping my heel on the turn," Lucas said. He worked his fingers into the double knot of his right racing flat, working the nylon loops loose. "Every single stride."

"So you surge on an uphill?" Miller capped his dry-erase marker with a hard snap. "You gave him four yards on the switchback, blew your lactic threshold before the crest, and died on the descent. You don't race the guy behind you, Lucas. You race the split."

"Yeah."

"The athletic board doesn't care about a guy clipping your heels.

Your partial scholarship is tied to conference placement, not pride.

" Miller picked up his gym bag, throwing the strap over his shoulder.

The cheap nylon squeaked against his jacket.

"Sleep it off. Sunday long run is moved up to sunrise. Don't be late."

The fire-exit door banged shut behind him, the heavy steel latch echoing down the empty corridor of green lockers.

Lucas sat on the wooden bench, resting his forearms against his knees.

His quads carried that dull, hollow ache that came from redlining too early—a dead-weight burn that didn't flush out with static stretching.

He leaned forward, reaching down to unpeel his socks.

His heels were raw, the skin worn down to slick pink patches from the thin racing mesh.

He pulled his phone from his kit bag. The glass screen was cracked across the top corner, spiderwebbing over a missed text message from two hours ago.

Maya: Drinks at the pub with Sarah and the guys? You said you’d let me know after the meet.

Lucas stared at the screen until the backlight timed out.

They’d been seeing each other on and off for the last two years.

She was a business major who understood his early morning training schedule and didn’t complain when he was too tired on Saturday nights to do anything more than watch a movie on his laptop.

When they slept together, it was comfortable.

It was predictable. He knew what she liked, he did it efficiently, and then he rolled onto his side of the mattress and fell asleep so he could wake up at five for threshold intervals.

He’d never lost his head with her. He’d never lost his head with anyone. Intimacy had always felt like another metric to manage—something normal college guys did to blow off steam, like taking protein shakes after a lift or going to the dining hall at five.

He typed a quick reply:

Rough meet. Gotta crash early. Talk tomorrow.

He didn't wait for a delivery confirmation. He shoved the phone back into the mesh pocket of his bag, pulled on a dry pair of cotton sweatpants, and tied the drawstrings tight.

The walk back to the athletic dorms was quiet. The campus grounds crew had turned on the perimeter sprinklers, the rhythmic tick-tick-hiss of the brass heads cutting through the cool October air.

Up on the third floor of Maple Hall, the linoleum hallway smelled of microwave popcorn and damp athletic gear left to dry on doorknobs. Lucas eased the door to room 314 open with his shoulder, slipping inside without letting the brass latch click against the jamb.

Across the narrow room, Kevin Chen was dead to the world.

He was buried face-down beneath an unzipped sleeping bag, one bare foot hanging off the edge of the mattress, breathing in slow, rattling whistles.

On Kevin’s desk sat three empty energy drink cans, a half-eaten sleeve of crackers, and an open biomechanics textbook.

Lucas dropped his bag by his dresser. He peeled off his shirt, tossing it into the canvas laundry hamper, and caught his reflection in the mirror hanging over the sink.

He was too lean. His ribs showed under his chest like slats in an old fence, and his hip bones jutted out against the waistband of his sweatpants.

He looked like an engine stripped down to its barest mechanical parts.

He ran sixty-five miles a week, tracked every carbohydrate that crossed his tongue, and logged his morning resting heart rate on a spreadsheet before he even brushed his teeth.

It was the only way he knew how to exist. Without the structure, without the numbers, everything felt like it was slipping off the edge of a cliff.

He sat on the edge of his cot. His muscles were exhausted, but his nervous system was firing erratically. His skin felt coated in that thin, greasy film of post-race sweat that the cold locker-room shower hadn't washed away.

He lay back, staring up at the textured plaster ceiling.

Every time his eyelids dropped, the race replayed in high contrast behind them.

He saw the red clay of the two-mile switchback.

He saw the orange course flags whipping in the gusting wind.

He heard the wet, rhythmic slapping of the rival runner's spikes right behind him, closing the gap stride by stride.

Lucas had broken. That was the raw truth of it. He’d let the other guy get inside his head. Instead of holding his pace, he’d surged out of blind panic, sprinting up a hill he had no business sprinting, and by the time he crested the ridge, his legs were filled with concrete.

A muscle in his calf fluttered, a tiny spasm under the skin. Then his hamstring twitched.

Lucas rolled onto his stomach, burying his face into the thin foam pillow. The room was too hot. The radiator under the window was clanking, spitting dry steam into the corner. He reached over, checking the digital clock on his nightstand.

Past one in the morning.

If he didn't sleep now, his resting heart rate would be up five beats per minute by dawn. Coach Miller would look at his training log, see the numbers, and pull him from the anchor leg of the distance medley relay next weekend.

He closed his eyes again, trying to force his breathing into a measured four-count box cycle. Inhale for four. Hold for four. Exhale for four.

It didn't work. His blood felt thick, full of useless adrenaline. If he stayed on this mattress, he was going to tear his own mind to pieces until sunrise.

Lucas pushed himself up, the springs beneath the thin mattress squeaking softly. Kevin snorted in his sleep, rolled over to face the wall, and went back to snoring.

Lucas pulled on a black long-sleeve cotton shirt, grabbed his running flats—the worn-in pair with the gum-rubber soles that didn't squeak on tile—and carried them in one hand down the hallway in his socks.

He didn't take his watch. He didn't take his phone. If he had the watch, he’d check his pace, and he didn't want to know how broken his legs were right now.

At the end of the hall, the heavy emergency exit door was held shut with a strip of black electrical tape over the striker plate—a trick the track team had used for years to sneak out past dorm curfew.

He nudged it open with his hip, stepped out onto the cold concrete landing of the exterior fire escape, and sat on the bottom metal step to lace his shoes.

He tied them with double knots, tucking the plastic aglets down under the laces so they wouldn't flap against his ankles.

The air outside was raw, thick with autumn mist that clung to the brick facades of the campus buildings.

Lucas walked at first. His knees felt stiff, the fluid in the joints cold and sluggish. He followed the service road past the varsity soccer field, where the floodlights had long been cut, leaving the turf pitch a vast, dark rectangle bordered by chain-link fencing.

To his left, the outdoor track facility stood empty.

The white lane lines were barely visible through the fog, circling the red polyurethane oval like rings on a bullseye.

He looked at the track and felt an immediate knot in his gut.

He didn't want the precision of that surface.

He didn't want the lanes, the measured hundred-meter marks, or the feeling of being watched by a coach with a stopwatch around his neck.

He kept walking, letting his stride lengthen gradually, turning away from the athletic village and heading toward the western boundary of the campus.

Out here, the paved access road gave way to crushed gravel.

The modern LED lamps of the main quad had been replaced by spaced-out sodium-vapor fixtures that hummed with a low electrical buzz, casting sickly orange circles on the damp grass.

On either side of the road lay the drainage ditches and the maintenance sheds where the university parked its tractors and groundskeeping mowers.

Beyond the gravel turnabout stood the tree line.

The Blackwood Pines formed a dense, unbroken wall of dark timber that separated the state college from the state forest preserve.

It was second-growth loblolly pine, thick and wild, choked with thorny underbrush and sweetgum saplings that blocked out whatever light the moon tried to push through the overcast sky.

At the trailhead, a heavy rusted steel chain hung between two creosote-treated telephone poles. A yellow metal sign, buckled at the corners and chipped from weather, was bolted to the wood: PARK CLOSED DUSK TO DAWN. TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED.

Lucas stopped a foot from the chain. His breath drifted out in faint, ragged puffs, hanging in the cold air before dissolving.

He knew what the woods were. Everyone on the athletic hall knew.

It was the kind of thing guys talked about in hushed voices while rolling out their calves on foam rollers or icing their shins after double workouts.

They said the fire roads back behind the state reservoir weren't just for trail running. They said if you drove down the unpaved service road after midnight with your parking lights on, you’d see cars backed into the dirt turnouts.

They said certain guys—guys from the fraternity houses across town, guys from the football squad, older men from the neighboring county—walked the lower loops in the dark when they wanted something they couldn't be seen asking for in broad daylight.

Lucas had always written it off as locker-room garbage. Running was about times and splits, training blocks and lactate clearance. The woods were just an eight-mile trail loop with slick tree roots that could tear an ACL if you lost focus on a recovery run.

He looked back over his shoulder.

The campus was silent. The dorm windows were dark, dead squares against the brick. In four hours, Coach Miller’s whistle would blow on the outdoor track, and the whole rigid machine would start grinding again.

Lucas took a breath of damp pine air. He lifted his right foot, stepped over the rusted chain, and hit the dirt.

The first fifty yards were packed clay, familiar and smooth beneath the waffle soles of his flats.

But as the trail dipped downward, the tree canopy closed overhead, shutting out the sodium glow from the campus perimeter.

The path narrowed, swallowed instantly by deep, heavy shadows, until the only sound in the woods was the rhythmic scuff-thud of his shoes against the pine needles and the cold rush of air through his lungs.