Chapter 32 The Present #2
I woke to the sound of Caiden breathing hard, as if he was choking on invisible hands. He muttered something, a string of frantic gibberish, and thrashed so violently he nearly rolled into the embers of our dead fire.
I watched him for several minutes, paralyzed by something that wasn’t quite fear but wasn’t compassion either. It was more like the sick fascination you have watching a wounded thing writhe.
When he woke, he didn’t look at me. He just scrubbed his face, refusing to acknowledge the violence that had just poured out of him. I didn’t ask. I wasn’t sure if I wanted answers, or if I just wanted the silence to stretch until it swallowed us both.
We kept on, day after day, following the river until its banks grew marshy and the trees thinned, the sun overhead a white-hot coin that did nothing to warm us.
Sometimes we spoke, but mostly we didn’t. It was easier that way. Each hour was another inch the woods tried to claim us, and we were too tired to resist.
My feet were raw, my hands swollen and useless. I stopped feeling hunger. It was replaced by a buzzing emptiness. A kind of cellular despair that made every sensation float and fade, so that even Caiden’s cruelty felt like it was happening to someone else.
I moved through the trees in a trance, numb to everything except the rhythmic crunch of my own battered body.
By now, Caiden and I could barely look at each other.
Sometimes I wondered if our silence made us invisible. If the wild things that prowled these woods caught the scent of our animosity and kept their distance, wary of a darkness that had nothing to do with the forest and everything to do with us.
Our faces had become masks, painted over with mud and old bruises, but the eyes underneath were not human anymore.
The further we went, the less I remembered about who I was before.
The girl who had fallen through a frozen pond in third grade and never learned to swim, the girl who wore black for weeks after her sister’s funeral, the girl who once screamed at Caiden in a school hallway that she hoped he’d die alone, all of them dissolved in the slow wear of frost and filth.
I was just a body, and Caiden was just another body, and we were both being stripped down to the bone.
The next time I saw my sister, she was crouching on a log ahead of me, knees tucked against her chest the way she used to sit on the front porch of our childhood home.
She gave me a look that cut straight through the fog in my brain, a look that asked if I’d finally had enough yet.
I blinked, and she was gone, replaced by Caiden’s rigid silhouette. He was waiting, arms crossed, the set of his jaw unforgiving.
Caiden’s anger and festering resentment turned vicious. He didn’t just spit sarcasm or mutter insults like he used to. He stared at me with a calculation that bordered on dangerous, as if he was plotting the best way to excise me from the universe.
When I caught up after falling behind, he’d sneer, “About fucking time,” or “Didn’t get eaten by your imaginary bears?”
I stopped answering. He could have all the air he wanted; my voice was better spent on the wind.
I could feel the gulf between us growing wider, the weight of history compacted into a single point of mutual revulsion. Our feud was a fire burning hotter the more oxygen we poured into the void.
We found a clearing that night, a patch of moonlit grass ringed by dead trees. The earth was littered with bones. Small ones, scattered by scavengers and gnawed.
Caiden stared at the remains, then at me, and the implication hung between us like a pall: This is how things end out here. You get picked apart, piece by piece.
Our anger boiled over.
We had been sharing a stick of dried meat, something scavenged from the carcass of a forest animal, when Caiden snapped.
He snatched the morsel from my gnarled fingers, his face contorting into something unfamiliar. “You’re not even trying,” he snarled, spitting flecks of sinew and saliva into the dirt between us. “You want to die, don’t you? Well, go ahead. Quit dragging me down with you.”
I looked at his cracked lips, the feverish glint in his eye. The thought flickered through me: he could kill me. And I realized that I almost wanted him to. It would end the gnawing ache in my bones, the grinding friction of our mutual loathing, the endless trudge toward nowhere.
But I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of begging. My hands curled into fists, trembling more from starvation than anger, and I stared him down, letting all the words I’d bottled up ferment into poison.
“Maybe I do want to die,” I hissed. “At least I’d be free of you. You think you’re some kind of martyr, dragging my useless ass through the woods, but you love this. You love having someone to hate.”
He recoiled as if slapped, and for a second the mask slipped. I saw the raw, naked hurt. Then it was gone, replaced by the familiar sneer.
“You’re pathetic,” he spat. “Completely fucking pathetic. You always have been.”
I laughed. It came out broken, more a bark than a human sound. “Takes one to know one. You’re so desperate to prove you’re not your father’s spawn you became him twice over. Congratulations. You win.”
He lunged. I didn’t move.
There was no room for fear, only a thrill of anticipation as his hands closed on my shoulders and shoved me hard into a tree trunk.
The pain stung, and it cut through the gray shroud that had muffled my senses for days. I could feel the ridges of bark bite into my back, feel the warmth of his hands through the threadbare shirt, feel the heat of his hate burning in the scant inches between our faces.
For one unbroken second, we just breathed. His fingers twitched, and for a wild moment I thought he might throttle me, that he might finish what our families and this forest had started.
I wanted him to. I wanted him to do something irreversible, to burn down what was left of us so we could finally be free.
Instead, he let go, shoving me off with a snarl.
I stumbled and caught myself on a rotten log, the sudden gap between us more nauseating than the impact.
We went back to sit on opposite sides of the fire, staring at the same ember and thinking our separate, poisonous thoughts.