Chapter 56 The Present
THE PRESENT
AMELIA
After we left the cabin, we gobbled up some of the canned food before collapsing by a cluster of trees. Drained of spirit.
As daylight broke, we found ourselves on the move again, not knowing where we were headed but determined to go as far away from the cabin as possible.
Silence enveloped us, broken only by the rustle of unseen creatures and the crunch of twigs underfoot, becoming our constant companion. A gnawing hunger crept back, but fear, a more potent appetite, drove us deeper into the emerald shadows of the forest.
Neither of us knew what to say. The tension hung stiffly, a presence that loomed over us like a dark shadow.
As we walked, I became acutely aware of the pain shooting through my feet. Our shoes, torn and weathered, turned each step into a painful ache. The stench that emanated from our bodies was nearly unbearable, but we had no choice; we had to endure it.
After what felt like hours of trudging through the woods, the trees began to thin and shrink until they finally disappeared. I glanced around, a surge of glee filling my body.
We had returned to the rocky flatland. Water flowed around us as we stumbled upon a large opening, the woodland retreating behind us.
“Fuck it,” I whispered, shedding my shoes and sprinting towards the water. I dove in, the cool liquid enveloping me as a smile broke across my face for the first time in days, cleansing my body and spirit.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Caiden exclaimed, approaching the spot where I floated in the water.
“I’m soaking in the freedom,” I murmured, closing my eyes and letting my heartbeat slow to a calming rhythm.
“Well, hurry up. I want to cover as much ground as possible.”
I rolled my eyes and looked at him. He stood in the sunlight, a frown etched onto his face.
“Loosen up, Caiden. Why don’t you come into the water with me and clean yourself? You stink.”
I splashed some water towards him.
He hesitated, his brow furrowing as if he might argue, but then a small smile played at the corners of his lips. For the first time since the cabin, the tension seemed to crack.
He kicked off his own battered shoes, the sound oddly loud in the sudden quiet, and cautiously waded into the cool water.
The sun warmed our skin, and for a few precious moments, the fear and exhaustion washed away, replaced by the simple relief of fresh water and shared silence.
“This is pretty nice,” Caiden confessed, allowing the water to cleanse us of stress and filth.
“I told you so. Maybe you should listen to me more often,” I said tiredly, savoring the calm waves between us that momentarily overshadowed our usual bickering and resentment.
“If I did that, we probably wouldn’t have made it through some situations,” he retorted, but there was no bitterness in his voice; it sounded light and feathery.
I realized he was right. He had guided us through many harrowing situations, keeping me going when I felt like giving up.
“Yeah, good point.”
But as soon as I spoke, my mind spiraled back to the cage, the image of that sadist with a knife to my neck, demanding Caiden to back down.
Yet, Caiden had charged at him instead.
“Why did you attack that psycho when he had the knife to my neck? You knew he could have killed me.” Instead of letting the thought fade, I allowed it to engulf me, a fire igniting within.
He glanced at me, a dark expression overtaking his features. “It was the only chance we had.”
“But I could have died! He could have sliced my neck in an instant.”
I remembered how close the knife was on the skin, how easy it would have been for it to slice into my flesh fatally.
Caiden looked away, shrugging. “It was a chance I had to take. I had a feeling you’d be alright. It was kill or be killed.”
A sudden storm of anger erupted within me, and I quickly waded out of the water, yanking a piece of cloth from the pack to dry myself.
Sensing my fury, Caiden followed me out of the water, his tall figure looming over me.
“You’re mad. Why? Why do you have to ruin any good moment we have?”
With an exasperated grunt, I threw my hands in the air, glaring at him. “Why am I mad? Maybe because you risked my life all to save yourself!”
Caiden’s nostrils flared as he moved closer, his feet pounding against the terrain. “Are you fucking kidding me? I wasn’t saving myself! I was saving you. Saving us! He was going to kill us if I didn’t do something. You could at least be grateful that I saved your life, again.”
The tension returned, crackling in the air like a fire on the verge of igniting, making the hairs on my arms stand on end. It wrapped around us with ferocity, a chilling blast that cut through my skin and made my teeth chatter.
“No, you risked my life! You could have waited until he didn’t have a knife against me!”
“You are so goddamn impossible.” Caiden shook his head, staring me down with equal anger.
He was so close now that our breaths collided, and I felt myself falling into the swirling depths of his brown eyes.
But what left me breathless was watching his gaze flick down to my lips, then lower to my chest, where my damp t-shirt clung to my body, outlining the shape of my breasts, my nipples poking through the fabric.
My cheeks flushed crimson as an intense heat surged through me, a wave of fire that sent shivers through my blood and tingles down to my thighs.
His gaze lingered there, a trace of something unreadable flashing in his eyes before he abruptly looked away, his Adam's apple bobbing.
The anger seemed to dissipate, replaced by a strange, almost awkward silence.
He ran a hand through his wet hair, the gesture revealing the strain beneath his controlled exterior. The tension remained, but it had shifted, morphing into something heavier, more intimate.
He cleared his throat, the sound low and rough. “Look,” he began, his voice softer now, “I… I didn’t mean to scare you. I wouldn’t have let you die. That’s a promise.”
His jaw set tight as he peered at me, analyzing my every movement. I nodded, the rise of anger ebbing as I dissolved into his softness.
“I know. I shouldn’t have blown up like that. I don’t know what came over me. Too much has happened in the past few days.”
“Yeah. It’s fine. I get it.” He looked away, his eyes tracing the rippling waves.
We put our shoes back on and drank some of the water, stumbling through fragments of tension intermingled with something intimate and profound.
My heart pounded; the thought of opening the door to something forbidden and unknown terrified me, and I sensed a similar unease in him.
Yet, a rush of thrilling curiosity surged within me.
I spent that whole day and much of that night gnawing on the memory of his gaze. How it had lit on my body, lingered, then retreated as if burned.
I told myself it disgusted me. I told myself it was proof that he was every inch his father’s spawn, that even now, even after all we’d survived, I was just a thing to be consumed.
But it was a lie, and the lie soured in my mouth, rancid and persistent.
This old anger was transforming into something that tasted like longing and disaster. That terrified me.
I couldn’t sleep that night. I told Caiden I was going to keep watch, though both of us knew I was too exhausted to last more than a few hours.
I perched on a boulder by the water, knees hugged to my chest, and watched the moon’s reflection shiver on the surface.
I tried to meditate on the beauty of the world, to remind myself that it still existed, that it hadn’t all been eaten away by cruelty and hunger.
But every time I closed my eyes, I saw the blood pooling under that man’s face, saw the edge of the knife flashing in two directions at once. I saw the glimmer in Caiden’s eyes when he’d finally killed for me.
I was so tired of being a victim that I barely noticed the moment I started to become the monster.
When the sky tilted from blue to pale yellow, I crept back to where Caiden slept. He was curled on his side like a kicked dog, his face stripped of anger, just soft with exhaustion and a thin film of sweat.
I knelt beside him and watched the way his eyelids twitched, the muscle beneath jerking at some remembered pain. I wondered if he was dreaming of his father, or the cage, or of me. Possibly all three.
I reached out and brushed a stray hair from his forehead.
The contact startled him awake, and for a moment he looked at me like he didn’t recognize my face in the morning light.
Maybe he didn’t. Maybe we were both strangers now, two new creatures with nothing left but hunger and the memory of what we used to be.
“What?” was all he said, but the word came out on a breath that was ragged, almost pleading.
“It’s day.”
We stared at each other, and then he nodded.
We shouldered the pack, picked a direction, and started walking.
It wasn’t until afternoon that we ran into the first sign of other human life: a dead hiker, collapsed in a tangle of sage and rock.
He’d been there a year maybe, or longer.
What was left of him was all bone and mummified sinew, the rags of his clothes fluttering around the frame.
His ribcage gaped, a hollow birdcage, and the sockets where his eyes had been stared straight up at the cloudless sky.
I stood over him, hypnotized, unable to look away.
Caiden knelt, his face unreadable, and searched the dead hiker’s pockets with a gentleness that nearly broke me. He found a battered lighter, a half-empty bottle of iodine, and a wallet with a faded photo stuffed behind a driver’s license.
The man’s name was Steven. His picture showed him with a woman and a boy, arms around each other at a backyard barbecue. Smiles too big for the camera, faces alight with a hunger for something.
I took the photo from Caiden, numb, and turned it over in my hands. Some animal in my chest wanted to scream, to warn the woman and child that this was what would become of Steven, all meat peeled away by time and loneliness.
I slipped the photo back into the wallet, hands suddenly shaking.
I wondered if that’s what I would become. A leftover, a corpse for the next lost animal to discover.
I thought: this could have been us. This almost was us.
I thought of the man in the cabin, how easily he could have made us this, and how easy it would be for the world to forget what we looked like before we were reduced to bone and dirt.
We left the corpse behind, but parts of it clung to us. The empty sockets, the decay, the glint of hope made monstrous by abandonment.
I watched Caiden from behind as we trudged on. His spine was a straight, stubborn line; his shoulders hunched with the effort of dragging himself into each new step.
In the daylight, with no fences or monsters or wire to separate us, he was both less and more than I remembered. Less menace, more ruin. I could see the seams where he’d split open.
I wondered if he knew how visible it was.
By sundown, we’d walked out of the dead man’s shadow but not his orbit.
We ate cold beans with our fingers and drank river water, then huddled together in a hollow beneath a fallen tree for warmth.
I kept my face angled away from him, safe in the shadow of a root, but I could feel his eyes on me.
I wanted to ask him what he saw, but I was afraid of the answer. Instead, I asked, “Do you think he was running away, or running toward something?” meaning Steven, or maybe myself, or maybe all of us.
Caiden’s voice was a rasp. “Does it matter?”
I thought about it. “Maybe not. Maybe, if you’re lost, one direction is as good as another.”
We lay there, silent, the only sound the wind sighing through the needles overhead.
I thought I would not sleep, but I did, and my dreams crawled with the faces of the dead: Steven, the man in the cabin, my mother, Lillian—each one blinking in and out like dying stars, their eyes wide and flat.
I woke to the touch of Caiden’s hand on my shoulder, gentle as a whisper.
He didn’t draw back when I startled, just let his palm rest there, warm and solid.
His fingers weren’t the claws I remembered from our youth, the bludgeons of violence; they were simply fingers, roughened by the world but not by malice.
I shivered and let myself lean into him, just a little.
“When we get out of here,” he said, low enough that I had to tilt my head to hear, “I want you to forget all of this.”
“That’s not how memory works,” I said, sharper than I meant. I didn’t want him to stop. The warmth pulsing from his hand was the only thing keeping me from shattering.
He shook his head, lips twisted in a smile. “It is if you try hard enough. I did it for years. You just fake it until the memories get tired and quit.”
“Is that what you did with me?” I asked, and there was a challenge in it. I wanted him to lie, and I wanted him to confess, both at once.
He didn’t answer right away, but when he finally did, he kept his voice so low it was almost a rumor, “I tried. I never could.”
He withdrew his hand and wrapped his arms around his knees, chin on wrist, and stared into the dark as if it would yield an answer if only he watched long enough.
A hollow ache shivered deep in my bones, some longing that had no shape and no voice, something so old and so unfinished it could only express itself as want.
The silence expanded and held, made sacred by fatigue and animal warmth.
I could sense the hunger in him too. Not the simple need for food, but the deeper, blacker hunger that had gnawed at us both since childhood.