Chapter 58 The Present
THE PRESENT
AMELIA
The wilderness cascaded endlessly before us, a vast expanse of rocky mountains and flatlands both majestic and utterly desolate.
A cold, biting wind constantly reminded us of the approaching night, which draped the world in a fog of eerie silence.
Each gust whispered through the tall grass and jagged stones, carrying echoes of our shared terror, haunting memories clinging to us like shadows.
The man’s voice still rang in my ears, a hawk’s screech.
The forest felt alive, watching, waiting. Every twig snap echoed, a reminder that we were not alone, igniting a primal fear within me.
I glanced at Caiden; his face was a mask of concentration, but the tension coiling in his shoulders betrayed his calm.
We were both on edge, our bodies weary from our escape, our minds too frazzled for rest. Exhaustion weighed down my limbs, each step a struggle against the fatigue threatening to overwhelm me.
My body ached from my ordeal in the cage, the knife wound still stinging, a worry that it might become infected despite Caiden’s bandages.
A feverish sweat prickled the back of my neck, and the bloody bandage clung to me, hot and sticky.
Every time I lifted my arm, a pain flared where the knife had bitten, a sick reminder of how close I’d come to being meat for the next freezer batch.
The thought alone made me shudder. I could almost imagine the man’s awful hands tearing into me, could smell the rot wafting up from that chest in the cabin, taste the coppery tang of his meal.
I wanted to scream, to spit out the taste of terror, but the woods seemed to swallow all noise, trapping us in a suffocating hush.
The sky above us hung low and bruised, clouds trailing scraps of moonlight that painted the world in sickly blue.
After hours, my legs were numb, my feet laced with blisters, but I pressed on, driven by nothing but the animal urge to stay alive.
Caiden stumbled beside me, his shirt stiff with dried gore, despite our brief swim to cleanse ourselves. A wild look haunted his face. He caught me glancing and turned away, jaw set in a hard line.
We walked until our shadows vanished, until the fire in the horizon traded places with a creeping pallor that threatened to swallow us whole.
The mountains were not the adventure I’d fantasized about as a child, nor the pretty tragedy I’d painted in my sketchbooks after Lillian’s death.
The land here was a bruised and battered canvas, scrubbed raw and left for dead.
We stumbled into a gully, the rocks slick with patches of lichen, the descent unforgiving. My ankle twisted and I tasted gravel, the pain a blinding white that made me gasp. The hum of panic rose again, a tide that refused to recede.
Caiden hobbled down after me, flinching as he landed, barely suppressing a hiss.
“You good?” His voice was shredded, every syllable sandpaper.
“Yeah.” My lips barely moved around the lie. I pawed at the ground, hauling myself upright. The wound in my shoulder burned, blood blooming anew through the ragged bandage, but I forced myself up.
We followed the gully, the world reduced to a corridor of stone and shadow. Somewhere overhead, the moon played peekaboo with the clouds, throwing the rocks into a nightmare chiaroscuro.
We were prey, scurrying through a landscape carved by predators, every shadow a snare.
My mind circled sickly, returning to the freezer’s eyeless stare, the way my captor’s blood had painted everything in sticky finality. I tasted metal in my mouth.
I thought about how, after all this, we’d still be nobody’s priority. The world would keep grinding, the search parties half-assed and useless, the people who loved us already mourning or forgetting.
I pictured my mother numbed out in a stained bathrobe, fumbling for her cigarette as the sheriff’s car rolled up, the headline already printed in her eyes.
Lillian’s ghost flickered at the edge of my thoughts, a warning or a curse.
The gully ended in a wide, stony fan, a graveyard of shattered boulders sloping down to a moonlit creek.
I stumbled again, my balance wrecked, and sat hard on a rock, breath rasping in the cold air.
Caiden dropped beside me. He pressed his palms to his knees, head bowed, sweat streaking the dirt on his face.
Neither of us spoke for a long time.
Somewhere upstream, something splashed. The notion of being hunted, even by a dumb animal, made me laugh, a dry sound that clawed up my throat and died.
Caiden turned, the whites of his eyes stark in the gloom.
“I keep thinking he’s still out there,” I said.
He nodded, silent.
“Like, if I look away from you for one second, he’s going to be there. With the knife. Or a gun. Or just his hands.”
“Yeah,” Caiden muttered. “It’s fucked. But I killed him, I know I did.”
He worked his jaw, then reached into the backpack for the last bottle of water. He held it out to me, not meeting my eyes.
I took it, screwed the cap off, and drank. The water burned down my throat.
Eventually, we came to an open plain, grass and sagebrush bowing in the wind, the slopes on either side hunched like the backs of starving dogs.
We walked in a line. Two pathetic figures bruised and bandaged, each footfall sinking us deeper into the wasteland. The wind tried to push us back, its teeth gnawing at our skin until we huddled closer, sharing what little body heat we could.
The moon, swollen and predatory, hovered just above the horizon, watching us with a pale, unsleeping eye.
The ground here was flat, but the stones conspired against us.
Every few steps my sneaker would catch on a rock, pitching me forward; every time, Caiden grabbed my arm, steadying me, but his hand lingered as if to memorize the shape of me.
I could feel his own tremor, the shared current of fear and adrenaline.
Neither of us mentioned it. Neither of us dared.
We circled a patch of burnt grass, blackened and brittle as bone, and ducked behind a boulder to escape the wind. I collapsed, my legs trembling.
In the darkness, Caiden’s eyes seemed to glow. Like a wolf’s gaze, wild and haunted.
My own mind was a tangle: the freezer, the knife, Lillian’s laughter in the distance, the possibility that this whole thing was a fevered nightmare and I’d wake up alone in a white room.
The wind howled, a high keening that reminded me of the way the man’s voice had twisted the air in the basement, whistling through the cracks and into the soft tissue of my skull.
I found myself straining to hear it now, half-certain that any moment he’d step from behind a tree, dragging a snare wire and wearing that polite, hollow smile.
I shivered, not from cold but from the sick certainty that trauma isn't something you outrun, it’s a parasite, it curls up under your skin and waits for night.
Our kidnapper was dead, yet I felt as if he would jump out and attack us.
It was a dread that was engraved deep into my bones. I wondered if I would ever feel safe again.
A raven landed on a rock, its obsidian eyes seeming to pierce my growing darkness, mirroring the unease that coiled in my gut.
Caiden glanced at me, as if sensing my unease, but did not speak. I embraced the security of his presence, grateful that I had somebody else to endure this with, being lost out here in the Colorado wilderness.
Suddenly, a low howl ripped through the stillness.
Caiden's hand instinctively reached for mine, his knuckles white against my skin, pulling me towards him.
My body stiffened at the contact, and a shiver enveloped me.
The raven took flight, its shadow a fleeting omen against the rapidly darkening sky.
Panic, raw and visceral, threatened to overwhelm me, but I clung to Caiden's hand, the shared tension a fragile lifeline in the invading dusk.
Each step was a battle against the crescendo of fear, the wilderness itself seeming to conspire against our escape.
My head drooped. My eyelids fluttered. Caiden’s shoulder pressed against mine, anchoring me to the stone, to his warmth, to the reality that we were not alone and not safe and, maybe worst of all, not dead.