She repeats the same words over and over, rocking me as if I’m a child. The creaking,snapping, sound coming from the skeletonized hospital bed. And yet, I feel all blood drain from my body, like the plug inside of me has been pulled.
It twists my stomach and I squeeze my eyes closed, blocking it out. I try to remember instead how I got here, among the bleak cream walls of what I knew was Devil’s Peak Hospital, how I got away, and how shedidn’t, when I hear the same crack, and the weight of Jade’s lifeless body crashing to the dirt as my feet pounded the forest floor.
My legs move, but my soul has departed.
It stays behind, curled around my lifeless best friend.
My hair is drenched with sweat, strands plastered to the outline of my skull. The carotid in my neck throbbing as I hold hostage the last of my breath.
I was a good runner. It was the one thing I had let myself be great at. I liked being in control of my pace, knowing exactly where I needed to derive strength from to be able to continue to throw one foot in front of the other. But today, as I blink, sweat amalgamating with the tears bleeding from my eyes, I knew that if I was to make it out of this alive, I would never run again.
My throat burns as I suck back air, hands trembling when my phone slips from my grip, landing on the forest floor.
I don’t stop to pick it up.
I keep running.
And when the ribbon from my hair becomes stuck on a branch, I let the woods take that too.
I veer to my left, then my right, vaulting over a fallen tree trunk, my toes gripping the dirt, my feet sticky with blood.
I couldn’t hear him, not even as I strained my ears, forcing them away from the paroxysm of terror and fear tugging at my pulse.
Had he let me go?
Was it easier to handle one, than two?
Will he come back for me?
Will I be forced to spend the rest of my life looking behind me?
My chin frantically meets my shoulder, peeking into the gaping hole of the forest. The sinister shadows of trees and their streaky limbs flex and groan, reaching for me, a shackle to my fate. Spinning back around, I feel my stomach lunge to my throat when I fly forward. My torn and shredded and bleeding toes catch on a protruding tree root. The weight of my body meets my shoulder, and then my temple when I crash to the ground, and before I can breathe or groan or cuss or wipe away the stream of tears searing into my cheeks, I return to my feet.
And with blood dripping into my eyes, I continue to run until I can no longer feel my feet.
Until each and every nerve is severed by the forest's teeth.
Until I feel a hint of the sunrise's heat.
Until I’m stumbling onto a road I didn’t know, my knees giving out beneath me.
My cut-up palms fall forward, pressing two bloody handprints into the rocky asphalt and I strip my throat raw when I vomit violently to my side.
And that’s when I hear it, my lifeline, or my demise.
The rumbling pitch of an engine.
I gasp for air when two headlights appear from the belly of desolation, racing toward me.
My bones are vibrating the same way they had when I’d laid myself out on the road. My lungs tightening the same way they had when I’d chased what would remain of my life, and what wouldn’t ofhers.
“W-w-who…” I pause to wet my lips, to swallow, to take another breath. “Who f-found m-me?” I ask Nan.
Another tear trails hot and fast toward my ear. I don’t palm it away.
“A young couple passing through. They brought you here, sweetheart,” she whispers.
A chill slithers beneath my skin, curdling the blood in my veins. I reach for my tricep when it throbs, rest my fingers over the plaster, squeezing my eyes closed tighter.
