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. Thewind 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.
