Watcher's Web

Watcher's Web Chapter 5

Chapter 5

Jessica whirled around and faced … Brian.

"What the fuck are you doing here, sneaking up on me like that!"

He took a step back, wide-eyed. His jacket was dirty and torn, his face smudged with mud. His hair was a tangle of sticks and branches, and one of his hands was bleeding.

Shit. "I’m sorry. Did you see the others?" Why the fuck hadn’t he responded when she called?

He nodded, wordless. There was a hardness to his face that chilled her. What had he seen last night? How they were killed? Had he been in hiding until now?

"Are you OK?" Her heart was still beating like crazy.

He nodded, again wordless. He didn’t look OK to her. Had he thought she was abandoning him?

"I … I thought everyone was dead." Stupid. She had seen a third body on the forest floor, but she should have checked to see if it was him.

"It’s OK." His voice was a lot more subdued than it was yesterday.

She shook her head. It wasn’t OK. "I’m sorry."

A wordless silence hung between them. She studied his face: haggard, dirty, younger than she had initially thought

She continued, uneasily, "I was about to leave. I think we need to get out of here in case those idiots come back."

He nodded again. "Do you have any water?"

She gave the bottle to him, and he took it, screwed the cap off and drank. All of a sudden, her world had changed. She wasn’t alone, and someone had survived. Not the person she would have chosen, but someone else nevertheless, and she was glad of that.

He handed her back the bottle. While she bent down to re-fill it, her stomach rumbled uncomfortably, acid burning in the back of her throat. She was hungry, but thinking of the food they didn’t have would only make it worse. She had to hang on. A day or two at the most and they would surely find their way back to civilisation. She stuffed the bottle in her backpack’s side pocket and swung the pack onto her shoulder.

"Let’s go."

"Where to?"

"Up there. See if we can find a way out of this bloody jungle."

She expected him to argue. Maybe she hoped he would argue, say he had picked up some sound and a rescue crew was coming. But he said nothing.

And that was weird, too. Certainly people would be out there looking for a missing plane?

This is not the Australian bush.

"Do you have a preference for which way to go?" she asked, just to make sure.

He shrugged, not meeting her eyes.

"I was going to go up the hill, because we might see something from up there. I also think that those men will think we’ll follow the creek."

"Fine."

Well, he wasn’t going to be much use to her if he was going to act like this. What happened to his I-know-everything attitude he’d had yesterday?

Jessica took the lead up the hill. There was no path, and the hillside was a tangle of low branches and large mossy boulders. Slippery and hard to climb. Brian would push her up, and then she would reach down, hanging onto whatever branches were close, to pull him up as well. He would grunt with each climb, his hands slippery with sweat. An odd smell it had, too, reminiscent of wood fire.