The whole time I ran, I couldn't help but think about my older brother — dead brother, Charles, and our last few moments together. A day of irritation, followed by flashes of fear, and then years of grief and regret. I thought about how he'd left me behind to navigate an alien world where he no longer existed, how I would be doing eerily similar harm upon my step-sister if I died there. She was even close to the age I had been when the incident that changed everything occurred, and I was now older than Charlie had been, or ever would be. It stung whenever I forced myself to think of it in those terms, reminding myself that my "older" brother would always be fifteen, and I would continue to experience things forever barred to him.
I missed my mother, too, in a way, but never as much as Charlie. There had once been a time where I yearned for her, usually on Mother's Day, when the other kids cheerfully prattled on about their moms, when the teachers would have us make paper cards and flowers as gifts to show the mother's a token of appreciation. Not wanting to draw attention to myself, I went along with it, folding flowers and drawing little daisies over the hand-made card, but, on that inside fold, the cards were always left empty of Happy Mother's Day wishes. A blank page. If I were a poet, I might reflect on some symbolism about how that card represented who I was at the time, a pleasant show of contentment for the wandering eyes of others, only to find an empty space inside upon further inspection.
I remembered my conflicting emotions, knowing I was being forced to make something for someone who simply wasn't there anymore. It didn't seem right for them to force me to reawaken myself to her absence year after year just so they could keep me busy for an hour along with the rest of the class.
It took awhile to get over myself enough to stop caring. Why be upset, when I still had the best parent I could ever ask for?
My dad was the reason I refused to allow myself to be killed, the reason why, no matter how hard things got, I kept moving, crawling across the forest floor with my leadened limbs, because I couldn't bare to leave him the way my brother and mother had left us both. He'd been through so much heartache, I didn't want to be the thing that finally broke the strongest person I knew.
Did he think I was already dead?
No, it had only been around an hour or so since my initial abduction. Surely he'd have more hope than to label me deceased after such a short period of time.
But had it been that brief a period of time? I truly couldn't tell. Each minute had seemed to last five, especially when I was choking for air, calloused hands holding me in place and blocking out intoxicating oxygen. My internal clock had stopped ticking at the exact moment I first spotted Shade amongst the shadows back in my school's sports field, my sense of liquid time skewed into a meaningless mess ever since, like a broken hour glass that had sand streaming out small cracks in the crystal. It might have been one hour, or half a dozen. I wasn't sure.
What I did know was that I continued pushing on until morning, and then more and more and more, until I was confident without a shadow of a doubt that Shade had to be miles behind me. If he hadn't found me by the time the sun painted the horizon with tendrils of gold, he wouldn't find me at all.
The problem? Neither would anyone else.
I'd been lucky, for once, that last night was relatively warm. I still shivered throughout the moonlit hours, but had it been winter, I might have developed hypothermia, or simply frozen beneath a blanket of snow.
Where parts of my dress ripped and frayed, I tore of a thin strip of fabric to pull my hair out of my face, dispelling the discomfort of sweat pasting strands to my damp skin. On the list of my many problems, sweaty hair ranked towards the bottom, but at least it was fixable.
For all I knew, I was half way across the world a hundred miles away from the nearest human settlement. I would be forced to scavenge for mushrooms and drink river water before tragically dying in three weeks from either poisoning or cholera.
Three weeks was a generous timeline, I forced myself to admit. If I didn't find a source of water — any source, contaminated or not — I'd be a goner in days, forget weeks.
I couldn't bring myself to sleep, even in the middle of the day, for fear of what else lurked nearby. Bears? Wild cats? Wolves and snakes? I had no idea. But I still required rest, as repellent as spending anymore time out in the wilderness than strictly necessary was. At some point my muscles seized up and forced me to down to the ground. It gave me time to think on my predicament, which largely served as a curse, because the majority of the thoughts flitting across my tired mind weren't the happy sort, hence my concerns about being stalked by wildlife. A particularly vicious squirrel stood a competitive chance of besting me at that point.
Sitting beneath the shade of a tall deciduous tree with leaves as large as my whole hand, I finally took full inventory of my wounds and found that, despite streaks of flaking, dried blood running down my arms and legs, my skin remained as unblemished as before this whole ordeal. Again, a minor victory that gave me one less thing to worry over.
Now, I thought, casting my eyes around, as though expecting walls of glass and steel to sprout into existence in the other side of a dense thicket of trees, If I was a city, where would I be?
I knew, in a vague sort of way, that civilizations grow alongside bodies of fresh water, though the information didn't exactly help me in my current predicament, seeing as, for all I knew, I was no nearer to a river I could follow to a town than I was to a town itself.
How I wished I was, though. My throat grated my tongue like sand paper every time I tried to swallow and my temple throbbed, hours deep into a dehydration headache.
I reasoned that I could climb a tree well enough, despite lacking appropriate tree-climbing attire. It beat wandering around blindly. Without shoes, however, trying to grip my toes in bark would be less than pleasant, and if I fell that would spell certain trouble, almost certainly gifting me with a broken leg, or worse.
My indecision at choosing between my bad, very bad, and worst options was paralyzing me in place, seizing my lungs into unyielding stone. I forced a breath, then another, and decided doing something that could potentially have catastrophic consequences was still better than doing nothing at all. Stupid as it sounded, I preferred to at least be active in my demise, as opposed to waiting around for someone else to miraculously save me (unlikely), get mauled by a cougar (possible), or remain frozen there until I died of dehydration in that very spot days from now (extremely likely).
I scoured around for an easy target to climb. It needed to be tall, with enough thick boughs and limbs to leverage myself higher without it snapping and being sent crashing back to the ground. Eventually, I found my victim and immediately set to work, because I knew if I took even a moment to brace myself for what I was about to do my nerves would get the better of me.
The sturdy tree I eventually chose was conveniently pressed up against a fallen one, allowing me to balance atop the horizontally laid trunk of the downed tree, which gave me a much needed boost in height in order to grasp one of the lower hanging branches and swing my legs up. I caught myself painfully by the heel, a punishing jab at my Achilles' tendon, but I managed to twist enough to hook my ankle and pull the rest of my weight all the way up, until I was finally straddling the limb. Carefully, I inched my way back towards the trunk and, using the extra security hugging the base of the tree gave me, I stood up.
The higher I got, I was forced to admit that I wasn't entirely sure what I was looking for. A campfire? A large neon sign in the shape of an arrow saying "Ranger Station This Way"? Skyscrapers shooting from the earth in the distance like large bamboo stocks? Hopefully there would be something.
I climbed as high as I dared, never opting to tempt fate by walking too far out on a limb, lest it fall beneath me. From my view on the surface level, I hadn't been able to tell that I was actually somewhere near the top of a mountain, able to peer down a long sloping valley, a sea of green painted in shades of emerald, jade, and olive for as far as the eye could see.
For as far as the eye could see.
No obvious cities. No towns. Not even a remote cabin in the woods, and the height of the trees obscured any potential streams at ground level that might have been snaking down the mountain.
I swallowed hard, lowering myself shakily back down to a seated position. It was too thin a limb for an extended stay, but I couldn't bring myself to leave yet and face the crushing defeat that awaited me back on the ground. So much time and effort, wasted. For nothing.. I took a risk and it hadn't panned out.
A frustrated whine building in my throat morphed into a raw scream that echoed over the tree tops when it escaped my lips. Splinters dug into my nail beds as I dug my fingers into the base of the tree, and I relished the distraction the pain brought, despite already hurting just about everywhere else. I trembled violently with repressed tears and burning rage at everything that put me in this position, and I beat my other fist into the jagged bark beside me. For one stupid moment, I didn't care what happened beyond the torrent of emotions building, swelling, erupting.
And then, in the next moment, I heard the snap of a branch breaking out from beneath me.