The woods shut behind her.
Sarah crashed through the darkness, Mark’s rifle slung wrong across her shoulder, throwing her weight sideways with each desperate lunge forward. Thorns tore at her sleeves, her arms. Blood where they caught skin. The bug-out bag slammed against her spine with each jarring step. She ran without seeing, the black woods swallowing everything ahead, everything behind.
She didn’t look back.
A branch caught her throat hard enough to gag her. She tore through it. The rifle kept sliding, the strap digging into her collarbone, pulling her off-balance, the dead man’s weight of it wrenching her a half-step wrong with every stride. She stumbled, went down to one knee in the wet dirt, shoved herself up, kept moving.
The air smelled of pine sap and gasoline. Her jacket snagged, held, then tore free.
Her breath sawed in and out, too loud in her own ears, drowning whatever might be behind her. She couldn’t hear them. That was worse than hearing them.
The trees pressed close. Black on black. She threw her hands out ahead of her, feeling for the gaps, and hurled herself through each one. No sense of direction. Just away. Always away.
Time dissolved.
Her lungs burned. Each breath came in ragged wheezes, a mechanical screech. The scratches on her arms had stopped bleeding, dried blood pulling tight against her skin with each movement. Something warm ran from her nose. Her mouth tasted of dirt and blood. Snot or blood — she couldn’t tell, and it didn’t matter.
Her boot caught on exposed root. She went down hard, hands breaking the fall, palms scraping across stone and decomposing leaves. The impact drove the air from her lungs.
Couldn’t stop. If she stopped, they’d kill her too.
She pushed up. Left hand screaming where she’d torn skin off on rock. Tasted blood.
One foot. Then the other.
The counting started without her meaning to.
Trees. A certain diameter — thick enough to push off from, change direction. Her palm finding bark, testing, shoving, momentum carrying her past.
One ninety-five.
Another trunk. Push. Pivot. The rifle strap cutting deeper into her shoulder with each impact.
One ninety-six.
The numbers helped. Gave her something to hold onto while everything else splintered apart. A pattern. Order in chaos.
One ninety-seven.
One ninety-eight.
Her foot caught on something — rotted stump, half-buried in the forest floor. She saw the dark mass just in time, threw herself sideways into a controlled tumble rather than risk the ankle twist that would end her. Hit the ground rolling, dirt and leaf mold packing her mouth.
Two hundred.
Got up. Hip throbbing where she’d landed on it. The bug-out bag had twisted around, strap digging into her ribs.
Two hundred and one.
Her breathing had gone shallow. The mechanical wheeze failing, each breath shorter than the last.
Two hundred and two.
Push off. Pivot. The bark felt different this time — smoother. Birch maybe.
Two hundred and three.
Maybe he’s okay.
Unbidden, desperate.
Maybe they drove away. Maybe Miguel came out to help him. Maybe Mark’s sitting up right now, hand pressed to his chest, catching his breath. Maybe—
Two hundred and fifteen.
Maybe he’s okay.
Her boot slipped in mud. She caught herself on a low branch, kept moving. The branch left something sticky on her palm. Sap or blood, she didn’t know.
Two hundred and twenty.
Maybe he’s okay.
Two hundred and twenty-three.
Maybe—
Two hundred and—
She lost count.
Started over. One. Two. Three.
Lost it again.
The rifle strap had carved a groove into her shoulder, a burning line of pressure that had gone from pain to numbness. Her legs were moving but she couldn’t feel them anymore — disconnected, mechanical, someone else’s legs carrying her forward.
Her hand struck another tree. Pushed. The bark crumbled under her palm — dead wood, rotting from the inside.
The ground began to slope. Branches thinned. The air came colder, wider — and above her, where the canopy broke apart, the clouds had pulled off the moon. After the black of the woods, it felt like light.
A shape took form in the untilled field — motionless, angular, man-made.
A barn.
It stood there like something she had imagined, and yet it remained when she blinked. Boards warped and gaping, some gone entirely, the gaps darker than anything the moon could reach. The roofline sagged in the middle, broken. The door hung crooked, dragged open on itself a long time ago and never shut since.
Sarah stood swaying in front of it, trying to place it. Maybe for animals, once. The wood had gone gray, gone to bone. Where the boards had fallen away she could see the frame underneath — heavy old timber, still standing, holding up everything that had died around it.
The smell hit her when she got close. Old hay, gone to dust and mildew. Animal musk — cattle or horses, impossible to tell how long gone. Decades of weather seeping through gaps in the roof. Bird shit and mouse nests and the sweet-sick smell of decomposition. Something had died in there. Maybe more than one something.
For a moment she just stood there, breathing the rot and cold, hand on the wood. The air on the other side felt heavy, unmoving.
She pushed through the crooked door.
The hinges screamed, a sound that split the silence and made her freeze, listening for response. Nothing. Just the creak of old wood, the whisper of wind through gaps in the walls.
Shapes came up slow out of the black. Hay bales against the far wall, or what was left — most had caved in on themselves, spilled open across the floor. Some dead machine along the other wall, half-eaten by shadow.
The dark went up further than she’d thought — a loft somewhere above her, its floor broken open in places, letting the deeper black through. A bird’s nest sat abandoned in the rafters. Long gone, whatever had built it.
The air was thick. Not just the smell of it — a texture, dust and rot she could feel going into her lungs. Close. Heavy. Sealed in with whatever else was in here.
Sarah stumbled toward the hay bales and dropped to her knees. The floor was hard-packed dirt, cold through her jeans. Dust rose around her when she fell, caught in her throat, made her cough.
The bag slid from her shoulder. The rifle clattered beside her, the sound too loud in the enclosed space, ringing off the roof.
She bent forward, forehead nearly touching the ground, and just breathed. In. Out. The wheezing slowly settling into something more human.
Outside, the wind still moved through the trees, but it couldn’t reach her here. The barn held its own air, stale and sealed.
Her hands were shaking. She looked down — could barely make them out, just enough to see the torn skin, the blood gone black in the thin moonlight coming through the gaps. She felt the tremor more than saw it.
Mark’s bag. Mark’s rifle.
Mark.
The name landed like a physical blow.
The sound that came out of her wasn’t crying. Not at first. Just a noise — animal, guttural, something dragged up from a place that had no words. Her body doubled over, forehead hitting the dirt, hands clutching at nothing.
He was dead.
Not maybe. Not possibly. Dead. She’d seen it. The muzzle flash lighting his face. Eyes wide. The second shot. Him dropping.
A wail tore through her. High and ragged, bouncing off the barn walls, coming back at her from all sides. Her fists pounded the ground. Once. Twice. Again and again until pain shot through her torn palms, until the impacts jarred her elbows, her shoulders.
They’d shot him. Like it was nothing. Like he was nothing.
She’d left him there. Left his body in that driveway while she ran.
Whatever had kept her running was leaving her. She felt it go. The shaking got worse. Her stomach turned over.
Mark. Mark. Mark.
Hours ago they’d been in the truck together. His hands on the wheel. That muscle in his jaw twitching. The dashboard lights casting green across his face. The way he’d looked at her.
“Sarah...”
“I know.”
She’d known. They’d both known.
She lay there on the dirt floor, staring at nothing, feeling the numbness creep in. Protective. Merciful. Her fingers moved. Found the strap of Mark’s bag in the darkness.
The sound seemed too loud. Metal teeth separating, one by one. She stopped halfway, listening. Just wind through the gaps in the walls.
She pulled it open the rest of the way.
Her fingers moved through the contents without seeing. Touching, cataloging. A flashlight — she found the button, didn’t press it. Something soft. A jacket maybe. Hard edges — boxes. Ammunition probably. A water bottle, half-full by the weight of it. Something that crinkled. Mylar emergency blanket.
Her hand closed around something cylindrical. Cold metal. She pulled it out, turned it in her hands. Too light to be ammunition.
She kept searching. Kept touching things she couldn’t name in the dark. As if the next object would be — what? She didn’t know. Just something. Something that would make this make sense.
A canvas pouch. She opened it. More small metal shapes inside. She set it aside.
A box. Cardboard, the corners soft with age. She lifted it, felt the weight shift inside. Something loose. Multiple somethings.
Her thumb worked under the flap.
The smell hit her first.
Tobacco. Stale and sharp. The scent of something Mark carried everywhere, that clung to his jackets, that lingered in the truck even when he hadn’t smoked.
She pulled one out. Smooth paper between her fingers. The filter. The packed tobacco at the other end.
Mark’s cigarettes. The pack was nearly empty — just a few left. She set it aside and reached back in. Another box. Unopened. Full.
Her hands were shaking again. She could feel the tremor through the thin paper. Could feel how fragile the thing was, how easily it would crumble.
She’d watched him do this a thousand times — the pack from his pocket, the tap against his palm, the one rising from the others. Between his lips. Unlit more often than not.
She brought it to her own lips.
The paper was dry. Tasted like nothing. Like paper and tobacco and Mark’s hands holding it.
She sat there in the darkness, cigarette between her lips, not smoking, not moving. Just holding this thing that he’d touched. That he’d meant to use later. After. When there was still an after.
Her hands went back to the bag. Searching again. More careful this time. More deliberate.
There. Small. Plastic. She pulled it out, thumbed the wheel.
The flame seemed impossibly bright. Orange and yellow, casting wild shadows across the barn walls. She could see her hands in the light. Torn and bloody. Could see the cigarette, white against the darkness.
She’d never smoked. Not once.
She brought the flame to the tip. Drew in.
The smoke burned. She coughed, eyes watering, but kept the cigarette between her lips.
A thin gray thread rose in front of her and vanished into the dark.
She inhaled again.