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“Ok,” I said, holding the flashlight up like a weapon, “I’ll go first.”
I pushed the door open slowly, with Jeff right at my back. The sun from the open door and the missing boards lit the room enough for us to see that we were stepping into a small living area, and there was an open kitchen off to the right. The plastic water bottle on the counter caught my eye immediately, because it was definitely new. There was no dust on it, and it wasn’t discolored. “He was fucking here,” I whispered, “I knew it.”
They all followed my eyes to the counter and came to the same conclusion I had. There was trash on the counter and the kitchen floor, food wrappers. I knew it could have been some vagrant or homeless person, stopping for the night in a dry building, but I also knew that it hadn’t been. The guy at the gas station mentioned Wally buying snacks and bottled water to bring to his cabin. A cabin I was certain by then he’d known about from his childhood, after a trauma so great that the exact location had likely been etched into his brain as a core memory. It had probably also been ingrained as a place of safety, a haven, the place where things were ok again. I would kill him.
It smelled musty and like mildew, but there were other smells, too- a metallic smell and something else that was faint, and I couldn’t place. The cabin was still sparsely furnished. There was a ratty couch under a window where streaks of light shone through. There were a couple of wooden chairs but no table. Dust floated through the sunbeams that filtered in. Everything was completely, eerily silent. I looked at the two doors off the living room. Bedrooms, I assumed, and there was a bathroom in between them.
Jeff grabbed a flashlight and nodded to Jesse, and the two of them headed into the room on the right. The girls went into the kitchen and started taking photos of the trash, collecting evidence without touching it. I stepped over to the other bedroom and pushed the door open.
When I stepped into that room, enough boards missing on the windows for me to see everything clearly, my world shattered. The smell, it was stronger in the bedroom. I couldn’t even call out to my friends like I wanted to, my voice didn’t seem to work. I stumbled over to the twin bed along the far wall, staring at the blood all over the yellowed sheet. While the sheets were obviously old, the blood. The blood was not.
I let out a sob, and the others heard me. They all came running, rushing through the door to stop beside me. They stared at the bed. No one said anything, but Amber was crying softly beside me. I felt hands all over me, letting me know they were there. Letting me know I wasn’t alone. I think I would have fallen if they hadn’t grounded me right then. I closed my eyes and turned away from the bed. There was so much blood. It was impossible to tell exactly how much, but I knew some had soaked into the mattress. It covered a large area and was the source of the metallic smell I’d noticed earlier. I suddenly realized the other smell, though still faint, smelled like death. A tear fell from my eye as my mind wrapped around the fact that I’d just been looking at the spot where Jamie had died.
I stumbled back through the cabin and out the front door with my friends following behind me. “I don’t have signal out here,” Caitlin said, tears threatening in her voice. She held her phone up, searching, obviously trying to call the police.
“I’m going to see if there are any freshly dug spots nearby,” I said, but I choked the words out. In reality, I was just stalling. I wanted to put everything off a little while longer. When the police arrived, and they told me that was Jamie’s blood on the bed, there would be no more denying it, body or none. I just needed a minute, just a minute before I accepted that.
I could hear water running from somewhere down a path off the porch, and I started walking in that direction. I was barely able to force myself forward, my feet dragging through the dirt as I tried to make it to the water I was hearing. I wanted to cling to the hope I’d held onto for so long, but I knew it was useless. I needed a peaceful place to stop and breathe for a second. I thought it might calm my mind just a little, enough to accept everything that was getting ready to happen.
When I was several yards down the path, I could see a shimmer up ahead where sunlight was hitting moving water, and I shuffled toward it. My backpack was rattling softly in the quiet, jostled by my uncoordinated movements. My friends had followed me outside, but they were much farther back, and a little uncertain. I’d left them behind to head down a path with no explanation other than I was going to look for a freshly dug grave.
I was in my head and ready to give up on everything, but somehow still had my wits about me enough to react when I heard Caitlin yell, “Caden, duck!” A fucking log, or at least what seemed like one, swung out from behind a tree, right at my head. I dropped to the ground, feeling the air as it narrowly missed my skull. I wasn’t sure what was happening, but the thought that Wally had an accomplice was at the forefront of my mind. I’d dropped the flashlight as I ducked, and I scrambled for it behind me as I prepared to defend myself. I heard every single one of my friends gasp from somewhere far behind me.
The sound of someone moving near me broke through my adrenaline-fueled panic, and when I turned back in the direction the danger had come from, I realized that there was someone in front of me. My brain fought to understand what I was seeing while still in fight-or-flight mode. There were a pair of bare feet in my line of vision. One hovered over the ground, a bloody white cloth wrapped around the lower leg. I was still trying to comprehend what was happening when the person spoke. “Caden?!”
That voice. It was the only voice in the world I wanted to hear, and a voice that until right then I’d believed I would never hear again. He dropped to the ground in front of me as my brain finally registered who was standing there. Jamie.
My voice was caught in my throat as I looked at him. He flinched as he landed, clutching at his right leg, the one with the crude bandage. But he was there. Right there.
He’d fallen slightly at an angle, and in one quick assessment of him I noticed a huge, gnarly looking scab on his right elbow, and what looked like healing road burn all the way down his back and right side. He was covered in small bruises and dried blood. His hair was a little longer and wild, and he had stubble all over- on his face and chest and other places he’d never have let hair grow if he hadn’t been out there, apparently in the wild, for weeks. He had on a pair of boxer shorts but nothing else. There was a huge bruise on his jaw that was turning yellow, he was pale and looked about a breath away from passing out, but he was right there. Alive, and right in front of me.
His voice was raspy, but he said, “Caden, you…you’re…I could have killed you…are you real? Or is it the fever?”
“Jamie!” Amber cried, sobbing behind us.
Our friends were running through the woods toward us. I reached out and touched his arm in a spot that didn’t seem injured. “Jamie,” I said, my voice catching on a sob, “We’re really here. And you…you’re alive.”
“I was trying to get back to you,” he whispered, “I was trying. My leg is broken. The bone was through the skin. I tried to clean it, but it was already infected by the time I was able to. It hurt so fucking bad I couldn’t…I’m trying to get rid of the infection, but I didn’t think I was…” He fell forward into my arms and hugged me, as though trying to prove to himself that I was really there. I hugged him back, trying to avoid the injured spots, but there were so many that was nearly impossible. He didn’t seem to mind. “I don’t even know where I am,” he went on, “I haven’t been able to get farther than the water, and I’ve only managed to do that twice. It takes all day. I didn’t mean to try to hit you. I didn’t know it was you.”
“Jamie,” I whispered, holding him in my arms while I tried not to hurt him. He was hot. Burning up. He was right about the fever. “Stop apologizing. You are literally in the middle of nowhere with an infected compound fracture and no clothes. Of course you couldn’t get back on your own. And you didn’t hurt me. You’re safe now. We’re all safe. I’m just so glad we found you.”
“I thought you were him,” Jamie said, “I thought he’d come back to look again. I left the cabin to get more water and try to wash my leg again.” I noticed the key in his hand, for the door he’d probably locked so that Wally couldn’t sneak up on him by surprising him in the house, “I heard footsteps, and it sounded like his walk. He drags his feet and stuff is always rattling in his pockets. So, I hid and grabbed the branch. I knew I didn’t have time to get away. No one else has been out here at all. I thought it had to be him coming back to make sure.”
“Wally is in jail, Jamie,” I said softly, “He can’t hurt you anymore. He called his mom from a motel outside of town. He told her-” My voice broke, and I didn’t even want to say it.
Jamie, however, perked up slightly. “What did he say?” he pressed.
I swallowed, but said, “He told his mom that he’d done something bad and that they were going to come after him. That he had taken someone, and that the person wouldn’t listen. He wouldn’t give names, but we all knew it was you. They found an actual shrine to you in his apartment. He said that he’d tried to tell you, but you hit him and ran. That you were gone forever, and that he did it, but didn’t mean to. He said you were cut deep, so many times, blood everywhere. That you were in pieces, and no one would ever find you.” I choked on a sob.
Jamie sat up and looked at me, adjusting his leg. Our friends had reached us and were hovering behind me. “Oh, dammit, Caden,” he said softly, “I’m sorry. That was my fault.”
I looked at him, confused. “Huh?”
He looked regretful but a little proud as he said, “I was at a big disadvantage when he got me out here, but I had a couple of things working for me. First was the fact that the bastard continuously underestimated me. To a point that it was almost offensive.” He looked a little annoyed at the insult to his intelligence, and I couldn’t stop a small, teary laugh. Jamie went on, “The other thing was the fact that the guy is deathly afraid of bears. Like, to the point of a phobia. He couldn’t stop talking about them, and telling me how I couldn’t leave, because there were bears everywhere, waiting to kill me. I don’t know why he brought me here, of all places. Maybe he thought I’d be just as scared, but the guy was petrified to walk out the door.”
I remembered the I tried to tell him part of Wally’s story as Jamie went on. “So, he got me out here and he put me in the bedroom and turned the doorknob around, so it locked on the outside. I heard him lock it every time he left. He knew I was in no shape to MacGyver my way out of the boarded windows or locked door. He kept coming in, though, and trying to touch me. I knew he wanted to rape me, but he wanted me to let it happen.”
“He called it making love,” I said, “And he told his mom that you fought him every time.”
