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Now, I wasn’t the only person living in the woods. Times were hard for people. There was a couple a while off who’d had their camper towed and couldn’t afford to get it out, so they’d been using their camping gear while working odd jobs so they could get it back out.
Further off than that was a vet who claimed he just couldn’t exist in normal society.
And while I hadn’t seen her personally, there were rumors about a “wild woman” who’d made this area her home for decades.
We weren’t alone in the woods.
In more ways than one.
So we minded our business as a whole, but there was also an unspoken agreement that we would all help when we could.
So when someone was screaming in the woods in the middle of the night, you got up and tried to investigate and help.
It could be anything, of course.
Someone stumbling out to pee and breaking a bone, or getting stabbed by something. Or, worst case, something like a bear cornering them.
I grabbed my bear spray as I stumbled to slip into my shoes, then make my way into the woods, not exactly sure where the noise came from, but making my way in that general direction.
The camper-less couple from Appalachia’s words came back to me. About not following sounds into the woods at night. About fae and creatures that best be left to their own devices.
Unluckily for me that night, I wasn’t the superstitious sort. So I followed the sounds deeper into the woods, sure some personal natural disaster had befallen one of my fellow woods-dwellers.
I’d just broken into the clearing where a fire pit was still flickering pathetically when I heard the gunshot.
Again, my mind went to bear.
Or some other predator.
I guess, in a way, I was right.
Only, these weren’t the four-legged predators I’d been expecting. Oh, no.
These were the two-legged human sort.
And they’d just put a bullet in the head of an unarmed man on his knees near the fire.
No, not even a full-grown man. The guy couldn’t have been any older than myself.
And his life was just… snuffed out. Just like that.
I hadn’t brought a gun with me when I’d left home, despite my parents all but insisting on it. But gun laws were complicated, varying from state to state. If I got myself pulled over or something, it could be ugly for me to have an unregistered gun.
So I had a couple different knives and bear spray and that was about it.
Against a group of half a dozen guys, all fully armed.
They saw me before I could slink back off and try to pretend I didn’t see shit.
“Oh, what do we have here?”
That was the same voice that greeted me when I pulled into the alley.
The leader of this little outlaw gang.
He was tall and the kind of broad that came both from genetics and a lot of hours lifting and putting down heavy shit. His pale skin was a little splotchy across his cheeks, and his light blue eyes almost seemed silver under the moonlight.
Curtis Carver.
