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I squeeze my eyes shut tighter. Shake my head.
“What is it then?”
She strokes my shoulders. I can barely feel it through my jacket. But my hands are free. My hands are free to reach into my pocket.
“It’s okay, baby.” She wraps her arms around my neck and pulls me lower. Her lips touch my face—ice cold. I feel her stand down off her tiptoes.
“Is it me?” She whispers. “I’ve been feeling like it’s triggering for you. Something about this. Coming here?”
She knows me, this girl. Gwenna misses nothing.
It’s an effort to open my eyes. To look at her face. Gwenna, whom I love. Gwen for whom I’ve waited my whole life.
That I have to do this…
That this is the end. It hurts so much. I ease my hand into my pocket, wrap my fingers around the gun grip. I look into her lovely eyes, although it almost kills me.
&nbs
p; “Gwen…”
ONE
GWENNA
OCTOBER 20, 2015
“Shit!”
I smack the mouse with my whole palm, making my giant iMac monitor quiver on my desk. Then I lean in, squinting at the frozen image of the woods inside the bear enclosure.
“Ugh.”
Just like the last two times, I’m pretty sure that right beside that tree—right there, near the upper right-hand corner of the screen—is…something. The ground and limbs and leaves don’t match up right. I can’t explain it. It’s as if a ghost is there, making things almost imperceptibly blurry. Someone in a Harry Potter-style invisibility cloak. Someone in the universe’s best camouflage.
I seem destined to go crazy, though, because each time such a thing has caught my eye on one of the bear cams, it’s been impossible to tell for sure.
The first time I saw something funny in the footage was two weeks ago, Cam 2, at 4:45 a.m. The blur looked man-sized. I could have sworn I saw an arm swinging, the shadow of an arm, with the rest of the body behind a tree. But it was too dark, and the image therefore too grainy, to say for sure.
Then last week, last Wednesday I believe it was, I was following Aimee from Cam 4’s view to Cam 3’s, trying to be sure he didn’t try to bash his new tracker anklet against that freaking rock like last time, when I saw it again: a funny blurriness on the screen, right up against the bottom of a pine tree trunk. The cameras film in color, but not infrared, so all I could manage to identify was a smudge.
I froze the frames, getting down into the milliseconds, looking for the subtle differences between the frames—and there were subtle differences. As if someone was moving: a semi-invisible form, moving between two trees. But it was dusk. Again, I couldn’t quite be sure.
And then today—right about the time I finished kicking some punching bag ass in the clearing and started heading down the hill behind my cabin, which is situated at one corner of the 300-acre Bear Inc. enclosure, I heard this weird noise. It sounded like two people wrestling in the leaves.
I booked it home and reviewed the footage from Cams 1 and 2, the ones closest to where I was walking. And I found this. This—person. I swear it is! A person in some kind of top-notch camo—or a ghost. I can only see the back and maybe a bent head, but it totally looks like a person.
…A person-like blur.
Would I swear on it in court?
Well, no.
Can I be one-hundred percent sure where the person’s outline ends and the thick woods begin again? Not exactly. But it seems like something. Seriously it does.
And if it is something, I need to know. If it’s someone, I have to be cautious. With all the ruckus going on around here lately, it could be anything. Maybe evil Haywood has some asshole spying on me. Maybe there’s a serial killer in the area, one who gets off on victimizing girls with disabilities. The likelihood he would have an invisibility cloak seems slim, but you never know. It could be really good camouflage. They make some patterns that blend in really well with the woods inside the Smoky Mountain National Forest. My property backs right up to it.
I tilt my head to the side, as if that will help my eyes focus. Then I let out a long sigh, rewind and view the footage one last time, and click the red button on the upper left-hand corner of my Safari window.
