I'd kill for you

paranoia in the Pines

I don't remember deciding to hide. My body did it before my mind caught up, dropping low behind the equipment shed, flashlight clicked off, breath held so tight my chest ached with it.

The footsteps stopped somewhere near the bonfire pit.

I pressed my spine to the wet wood siding and counted my own heartbeat, because it was the only thing loud enough to focus on. One. Two. Three. I made it to eleven before my mind caught up with what I was actually doing, crouched in the mud six feet from a body, hiding from whoever had put it there.

A voice, low, familiar, cut through the rain.

"Claire."

Marcus.

I didn't answer. My hand found a fist sized rock in the mud beside me and closed around it without deciding to, some animal part of my brain choosing a weapon before the rest of me caught up.

"I know you're out here," he said. Not loud. Not urgent. Just certain, the way he said everything. "It isn't safe."

He was seven feet away. Maybe eight. I could hear the rain hit his jacket, a different sound than the rain hitting the shed behind my back, closer, sharper.

If I ran, he'd hear me. If I stayed, he'd find me anyway. There didn't seem to be a version of the next thirty seconds where I came out ahead.

I thought about the lighter sitting in Preston's blood and something cold slid down through my stomach and stayed there, curling up like it planned to live in me now.

Then Ms. Ward's flashlight beam swung across the clearing, and voices erupted from the direction of the cabins, shrill and panicked, someone screaming Preston's name into the storm loud enough to carry over the wind.

Marcus's footsteps moved away, unhurried, toward the noise.

I stayed crouched in the mud another full minute before my legs would work at all, my knees locked, my hands shaking around a rock I finally let fall.

By the time I limped back into the chaos, half the school was awake, flashlights crossing like search beams, Ms. Ward shouting for everyone to stay together, stay inside, stay calm, her voice climbing an octave with each word she forced out into the rain.

Nobody asked where I'd been. Nobody looked at me long enough to wonder.

Except Marcus.

He stood at the edge of the crowd, soaked through, his expression unreadable in the dark. When our eyes met, he didn't look away first.

Neither did I, this time. I couldn't. I was too busy trying to read him, trying to find the c***k in his face where the truth would show, the way it always showed on everyone else eventually, sooner or later, if you watched long enough.

There was nothing. No panic. No grief. No guilt.

Just that same steady, waiting look he'd given me on the bus, like the last few hours hadn't rearranged anything for him at all.

I made myself look down at his hands before someone pulled me away toward the cabins. Clean. No mud past the wrist, no blood I could see under the flashlight beams crossing the clearing. Either he hadn't touched Preston at all, or he'd known exactly how to avoid it.

Both possibilities kept me awake long after Ms. Ward stopped counting heads.

The rest of the night blurred into flashlights and static choked radios that couldn't reach anyone past the ridge. The caretaker's truck wouldn't start. The one landline in the lodge office crackled with dead air. Ms. Ward's hands shook so badly she dropped her phone twice, screen dark, no bars, no help coming until the storm broke and someone could hike out far enough for a signal.

We were locked in with whoever did this.

They herded us into the main hall before dawn, forty students on cots and blankets under flickering emergency lights, and told us not to leave in pairs, not to leave alone, not to leave at all, not for any reason, until someone in charge said otherwise.

I lay awake staring at the rafters, replaying the clearing over and over. The angle of the wound. The rain sliding off silver metal. The particular, precise way Preston's body had been arranged, almost gentle, like whoever did it had taken their time and hadn't minded getting wet doing it.

Marcus didn't seem like someone who took his time by accident.

By midmorning, the storm hadn't broken. If anything it worsened, wind slamming the shutters, rain turning to something closer to hail against the windows. The lodge groaned around us like a ship taking on bad water, and somewhere down the hall a door kept slamming open and shut with the pressure change until someone finally wedged it with a chair.

I watched Marcus from across the hall for three straight hours.

He read. He ate a granola bar someone handed out without looking at who gave it to him. He didn't join the whispered clusters of students trading theories under their breath, didn't flinch when Naomi Cole loudly announced she'd seen him near the shed the night before, didn't so much as glance up when half the room turned to stare at him at once.

"You saw him?" Bree whispered to Naomi, close enough that I caught it clean.

"I mean, I think so." Naomi's eyes flicked toward me, then away fast. "It was dark. But it looked like him. Same jacket, anyway."

I filed that away too. The hesitation before I think so. The way her gaze had touched me and skittered off like it burned to hold still on my face for even a second.

Around noon, Ms. Ward assigned pairs to check the supply shed for a working radio, the old hand crank kind the caretaker swore was in there somewhere behind the paint cans. She read the list off a clipboard with a pen that kept dying in the cold, shaking it against her palm between names, her voice fraying a little more with every pair she called.

"Claire Doe," she said. "You're with... "

Her eyes scanned the room, found no one free, and settled back on the clipboard with a small, apologetic frown that didn't reach her eyes.

"You'll go alone. It's twenty feet from the porch. You'll be within sight the whole time, I promise."

Bree's hand shot up beside me. "I can go with her."

"You're already paired with the kitchen check." Ms. Ward didn't even look up from the clipboard. "We need every team doubled up somewhere. Twenty minutes, Claire. That's all."

I wanted to argue. I didn't, because arguing meant admitting I was afraid, and admitting I was afraid meant someone might ask why, and I didn't have an answer yet that I could say out loud in front of forty exhausted, frightened people.

Bree caught my sleeve on the way out the door anyway. "Yell if it's weird out there."

"It's a shed."

"Everything's weird now." She wasn't wrong.

The path to the shed was shorter than it had felt the night before, mud sucking at my boots with every step, rain slicing sideways under the porch overhang and finding the gap at my collar anyway, cold enough to make me gasp. I pulled the door open, hinges shrieking, and stepped into a dark that smelled like gasoline and old rope and dust gone damp with the storm.

I found the radio on a shelf just inside the door, dust thick over its casing, cord tangled around a coil of garden hose. I picked it up and turned to go, already thinking about getting back under the porch overhang, back into the noise and light of the main hall.

The door slammed shut.

Not the wind. The wind didn't drop a bolt into place on the other side, a sound I felt in my teeth, metal on metal, final.

"Hello?" My voice came out smaller than I wanted it to. "This isn't funny."

No answer. Just rain drumming the tin roof and my own pulse loud and stupid in my ears.

Then I smelled it, sharp under the gasoline already sitting in the air, stronger now, wetter, spreading fast across old wood that would drink it right up and hold onto it.

I dropped to my knees and pressed my eye to the gap under the door.

A thin, dark stream was sliding under the wood, pooling toward my boots, and somewhere on the other side, unhurried footsteps moved away through the mud like there was no reason at all to hurry.