I'd kill for you

The Predictor Journal

I scrambled backward until my spine hit the far wall, the radio still clutched in both hands like it could shield me from anything at all.

Gasoline crept toward the doorframe in a thin black ribbon, catching what little light came through the gap and holding it there, glossy and wrong, spreading wider by the second.

I screamed then. Loud, raw, everything my throat had refused to do over Preston's body finally tearing loose all at once, until my voice cracked and gave out and I kept trying anyway.

Nobody answered. The storm ate the sound before it could travel twenty feet in any direction, swallowed whole by wind and rain and the thick old walls around me.

I threw my weight against the door once, twice, pain jarring up through my shoulder into my teeth, the bolt outside not moving a fraction of an inch for any of it, solid as the mountain itself.

I don't know how long I stood there, counting my own breathing, waiting to smell smoke instead of just fuel. Long enough that my hands stopped shaking and went numb instead. Long enough that I'd started, quietly, uselessly, planning which corner wouldn't hurt as much when it finally happened.

Then the door didn't creak.

It exploded.

Wood splintered inward off its hinges in one violent motion, rain and gray daylight flooding the shed all at once, and Marcus stood in the frame, chest heaving, both hands still curled from where he'd torn the bolt clean out of the frame like it was cardboard.

I didn't have words. I just stared at him, at the door in pieces around his boots, at strength that shouldn't have belonged to anyone built the way he was.

"Are you hurt?" His voice was low, controlled, but his eyes moved over me fast, cataloguing every inch of me the way I usually catalogued other people.

I shook my head. I couldn't make myself speak yet, my throat still raw from screaming into a room that ate every sound.

He crossed the shed in two strides and pulled me up by the arm, careful, not rough, and got me out into the rain before I fully registered moving at all, my boots stumbling through the gasoline slick pooled by the threshold.

Behind us, in the mud near the tree line, I caught a glimpse of a shape retreating into the pines. Gone before I could be sure I'd seen it at all, or only wanted to, some small desperate part of me needing a face to put to all of this.

"Someone was out here," I finally managed, my voice still thin.

"I know."

"You saw them?"

"I saw the door was bolted from outside." His jaw tightened, a small, controlled motion. "That's enough for me."

He didn't ask why I'd been alone in the shed. He didn't ask who might have done it. He walked me back to the lodge with one hand at my elbow, steady, silent, like the answer to both questions already sat behind his eyes and he simply hadn't decided to share it with me yet.

Halfway across the clearing I found my voice again. "How did you know? To come."

He was quiet long enough that I thought he wouldn't answer at all.

"I heard the bolt drop," he said finally. "From the porch. That's not a sound you mistake for the wind."

It wasn't really an answer. It also wasn't a lie, as far as I could tell, and after two days on this mountain I'd started grading honesty on a curve I didn't like.

That was the moment the fear in my chest changed shape.

It wasn't only fear of whoever locked that door anymore.

It was fear of how calm he'd been standing in the wreckage of it, like violence was a language he already spoke fluently, one he hadn't needed to learn in that moment at all, only remember.

Ms. Ward fussed over me for twenty minutes, wrapped a blanket around my shoulders, made me drink water I didn't want, her hands still trembling as she checked my arms for burns that weren't there, murmuring apologies that weren't really hers to give. Nobody suggested calling the police, because there was still no way to call anyone at all, and saying it out loud only seemed to make the walls press in closer around all of us.

By evening, the storm hadn't loosened its grip on the mountain. If anything, the wind screamed harder through the gaps in the shutters, and half the class had stopped pretending they weren't crying somewhere between meals, huddled in blankets that never quite got them warm.

They put us back in the main hall, cots lined in uneven rows, one exhausted teacher's aide keeping watch by the door with a flashlight balanced on his knee, its beam dimming a little more with every hour that passed.

Marcus's cot sat four down from mine.

Somewhere near the back of the hall, two girls I barely knew were whispering theories about the caretaker, about a hiker who might have wandered onto the property, about anyone at all who wasn't sitting four cots away from me with a lighter that had put a boy in the ground. I let their voices blur into background noise and kept my eyes on Marcus instead.

I watched him fall asleep the way I'd watched everything else, tracking the moment his breathing slowed and evened out, the moment his hand, curled loosely near his backpack, finally went slack against the blanket.

I gave it another twenty minutes to be sure, counting them off in my head the same way I'd counted his eyes not moving on the bus, the same patient, useless arithmetic I'd been running my whole life.

Then I got up.

My legs felt like borrowed things, unsteady under me, but I crossed the gap between our cots in careful, silent steps, kneeling by his bag while the aide's flashlight beam swept somewhere else across the room, toward a window rattling hard in its frame.

The zipper was loud in my ears even though it barely made a sound at all. I froze twice, certain he'd wake, certain I'd feel his hand close around my wrist before I got the chance to explain myself, to explain anything. He didn't move.

Inside, past a change of clothes and a half eaten protein bar, my fingers found something hard and leather bound, its cover soft at the edges from years of handling, worn the way a favorite thing gets worn.

A journal. Old, cracked spine that fell open on its own to a page near the middle, like it had been read there a hundred times over.

I angled it toward the faint hall light and read.

Preston Hale. Midnight. Equipment shed. Throat.

The date beneath it sat three days before we'd even boarded the bus.

I stared at the ink until the letters stopped making sense as words, my heart slamming so hard I was sure the whole room could hear it over the storm still working the roof above us.

He hadn't guessed. He hadn't stumbled onto something after the fact. He had written it down, exact, before it happened, in handwriting that didn't shake at all, not once, not anywhere on the page.

I flipped forward with numb fingers, past pages of dates and names I didn't recognize, strangers from some version of this week I hadn't lived. One entry was crossed out so hard the pen had torn through the paper. Another just read too late in letters pressed so deep they'd ghosted onto the page behind it.

I kept turning until my own name jumped off the paper and stopped my breath completely.

Claire. Shed. Gasoline. She lives.

Below that, in smaller, tighter script, like an afterthought that mattered more than everything written above it:

This time, she lives.

Behind me, on the cot, Marcus's breathing changed.