Copyright 2026 by DJ Rawlings

12:07 AM

I am away from him. But not far enough.

A branch strikes my mouth, and I run through it. The next one catches my shirt. I pull until something tears, stumble forward, and keep going with both hands in front of my face. I cannot see where my feet land. Each step finds a different piece of the forest: mud, stone, something sharp that stays in my heel until the next step drives it farther in.

Behind me, a man shouts.

I run harder.

The trees crowd together. My shoulder hits a trunk I never see, turning me sideways. For a moment my feet keep moving without the rest of me. I fall onto my hands, scramble up, and leave something warm on the bark when I catch myself.

I do not know how far I have come. The building disappeared almost as soon as I reached the trees. There was light behind me, a rectangle in the dark, and then branches closed over it. I have been running downhill because that is where my body went when I fell through the brush. If the ground turns me back toward the building, I will not know until I see the door.

Please do not let me see the door.

My breath catches on a sob. I swallow it and try to pull more air through my nose, but I cannot get enough. My mouth opens. The noise seems to travel ahead of me, warning everything in the woods that I am coming.

Another shout reaches through the trees.

“Hannah!”

My name.

He says it as though the sound belongs to him. 

I duck beneath a branch and run straight into the one below it. Wood strikes the top of my shoulder. My knees fold, and this time I cannot make them straighten. I slide into the muddy space between two roots and stop against the base of a tree.

Get up.

I put both palms beneath me. My arms shake. The skin around my wrists burns where the restraints rubbed it raw. One knee rises, then falls back into the mud. There is nothing wrong with the knee except pain and the fact that I cannot get air into my lungs fast enough. I try again anyway.

Something cracks behind me.

I pull myself around the tree instead.

The trunk is broad enough to cover my back. I press against it and draw my bare feet out of the open. Bark catches in my hair. The cuts across my knees sting where mud enters them, but the pain in my left heel is deeper. I reach for it and stop before touching the sole. I am afraid of what I might find there.

I listen with my mouth open.

Leaves move overhead. Water falls from a branch and taps the ground beside my hand. Somewhere downhill, something rustles and becomes still.

No footsteps.

I lean sideways just enough to look past the trunk.

The forest gives me almost nothing. Black trees against other black trees. A pale opening high above where clouds pass across the moon. The bushes I came through are moving, but I cannot tell whether he is inside them or whether I left them shaking.

I pull back.

My hands are empty.

The screw is gone. I remember its head pressed into the center of my palm and the short, terrible sound he made when I drove the point into his hand. I remember him reaching for me with the other one. After that, the memories come too quickly to separate: a wall, a door handle, the girl calling from somewhere I could not reach.

Then air on my face.

I should still have the screw. I should have kept it. Dad would tell me to stop thinking about the thing I dropped and use what I still have. I look at the mud around my knees as if it might have fallen here instead of somewhere between the building and this tree.

Nothing shines.

I close one hand around a stone. It fits inside my palm, rough on one side and wet on the other. When I lift it, my wrist trembles so badly that I have to bring it back against my chest.

I need to stand before he comes.

I put the right foot beneath me and push against the trunk. The left heel touches the ground. Pain goes straight through my leg, and a small sound escapes before I can stop it.

The rustling downhill stops.

I stay halfway upright, one hand against the tree, the other holding the stone.

Something breathes beyond the bushes.

It is low and rough, followed by a slow movement through wet leaves. I cannot see a light. He may have turned it off. He may have come around me while I was looking uphill.

My legs begin lowering without permission.

I make them stop.

A branch moves ten yards away. Beneath it, two pale points appear and vanish. They return lower to the ground.

Eyes.

I cannot make sense of their height. Then a long shape steps out of the brush, and I see a head held level with a narrow body. Gray fur catches what little light reaches the ground. One ear stands higher than the other. The lower ear has a piece missing near the tip.

A dog.

The word belongs to sidewalks and backyards and Lucy asking if we can pet one.

I almost say it aloud. I almost hold out my hand.

The animal lifts its muzzle. Its lips draw back, and the sound that comes from it presses against the tree at my back.

Too large. Too quiet before the growl. No collar that I can see.

A wolf.

My foot slides in the mud.

Its head turns at once.

I stop moving. The stone is trapped between my hand and my chest. I try to raise it, but my elbow strikes bark, and the small knock brings the wolf another step closer.

There is brush to my right and open ground to my left. I look left.

The wolf moves left too.

I cannot go that way.

I press my back harder against the tree, as though there might be somewhere farther inside it to go. The wolf lowers its head. I can hear air passing through its nose. Its eyes disappear when the moon goes behind a cloud, but the growl remains.

I have no shoes. No door. Nothing between its mouth and my legs.

I lift the stone.

“Please,” I whisper.

The wolf steps into the space where my feet had been.