Chapter 1 (Part 1)
Present Day
A blood-curdling shriek ripped from deep within Ryan Caldwell’s throat, pulling him up from the seemingly endless depths of his nightmares. Every morning for the last three and a half months, he had woken up the same way, with the same scream, with his cheeks flushed and burning with embarrassment afterwards. Among other new, incredibly inconvenient manifestations, he wondered if this was going to be his new normal for the rest of his life.
Sunlight streamed through sheer black curtains of the dorm room, burning his retinas. Involuntary shudders took over his body. He could feel a thick layer of sweat coating him head to toe as if he’d pulled his clothes on after a shower without bothering to dry off first. He hid himself under the covers, peeking only a single eye out into the room. His knuckles whitened as he squeezed fistfuls of his comforter in an effort to gain control over himself again.
From beneath his covers, he watched a mass of blankets across the room shift, and a pair of white, bulky headphones appeared, beneath which was the groggy face of Ryan’s roommate, Tony Gillis. He was the poor, unfortunate soul who was stuck sharing the room with Ryan for the year, though Ryan suspected that his patience wouldn’t last past November. Of course, there was always the chance that someone else on the floor could hear and file a complaint, then Tony wouldn’t have to worry about a thing. Ryan was just thankful that the walls were thick, since nobody seemed to notice his screams.
Tony pulled his phone to his face and squinted and blinked his eyes hard to will the sleep away. “Well, we almost made it to six today,” he noted sarcastically before sweeping away his blanket and standing up to stretch. He pulled the headphones from his head, leaving a dent in his curly brown hair. He gave a quick shake and the dent disappeared like magic.
“Wakey, wakey, hands off your snaky,” he called with a grin.
Ryan didn’t respond. He forced his body to sink into the mattress and felt his cheeks blaze again. He opened his mouth to say “Sorry,” but it caught in his throat, and a squeak of air came out instead.
Tony had the chance to request to change his dorm at any time, but he didn’t. At least, not yet anyway. The first day they met, Tony knew exactly who Ryan was. It was hard not to when his face had been plastered all over the national news, newspapers, social media, and who knows where else. At first, Ryan was worried that he was going to make a big deal about everything, but he hadn’t. In fact, he was probably the most patient and understanding person Ryan had met since the Incident.
It wasn’t an easy thing to wake up every morning to Ryan’s screams (as Ryan hated himself for waking up that way), but Tony didn’t complain. He always played it off as nonchalantly as he could. Of course, he made a few changes to make things easier, like headphones, but he was quick to play things off.
Ryan appreciated how Tony treated him. Tony never coddled him, as everyone else in his life did. It wasn’t long after the Incident that people started treating him like he was a piece of glass ready to shatter at any second. That didn’t take long to get old. Tony was always quick to make sure he was including Ryan in everything, no matter how boring or stupid Ryan thought it was. Though perhaps most of all, Ryan was just happy that Tony stayed despite seeing all the weird things he did.
Ryan suspected that on some level, Tony must have understood that red flags would start popping up all over the place if he requested a dorm change so early in the semester. Not to mention, if someone much less understanding moved in and complained to the right person, there was a chance that Ryan would have to move back home. Living five hours away wasn’t exactly the ideal commute. That would leave him with dropping out or switching schools. Considering how hard he fought with his folks to come back to school this year, that wasn’t an option Ryan wanted to entertain. That would be all his parents needed to have him committed, which he also fought tooth and nail to avoid.
Ryan continued to lie in bed, still hiding under his blankets. Feeling his chest wanting to collapse in on itself, he forced himself to take deep breaths to try to loosen it. Instinctively, his hand clutched his T-shirt to pull the collar away from his throat. Even through the shirt, he could feel the angry raised skin of the thick, jagged scar that ran from his chest, across his collar bone, to his right shoulder. His fingers traced it through the fabric. No matter how much he kept it hidden, it was still there and always would be, serving as nothing more than a constant reminder of his nightmare. A lobotomy would be the only thing that would let him forget- scar or no scar. Deep down, he knew there was never going to be a day that he didn’t think of that hellish weekend. Although the way things were going lately, a lobotomy would be the most sane-sounding solution to all his problems. I bet I’d get a better night’s sleep. Maybe Tony, too, the poor bastard.
But who was really the poor bastard in this situation?
“Good morning, Sunshine,” Tony teased as he came back into the room, “You plan on getting up today?”
Ryan didn’t sit up. He didn’t respond. His mind had since gone elsewhere. It went to where it always went the moment after his sleeping nightmares ended, the very place where his waking nightmares took over...
Emma.
Emma. Just the thought of her name alone felt like getting socked in the gut. It hurt losing everyone, but losing her was like losing a lung. Perhaps worst of all was that he wasn’t even granted the decency of closure with her. Everyone else’s fates were discovered, but Emma was never recovered.
For Ryan, she was the one. He and Emma had been dating for two years before everything happened. They were young, and there was a lot in his life he was unsure of, but he knew unequivocally that he didn’t want to live a life without Emma in it. Part of him wondered which impacted him more, losing her or...
Today marked the fourth month since the incident. It felt like an entire lifetime had passed him by, not just four months. Another month down, however many more to go, he thought soberly. His mind wanted to go back to the woods, to where everything happened, to rehash every split-second decision they made, trying to see if there could have been any other outcome, but he knew better. All that did was bring him back, but it didn’t bring back everyone else.
He listened to Tony shuffle around to get ready for the day until his pulse slowed, and then his breathing. He pulled the covers back and took a deep, slow breath, relishing the cool air. He remained unmoving in bed, just staring up at the ceiling. The first panic attack of the day was done, but there would be more. There were always more. His folks had said he wasn’t ready to go back to school, but he craved to have some semblance of normalcy in his life again. He also thought it was good to get away from his parents. His mother had been overbearing, fussing over every little thing. At first, it was nice, but it didn’t take long for him to feel like he was suffocating. His father was more combative. Angry that Ryan wasn’t making strides in therapy; he often nitpicked every decision that Ryan made, equating it to him not wanting to get better. If it were up to him, Ryan would have been committed as soon as he was out of the hospital bed right after the Incident. Ryan had argued with his father that he was doing the best he could to get better, that he didn’t need to go to a mental hospital, but all it did was drive the wedge between them further apart. They meant well, or at least his mother did, but they were only making things worse. Coming back to college seemed like the right move. The problem was that he hadn’t anticipated just how hard it was to come back and pretend that everything was normal. He was trying so hard to convince his parents that he could handle it that he didn’t realize he was trying to really convince himself. It was clear from the get-go that he was going to be stuck between a rock and a hard place.
People staring at him everywhere he went was the first sign that things were going to be far from normal. He knew that some people would stare; it was unavoidable when you were all the national news could talk about for a week straight. But what he didn’t anticipate was rooms quieting when he walked in, or the lingering, slack-jawed stares people gave him as if he were born with a third leg coming out of his head. It didn’t take long for it to get old. Even in class, while the professors gave their lectures, he could feel eyes on him. The first week back, it clearly annoyed his professors, who were used to having total, undivided attention, but their bruised egos recovered quickly.
“Are you planning on hiding in the blankets all day? Or are you planning on joining the rest of the world? I was hoping to get breakfast today, so, shake a leg,” Tony nagged.
Ryan shot him a glare from the corner of his eye. The tone in his voice made Ryan think of his mother hounding him, but he knew he couldn’t mope around in bed all day. He had things to do, places to be, and unfortunately had people to see. Namely, he had an Economics class this morning with Professor Davins, a short man with an even smaller moustache, who loved to drone on and on in a monotone voice about the most boring topics that Ryan had the displeasure of having to hear. If there was any silver lining to be had of this whole situation, it was that his obsessive paranoia of people watching him in public kept him awake; otherwise, the lectures would put him right to sleep. The old Ryan would have fallen asleep by the second day of class, but this new Ryan wanted to avoid sleeping any way he could. Besides, if he wanted people to stop noticing him, having a nightmare in the middle of Economics wasn’t the way to go about doing that.
Ryan swung his legs out of bed and padded over to the crappy, school-issued pine wardrobe. He pulled out a gray T-shirt with a faded AC/DC logo on the front. Then he pulled out his usual black hoodie and zipped it up to his chest, leaving the very top of the band’s logo peeking out over the top of his zipper. He threw on a pair of jeans that didn’t smell too ripe and then grabbed the last bit of his ensemble, which was a faded black cap he’d worn every day for the past five years. Besides the scars, it was the only other thing that made it out of the forest.
During the summer vacation between his Sophomore and Junior years of high school, he managed to get the opportunity to become a junior ranger back home in Midway Forest. It was one of the proudest moments in his life, shadowed only by his acceptance into college. Even though it was only trivial tasks the rangers were having him do since he was a kid, he still felt like he was an important member of the crew, and they still treated him the same. His time there taught him more than he could have ever imagined. When he started, he felt that he knew the forest paths fairly well, and even some spots off the beaten path. It wasn’t until he walked into the station and saw the map pinned to the wall that he realized just how little he knew about Midway Forest. By the end of that summer, he had memorized the forest map and could get around almost half of it on foot by memory. Best of all, he was told he had the opportunity to secure a future job for himself if he wanted. The rangers told him all he would need was a bachelor’s degree in wildlife management. Once he had that, he could come back and apply for a position.
Ryan always complained as a kid that Midway was too small for anything exciting to happen, but sometimes being a small, rural town had its advantages. A larger city would have him jumping through hoops to become a forest ranger, but not Midway.
When summer came to an end, he had to turn in the uniform, but they let him keep the hat. He thought it was so cool that he wore it everywhere he went. Despite countless washings, there was still a permanent sweat stain around the base of the hat. The front logo, originally a pine tree made of black fabric, had come off, leaving behind a ghost of the image. Beyond that, there wasn’t any other wear or tear. It certainly withstood the test of time. He slipped it on over his close-cropped, dark hair. His eyes lingered on the brim where his thumb pinched. Just to the left was a dime-sized splotch that any stranger could have easily mistaken for an oil stain or rust dust that had been worked into the fabric, but Ryan knew exactly what that stain was.
It was blood.
Whose blood it was, he couldn’t say. It could have been his, one of his friends, or it could even have been one of theirs. Part of him wanted to know, but another part chose to ignore the tugging curiosity. Every time he would start to wonder, a voice in his head would say, You might not like what you find. Do you really want to open up that can of worms? Now? Whoever the owner of it was, he couldn’t bring himself to wash it away. It was as if he was washing the last bit of them away. As twisted as it was to have a constant reminder in front of his face, day after day, something inside compelled him to leave the hat the way it was. He didn’t even tell anyone when he found it the next day after the Incident. His mother would have run the hat through the washing machine until it was reduced to threads if she found out about it. His therapist would be salivating if he knew what he was clinging to. Ryan could already hear the questions now, one after the other being fired off in rapid succession. Some stones were just better left unturned.
