Survivor Guilt wrote:
Pet's name: Matted Love (Dove for all intents and purposes) and Pet's name: Charlie
"We've got to get out of here!" I yell over my shoulder at Dove to find her right next to me, panting an extremely small amount for the distance we've already ran.
However, I don't get a chance to think about that fact very long, as she shoves me forward and tells me urgently as she begins to run again, "He's not too far behind! We've got to keep moving!"
As soon as the words are out of her mouth, I hear the crashing through the undergrowth that could only be him - a part of my mind, the part not completely occupied with staying alive, wonders if he would shoot us like he did the rest of them or strangle us out of anger if he caught us - and I start to run again too, eager to put a million miles between me and him.
"I think we've lost him for now," Dove manages to gasp as she bends over, with her hands on her knees, in an attempt to catch her breath. We had just been running for around two hours straight, if my watch is correct, so we probably put at least five miles of distance between us and him. It's not nearly as much as I would want - being on the moon and him on Earth wouldn't be a large enough distance between us and him - but it will have to do for now, because it's now dark and because I don't think I could run another minute.
Glancing over at Dove, I find, with almost jealousy, that she's almost completely caught her breath now, as she's standing up and isn't breathing nearly as heavily as I am.
"How did... you catch... your breath... that quickly?" I ask her between ragged breaths, and her eyes lock on mine in the darkness for a moment, an unpleasant emotion - distaste, maybe even loathing - flashing through them before she replies.
"I'm a cross country runner. What we just ran is maybe a little more strenuous than our daily workouts," she responds, and I hear in her voice what I saw in her eyes - distaste, maybe even bordering on loathing. She really doesn't like me, does she?
Unfortunately for her, I'm the only life form in probably a ten-mile radius that doesn't want to rape her or kill her and eat her - as we're surrounded by wild animals and him, the scariest animal of all - so I guess she's stuck with me for the time being, unless she would like to be suicidal and go out in the forest by herself and walk into his open arms.
I actually don't mind being out in the woods with her at all; in fact, out of all of the girls that we originally kidnapped by him, along with me - it's incredible to think that, after twelve hours, Dove and I are the only ones still alive of that party of ten - she's probably the one I would want to be stranded in a forest with after running from a serial killer. Dove is far more resourceful and practical and brave and level-headed than any of the other girls, and she, in my opinion, is nicer to look at than any of the other girls too.
The crunching sound of forest matter being crushed under someone's feet catches my attention, and I look up in surprise to find Dove walking off into the forest, away from the small clearing of trees we had stopped in.
"Where are you going?" I call after her, slightly alarmed that she didn't even bother to tell me when she was going to leave.
"To go get firewood," she answers shortly, and I nod my head in understanding.
"Do you need help with that?" I ask her, and she shakes her head as she responds, in a cynical and annoyed tone, "No. Just stay put and don't get yourself killed, alright?"
She looks over her shoulder to meet my gaze once more, to make sure that I understand, and I nod my head again and watch her turn back around and walk farther out into the forest as I realize that she sees me as nothing more than a burden, just something to slow her down and make it harder for her to survive. And maybe she's right; so far, I really only have been a burden. Multiple times, she had to stop and wait for a few seconds for me when we were running, and had to pull me up after I tripped over a low-lying branch more times than I can count, and I have a feeling that she wasn't running as fast as she were if she were alone so that she wouldn't lose me. In fact, she would probably be a good two or three miles away from here if it weren't for me slowing her down when we were running.
However, I don't want to be a burden, and I don't want her to not like me because she sees me as just a burden, so, determined to show to her that I'm useful, I find two logs nearby that would be good to sit on and drag them to about the middle of the small clearing, with some space in between, so that way we can light a fire in the middle of the logs and stay warm while sitting.
Just as I've finished arranging the logs, I hear Dove coming back from collecting firewood, and look up to find her struggling to carry the pile of wood in her hands.
Immediately I run to her, tell her, "I've got it," and take the wood, which proves to not weigh that much at all, from her, our hands brushing at the transfer of the last piece. Our eyes meet for a moment, and she looks away quickly, but not so quickly that I can't see the expression in them: one of grudging respect, and I can't help but smile to myself as I walk back over to the two logs for sitting on and deposit the wood in between them.
It looks like Dove is starting to think that I'm not such a burden after all.
"Where did you find these?" Dove asks me, gesturing to the blueberries in the palm of her hand.
"There's a small pond I almost fell in not too far from here, and there was a bush right there," I reply, shrugging my shoulders nonchalantly and hoping that the satisfaction I'm feeling at finally proving to be useful doesn't show.
"Well, that was a pretty good find," Dove tells me, and something that partially resembles a smile flits across her face.
"What's so funny?" I question, my eyes locking on hers in the darkness to find, unfortunately, an almost savage pleasure in her eyes that lets me know that what she's thinking is about me and isn't very nice at all.
"The thought of you, smooth Charlie Jameson, falling into a pond," she responds, and I see all of the distaste she originally had for me still present in her gaze.
Although I'm disheartened by that, it just makes my desire for her to like me or at least not so openly dislike me even stronger, and I ask her quietly after a few moments of silence, "All of the other girls begged for their lives, when he was about to shoot them." He got distracted and Dove and I were able to break out just as he was about to shoot her - it's incredible how easy it is to talk about the events, when my mind is too shell-shocked to really register everything; it's like I'm talking about complete strangers when I detail all of the horrors we went through. "Why didn't you?" I look her in the eye seriously here, and she regards me almost warily for a second before answering.
"Because begging for my life wasn't actually going to save it, and, because I was going to die either way, I wanted to die on my own terms, silent and rebellious to the end. I didn't want to give him the satisfaction of knowing he'd broken me." She shrugs here, and looks away after a moment to stare into the fire contemplatively, her eyes reflecting the flames.
That means that Dove is far braver as well as far tougher and more resilient than the rest of us kidnapped by him; in other words, she's just an all-around better human being than us nine who either begged for our lives - in the case of the eight girls who are dead now - or were going to beg for our lives - in the case of me.
Suddenly I remembered something, about how there were no sounds when he took her back to his room - there had been screaming from the other eight girls - and I couldn't help but question, "What happened when he took you back to his room? Did you just stay quiet for that too?"
"No," she responds, surprising me greatly, "because he didn't do anything to me. He took my shirt off, said that I wasn't pretty enough, let me put my shirt back on, and then we just sat there in silence for the allotted time, so as to make you think that he was doing something to me." She adds, with a bitter smile on her face, after a small pause, "Just one of the benefits of being completely forgettable, I suppose."
"Oh," I say quietly, incredibly surprised, and find myself saying, before I really know what I'm doing, "I don't know how he thought you weren't pretty enough, and I don't know how you think that you're forgettable. If anything, you were the prettiest girl out of the bunch, and definitely not a girl anyone would forget anytime soon."
As soon as the words are out of my mouth, I expect her to rise from her seat on her log facing me and punch me, even though what I said is true - she most definitely is the prettiest girl out of the group, and very unforgettable too, with her long hair pulled carelessly but attractively into a ponytail and her sharp blue eyes that stared out of her intelligent and exotic-looking face - but instead she just scans me carefully for a long moment before finally telling me, "Thanks, I guess."
"No problem," I say, watching her carefully myself for a second before noticing that she's shivering violently. I hadn't noticed the cold at all really, but I guess that Dove, being so much smaller, is much more affected by it than I am.
Almost instinctively, I rise to my feet and find myself walking over to her, sitting down next to her and wrapping my arms around her to keep her warm. When she doesn't react and doesn't even seem that stiff and unwilling, I bend over her, put my lips next to her ear, so that I'm not touching her skin but am very close to, and murmur, "You know, you're supposed to huddle together to share body heat and stay warm." I then find myself having a difficult time pulling my head away, with the knowledge that her neck is right there and that it would be so easy, so easy, to just lean it and kiss it, but eventually I'm able to.
After a long moment of silence and Dove looking away, she finally murmurs, "I know," not bothering to even turn and look back at me, and here I get annoyed and pull away from her so that way I can look her straight in the eye.
"Dove, why do you dislike me so? I've done basically everything I could over the last few hours to make it so that I'm not a burden to you, and that I'm actually useful, and still you don't like me! So what is it? Why don't you like me?" I ask her commandingly, the will in my voice almost forcing her to keep looking me in the eye.
"Because you're a player, and you only ever date girls for their bodies, that's why," she replies sharply. "It's always the same pattern with you: you find some pretty girl, date her, undoubtedly sleep with her, and then dump her when you get tired of her, and that, that using of girls, doesn't sit well with me. It doesn't sit well with me at all."
"First off, I never slept with any of my girlfriends. I made out with them, sure, but I never slept with them," I tell her, feeling that I need to defend myself on that issue, "And I only dated all of those girls because, the whole time, I was hung up on this one girl but knew that she wouldn't want me, and so I dated other girls to try to fill the hole in my heart that loving her had given me."
"Who's the girl?" Dove asks me quietly, but I can tell by the expression in her eyes that she already knows and is just looking for confirmation.
"You," I tell her in response, my gaze glued to hers, and she swallows with difficulty but doesn't really look surprised at all, which confirms my suspicions.
After a moment of silence, during which time Dove stares into the fire and I stare over at her, trying to read her, she looks back up at me, looks me in the eye again, and begins quietly, a strange, longing expression on her face, "You know, I've never even kissed a guy before..."
That's all she's able to say, as that's all the invitation I need to lean forward, take her head in my hands, and kiss her. Her lips are soft and warm against mine, and, after a second, her hands - shaking and tentative as they are - make their way up and lock around my neck, holding me against her. Unfortunately, we both run out of breath soon after, but all of my disappointment at not being able to kiss her any longer is completely gotten rid of when she gives me a small smile, her eyes on mine, and tells me, "I think I kind of like you now, Charlie."
She then huddles up against me, which prompts me to wrap my arms around her, and falls asleep a second later, her chest rising and falling reassuringly. I watch her for a few moments, struck by how beautiful she is, before realizing exactly how tired I am, giving her a kiss on the forehead, and then falling asleep myself.
"You weren't very smart for keeping that fire burning through the night, were you?" he asks me, a wicked grin on his face and his black eyes boring into mine as he holds a gun, a small pistol, to be exact, against my forehead. I know that I'm about to die - Dove, in her hypocrisy and apparently in order to break my heart before I'm killed, ran off into the woods as soon as she heard him approaching - but I've decided to follow Dove's words, and die quietly and with my dignity. Like she said, I won't give him the satisfaction of breaking me.
"Scream for the girl to come save you. Go on, do it; that way she can watch you die," he bids me, as he walks to my left and holds the gun against my temple, and I shake my head wordlessly in denial of his request.
"Go on, do it!" he commands, more urgently and annoyed this time, and gives me a shove for good measure.
However, I merely shake my head again and say, "No," as I stare straight in front of me and wish that he would just go ahead and kill me already, so that way there's less of a chance Dove actually will see me die. After all, even though I don't respect her for running away when I needed her, I don't want her to be permanently scarred by seeing me die, and I also hope that she'll be able to get out of this alive, even though I obviously won't.
"Fine. Have it your way," he tells me, and, as I hear him cock the pistol next to my head, I realize that this is it, that I'm about to see whatever follows death. Hopefully it's heaven, or at least a nothingness of sorts, because I don't really want to spend any more time in hell, after experiencing it here on earth.
His finger tenses on the trigger and I close my eyes, waiting for my brains to get blown out, to hear a gunshot not from right next to my ear and open my eyes in shock to see him lying on the ground next to me, with a bullet wound in his heart. I then look up to find Dove standing there about fifty feet away with a rifle in her hands and a look of pure loathing on her face as she stares at his body.
"Dove!" I cry in surprise and happiness, running towards her to embrace her in a hug. When I pull back, I look down at her worriedly to make sure that she's ok, and, when she appears to be so, I ask her, "Why did you come back? And how did you get a gun?"
"My father and I used to hunt in these woods, and, when he died, one of his rifles got left out here because no one knew where it was but me. I made the fire last night as a trap, because I knew he would see it and come to it, and then, when I heard him approaching, I ran out, got the gun, and came back to kill him, because I wasn't going to leave you, Charlie. I wouldn't even have left you early last night, when I still didn't like you," she tells me, and gives me a smile here.
I have leaned in and am about to kiss her, completely overcome with happiness, when all of a sudden an SUV bursts into the clearing to stop ten feet in front of us, and a woman that I recognize from parent-teacher conferences as Dove's mother jumps out.
When I turn my gaze onto Dove questioningly, she says, "There was also a cell phone hidden with the rifle, so that way my dad and I could call someone if we got lost."
"Oh," I exclaim quietly, and am about to say more when Dove's mom embraces us both in a huge, almost rib-cracking hug.
When she pulls back, she tells Dove, "I was so worried when you didn't come home from school yesterday that I called the police, and then when I got that call from your dad's old phone, I didn't know what to think. It's a good thing I picked it up and drove out here as quickly as I could!"
She then turns to me and says, "Your parents are frantic looking for you too, and apparently eight other girls went missing with you. Do you know what happened to them?"
Dove and I look at each other for a moment, and my gaze flickers onto his dead body laying off to the side. "Yeah, we do," I reply slowly, "but I think we should save our story for the police."
"Oh," Dove's mother murmurs, and here she notices the body lying on the ground behind us. "Oh!" she exclaims again, but in a much more surprised and frightened tone this time. "Well, I should probably get you two out of here and to the police station, so that way you can tell them what happened and they can come out here and deal with... that." She gestures to the body, and we nod our heads in agreement with her plan as she ushers us into the car. She then gets in herself, and, as she backs up and begins to drive away, my hand finds Dove's and I give her a tired and small but sincere smile.
Despite all that we had seen and done, the memories would fade some, the nightmares would come and go, and we would get past this tragedy... together.
Well, this story was pretty fun to write, so I hope that you find that it's fun to read, too.
Wow!! Thanks soooo much for making this story I asked for!!! If I could rate it it would 100/2 Or 2000/2000:]
When I'm on my computer(On a IPad right now)maybe I could ask for another story request??
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