When Lightning Strikes

Chapter 3

Chapter 3 The Visitors

I woke to the eerie sound of a breaking branch. I shack Brianna awake in the late night darkness.

"Brianna, Brianna!" I whisper to her in alarm.

Brianna wakes with a jerk, "I heard it to, where do you think it came from?" Brianna questions me as she stares at the last dieing embers of our fire.

Suddenly the bushes in front of us rustled and two tall young men stepped out from the darkness. The one I new instantly, he was the red headed guy named Garrett who had helped me in the hallway earlier that same day. The other I didn't recognize, but I think he went to my school as well. I had to clap my hand over Sarah's mouth to hold back the scream that she still held deep in her throat.

"What on earth are you doing here?" I question the two young men who stood awkwardly in front of us.

I can see Garrett begin to recognize me as a see his eyes light up in surprise.

"Claire, is that you?" He asks slightly puzzled.

"I asked you first," I firmly inform him with my hand still over Sarah's mouth.

"Aaron and I are camping, because it's the weekend and we want to get away for a while," he tells us as if it was already obvious.

"Now what are you doing here,"

I stumble around in my brain trying to find a suitable answer for the muscular boy in front of me.

"Same, we're camping as well," I decide to say; since it was the most believable thing I could come up with. Aaron must be the name of Garrett's friend I think silently in my head. I slowly ease myself onto my feet, and what little hostility that was left in Garrett's eyes completely melts away as he sees the tattered wound on my forearm.

"You're hurt, do you need any help?" Garrett asks my sympathetically.

I look down at my arm in surprise, and realize it looked worse than I thought. I needed help, badly, but I wasn't about to let some stranger help me with my own personal fight that I needed to do alone.

"No, it feels better then it looks," I tell him trying to cover it with what was left of the bed sheet.

"We brought a first aid kit, please come sit down and I'll make sure it will heal and not get infected," he said ushering me to a hollow log a few yards away from our blankets and campsite.

I finally decide that if I let him help us, then maybe he and Aaron will leave and decide to camp somewhere else.

"Okay," I say with regret in my voice, "but don't waste all of your supplies."

Garrett walked briskly over to the hollow log, but I had to limp. I guess my fall out of the tree and the endless traveling had finally taken its toll on me. We sat there in the calm damp silence as Garrett carefully wrapped the clean bandages around my arm while he gazed at me with wide blue eyes.

"How did your arm get hurt like this?" Garrett asks sounding a bit concerned.

That's the very last thing I want to tell the one person who has tried to help me in life besides my two friends.

I look away franticly, and then down at my now covered arm. "I bumped into a tree in the dark on the way out here," I tell him in a dim faded voice. This hurts me, to lie to a person who has only ever tried to help me.

"I don't believe that, but I will respect your privacy," he says as he helps me to my feet. When we make it back we find our campsite just as we had left it, with Brianna and Sarah huddled on the out stretched blankets with Aaron standing patiently waiting for Garrett and me to return.