Her Terrifying Love

Part 71

Jack climbed the hillside up to where she stood.

"This is it," she said. "I know it." Her chest rose and fell with each choppy breath.

"How? Everything looks the same."

"I was so scared." She choked back her fear as she recalled the event. "When he gets angry like that, he's literally like a wild animal."

She took off.

He jogged after her. "Hey! Where you going?" He followed her through the dense stands of trees along the curve of the road.

Finally, she stopped and turned, her face ashen. She leaned forward, looking down on the road to verify that Jack's car was out of view.

"I'm pretty sure I got to right about here. I crawled through these woods far enough so that I couldn't see his car anymore." She swallowed her words. "But I totally knew he was out there in the dark somewhere hunting me down." 

Her whole body trembled, her breathing became shallow as she relived the trauma she'd never forget.

Jack draped his arm around her. "It's okay," he whispered.

"I was hiding right here when... he found me." Tears welled in her eyes at the recollection. "I knew he was gonna kill me. And then... I don't know how to explain it. I mean, one minute he was staring at me with those insane eyes. And the next... It was like a miracle. Almost like he was pushed down the hill by..."

The memory eased her into a meditative state. "When I saw him bounce off your hood, I swear that I could feel it."

"Feel what?" Jack asked.

"Feel his life getting knocked right out of his body." She paused for a moment. "It was like someone was looking out for me. Like somebody saved me. Like it was supposed to happen. "

"Supposed to happen?" She could hear rising tension in his voice. "So what about me? I was supposed to accidentally run him down?"

"No. I didn't mean it like that."

"He slipped. And I just happened to be coming around that bend when he did," Jack said. "Total coincidence. Just bad luck."

"Not for me."

"Well, it was for me and him."

Lyla looked at the ground and said, "And with him coming back, now it's bad luck for all of us."

The woods suddenly felt colder.

She heard the sound of a zipper being tugged up and down, up and down. "You hear that?" she whispered.

They froze.

She realized how vulnerable they were alone in the woods far from the safety of Jack's car. Inadvertently, she had made them easy targets for Keenan.

Zip, zip. The noise amplified and then stopped.

"Where is he?" he whispered hoarsely.

Her eyes came to rest on two locusts perched on a fallen log, one mounted atop the other, mating. The zipper sound started again when the male scraped the comb-like pegs on the back of its legs against its body.

Zip-zip. Zip-zip. Nothing more than two small creatures procreating.

"That scared me." She breathed a momentary sigh of relief.

"Yeah, kinda freaked me out, too."

He led Lyla down the hill onto the area of the road where she believed that the accident had occurred, surveying the steep hillside descending into the thick, impenetrable forest.

"This is definitely where it happened," she said. "He stumbled down that hill right when you came around this bend. I know it."

Jack limped slowly along the side of the road, pacing carefully, studying the dirt and gravel shoulder as he walked. A chunk of plastic tucked beneath a clump of weeds caught his eye. He pushed aside the growth, recovered the evidence, then showed the fragment to Lyla.

"This looks like it could be a piece of my car's grill," said Jack.

"Yeah, maybe."

"I think it is."

She walked to the edge of the road and peered down the sharp hillside. When she turned to Jack, their eyes met. They didn't share a romantic glance. Each recognized in the other a look of abject dread.

"So let's do this," he said, taking her trembling hand.

Her heart pounded. Searching for the corpse was no longer an abstraction. Now it was real.