'SIP

Chapter 1

She could hear the rustling of leaves as he moved closer to where she hid. She had tried to make a run for it. She had almost gotten away, but she caught her foot in a hole that had been dug by a dog or some other wild animal, and she couldn't move her right ankle.

Maybe it was the active danger the woods held that made the scene so ominous, or maybe it was the foreboding look of the woods at midnight that made this night feel more like her last night. The trees stood tall and bare, and as the moon cut through them, their branches looked almost like long fingers writhed in malevolent twists, reaching down to grab her. There was no sound. There was no wind. There was only the damp, cold earth and the terror that pumped adrenaline through her veins.

Her breathing was labored.

He had surely broken a few of her ribs, and she was starting to feel the effects of where he had hit her in the back of the head with something heavy and sharp. She stuck her tongue in the empty spaces inside her mouth, the tip of her tongue touching the parts of bare gum that had once held teeth.

Three. She had lost three teeth already.

"Amanda..." He sang her name as he walked closer. His thick Southern accent was maliciously inviting, as if he was daring her to come out as part of a playful childhood game of hide-and-seek. His game with her was far from over. His footsteps had stopped, and he was now just feet away from where she was crouched. She could see his muddy work-boots with one leg of his tattered bluejeans tucked into his left shoe. She didn't even have to look up to see the scheming grin on his face. She could see everything without seeing anything at all. Her eyes were wide with panic, and her skin was pale and covered in goosebumps from the cold. She had on a black tank and no underwear. The low temperature was not helping her chance of survival, and the water around her ankles was beginning to make her legs go numb. There was no way she could run now.

He had begun beating the baseball bat against his hand. It was a slow, rhythmic sound, and each thud of the bat against his palm made her cringe at the thought of how much louder the thud would be against the back of her skull. She knew that he would only keep searching for her. He hadn't grown impatient yet. He was watching, thinking. He was waiting for his pretty little plaything to come back out to play. She refused to make his chase easy for him. She was hidden behind a fallen tree, and she knew that he would think to check it at any moment. She held a small rock in her right hand, and her left hand was clamped tightly over her mouth so that he couldn't see her breath through the cold.

She leaned her head down low and to the right so that she could see him between the fallen tree's bare branches. He was turned away from her, the back of his red flannel shirt and blonde hair poking through the back of his baseball cap just barely visible in the woods' filtered moonlight. This was her last chance at surviving. She closed her eyes, ready for the sharp pain that would surely come from her ribs and bit down on her already bleeding lip as she tossed the rock over the branches and heard it thud against the ground just a few yards away. She hadn't made a sound, but when she opened her eyes she saw his head turn opposite of where the rock had fallen. He knew what she was doing, and he was now staring right at where she hid.

She would die in these woods.