Silas by V. J. Chambers Page B

make
noise.
    “ Run!” I screamed at her, my
voice hoarse.
    She looked at Ken. She looked at the
woods. And then she took off.
    I watched in relief as she disappeared
between the trees.
    But then another bullet drilled into my
head, right below my earlobe.
    My head felt as if someone had taken a
hammer to it.
    I grunted.
    And I went dark again.
    * * *
    When I woke up, it was silent. No gun
shots.
    I could see the bodies of
Ken and Ross still lying on the ground where they’d fallen. The
hunters hadn’t gathered up the bodies. Maybe they would just leave
them lying there. I wasn’t sure.
    I didn’t see anyone else,
however.
    But I was close to the woods, so I got
to my feet and ran until I was safe in the dark shadows of the
trees.
    I headed in the direction of
the last place I’d seen Christa, about a hundred yards to my left.
I hiked through the foliage, the thorn bushes and brambles. But she
wasn’t there.
    No one was there.
    I hiked around in the woods
for hours, and I didn’t find any of the others.
    I wasn’t much of a woodsman,
not really. I hadn’t grown up in the country, and I hadn’t spent
much time out in the woods. I found crawling through the
undergrowth to be annoying at best, and downright awful at
worst.
    Everything was growing. The
trees were jutting up out of the earth, of course, but there were
things growing on the trees—vines winding around their trunks,
creepers hanging from their branches. The forest floor was covered
in various other green plants. Some were only leafy. Others were
outfitted with thorns and other sharp points. I stepped over all of
them, doing my best to navigate everything.
    The worst thing about the
woods was that it wasn’t made for a person of my height. When I
tried to walk, I was inevitably tangled up in various branches and
vines, all of which seemed to be reaching out to grab me from the
waist up. Below that, there was a nice clear space. It was probably
a great place for four-year-olds. Maybe that was why kids liked
playing in the woods so much. They weren’t tall enough to get
thwacked in the face by a tree every three feet.
    Emmett had said that we
should meet up out in the woods. But I wasn’t finding anyone to
meet up.
    This must mean one of the
following things. A) They’d all met up already and left me behind,
assuming I was dead. B) They’d all died, and I was the only one
left. C) The rest of them were around here somewhere, but I was too
big of an idiot to figure out where they were.
    I thought A and C were
likely. I didn’t even want to consider B. Not really.
    Because if everyone was
dead, that meant that Christa was dead. And I couldn’t face that
idea. She couldn’t be dead. She had to be okay.
    I’d seen her get safely into
the woods. She was out here somewhere. She had to be.
    I picked my way through the
woods, going deeper and deeper into the green darkness. At first, I
walked toward the sun, remembering that Emmett had told us to go
east.
    But as time went on, the sun moved
through the sky. I kept moving the same direction, but the sun was
at my back, filtering hot and bright through the
foliage.
    The hours wore on. I kept
moving.
    Luckily, it was late spring,
and so it wasn’t blazing hot outside. It was a comfortable
temperature in the lower seventies.
    I tried to think of other things I
could be grateful for.
    I couldn’t think of
any.
    And I was starving. I hadn’t
eaten since the meal they’d given us the night before. Our last
meal, or so they’d said.
    I couldn’t die of
starvation. At least, I didn’t think I could. I knew that the serum
healed up pretty much everything bad that happened to me. The
intention of the scientists who’d made it was to make a
supersoldier, impervious to harm. They’d wanted someone who
couldn’t be killed. They figured an army of those guys would be
unstoppable. So I didn’t think a little thing like not having
enough food was going to kill me.
    On the other hand, I had to
eat. I couldn’t