SORROW WOODS (2 page)

She pulls her door open and wipes the beads of sweat from off her forehead with the back

of her hand, pushing her bright red hair away from her face and into a ponytail that sits high up on her head. “Three weeks, just like I always am.”

She never used to go for three weeks. She says ‘always’ as if her trips to the city have always

taken that long, but they haven’t. I don’t forget these sorts of things. “What day is it now?”

“Sixth of April.”

I take a step towards her and run my hands along the edge of the truck. “Will you be back for

my birthday?”

“Yes,” she sighs, sounding more annoyed with me than I’ve ever heard her sound before.

“And Elodie’s?”

She nods and yanks the door open. “Yes. See you soon.”

I stand back, watching as she climbs into the truck and turns the key over in the ignition. It

rumbles to life and in an instant, she’s gone, leaving only a trail of dust behind her. I flop down onto one of the old wooden steps and sigh. Why doesn’t my Mother understand that I’m not a baby

anymore? The books that she brings me back from the city tell me about a wonderful, interesting

world that’s out there, but the fact that she won’t let me explore it is starting to really bug me.

“Come on Serenaaaa.”

I turn around and stare at my six year-old sister, who smiles up at me and twirls her long

dark hair around her finger. She wants to play hide and seek. I hate hide and seek. “You go hide,” I say. “I’ll wait here and count to one hundred.”

She grins and sprints off into the woods. I don’t bother counting. I wait about ten minutes

before standing up and stretching my muscles out. I pump my arms and legs and run until I can’t

breathe anymore.

The sweat drips down the back of my neck and slides in between my shoulder blades. It’s

too hot to be running around, I think, as I lift my leg and climb over a fallen tree. “Elodie!” I call. “I’m gonna find you, and when I do, I’m gonna tickle you until you’re begging me to stop.”

I hear her giggling to the left of me so I turn and run without thinking. I hate playing hide and seek with Elodie because she always hides in the woods, and it’s too hard with all of the trees to ever find her. I also think she cheats by moving about as I’m searching for her, because sometimes, I’ll find her hiding in a place that I know I’ve already looked. Every time I take a step towards the place where I think she’s hiding, the twigs and leaves rustle and crack underneath my foot, meaning there’s no way I could ever creep up and surprise her. I always end up being the hunter that gets hunted.

“Boo!” she calls out from behind me, before giggling and running off again.

“Hey,” I laugh, as I run through the trees after her. “That was cheating!”

I hear her laugh trickle and bounce along the trees around us as she sprints on ahead of me.

We’re both really fast at running, so fast that sometimes the trees start to blur at the side of my vision, just like they are now. I take a deep breath and pump my arms and legs faster. I’m not letting her win today, not when she cheats at every game we play.

“You won’t catch me,” she calls.

“I will.”

We run and run and run. I’m running so fast that the twigs hanging down off the low

branches whip against my face and the leaves get stuck in my long, blonde hair as it flails out behind me. Just as I’m about to pounce on her, I feel something warm trickle down my face. It sneaks down my cheek and into the corner of my mouth. My tongue darts out and within an instant, my mouth is

full of the taste of metal. Blood.

“Elodie, stop!”

She just laughs and carries on running. I stop and turn back around. This is the farthest we’ve

been from home in years. It’ll take us hours to get back to our house now.

“Elodie,” I call again, “I’m not playing anymore.”

She squeals, the sound echoing all around me, but she still doesn’t stop. She just runs as if it

takes no effort at all. I can run, but I’m sure she could run a marathon and not even be out of breath.

I sigh, roll my eyes, and run after her again.

After about ten minutes she starts to slow, and I finally have the chance to jump on her. We

tumble to the ground together, laughing and hugging in the dirt. “You run like a cheetah,” I pant.

She sticks her tongue out at me and says, “You run like a hippo.”

I tap her nose. “You’re a cheeky monkey.”

She giggles and stands up, brushing the dust and dirt from off her tiny shorts. I stare up into

her bright blue eyes that are surrounded by deeply tanned skin, not unlike my own. Her long, black hair falls to the bottom of her spine and is nearly as long as mine.

I have bright green eyes, she has blue. My hair is blonde, while hers is black. She’s short but

lean, while I’m tall and have lots more muscle than she does. I look down past my breasts that are covered in a black crop top and look at my bare midriff and the muscles that ripple across my

stomach. My muscular thighs stick out from the bottom of my black shorts.

My skin is the deepest brown I have ever seen, much deeper than Elodie’s. Mother says that

Elodie will grow into her muscles and that her skin colour will deepen until it’s as dark as mine.

“When do you think Mamma is going to be back?” she asks.

I twirl a twig around in my fingers and shrug. “She’s gone to get supplies so she’ll be gone

three weeks like normal.”

“We can’t live
that
far away from the city, can we?”

I shrug. I’ve been thinking that for years now, but my Mother never gives me a straight

answer. She used to leave me when I was younger, but she’d only be gone for a few days. She’d

come back with food in the back of her truck and scratches and bruises all over her body. She always refused to tell me what caused those injuries, and the fact that she wouldn’t tell me caused me to worry about her even more. She would always just unpack the truck, give me a hug, and then spend

the next few days in bed.

Lately, it’s become more than just a few days away, and the days she spends in bed

afterwards often stretch to more than a week. She also comes back with even more bruises and

scratches than she used to. I’d never questioned it when I was younger, but now that I am sixteen my thoughts lead to deeper, darker things. I hope I am wrong.

“What are you thinking about?”

I snap out of my thoughts and smile at Elodie. “Just how long it’s gonna take for us to walk

back home.”

She rolls her eyes. “You’re always talking about having to go back home. Why don’t we just

stay out here?”

I shake my head and stand up. “The woods are too dangerous for us at night, Elodie. You

know that.”

She sighs. “Let’s go then. I’m getting hungry.”

I throw my arm around her neck and pull her into me. Just as we take the first steps back

towards home, a loud, ear-popping snap splits through the trees. We freeze. Elodie gasps, her eyes widening as she looks up at me. My chest is rising and falling faster than it was when I was running.

I feel like all of my blood has frozen in my veins. My legs won’t work. My body won’t push me

forward. I can feel sweat dripping all over my body from the heat and the exertion of running, but I’m dithering. I feel cold inside. That noise was the loudest thing I’ve ever heard in my life and it’s still ringing through my ears. I shiver.

“Serena,” she whispers, “what was that noise?”

My brain suddenly starts to work again. The noise of the birds panicking in the sky above me

makes me look up, and when I do, I see a cloud of smoke floating over the tops of the trees. I don’t know what that noise was, but I know that it could be good or else the birds wouldn’t be screeching through the sky like that. We need to go.

“Run,” I say, “and don’t stop until we get home.”

The panic in her face transfers to her arms and legs as she lunges forward through the trees.

I follow her, matching her pace for pace.

“Hurry,” I call out to her. I can hear the panic in my voice. I’ve never heard it before and I

don’t like the sound of it.

We’ve run for all of two minutes when she suddenly skids to a stop. We’re running so fast

that I don’t have time to stop myself before I crash into the back of her.

“What are you doing?” I huff. “Get going. I told you not to stop.”

She turns her head slowly around and points to the right of her with a shaking arm. The fear

in her wide, frightened eyes makes me hesitate for a split second. When my eyes follow her finger, they snap onto a boy. I instinctively reach out and haul Elodie behind me without taking my eyes off him.

The first thing I notice about the boy is that he’s wearing faded blue denim jeans and a white

t-shirt that stretches tightly across the tops of his arms. He has short but messy black hair and deep brown eyes that sit wide in his head. In his hand, he holds a gun. I’m not sure what type it is, but I know it’s a gun because it looks like the pictures of guns that I’ve seen in my books at home.

“What the hell are you doing here?” he demands, stepping towards us. “You shouldn’t be

here. Go away.”

He’s talking to us. Another person is actually here, in our woods, and he’s talking to us. I

push Elodie back and step away from him. “Who are you and what are
you
doing here?”

He frowns and starts to stride towards us.

“Stay back!” I order, pushing Elodie further back.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he says, looking confused. His eyes are roaming all over me. I

can see him looking at my face and then down my body, where his eyes rest for a long time on my

legs. He frowns again, making his face wrinkle up.

As my own eyes look over him, I soon realise that he’s just like the boys that I read about in

my books. I ignore the gun for now and stare at his strong jaw line and perfectly clear face. My eyes search his features, whilst my brain registers how different he is from us. I notice his Adam’s apple. I notice the way his broad shoulders meet his thick arms. I notice the way his jeans hang low on his hips that don’t curve in like mine.

“Who are you?” I ask again.

“My name is Kaiden, but everyone calls me Kai.”

“Kai?” I repeat, listening to the way my mouth says his name. I’ve never heard of the name

Kaiden and never read a book that has a Kaiden in it either.

He rubs his face with his hand. “You need to leave,” he snaps.

I glance back at Elodie, who is staring with her mouth wide open in awe at the boy. I don’t

know what to do. He said he wasn’t going to hurt us, but it must have been his gun that made that horrible sound. What was he shooting at if he wasn’t shooting at us?

I shake my head at him, whilst my heart pumps furiously in my chest. “These are our woods.

It’s you that’s gonna have to leave.”

He snorts. “How did you even get here?” His accent is not the same as ours. His words are

clipped and sharp, where as ours are more rounded and lazy.

“We live here,” says Elodie. “How did
you
get here?”

“You live
here
, in these woods?”

I look back at him and those eyes that remind me of the colour of chocolate and nod.

“Where?”

Mamma said we should never talk to anyone else. She said we would probably never see

anyone else in the woods, but if we did, we were to run away and not talk to them. “I don’t need to tell you that.”

He smiles. His teeth are white and clean. “No, I guess you don’t.” He steps even closer to us

and I watch a frown take over his forehead when his eyes lock on to my face. Why is he looking at me like that?

“Let’s go, Elodie,” I say, pushing her back with my hand.

“You could at least tell me your name,” he says smoothly. “It would be rude not to, really.”

Rude? Is it really rude to not talk to him? I don’t know. I don’t know what to do, but it

doesn’t feel right to just ignore him and walk away. We’ve always wondered about other people in

the world and he might be our only chance to find out anything. I swallow and say, “I’m Serena and this is Elodie.”

He nods once. “Nice to meet you.” His eyes fall back onto my face and a look or an emotion

that I’ve never come across before washes over him. “How long have you lived in these woods,

Serena?”

It’s just talking. He’s not gonna shoot us or hurt us. He just wants to have a conversation

with us. I’m sure Mamma wouldn’t mind if we just talked to him. Would she? I don’t know. He looks as interested in us as we are in him. “I’ve lived here since I was two and Elodie has been here since she was born.”

He nods and takes another step towards us. I push Elodie back but she hits a tree. There’s

nowhere for us to go now. He has us trapped.

“You’re bleeding,” he says, nodding at me, “on your head.”

I reach up with my hand and feel the warm blood skim over my fingertips. “It’s just from the

trees. We were running.”

“Why were you running?” he asks.

“We were playing a game. We run all the time.”

He smiles, stepping closer to us again. He’s so close that I can smell him. He doesn’t smell

like the wind, rain, or trees, like we do. He smells like salt and something that I’ve never smelt before. It reminds me of flowers, but not the sweet type of flowers. He smells musky and dirty, yet clean and fresh at the same time.

“Why do you have a gun?” I ask, curious.

He looks down at the weapon in his right hand and lifts it up high. He turns it around, making

the sun gleam off the shiny metal. “I was shooting animals before you pair got in the way.”

Elodie whimpers behind me. “Why would you do that? Animals are our friends!”

He blinks at us. “I’ve always hunted animals, mainly birds,” he says with a shrug.

“Birds?!” she screeches. “What have the birds ever done to you? Why are you hurting them?