I run through the night away from the white lights. My back is turned to the motel building as I run towards those sloping, black hills in the distance, and I am filled with an expectation of being torn up by bullets. Nothing. No gunfire, no flesh torn from my bones, no falling over, headfirst, into the moist grass beneath me. My surroundings turn feral, vague outlines of trees and shrubbery appear in the blurry blackness as I make my way away from my nightmare. In the distance, I still hear the sound of the helicopter, humming lowly, a sound that engulfs most other sounds around me.
Then I find myself going upward, ascending some wet, black hill with knee high undergrowth. My pants and legs are entirely drenched now, and I can hear the muddy water pooled in my shoes make splotchy sounds as I take step after step. Finally, I reach the top of the hill and stare into the black unknown. I can barely see the outline of more vegetation around me, and perhaps more hills nearby. I turn around and see the motel illuminated from tiny white spots, it looks small and unrecognizable from here, and something in me find it hard to correlate this view of the motel with the place is was just in five minutes ago.
I breathe heavily and feel dizzy, then I see the yellow lights from the town down the road from the hotel. The town isn’t much to look at, with maybe 50 ground level buildings that all looks so perfectly square from my angle that they may as well be shoeboxes. I tire and lean up against a tree and continue breathing in long raspy breaths, while I start to feel cold down to the bone.
Then a yellow glimmer from the town, immediately followed by a fiery explosion that births a yellow-red mushroom cloud. Almost a second later then sound of the explosion reaches me, and it is long and powerful.
It looks like a building has blown but it all went so fast so I don’t know if it was a building or a car or something.
There is an immediate response, the helicopter take off from the parking lot, all black and grey in the night, and takes off for the town. As it moves towards the explosion, that is now only scattered fire and a black column of grey smoke, little white pinpricks from the town and the sound of small arms fire reaches me. The chopper veers, makes evasive rolls in the air, then retaliates with a volley of massive fire from its undercarriage. There is a deep, fast sound of a thousand bullets fired all at once, then another of those helicopter bursts followed by a third, all the while the helicopter turns and angles its way through the lit night sky.
It must be the burnt man, I think, that crazy, black guy who tried to kill me. Then I realize that I am literally completely in the dark here, that I have no idea what the hell is going on here, who that man was, where all the townspeople are, who the military guys are and who that woman on the phone was. My train of thoughts make me look at my phone again and almost makes me call 911 for a third time. But I don’t.
Instead I suddenly recall those thoughts I had earlier, there appear loud and clear to me, almost as if being spoken to me by some deity with a loud booming voice; I WANT TO LIVE.
With that, I head down the hill away from the town, from the burnt man, from the military and the helicopter.
I head off into the unknown of silhouetted nature. All around me there are dark trees, flowers, grass and bushes, and they all look slippery and greasy in the pale moonlight. In my mind I imagine myself shambling out of the woods three weeks later, I emerge at some truck stop, looking wild and primal with homemade bandages, makeshift weapons and a determined stare in my eyes. The fat truckers all gasp and point as I make my way back to civilization, having conquered the wilds of the Americas.
While something about it seems funny, I don’t laugh or smile, since I realize that starvation and actual survival might become very real subjects for me. That even though I may want to live, I( might not make it, that I might end up lying dead in some patch of forest, wild animals picking at my bones. With determination, I shake those thoughts from my mind; they are dangerous, self-destructive ideas I realize, and they are more likely to kill me than actual hunger or peril. Instead, I concentrate on my surroundings and deliberately subdue my inner voices, my imagination and my self-awareness; they have become expensive and perilous luxuries.
I ascend and descend another hill and start to feel a horrible shrinking feeling of numbness in my shivering bones; they both ache and feel numb and every step hurts, but still I drone on, my complaints buried in the back of my mind.
In the distance, I keep hearing sporadic sounds of gunfire, but soon they fade into the night, and all that remains are little sounds of raindrops falling on leaves. In a way, the sounds are quite calming and makes me forget my dying body.
I continue for a few more minutes until I spot something on the ground. Or rather, what I spot is the ground itself. There seems to be some kind of path here, crossing through these foothills.
Instead of wet grass there is a straight path caked with mud, but maybe it’s not really a path, but more of a track? I realize that I don’t know, that since I’m a city girl I have no idea about the difference between a trail, a track and a path, but this one seems patchy, fresh and disorganized, Whatever it is it crosses through the hills, likely going to and from the town.
Continue on through the hills.
Follow the tracks leading away from town.
Follow the tracks leading back into town.