“Michelle!” Jack’s voice calls out.
“What’s going on?” I mumble.
Noah just shakes his head, and the two of us get to our feet. Every joint in my body screams in pain as I stand up, but after a few steps, the pain subsides to a dull ache. Jack is standing at the edge of the clearing, a wild look in his eyes. His hair is as disheveled as Noah’s, and there’s a rip in the sleeve of his T-shirt. He cups his hands around his mouth and yells, “Michelle!”
I clear my throat. “What’s going on, Jack?”
He turns to look at me. His puppy dog brown eyes are bloodshot. “I can’t find Michelle.”
“What?” Noah frowns. “What are you talking about?”
“I woke up and she was gone.” His eyes dart around like he expects her to pop out from a bush at any moment. “I don’t even see any footprints. I don’t get it. Where would she have gone?”
“She couldn’t have gone far,” I say. “She had a sprained ankle.”
Jack rubs his fingertips against his temples. “I know.”
“Maybe she went looking for water?” Noah says.
“Alone?” He shakes his head. “It doesn’t make any sense. She wouldn’t have gone off by herself. Not without me.” He takes a deep breath, then yells out again: “MICHELLE!”
“Hey.” It’s Warner’s voice coming from behind us. We turn to look at him. “I found footprints I think belong to her.”
Sure enough, there is a single set of footprints leading off in a completely different direction. It’s hard to tell who the footprints would belong to, but they seem about the size of a woman’s sneaker. The footprints disappear into the trees.
It seems inconceivable to me that given her sprained ankle, Michelle would suddenly wander off by herself into the woods. But there’s no other explanation.
“Should we follow them?” Noah asks.
Jack nods silently. But then he goes back to our camp and grabs his backpack. He unzips it and pulls out a pillowcase. He starts pulling parts of something black out of the pillowcase. I watch him for a moment before I realize what he’s doing.
“You brought the rifle,” I breathe.
“Yes.” His voice is clipped. “I did.”
“You told Michelle you didn’t bring it.”
He lifts his bloodshot eyes. “I lied.”
It takes him a minute to assemble the pieces of the rifle. This whole thing is freaking me out. I had no idea Jack had a gun. Presumably, he only brought it for hunting. And maybe now that we’re stuck out here in the woods, it’s good that we have it.
But it makes me uneasy that he lied to Michelle and the rest of us about it.
Now that the gun is assembled, we all start down the path formed by Michelle’s footprints. I don’t hear any animal noises anymore, but it occurs to me that this is the same direction from where I heard the howling sound last night. What if she took a walk and ran into a wild animal?
The footprints continue for about ten yards before something catches my eye. Something white.
“Isn’t that a piece of Michelle’s shirt?”
There’s a shard of fabric hanging off one of the tree branches. Jack runs his finger along it, and then yanks it off. “I think it’s hers,” he says.
He raises his gun, his eyes scanning the wilderness. My heart is thudding so loudly, I can’t believe everyone else doesn’t hear it. I look around the woods, expecting Michelle to jump out at any moment. But she doesn’t. And then I see…
“Look!” I cry out.
Everybody looks down at where I’m pointing. There’s a large rock behind one of the trees and it’s been drenched in something crimson. And that same color stains the grass all around it.
We creep closer. All that red. There’s only one thing it could be. And the closer we get, the more obvious it becomes.
It’s blood. And a lot of it.
“Oh, Christ.” Jack lowers the rifle. He starts to sway and eventually collapses to his knees. “Oh my God.”
“It might be blood from an animal,” Noah says, although it’s obvious he doesn’t really think so.
I try to put a hand on Jack’s shoulder, wanting to comfort him the way he comforted me after we lost Lindsay, but he roughly shrugs me off. I don’t try again.
“Do you think an animal got her?” Warner asks. He doesn’t seem particularly upset, simply curious. “Maybe she went to take a walk, and that coyote Claire heard dragged her away.”