Forgetting What's Forgiven

The sharp stinging pain of branches whipping across my body makes me cringe in pain as I run through the woods. Chase is just ahead of me; I can hear him, but I can’t see him. The icy-cold chill of the night air causes my skin to crawl, but I barely even notice as I carry Jenna in my arms. She doesn’t look like the girl I know; she looks like someone fi ghting for her life. We’ve been running for miles, it seems like. I don’t know why I didn’t stop Chase earlier. But I think we’re heading in the wrong direction. “Chase! Stop!” I scream at the top of my lungs. I hear him stop off in the distance. As I start to walk toward where I think he is, I come into a small meadow in the middle of the woods, and there I see him sitting on the trunk of an old dead tree. “I think we’re lost.” He looks back down at the almost-black ground. “There are no markers, no signs, nothing,”