Jacked Up by Erica Sage

Author:Erica Sage
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sky Pony Press
Published: 2018-05-13T16:00:00+00:00

I started up the hillside, following that familiar backpack. Yes, I could get in trouble for being on the hill, but I already had gotten in trouble, and for something I hadn’t even done. At least the small trees dotting the hillside partially hid us from view.

We climbed, Natalie still unaware of me behind her. After scrambling up and over the ridge, Natalie kept walking, but I stopped. Not because I was out of breath. I was stunned into place by the view. Three giant crosses stood beyond the hill in a small valley in the vast, desertlike landscape. They hadn’t been visible from camp, and they were huge—way bigger than the one I had to carry.

Natalie slowed as she passed between two crosses, resting her hand on the middle cross. She was not in a hurry. Not to bury the backpack or remove its contents.

I called out to her, hoping my voice wouldn’t sneak out of the valley and down the hill toward camp.

Natalie turned and spotted me, clearly surprised. She didn’t smile like usual, and she didn’t wave.

Instead, she looked back over her shoulder, in the opposite direction from camp, as if someone else was waiting for her. I looked past her, but all I saw was more gray-brown hills of brush and short trees. The sky was turning a soft pink. Natalie turned back around to face me.

Finally, she turned on a smile, the smile of the bubbly, breezy Natalie. But I could tell that’s what she’d done. Folded up whatever expression had been on her face and put on her smile like a mask. She walked a few steps toward me and called, “You do know you’re breaking a rule right now?”

I caught up to her. “Birds of a feather and all that,” I said, eyeing her pack.

“Yeah right.” She smiled.

I shrugged and smiled back at her. “What is this place?” I asked, tilting my head back to look up at the crosses. They were at least twenty feet tall.

“Golgotha, obviously.”

It wasn’t so obvious to me. “What?”

“Not what. Where,” she said. “It means ‘hill of skulls,’ or something like that. It was the place outside Jerusalem where the Romans crucified their criminals.”

“Like Jesus.” I hadn’t known the place had a name.

“Exactly. But it wasn’t just Him. There were thousands of others. It wasn’t a special way to die or anything. It was normal. Like lethal injection.”

“Your definition of ‘normal’ concerns me.”

Natalie laughed. “You know what I mean.” She shifted the pack off one shoulder.

“Well, I can say from personal experience that I’m glad we’ve moved away from crucifixion.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Oh, it still happens. Just like people are still stoned and burned and beheaded.”

I imagined giant nails hammered through my wrists and feet. Hanging naked and bloody for hours, until the weight of my body crushed my lungs. The time it would take. How long you’d have to be alone in your pain.

It was the last moments of death that obsessed me, especially after Diana died.

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