Rose’s Story: A Prequel to the Strung Trilogy by Jacobsen Per

Author:Jacobsen, Per
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HumbleBooks
Published: 2024-03-18T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eighteen

It’s a quarter to five in the afternoon when Rose finally admits defeat and accepts the bitter truth.

They’re lost. At some point, they accidentally lost their orientation and moved too far away from the river. And they were so careful. They walked parallel to it while trying to keep the sound of the running water within earshot.

They have not been able to hear it for over an hour now.

Raindrops bouncing off the leaves of trees. Branches rustling in the breeze. A maddening choir of buzzing mosquitoes. A screeching crow. A plane hum­ming in the distance.

All of that, yes. But no trickling of water. No river.

“Is it still helping?” Sebastian asks. He is climbing a moss-covered slope some distance ahead of her.

“Yeah, it’s great,” Rose replies, raising her walking cane demonstratively a few inches off the ground. “And it makes me look pretty badass, doesn’t it?”

Sebastian rolls his eyes but still smiles.

In reality, the cane is nothing more than a thick stick of about five feet that he found on the forest floor and gave to her when the splinter in her thigh really started to hurt. And she has to hand it to him that, for lack of better, it’s an excellent crutch.

Now, if he could just find bug spray.

The mosquitoes are driving her nuts. Those tiny, blood-sucking bastards hang in a cloud around her head, whirring like miniature helicopters next to her ears.

And yes, she does realize that there’s a deeper reason why they’re making her so furious. That it’s really about her being on the verge of a nervous break­down.

Because the world has lost its mind. Because she misses her mom, whom she is no longer sure she will ever get back. Because her best friend is dead. Because she is afraid that Sebastian and herself might be heading for the same fate. Because they’re lost in the county’s largest forest while the day gradually draws to a close—and because she absolutely doesn’t feel like spending the night out here.

The idea alone is enough to give her the jitters. Having to sleep on the clammy leaves of the forest floor, which undoubtedly houses thousands of small creepy crawlers.

“Do you see anything?” she shouts to Sebastian, who has just reached the top of the slope.

“Trees,” he replies dryly. “Lots of them.”

“You’re so funny,” Rose says just as dryly … while on the inside she prays that this is indeed what his words are: A poor attempt at being funny.

But Sebastian neither laughs nor smiles when their gazes meet. He looks resigned.

As an eerie extension of this thought, he now sits down, pulls his knees up to his chest, and puts his elbows on top of them. Then he buries his face in his hands.

Small, sparking jolts of pain emerge in her injured thigh as Rose speeds up, but she powers through it and keeps going. Her only moment of hesitation comes as she begins the ascent on the moss-covered slope and her head is filled with a heavy, suffocating fever heat.

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