Free No Service by Susan Luciano Page B

possibly an owl flapping its great strong wings as it moved up to the farthest branches.
    That’s when the beam hit a foot. Jess trailed the light upward toward the rest of the figure. The person was on the ground, seated against the base of a tree. Jess’s beam shook even harder as she saw the blood, the face, the hair. It was the dead girl from the picnic table.
    Jess let out a gasping cry and covered her mouth with her other hand. Chris let go of her and immediately shot to his feet.
    “Give me the light,” he said.
    Jess willed herself to hand it over. It was nearly impossible to allow herself to be engulfed powerlessly back into the blackness, but she managed to place the phone in his outstretched hand. She cowered against the fallen tree. She was trying so hard to contain the screams that wanted to erupt from her mouth. Tears clouded her eyes as she watched the light move closer to the girl.
    Chris knelt down and felt for a pulse. He wondered if she somehow wasn’t dead. She looked extremely dead. Everything about her was slack and she was so pale there couldn’t possibly be a heartbeat, but he’d seen miracles before and needed to know. He reached up to feel her throat, but reconsidered when he saw how torn up she appeared. Taking her wrist instead, he felt for a pulse. As he predicted, the girl seemed to be positively deceased.
    He stood back up and shined the light around some more. There were some drag marks near her where she’d been positioned by the tree, but with everything else so undisturbed he assumed she must have been carried there and dropped.
    He flashed the light around wildly. Someone had to be nearby. A noise had woken them and while he supposed it was possible for a wild animal to have been at her corpse, he didn’t feel that was the case. The beam passed over nothing.
    Suddenly he felt a panic like he needed to race to Jess. He was certain the light would shine over her terrified face and then with a slight upward motion he’d illuminate someone. It was going to be someone with a knife, he was certain. He whipped around, illuminating his weeping wife curled into a ball on the ground. He moved the light up, ready to attack and destroy.
    The beam hardly lit up the woods behind their fallen tree. Chris continued his search. At some point the light would show a face, a body, a weapon. Instead, he found himself turning in frantic circles.
    Someone had to be toying with them. Why else leave a dead girl and depart? Mental torment was definitely on the menu and they were being served a great big helping. Jess was taking the brunt of the invisible menace’s torture. He was proud that she’d had the courage to turn on the light, but once he’d taken charge, she was a lost cause. She was a whimpering heap and he was worried she was simply broken beyond repair.
    He hoped she was stronger than that, but it was certainly understandable that she’d lose her shit over a dead girl showing up in the middle of the night. The whole day after they’d strayed from the path had been one long road to an overflow of emotion.
    Chris knelt down next to Jess. He put a hand on her cheek and brushed back her hair. Her mascara was absolutely everywhere on her face. She had her hands curled up into tight little balls over her mouth. There was a monstrous fear in her eyes like nothing he’d ever seen in her before.
    “We’re going to keep walking,” he said. “We’re getting the fuck out of here.”
    Jess shuddered with a rattling sob, but unfurled one of her hands and let Chris take it. He pulled her up and hugged her so tight to him that he practically engulfed her with his larger form. She blew out a heavy breath. She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hand and snuffled once.
    “I got makeup in my eyes. Fuckin’ burns.” She let out a single pathetic laugh and wiped at her face again. Chris let her have a moment. He kept the light on her. She was so tiny and frail in the white glow.
    Normally he thought