By the time Roger made it across the back yard and to the path into the woods, he was huffing and puffing. Sweat formed on his forehead, mingling with the blood and causing his cut to sting. He wiped the blood away and pushed on.
The tree cover had thinned with the progression of fall. As he moved down the path, the occasional branch took a swipe at his arms and legs. Roger looked ahead, hoping to catch a glimpse of the girl. A couple of times he thought he saw her, the red shirt catching his eye somewhere in the distance then, just as quickly, fading from sight. He knew that eventually, if she continued on long enough, she would reach a county road or one of the new subdivisions that had recently been built, but those were several miles away, and the paths weren't straight or predictable. He didn't want her getting away and causing trouble for him, but he didn't want her ending up lost or hurt either. He cared about her. He wanted her back.
Roger came to a spot where the path forked. To the left, the more well-worn path, was the area he hunted, the places he would go with his father. The safe places, as he liked to think of them. And to the right, down the slightly overgrown and less frequently used path, lay the clearing. Roger stood at the fork, considering his options. He thought that it made sense, and seemed more likely, for the girl to take the easier path. Wouldn't she think that she would be more likely to find help down there, in the direction that it appeared more people had traveled? Roger took two steps that way and then stopped.
But...
If someone wanted to throw someone off their trail, wouldn't they take the unexpected path, the one that led to the right? Roger reversed his course and returned to the fork.
It was getting on toward evening. The tall trees blocked most of the declining sun, letting only filtered and indirect light reach the floor of the woods where Roger stood. He had been out there enough to know that the clearing didn't do much to him during the day, that only at night did he feel its full power. But standing there at the fork, and knowing that the new girl might be down there as well, caused the sweetly painful stirring between his legs, a more intense cousin to the feeling he had experienced standing outside the bathroom door just a few minutes earlier. The feeling spread through his blood, a cold current that made his skin prickle, and if it had been dark, as it usually was when Roger came out here, he wouldn't have been surprised to see sparks leaping off of his skin like Fourth of July fireworks.
A low, animalistic grunting slipped through his teeth.
He started down the path toward the clearing, his body moving faster than it normally did, faster than a body that big and clumsy had any right to move. His dad had warned him about rocks and holes, telling him that the last thing Roger wanted to do was turn an ankle or snap a bone out in the woods.
"You'd be laying there 'til you croaked," his dad had said. "You're all alone out here."
But Roger had other things on his mind. He didn't want to be alone, so he had to find the girl and bring her back to the house. Nothing else mattered. He just kept moving forward until he saw the clearing up ahead, its surrounding ring of trees open to him and even inviting. He moved even faster with the goal in sight and soon found himself in that familiar and comfortable space.
He stood at the outer edge, breathing hard. The energy that had been flowing through his body intensified, rising to the surface of his skin like boiling lava, hardening the member between his legs until it hurt. His hands and feet felt like they were twice their normal size. He stood near the grave of the last girl, but he didn't even think about her.
He looked around, but he didn't see the new girl. So he listened, just as he did when he hunted deer.
At first, Roger only heard the blood thumping in his ears, a steady beating that moved in time to the pounding of his heart. But the more he listened, the more he heard his surroundings. The chirping cries of birds, the chittering song of a cicada. Beneath that, he heard a rustling, like a sheet of paper being slowly rolled into a ball. It came from his left, from the edge of the clearing, and at first he thought it was simply the stirring of the wind or even the scuttling movements of a squirrel or chipmunk. But the noise continued, and it sounded too large for one of those tiny ground animals. And then Roger heard something human, a soft whimper of fear or sadness, and he knew the girl was near.
He moved toward the sound, slowly but purposefully. He didn't want to startle her or send her away, but he imagined that if she wasn't jumping to her feet, something might be preventing her, and Roger hoped that she hadn't fallen or hurt herself as she ran through the woods. And if she did, if she was hurt, wasn't that his fault as well? Wasn't he the reason she ran in the first place?