She didn’t pause, running as fast as she could, which, considering the underbrush of the forest and the lack of light, was not very. She pushed through the dry brush, the twigs and briars ripping at her jeans and slowing her down. In less than a minute, she had made it out of the patch of brush to forest floor that was more covered with pine needles, but by now, she could hardly see, eyes still blinded from the high beams of the headlights, the lights from the still-parked car providing little help. But then she did catch a glimpse of another light—a flashlight.

He was coming after her.

“Fuck!” She continued into the woods away from the road, keeping low and letting her eyes adjust, the trees periodically lit by Murderguy’s flashlight. She stumbled over a root once, then twice, trying to use her hands to feel her way through the trees. “Ampersand?”

No response.

“Ampersand, can you hear me?” She ducked behind a tree just in time for the light to glide over where she had been standing, like a prison spotlight. “Please, I think I’m in danger. Like, serious danger.”

Still nothing, and despite the increasing sense that she was about to become the kind of victim of a rape-slash-murder whose bones were only found twenty years after the fact, she could not sense anything from Ampersand at all. The wall had turned to stone.

“Ampersand?” She tried to quiet her breathing, unwilling to speak louder than she already was. “Ampersand, please, can you hear me?” she breathed, lowering herself to her hands and knees. “Please, I’m begging you, answer me!”

Nothing.

She heard the crunch of footsteps on pine needles, and the spotlight came close, dangerously close. She saw a root creating a ledge that went farther down the hill and crawled over it, continuing her descent downhill.

“Hello?” said Murderguy, like he’d wandered into a store and was asking if it was open. Not a particularly loud or aggressive hello, nor a remarkable voice. A normal voice with a normal American accent. The spotlight glided right over her ledge. He wandered closer, the treads of his shoes crunching the dirt.

Why wasn’t Ampersand answering her? The footsteps stopped, and she curled herself into a ball. Was Ampersand punishing her? Would he really cut her off in a situation as dangerous as this?

It was that thought that made her stop and wonder if perhaps he couldn’t hear her.

The flashlight turned to the other direction, and she took a thin, shaking breath. Ampersand’s earbud had line-of-sight range, but she’d known him to use it as many as sixty miles away, so she was nowhere close to the maximum range, unless he had left the area altogether. Was it possible that the hills had gotten in the way? Unlikely; they’d been separated by hills before, and the earbud had worked fine.