Page 2 of Recurve Ridge

What didn’t kill me created a new evil, or some bullshit affirmation regular people invented to protect their cloistered lives. Pain offered a tainted strength that propelled me forward, each of us craving his preferred brand of poison.

The youngest man in the cabin stirred on the floor. Cracking a swollen eyelid that looked like it bore the brunt of fisticuffs from the night before, Will offered me a sloppy salute that might have been a thumbs-up and returned to his sloth-like state. The man beside him, who sported a home-job military-grade haircut, lay face down in a puddle of his own drool.

I might have worried for Miller’s existence if his barrel chest didn’t lift every so often in the deep sleep of an inebriated man. That, and he snored like a local drunk.

What else did we have to celebrate but surviving one more day against our personal battles?

I served with both Will and Miller in the Middle East, working shoulder to shoulder as their commanding officer for too many years. The latter retained a desire to address me assir,though I no longer held any right to the title. Jon, I had found in the midst of his blackest moment, while my newest recruit, Alan, fell into our ramshackle life through a design of fate I didn’t stop to study too hard, lest it replace their heartache with a loneliness once they left.

My lost, broken boys.

A piece of my splintered self featured in each man, giving us a common, if neutral, ground. Their healing provided me with a selfish version of pride as I strove to give them what I couldn’t fathom for myself: redemption.

A life outside this pitiful existence.

These loyal men looked to me for protection and had decided to stick around to make a hash of my self-imposed serenity. Some part of me liked that a few salvageable qualities remained from my previous life, because the mission I set us on didn’t allow for error, only a skewed sense of morality.

One of the assholes broke wind in his alcohol-imbued stupor, filling my living room with a vile stench. I slugged the remnants of my coffee and thrust the cup at Jon. One bushy eyebrow rose, and his beard twitched.

“Make sure they clean up after themselves. I’m out.”

Jon said nothing as I stormed from the house into the welcoming arms of the forest blanketed in snow. A stubborn Eastern white pine stood above everything else, its many stoic faces battered by winter’s kiss.

I needed to shoot something.

* * *

The weightof the axe soothed my calloused palms as it sliced a parabolic arc through Recurve Ridge’s crisp winter air. Sharp pine and warm, earthy mulch wrapped around me in a cocoon only the forest could offer as comfort as I disturbed the thin layer of snow that fast turned to slush beneath my boots. The numbing cold edged beneath my jacket, but I was more at ease here than I’d ever been in the city among everything I hated.

A city that hated me in return.

One day I would return to the lights and face my nemesis, but for now… I took a sense of peace in the ache of muscles tight from a lack of work that craved action. Sweat soaked my shirt with each swing, log after log. But as good as the repetitive action felt, it wasn’t enough.

Shooting was my preferred method to redirect the coiling violence that writhed beneath my skin. The twang of the bow and a breath of mountain air at my cheek settled a sense of peace into my heart. Despite firing off several dozen quivers earlier, the tension remained, the sort no bow or amount of spent arrows could fix.

I returned to my axe, a therapy Jon taught me when we first scouted land for the cabin together. My next exhale clouded around me, condensation obscuring my vision before air and breath melded in an invisible seam. A neat pile of split logs lay by my feet, dusted by a skiff of fresh snow. My therapy billets of chopped wood far outweighed our actual usage in the cabin. I kicked the halves over to the heap and hefted the next round onto the stump.

Snow crunched underfoot in the wrong direction. The mountain stilled in a pensive air.

The only warning the forest provided that all was not well.

Hair rose on the back of my neck. I pivoted, reaching toward a change my brain reacted to but hadn’t processed yet.

Fleeting sounds traveled between the trees, shattering and rebounding to displace its origin, but the predator in me refused to be distracted by splintered echoes. I closed my eyes, my breaths softening as I listened to the forest. The irregular stumble of prey that had already forfeited its life filtered into the clearing.

A dual need—to hunt, to protect—rose in my chest as I swiveled on my heel, tracking my prey’s path across land I knew too well to allow its escape.

I marked the thrashing gait against an invisible map in my mind as I scanned the spaces between scant evergreen foliage. There—a flicker in the shadows between the trunks. The light shifted, then again. This section of the forest around my cabin was thickened by nature rather than design. I never bothered to clean out the underbrush and smaller saplings that vied with the natural giants, seclusion being the aim of the game.

My game.

My blood heated as my boots carried me one step forward, then another, each lunge faster than the last as the panicked flurries neared. I wanted to pause and study the rhythm of the creature’s flight, but my heart put together what my mind still fought—the frantic, fleeing form washuman.

Another person in my patch of the forest where no one else should be. Only those with a preconceived death wish sought access through my trees, not one whose survival instinct kicked in to extend a life. My land didn’t come under the category ofsafeby any definition, occupied as it was by some of the deadliest creatures in Upstate New York, including the local human contingent.

Which begged the question: What could be so big and bad that it drove desperation in my direction in our coldest season?

Nothing else came close to the ruckus a person created in their struggle to survive. A black bear lumbering through the Adirondacks in search of its dinner had more grace than a stumbling amateur hiker on a trail rated beyond their ability. Pure panic sat under its own category for the average, untrained person.

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