Page 37 of Stream & Scream
“Copy that,” comes the clipped reply.
They’re quiet in my ear now, satisfied for now. Cody’s screams bought me that. Blood always does. But I know how this works. It won’t last. Cody wasn’t who they wanted. He was filler. Background noise.
She’s the prize. The clickbait. The one face the audience keeps replaying, zooming in on every tremor, every glance into the dark. And I’ve left her alive. Untouched for too long.
I rise, leaving Cody draped across the log like a warning scrawled in flesh. Anyone who finds him will understand. But the producers won’t be impressed for long. They’ll start pushing harder. They’ll want her blood.
So I’ll have to give them something else instead. A mark. A memory. A piece of her they can feast on without taking the whole thing. Something to prove she’s mine before anyone else can blink.
I move back through the trees toward the cliffside. The ground is damp under my boots, earth rich with the metallic tang of blood. Shadows ripple across trunks as the firelight flickers ahead.
When I reach my perch, she’s still there. Still pacing. Still alive. She looks tired, frustrated, like she’s debating whether to run again. She shouldn’t. There’s nowhere safer than near me. Nowhere more dangerous, either.
That’s the balance. The hook. That’s what keeps her breath shallow, her pulse spiking every time the night moves. Thewant.
I crouch low, watching. Silent. Still. A predator in the dark. I don’t speak. I don’t blink. I just wait. Because soon, I’ll have to do more than watch. I’ll have to touch her. Leave proof for them, and when I do, they’ll stop questioning me.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Olivia
Saturday night.
Ifind them by following the sound of Lexie's voice.
She's complaining, naturally. Even here, even now, with people dying around us, she's bitching about the lighting conditions for her wrist camera like she's shooting a fucking music video instead of fighting for her life.
"This is absolutely unusable," she's saying to Tara. "Look at this footage. Look at it! I look like a corpse. My followers are going to think I'm dying."
The irony would be funny if it weren't so pathetic.
I crouch about twenty yards away, hidden behind a cluster of pine trees that provide perfect concealment while giving me a clear view of their campsite. I’ve been sitting here debating whether or not I should join them.
I can’t stop going back and forth. It could be me losing my mind out here. I’m probably not thinking clearly considering everything I’ve seen in the last twenty-four hours. Lack of sleep. Lack of food. Fear. It’s all adding up to one big cluster fuck insidemy head. The smarter part of me says I need to remain a lone wolf. Being with others will only draw attention.
But the other part of me…
Makes me think being with others might be a good thing. I’m almost certain I could outrun Lexie and Tara. If The Hunter showed up, theoretically, I could trip one of them and take off into the woods while they’re scrambling to get back up. They’d be the easy target. I’d take out Lexie first, then Tara later on when the time was right.
But an even smaller part of me knows he doesn’t want them.
He wants me.
Then again, these two haven't shown much evidence of functional brain cells since this nightmare began.
Tara sits across from Lexie, her hair catching the firelight as she nervously adjusts her own camera angle. "Maybe we should keep it down," she whispers, glancing toward the tree line. She's finally starting to understand that something is very wrong in these woods.
Too little, too late, but at least it's something.
"Keep it down?" Lexie's voice rises to near-shriek levels. "Are you insane? This is for the fans, Tara. Fame. This is exactly what the people want to see. The more we do, the more airtime the producers will give us. Do you have any idea how many views this is getting? How many new followers I’m probably gaining right now?"
Views. Followers. Fame.
I watch her adjust her camera for better lighting and wonder if there's any scenario where natural selection could work fast enough to clean up this particularly poor gene pool.
"Lexie, seriously," Tara tries again, her voice tight. "Something's wrong here. This doesn’t feel right. I think I want to go home."
"It’s all fake," Lexie interrupts, rolling her eyes at her camera like Tara's the one being unreasonable. "God, you're so gullible. This is reality TV, honey. They’re not really going to let us die out here. Sure, they’ll rough us up a bit, but they won’t let anythingactuallyhappen to us."
