What were her other options? She could find a weapon. They had had bats, but she was really fast, and if she had a bat of her own maybe she could get a few hits in enough that they could both escape. There was a baseball diamond nearby of which she was aware, but baseball season was over. Still, it didn’t hurt to try. He would probably be pissed enough to actually burn down some trees, but maybe his anger would be cooled if she could help him even a little.
By tree, she made her way toward the baseball diamond she’d passed a few times. It was almost deserted, but there were a couple of people practicing together. Nearby, they’d left duffle bags, and an aluminum bat sat atop one of them. They were on the other side of the fence, but Jia Li had serious qualms about theft, so she managed to get their attention. “Hey, I’ll give you guys thirty dollars if I can take that bat.” They looked at her like she was crazy.
“Are you okay? What happened to your face?” One of them asked her. Crap… She’d essentially forgotten that she probably had a large bruise accompanying the wound that had bled on her cheek, and there hadn’t been enough time to have the puffiness of her skin from her tears to go down.
“Oh, this? I fell pretty hard when I was playing tackle football with my brother.” She said with a laugh. “It hurt, a lot.” She hoped the lie was convincing. “So what do you say? Thirty dollars for your bat?” She pulled her wallet from her bag and showed them she was good for the money. Bats were cheap, so she hoped it was an enticing deal. They hesitated, and she could practically feel valuable seconds ticking by.
“Yeah, I guess so.” The other one shrugged and approached. She handed them the money, grabbed the bat, and ran into the nearest tree. She didn’t care what they would think of it; she was just glad to get moving again. Her face held a determined expression and she ran from tree to tree, back toward where she’d left Jack.
It seemed like an eternity before she arrived, but when she finally moved into the tree into which he’d thrown her, she paused, listening. She couldn’t hear things from inside the tree, but she was able to get a small sense of what surrounded a tree in which she stood if she concentrated hard enough. She wasn’t picking up much at all. In fact, it almost seemed as if the area had been deserted. After concentrating for a short while more, she slowly pushed her head through the tree, just enough to see.
The sight horrified her. They were all gone, but blood streaked the tree trunk, and it pooled around a body, Jack’s body. Jia Li felt sick, but she pushed herself the rest of the way through the tree, the bat slipping from her grip. Kneeling beside him, not caring about the blood soaking through her jeans or the tears that streamed down her face, her fingertips moved to his throat. The dryad couldn’t feel a pulse. She began to shake, and she removed her bag, digging through it for her cell phone, but she couldn’t find it even after dumping the contents onto the ground. She’d forgotten it.
“I’m so sorry.” She sobbed quietly. This was all her fault. She should have stayed quiet; she shouldn’t have made a sound. Maybe she should have taken a different route to her dad’s. Getting there quickly wasn’t what was important, life was, and her foolishness had just caused one to end.
Her hands were already bloody from having searched for a pulse. His blood was on her hands metaphorically, too. The worst part of it all was that she had been absolutely awful to him, and he had saved her life in return. Her hands moved to the sides of his face and she gazed at him sadly. “You should have just turned around. You’d still be alive if you’d just turned the other way.” She wasn’t really accusing himself of being stupid so much as she was desperately wishing he hadn’t died. The preferable choice would have been that they had both survived with minor injuries.