A branch cracked behind him and he jumped out of the way as it crashed to the ground not a few yards to his right.Fuck.īlinking against the wind, Barrett narrowed his eyes as a shape appeared up ahead. Recalling his old linebacker days, he barreled forward, propelled by that gnawing sense of dread. A snowstorm was moving in and he needed to haul ass. It rattled branches and scattered dead leaves and echoed through the forest with a groan.īarrett wasn’t superstitious, but he wasn’t stupid, either. The skies were darkening and the wind was picking up, and whatever strange, ominous feeling he had seemed to be following his boot prints in the snow. It was very likely just a weird coincidence.īarrett ducked as a set of branches tried to whip at him and pushed forward again. But he did want to check those saw marks on the trees to the saw marks on the bridges, just in case. The trees had been fairly young, so Jacques had written it up and filed it away. People sometimes poached trees from the forest, or didn’t realize it was forest land. But he’d found a few with obvious saw marks and had mentioned it to Jacques. It wasn’t, in and of itself, unusual trees fell. And then Ambrose’s text had come in and the implications of it - and the future it might hold - made panic shoot through him.Īdd in the fact that they’d had some downed trees in certain parts of the forest of late and well. There hadn’t been time, in the rush to get the runners down to the ambulances, to show Meredith or Jacques. Maybe he was just getting cynical and suspicious as he aged.

He’d had a moment where he thought he was seeing things, but he’d taken a picture and another piece of wood with the same marks. Add thousands of visitors every week crossing the bridge, even in the winter, and you had a trap that could spring at any moment.

Not all the way through the beam, but enough to weaken it. And the more he looked at those marks, the larger the ball of dread in his stomach grew.

When he’d been digging the man out of the rubble, he’d caught sight of a set of strange marks in the remaining support beams, as cracked and splintered as they were.

Ask Me for Fire by Halli Starling