Forsaken - An American Sasquatch Tale Read Free

You can trust them.”
    “Uh—” Liberty peeked open an eye and watched her mother start to climb.
    “Don’t forget,” Sarah said when she neared the lip.
    Liberty squeezed her eyes shut again. The white auras? Everyone knew there was no such thing. But before she had a chance to question it, Sarah had lifted herself out of the pit. Liberty heard leaves crunching and counted Sarah’s steps until she couldn’t detect them anymore.
    She decided she’d been tricked. Like the first time she’d gotten hiccups, they’d lingered the whole day until out of the blue her mother told her to think of someone who was talking about her. The words caught her off guard and by the time she’d thought of everyone in the cavern who might indeed be talking about her, the hiccups had vanished. Another diversion.
    Liberty opened her eyes. Digging and kicking at the dirt, Liberty tried her hardest to unearth the rock. If the men happened upon her before her father made it back, she hoped to be strong enough to use it to defend herself. She continued to excavate, pausing every few seconds to listen, until the men approach again.
    “Ray!” the other one shouted, “It’s over here!”
    A crash in the woods, like a tree had fallen in the distance, and then footfalls thundered to the right of the dugout. She maneuvered, trying to get a good angle to see up above. See anything at all. A moment later, pounding steps came from the opposite direction. Had they turned back? A man’s voice hollered out, “Which way did they go? Sam?”
    Sam. Now she knew the names of both the men who had caused her mother to leave.
    “Left! Left! Off the trail,” Sam answered.
    “I’ll head ‘em off this way,” Ray said.
    She stood on tiptoes and glimpsed a beam of light as it bobbed and bounced off the spruce. Heard the men’s excited voices as they talked over each other. And the unmistakable sound of gunshots and a brief wail. She dropped down to her knees and in a frenzy, pulled the rock free.
    “Whoa! Did you see that? I hit it,” the Sam person called out. “Point your light over here.”
    They couldn’t have been more than fifty paces away. How far had her mother gotten? Liberty refused to accept the cry had come from Sarah because she’d gone for help minutes ago. She couldn’t be the ‘it’ they’d hit. Liberty picked the rock up, balanced it in her hands near her small shoulders, and prepared to heave it toward anyone who looked into the pit.
    The footsteps stopped. The air was still and the woods grew silent. Liberty waited, finally peered up at the opening, curiosity getting the best of her. “Holy shit, man. Oh man,” Ray said.
    Liberty didn’t understand, but the terror in his voice was clear. His fear fed hers. She put the rock down, sat on top of it, and hugged her knees.
    “I swear to God, brother, that isn’t what I shot at.”
    “How the hell did she get out here?”
    She. The word resonated in Liberty’s head.
    Sam started to whimper and babble nonsense.
    “Knock it off, dumbass. We gotta hold our shit together,” Ray said.
    Liberty heard a grunt. It sounded like one of them fell.
    “What the hell you do that for?”
    Ray ignored Sam’s question. “You drop anything out here?”
    After a few seconds, “I don’t think so. Why?”
    “You better know so, because we’re going back to camp, packing our crap up, and getting out of here. We ain’t coming back because you realized you lost your fucking hat full of hair samples in these woods,” Ray’s voice grew louder.
    “So we’re just gonna leave?”
    “You wanna stick around, pray or something?”
    “I just thought—”
    “You think whatever you want. I’m going to the truck.”
    Leaves crunched and Sam hollered, “Ray! Wait up, Ray, I’m coming.”
    Their voices reached Liberty as they walked, but she didn’t listen. She continued to sway back and forth inside the pit, knowing two things for sure.
    One, her mother’s body lay out there in the