Tara's Fate

Chapter 1

“Calm down, Tara,” Tara Winslow whispered to herself. “Everything will be ok.” Even to her own ears she could tell her voice lacked conviction. As though to prove a point, the wind blew through the trees, causing leaves to rattle. She gasped, turning left and right like a frightened rabbit.

A moment passed, and nothing jumped out of the shadows to kill her. Tara lifted her eyes up to look towards the sky. The bit of sky she could actually see through the thick canopy of leaves at the tree top told her it was already getting late in the day. A fact that did not bring her any comfort. Not that the situation had any aspect of comfort to begin with. In fact, comfort could not be used to describe any part of the day she’d had so far.

Her eyes fell on the simple plastic watch on her left wrist and made a few mental calculations. It took her a few seconds, her brain activity slowed down from exhaustion and stress accumulated through the hours. She had already been walking for three hours by her calculations, and her feet ached. She was certain she had blisters all over the soles and toes of her feet by now. But she would not stop and check. Somehow, she believed the pain would intensify if she actually saw them.

Sweat had covered her entire body. It was not a simple sheen but the kind that rolled down her skin as though water had been sprinkled on her and it was beginning to make her more than a little uncomfortable, sticky, with her clothes pasting to her skin. The smell wasn’t too good either. Her nose twitched unhappily at the odor that was emitted from her own armpits.

The tree cover above her prevented her from getting sunburned, but that was a small blessing she wasn’t ready to appreciate. She was all for counting blessings, but circumstances had to be right for that. And her current circumstances were not right, not by a long shot.

Panic began to make its way in her chest from the pit of her stomach like a slow burn. It was either that, or bile from her stomach was rising through her esophagus and her body was preparing to puke.

She took a deep, slow breath and tried to calm herself. “There is no reason to panic,” she told herself quietly for what felt like the hundredth time in the last hour. On the contrary, deep down, she knew she had every reason to panic. She was lost. That was a fact staring her in the face, plain as day.

Giving her phone another hopeful glance showed her she was still as lost and hopeless as she had been hours ago. There was no cellular reception and the google map app was nothing more than a wallpaper on her screen. A very plain uninteresting one at that.

Tara stopped walking. It was time to reassess the situation - probably pastime, actually.

Her car had broken down miles away from any town, city or village, for that matter. After waiting for an hour by the roadside with her useless dead car, she had reached the conclusion no other car was traveling that road today and she couldn’t wait indefinitely. Not with the pressing matter that had put her on the road to begin with.

A quick look at her google map app, which she had been using since she left home earlier in the day, had told her there was a small town just a few miles away from where she was stranded. She couldn’t search for more details or call anyone because her phone had absolutely no network reception. Like the makings of a horror movie, her car had decided to break down in an area with no cellular network. Perfect. She looked at the last image the app had saved before losing the network and determined the fastest way to get to the town had to be by going through the woods. It didn’t look so far.

Tara was beginning to wonder if she had engaged all her brain cells before making the decision to walk into the woods with nothing else but a phone with no network reception, two-thirds of a bottle of water and her backpack full of snacks, an extra shirt and her purse which held some cash, her cards and her ID. At least, her body would be identified if she died in there. The morbid thought crossed her mind for a second.

Now that she gave it another thought, she realized her circumstances really resembled a plot for a horror story. The kind no one made it out alive in the end. What had she been thinking?

The feeling of panic intensified as she looked around. Her gut clenched, bringing a bitter taste to her mouth. She was definitely going to puke; she thought.

Every tree looked the same as the other. She couldn’t tell one direction apart from the other. That meant she didn’t even have the option of walking back to the car she had abandoned by the side of the road. She had stepped around thorny bushes, enormous trees and large rocks enough times that she did not know if she was heading west or north.

Tara had never taken part in activities such as camping trips or Girl Guide adventures. Anything to do with the outdoors had never been her cup of tea. That had been more of Olivia’s thing than hers. Tara preferred all her adventures contained between the pages of a good book with a decent cup of coffee for company.

Unfortunately, books gave her all the theory and juice for her imagination and none of the practice for the real thing. She could vividly recall reading about how to find north with the sun or stars. Or even how to make a compass with a needle on a leaf using a magnet. Well, when theory met reality, Tara realized she was not prepared.

She could hardly see the sun and she certainly had no magnets on her - who walked around with a magnet, anyway? And she definitely didn’t want to see stars while she was still in this predicament. A night in the woods did not fill her with any happy thoughts. Her stomach churned just thinking about it.

Olivia was the only reason she was here in the first place. She had left everything and jumped into her car without a second thought. She couldn’t even remember if she had turned off all the electrical appliances before leaving the house. Her mind had been on her younger sister, and now she was lost in the woods, surrounded by more vegetation than she had ever seen in her entire life.

Tara scratched the back of her neck and tried to think. It wasn’t easy to get past the morbid thoughts floating in her mind, but she had to try.

She was a full grown twenty-three-year-old woman who had proved her intelligence and brilliant mind several times before. For goodness’ sake, she had single-handedly raised and provided for her younger sister for years after their parents’ death. She could definitely figure her way out of the thicket of trees that all looked the same.

After a few more minutes of doing nothing but thinking, she still had no better option. Nothing came to mind worth a penny. Her brain had hit a stone wall. It was either her brain was too tired to reason or had been paralyzed with apprehension of what was going to happen to her in a few hours once it got dark.

She stood there another few minutes before finally she exhaled heavily and looked in the direction she had been heading. “The woods can’t go on forever... sooner or later I should find a road or the damn town,” she reasoned out loud.

Her voice sounded rough from hours of disuse. Tara cleared her throat and took a sip of water. She inspected the bottle and shook her head. She had consumed well over half the bottle already. The last thing she wanted was to be stuck in the woods without water. Dehydration was a problem she could do without.

She didn’t believe all that science business about the human body surviving days without water and food. Her smart brain told her she needed food and water for survival and clear thinking. And she had no interest in being proven right or wrong.

She looked down at her lean body as she adjusted the bag straps over her shoulders. Tara shook her head again. She definitely didn’t want to find out if the science nerds she read about were right. She didn’t have enough fat on her body to attempt scientific research of any kind.

The miles piled on as she continued to walk, even so, no town, road or even an abandoned cabin appeared miraculously in her path. The glimmer of hope she had held in her heart began to fade rather fast, so did daylight. Her wrist watch told her it was already past five. Her phone told her nothing. The battery had drained, and the phone was dead.

Tara was forced to stop again when she stumbled over an exposed root. Tears filled her eyes as she looked round and saw how dark it had gotten. Her throat closed and goose bumps covered her skin as genuine fear took root in her stomach.

The saying ‘things couldn’t possibly get any worse’ crossed her mind. But Tara knew things could get worse. Life on good days was very unpredictable. But on a bad day such as the one she was having, she knew it could knock her six ways to Sunday before the sun even set over the horizon.

Suddenly, a sound cut through her panicked mind. Her head jerked in the direction. Her eyes were already wide with fear as she wondered what unknown creature she’d had the misfortune to come across already. All manner of gruesome deaths flashed through her mind.

She held her breath and waited, frozen like a deer caught in headlights. Her heart was beating so hard it was causing physical discomfort. The sound of blood rushing through her veins soon became the only thing she could hear. She drew in shaky quick breaths in quick succession. And they seemed to not provide her body with the necessary oxygen, because she suddenly began to feel light-headed.

When the source of the sound finally made an appearance, Tara wasn’t sure what to make of it. Her tired, confused brain couldn’t decide whether to be happy, shocked, scared or all the above. It wasn’t every day she came across a naked man in the middle of nowhere. And the man was completely naked as the day he was born.

For a moment, she wondered if it was a hallucination. A figment of her exhausted imagination. She remembered reading that hallucinations were common when people were scared, dehydrated, stressed, and tired. And she ticked all the boxes.

There wasn’t enough light to clearly see him, but what she saw was enough and it took her breath away, or at least froze it in her throat.

The man was tall, she could guess, about six feet. He had wide shoulders and muscles that flexed as he walked towards her with purpose. Tara’s eyes took the man in. Every inch of his body was hard. Well, all except one.

Her eyes looked down on their own violation and took note that even though the man was clearly not excited in that department, his package still made an impressive presentation between his firm, muscled thighs.

A blush suddenly filled her cheeks all the way to the tip of her ears and she quickly lifted her eyes to look into the eyes of the man. Eyes that seemed to glow in the fast fading light and looked positively pissed for some reason. She blinked, confused. Tara wondered what the man had to be so pissed about. He wasn’t the one who had been hopelessly lost in the woods for hours.

It took all her self-control not to return her eyes to the lower parts of his body, but the task was not made easy when the man stood a good ten feet away from her instead of reaching her. That gave her far too much view of him without even shifting her eyes.

The man crossed his muscled arms over his chest and frowned. Tara took a step back cautiously. The man really did not look pleased to see her. He looked at her as though she had personally offended him, yet she was certain she had never met the man in her life. She would never have forgotten meeting such a man.

He looked like the definition of a living, breathing Greek god. If Zeus or Poseidon took human forms and visited earth, she could expect they would look something like this man. Tara gave his body another quick inspection. Her mind temporarily forgot the man’s pissed expression and her own fatigue and fear. For a moment, all she could think of was how she could climb the man like a tree and feel his hard muscles rub against her body.

“What are you doing here?” the man suddenly asked without the slightest warmth in his deep voice.

Tara’s eyes snapped back to his and locked.