Still Here, After Everything

The footsteps are slow. Unhurried. A figure emerges from the tree line to the north — a man, she thinks, though in the dark it’s the shape of him more than any detail: tall, wide through the shoulders, wearing a canvas jacket and carrying something long across one arm that her body identifies as a rifle before her mind catches up. He walks toward the station with the ease of someone who knows this ground, who has walked it a thousand times, and he doesn’t look toward her. He reaches the door, pauses with his hand on the frame, and then — just before he steps inside — he turns his head and looks directly at the cedar tree where Chioma is standing.
He can’t see her. The darkness is too complete. She knows this.
He looks for a long moment, and then he goes inside.
She runs.
Not back toward her camp — she’s not going to her camp, not now, not with the tent and the sleeping bag and everything she owns sitting in a bright orange beacon two hundred meters away. She runs west, parallel to the access road but inside the tree line, her headlamp still off because the headlamp is the thing that will give her away and she knows this terrain well enough from the map she has memorized, she has to trust that, she has to trust herself. Branches catch at her jacket. The ground is uneven, root-buckled, and twice she nearly goes down, catching herself on her palms and pushing back upright without stopping. Her breath is ragged and too loud in her own ears and she hates how loud it is, hates every sound she’s making, but she doesn’t stop.
She runs for perhaps twelve minutes before she lets herself slow.
She crouches behind a granite outcrop above a small creek and listens. Water over rock. Wind through the upper branches. Nothing else. No footsteps, no light moving through the trees behind her, no sound of pursuit. She waits. She is good at waiting — it’s most of what her job is, really, waiting for the crisis to clarify before you act, reading the shape of it correctly. She waits for twenty minutes by the count in her head and the forest stays quiet and ordinary around her.
Then she hears the voice.
It comes from directly behind her, low and conversational, as though continuing a sentence already in progress: “You shouldn’t be out this far east.” She spins. An older woman is sitting on a rock she is almost certain was empty when she crouched down, wearing weathered hiking gear, a headlamp pushed up on her forehead and switched off, a thermos in both hands. Not the man. Someone else entirely. The woman’s face is calm and deeply lined, her gray hair pulled back, and she is looking at Chioma with an expression that is not threatening but is also not warm — it is the expression of someone delivering a fact they find unpleasant.
“The eastern corridor is closed,” Chioma says, because it’s the only thing she can think of to say.
“Yes,” the woman agrees. She looks down at her thermos. “Has been for a while.”
“The station burned.”
The woman looks up again. Something shifts in her face — not quite discomfort, not quite pity. “Is that what they’re saying?” she asks, and her voice is perfectly even.
Chioma opens her mouth. Closes it. The creek runs on below them, indifferent and clean, and the trees stand where they have always stood, and somewhere east through the dark the window of the station she has read about in incident reports and closure notices burns its steady, impossible yellow.
The woman stands, caps her thermos, and pulls her headlamp down over her eyes without switching it on. “Head west,” she says. “Don’t stop until you hit the trailhead.” She steps past Chioma without touching her and walks north into the trees and within seconds the dark has closed around her completely, as though she stepped through a door.
Chioma stands alone above the creek.

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About the Author

Helena Ward — a crisis psychologist writing ordinary people thrown straight into survival mode. She turns stress into words and stories.

— Helena Ward

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September 1, 2026

10min-stories