Sheep in Wolf’s Skin ||geronimeow||
Brian sat hunched over in his chair at school. The boy next to him was reading a magazine, and the cover had a gun on it. Brian couldn't stop staring. Ever since he was rescued, Brian had this weird feeling of isolation, like he didn't quite fit in anymore. He almost craved the wilderness again, he'd been there for so long. So he had tried to find things to read or watch that brought the woods to him. He missed the forest, the lakes, the wild as he thought of it, so much that at times he could not bear it. The guns-and-hunting magazines, the hunting and fishing videos on television sickened him. Men using high-velocity weapons to shoot deer or elk from so far away they could barely see them, or worse, blasting them from a blind or the back of a Jeep; baiting bear with pits full of rotten meat and shooting them with rifles that could stop a car; taking bass for sport or money in huge contests with fancy boats and electronic gear that located each fish individually.
Sport, they called it. But they weren't hunting or fishing because they needed to; they were killing to kill, not eat, to prove some kind of worth, and he stopped reading the magazines and watching the videos. His survival in the wilderness had made him famous, in a small way, and some of the magazines interviewed him, as did some of the hunting and sporting shows on television, but they got it all wrong. Completely wrong.
Brian killed to survive, not for fun. Quite frankly, he found the idea of killing for fun disgusting, despite all he'd done - had to do, he corrected himself - to survive. He looked up tiredly as his teacher called on him, giving him a snide look that said, 'I know you weren't paying attention, so let's prove it to the whole class' that teachers did so often. Brian wasn't up for it right now, he was too tired, too distracted. So he simply stared at her with cold eyes until she awkwardly moved on to the next question.
Brian glanced over and caught eyes with another boy in his class, Tyler, he was pretty sure his name was. Brian just looked away, staring back at his scarred hands. He couldn't stop thinking about it, thinking about what happened. The crash, the struggle and terror; he couldn't stop seeing the pilot's dead eyes staring at him from the bottom of the lake. Those eyes haunted him at night, and he had this strange, irrational fear that he would come for Brian. The pilot, that is...his experience was like some ghost story, some horror story. He didn't know why; he knew that the pilot was dead, and it was completely impossible for him to come back to life to haunt him or something, yet...
Brian felt a tap on his shoulder just as he thought that and let out a screech before he could stop himself.
"What the-"
Brian scrambled out of his seat, eyes wide with fear as he looked around, trying to find the dead man who'd come back for him, or maybe the corpses of all the things he'd killed. But there wasn't anyone, just another kid in his class who was handing out worksheets. Everyone was staring at him as he backed into the wall, and silence filled his ears except for the clicking of his shoes against the floor, which made him flinch with each footfall.
I wouldn't have heard that in the forest, Brian thought to himself. He didn't understand, he didn't understand why he had these weird thoughts, why everything seemed so different now. Brian heard whispers of his classmates,
"What's wrong with him?"
"Why is he being so weird?"
"Freak."
"Shouldn't he be in a hospital or something?"
Brian slid to the ground, covering his face in his hands and curled up tightly as if he would just disappear into the plaster behind him if he tried hard enough.
"Stop," he muttered to himself. "Just stop it."