I left just one week before my eighteenth birthday. I couldn’t stand to stay with my dad for another second. He had gone off the walls, his crazy off the charts. I packed my bags and headed out to the woods. The one good thing about Alaska, besides the excellent cell service ( a little bit sarcastic… Okay a lot) is that finding a silent, unpopulated place to camp is as easy as finding a McDonalds in most of central USA. I only had to drive about 3 miles down a narrow path until I found a spot that I thought would work, but I passed the ideal spot up and drove for a little while longer. By the time I had stopped, I wasn’t sure how far I had actually gone, but it didn’t matter. Distance didn’t matter for me. I was searching. For happiness, peace, calm, a cure to the mind-numbingly insane life that was forced upon me when my mom passed away. I was searching for anything that made sense.

That night, I couldn’t fall asleep. I laid curled up in my tent, surrounded in blankets. I heard something, a noise just outside, not more than ten feet away. A crackle, a crunch, a I held my breath. Just then, something brushed against the tent. I bit my tongue to keep from screaming. The zipper began to move, and I could hold it in anymore. I screamed, releasing all the air from my lungs. I screamed so loud it echoed from the surrounding mountains. I screamed until my lungs burned and my throat was sore. I called for help, I pleaded, I begged. Anything to make whatever was coming for me leave. I paused for a breath when I heard the receding steps, tramping through the brush. Whatever it was, I had scared it off. I prayed that it wouldn’t come back later to finish the job. I got out my flashlight and got my gun from the  rack that lay just outside the tent flap. I gathered my courage, and left my tent. I walked, shaking down the lane a little, and when I didn’t see anything, I turned to go back, and that’s when I saw it… There standing in the middle of the lane was a ? well, I’m not sure you really want to know. Are you sure? It was … my father.
“What the HECK Dad? What are are you doing out here?” I shivered in the cold, mountain air. The silhouette of my father shuffled around to face me, I squinted in the dim moonlight to distinguish the figure that appeared to be my father. The figure shambled towards me, its dull eyes the only feature visible. His eyes were empty, seemingly just endless voids, set deep in its skull. I turned and ran. I ran as hard as I could for as far as I thought that I could manage. Even then, I kept going, and yet,  as hard as I ran, as far as I thought that I had gotten, every time that I turned around, he was closer. The branches of trees whipping my arms and face. The bushes were tearing at the flesh of my legs, thorns like tiny teeth, willing to kill for the taste of blood.
I just couldn’t get over his eyes, that even when I was running, I could feel boring into my skull. Those lifeless lumps of coal stuck into his head, staring, empty, and well, dead. Whenever I thought of them a new surge of fear would streak through me. I still ran, until once I turned around, and he was gone.
At this point, I had no clue where I was, and I needed to get back to my truck. I didn’t know where that thing that used to be my father had gone to, but I knew it was still out there. I pulled out my cell phone, and began to pull up my GPS. It was still searching for my current location when they found it on the forest floor two days later. The battery should have been dead, the phone broken. Yet it still displayed that one word. Searching. That is what they have done for weeks. Searching for clues, a body, a weapon, a hint, anything. I am still here too. Still searching, only for me, its no longer for a cure, for happiness, for peace. It’s for revenge.