by Danika Stone
Ash flinched. He wanted to intervene, but all his jokes had escaped him. “Vale, I don’t think—”
Vale jabbed her finger toward the wrappers spinning in circles. “THAT garbage! This is a national park. You can’t just leave garbage like that,” she snapped. “Animals will eat it. They might DIE!”
“Well, you’d better not eat it, then, pig!” Mike barked. Brodie and Ethan howled with laughter.
Ash could see tears prickling Vale’s lower lids, and the urge to defend her rose like the tide. He fought it down. “Just ignore those jerks,” he said quietly.
The other boys turned to go, but Vale yelled after them. “Wait! You need to come back and clean that up!”
Brodie flicked her the finger. “You two better hurry! Perkins ain’t waiting for ya!”
Ash’s gaze moved through the trees to the meadow. Perkins stood with his back to them. With the howling wind, he hadn’t heard a thing.
“I’m gonna tell Ms. Holland about this, you know!” Vale shouted.
“Ooooooh! I’m so scared.” Mike turned to Ash. “C’mon, Hashbrown. Let’s head out before Holland flips.”
“All good, man!” Ash said with a wave and a guilty smile. “I’ll catch up with you in a bit.”
“Your loss, Hashbrown!” In seconds, Mike, Brodie, and the others were bounding across the field, leaving Vale and Ash behind in the forest.
“Jerks!” Vale grumbled.
“Let it go. They’re not worth it.”
“But it’s their mess!”
“Yeah, well. We can get it. And then tell Holland about it afterward.” Ash stumbled around the clearing, picking up the scattered garbage as the wind abruptly rose, a small tornado of wrappers rising up and scattering farther into the trees, out of sight of the trail.
Vale rushed to grab the wrappers. “Thanks for helping with this, Ash. Seriously. Thanks.”
He smiled. “That’s what friends do, right? It’ll just take a sec.”
It took a while before the two of them caught the last piece of garbage. Ash jammed it into a plastic bag. “Here, Vale. Give me the rest. I’ll carry it.” She handed it to him, and he shoved it into his coat pocket. “See? Easy-peasy.” Ash pulled out his phone, checking for messages.
“You … you brought your phone.” Vale gasped.
“Yeah. So what?”
“But Ms. Holland—”
“Has my brother’s busted iPod in her box.” His face broke into a wide grin. “I texted you about it this morning.”
“I … I didn’t see your text.”
“Well, now you know.” Ash winked. “I spent half the drive out playing Into the Abyss.”
“I thought you were sleeping.”
“I was … for the first part of the drive.” He shoved the phone back into his pocket, pulled on his pack, and headed out of the trees toward the trail. His feet slowed as they reached the tree line. The trail that led to the Twin Lakes Backcountry campground was bare. In the fifteen minutes they’d taken to pick up the garbage, they’d become completely separated from the larger group. Even Mr. Perkins was gone.
“Whoa,” Ash muttered. “Where is everyone?”
“They—they’re gone.” Vale stared out at the open field. Her face went white except for two bright spots of color on her cheeks. If Ash didn’t know better, he’d think she was going to cry. She spun on her heel. “Perkins wasn’t supposed to leave until everyone was accounted for,” she said in a high-pitched voice. “That was the rule. He wasn’t supposed to leave us. We aren’t on the list!”
“But he’d already counted us.”
“He what?”
“Right before we went into the trees, he counted us. I heard him.”
Vale stared out across the crumpled grass of the meadow. “Oh my God … they left us behind!”
“They can’t have gone far. We’ll catch up with ’em.” Ash tightened his grip on his pack’s shoulder straps, picking up his pace as he headed down the trail. Vale bolted after him.
“Wait for me!”
He slowed as Vale jogged to his side. “You okay?”
“I’m fine,” she said. “But we need to stay together. There are dangerous animals in the mountains.”
“Like what…?” He snickered. “Fool hens?”
“Wolves and cougars and bears and—”
“Bears…?” Ash gasped.
“Uh-huh, bears.” Vale took her place at his side. “So, um … let’s stick together. Okay?”
Ash nodded and pulled out his phone, then tucked his earbuds into his ears. “You got it. Just lead the way.”
For a long time they hiked in silence, the faint sounds of music echoing through the earbuds the only interruption. Vale couldn’t identify any of the songs, but they were all epic orchestral themes, as if the video games that Ash played had become the soundtrack to his life. Worried, Vale kept her eyes on the trail.
An hour after they’d left the clearing, a heavy layer of fog filled the valley like a moist blanket. The trees grew into amorphous shapes, mountains gone.
Ash stopped dead in his tracks. He stared into the forest with wide eyes. “Whoa! D’you see that?”
Vale jerked to a stop. “What? Where?”
“There in the trees.” He pointed into the forest where the rainy undergrowth grew thick with a veil of gray-white mist. “The haze.”
“What about it?”
“Looks like game lag. But like … real lag. Real-life lag.” Ash grinned at her, his brown eyes sparkling. “Like the forest is supposed to be there, but it’s not totally loaded by the computer yet.”
“That’s going to be trouble.”
“Why?”
Vale nodded to where Ash knew the mountaintops should be, but were no longer visible, caught in an otherworldly lag. “It means we can’t see the mountains.”
“So?”
“So we can’t see where we are going anymore.”
Ash frowned. “Er … yeah.”
“C’mon. Let’s keep walking.”
They’d gone a few feet when Ash bumped her shoulder. “Hey, Vale. I got a joke for you.”
She smiled. “Okay.”
“What do you do when the world champion of Scrolls of the Illuminati knocks on your door?”
“I…” Vale giggled. “I have no idea.”
“You say, ‘Well done, sir!’ then pay the man for the pizza!”
Ash cracked up at his own joke, and a moment later, Vale began to laugh too. For a few seconds, it felt like everything was normal again.
“Good one, Ash.” Vale’s smile faded away. “Now we really should hurry. We need to catch up.”
On they walked.
An hour after the mountaintops disappeared, the first flecks of moisture dotted their jackets and it began to drizzle. Ash pulled out his earbuds and tucked them into his pocket. He blew on his hands. “You don’t happen to have an umbrella, do you?”
“Sorry. Never thought to bring one.”
“Me neither.” Ash pursed his lips. “How long until we get there?”
“Not sure.”
Ash squinted at the misty cloud bank that covered the sky from horizon to horizon. “Should I try to give someone a call?”
“Will Ms. Holland even have a phone with her? She’s pretty fixated on not bringing devices along.”
“Don’t know about Holland, but Mr. Perkins sure does.”
“You have Mr. Perkins’s number?” She snorted. “You two buddies or something?”
“No!” He laughed. “But his son, Josh, plays on the same Death Raiders squad as I do. I got his phone number last year back when the group of us did a three-night endurance tourney, battling squads from each of the main action levels. Josh didn’t want to be interrupted while—”
“Ash.” Vale lifted her hand. “Can you pause the story a minute?”
“Huh?” He blinked as if he’d been on a different channel and had just switched back to Vale. “Sorry. Had a bit of a 404 there.” Ash grinned an
d pulled out his phone. “Gotta text Perkins.” He thumb-typed in a quick message. After a few seconds, he swore.
“What’s wrong?”
“Text messages aren’t sending.”
“Can you call him?”
There was the low boom of thunder, and Ash looked up in surprise. His face was splattered with heavy droplets of rain. With a swear, he jogged away, taking shelter under a tree. He lifted his phone, hoping and praying for reception bars.
Nothing.
“You shouldn’t be standing there,” Vale called. “If there’s lightning, you could get hit.”
He looked up to see her waiting out in the rain. “I’ll take my chances.” He glanced back down. There was a single band. With a grin, Ash dialed his phone, then held it to his ear. After a few seconds he glared at the screen.
The band was gone.
Ash let out a blast of swearing. No fricking reception out here! They were in the middle of the mountains, so it wasn’t a surprise—Ms. Holland had said as much—but it worried Ash. He didn’t know what to do if he didn’t have his phone!
Lightning arced across the sky, and with that the storm clouds opened up entirely. This wasn’t the end of a passing storm; it was the beginning of one. Waves of rain fell in silvery sheets. He heard Vale mutter something, and Ash looked over at her from the relative safety of the tree.
“You should get out of the rain,” Ash said. “I know Holland said not to stand under trees, but it’s not like we can walk up to Walmart and buy a raincoat or—”
There was another crack of lightning followed almost simultaneously by the roar of thunder. Ash flinched. (But he was still alive a moment later.)
“That’s it!” Vale laughed.
“What’s it?”
“Raincoats. You can use anything plastic to make one.” She dropped down to her knees, pulled out a black bag and shook it out. “I’ve got trash bags.”
Ash tucked his phone deep into his pocket as Vale rustled through her pack. “What’re you doing?”
Vale tore open a hole at the bottom and a smaller one on either side. “I’m making a rain slicker,” she said.
“Out of a garbage bag…?”
“Uh-huh. You want one?”
“Sure, I guess.”
A minute later they both wore black garbage bags. It didn’t prevent the rain from hitting their faces, but the difference to their bodies was noticeable.
Ash gave her a crooked smile. “Good idea, Vale.”
“You say it like you’re surprised.”
“No, I mean yes. I mean … I knew you were … woodsy and all that. But this is some MacGyver-level thinking.”
Vale laughed. “Thanks. That’s a compliment, I think.”
“It is! This is way cool, Vale! We’re totally saving HP this way.”
Vale smiled despite herself. “Uh … thanks, Ash.” She straightened her pack and turned back to the trail. “Now we’d better catch up with the others.”
“Twin Lakes should be straight ahead. Right?”
“I think so.”
“Then let’s keep walking.”
* * *
Janelle Holland had rarely been in such a bad mood, but today everything was pushing her buttons. The bus ride had been awful. She’d spent half of it trying to quell her nausea, the other half dealing with Mike Reynolds and his goonies. More than once, a mantra had risen in her mind: I don’t get paid enough for this crap.
It was only when the Twin Lakes campground finally appeared—campfires flickering in the distance—that the angry voice inside her quieted. She lifted the checklist from her backpack, scanning through the items. The paper was immediately soaked, her handwritten notes blurring. Around her, kids scattered into the trees.
Janelle looked up. “Go to Mr. Perkins!” she shouted. “Go check in!”
Half the students obediently made their way to Karl’s side; the others milled around the smoky fires and the tents that circled them. Janelle gritted her teeth. Outback camping was fun when it was warm and dry, so of course tonight it was raining.
It’s going to be a long night.
“Angela!” she shouted. “Trey! Maya! Get over to Mr. Perkins and sign in.”
“Britt told Perkins I was there,” Maya said. “He already knows.”
“You go over yourself,” Janelle snapped.
“But Ms. Holland—”
“Do it right now, Maya, or I’m going to make everyone line up again and—”
An ear-splitting shriek filled the air, and Janelle’s hand jerked to the bear spray at her side. Another scream rang through the forest. A second later, a sobbing girl—Eden Sanderson—and her best friend came through the screen of trees. Eden had one sleeve of her coat off, the girl’s face white with terror.
“What’s wrong?” Janelle said, jogging to the girls’ side, the student checklist forgotten. “What happened?”
Eden tried to answer, but her voice was hitched with sobs. Janelle turned to the teen next to her. “Drea. Tell me what happened!”
“There’s a spider on her,” Drea said. “It won’t come off!”
Janelle’s heart sank as she looked down at Eden’s arm. Sure enough, the bug was firmly attached, eight legs tucked under itself, its face securely attached as its abdomen ballooned with blood.
“It’s not a spider,” she said grimly. “It’s a tick.”
“A tick?!” Eden shrieked.
“Relax,” Janelle said. “I’ll get it off, and we’ll save it for testing when we get back to Lethbridge.” A group of students gathered around her in macabre interest. “Back up,” she snapped. “Go check in with Mr. Perkins!”
“I can’t find him,” one student said.
“Me neither,” another added.
Janelle looked up. Students milled around the campground, Karl Perkins nowhere to be seen. Beyond the tents, the fog was so dense it looked like they were on the coast of British Columbia where Janelle had grown up. Rain fell in sheets, the temperature dropping. If it keeps up, we’re going to have snow too. Over at the far side of the fire, the third instructor crouched, his hands held out to the flames.
Frustration rose inside Janelle. “Mr. Barry!” she shouted. “I need a med kit over here. Hurry!” She looked down at the tick embedded in the girl’s skin. “Of all the days…”
Counting students would have to wait until later.
CHAPTER THREE
“I’m not gonna lose you too.”
CHIEF RAY GAINES, SAN ANDREAS
ASHTON HAMID HATED HIKING. He hated the woods. Hated the whole insistence on “real-life experiences” and “survival” and “nature” in general. He took another step, wincing as the blister on his heel throbbed. THIS is why I prefer VR! The trees grew close together here, and the trail on which he and Vale hiked wove between them like a ribbon. He squinted into the forest. If Vale wasn’t leading, he’d have no idea where to go. The trail was little more than a muddy path.
At least one of us knows what she’s doing.
With Vale’s auburn hair pulled back into a sensible ponytail and her cheeks flushed with color, she looked younger than sixteen, the spray of freckles over her nose as clear as it had been in kindergarten.
Vale caught his eye. “What are you staring at?”
Ash blinked. “Wait … What?”
“You’re staring, Ash. What’s up?” She wiped a string of hair away from her cheek. “Do I have something on my face?”
“I … no. It’s nothing.”
“If it’s a booger, Ash, just say it.” She rubbed vigorously from chin to forehead. “I can hardly feel my nose.”
He snorted happily. “It’s not. I would’ve taken a picture if it was.”
Vale giggled. “Jerk.”
“Takes one to know one.” He turned back to the muddy trail, his laughter fading. “Just hoping we reach the campground soon.”
“God … Me too.”
With the weather as bad as it was, Ash knew he and Vale wouldn’t arrive u
ntil nightfall. There’d be no time for hanging out and telling stories. No time for a campfire. We might not even get supper! Ash’s stomach growled in protest. He hunched his shoulders and walked faster.
Up ahead the forest thickened. In the past few hours, the rain had grown heavy and rivulets now crisscrossed the trail. Ash jumped across. A moment later, Vale splashed through the puddle.
“Can you wait a sec?” she said. “I … I need a break.”
He glanced back. Vale had fallen ten steps behind him and had one hand pressed to her side, her face tight with pain.
Ash’s stomach dropped. “Geez! You okay, Vale?” He took two splashing steps back to her side. “Did you hurt yourself? Pull a muscle?”
“No, I—”
“Is your back sore? You need me to carry your bag or piggyback you or—”
“No, Ash,” she said with a tired laugh. “I’m fine.”
“But—”
“I’ve just got a stitch in my side. I need a break.”
Ash let out a relieved sigh. “That I can do.”
While they rested, he searched for landmarks. The mountains they’d walked into were gone, a hazy gray ceiling of storm clouds in their place. It gave him the unsettling feeling of being caught inside a box. Ash turned and looked back the other direction. His attention caught on the forked top of a pine tree, and he frowned. What in the world…? That looks like the same tree we passed fifteen minutes ago. It felt for a moment like he was in a poorly designed game and had just come across a repeating landscape. His gaze dropped down to the part of the path they’d just passed. His stomach churned uneasily. The trail was a faded smudge, the line of it almost too faint to follow in the gathering darkness, but there was a small outcrop of rocks in the trees that also looked familiar.
His attention jumped back to the pronged top of the branches. “What the…?”
“Something wrong?”
Ash nodded to the forked tree. “Does that tree over there look familiar to you?”
“Which one?”
“That tree. The one there with the split top. I … I think that I might have seen that one before.”
“Like, another tree, on another hike?”
“I don’t hike, Vale,” he said with a snort. “No, I mean, like, today.”