by A N Sandra
Helena decided to put as much distance between herself and Tawna as she could. Miss Jan ran back past her though and grabbed Lourdes by the arm.
“There is a landslide coming!” Miss Jan yelled. “If you go back you will be stuck there!”
Lourdes ran toward Miss Jan, causing Tawna and Ray to follow her. The whole group scampered across the trail as fast as they could with their huge packs, and rodents scurrying underfoot.
Helena screamed as she felt her foot crunch a small animal. Maybe a small ground squirrel or chipmunk of some kind. Her stomach turned, but she forced herself to keep going. Larger rocks began to roll on the path in front of her and she tried to guess how far off the life crushing rocks and thick mud might be.
The rumbling stopped, and the silence was almost louder than the rumbling had been. The shriek of a bird cut through the air and Helena’s heart raced even though she’d stopped running. Peter was right in front of her and instinctively she reached out and grabbed his arm for support.
“Everyone all right?” Miss Jan asked as Ray and Tawna caught up, huffing under the weight of their packs.
No one could talk. Everyone nodded.
“Okay, we need to regroup.” Miss Jan looked everyone over carefully. All of them were filthy dirty, and none of them had anything to say. “Drink some water.”
Without any fuss each person found their water bottle and took a large swig. Tawna made a face as her water went down and Helena knew Tawna was wishing for a drink of liquor.
“Here we go,” Miss Jan told everyone. Tawna and Ray made a point of sticking right behind Miss Jan, so Helena hung back.
The group moved slowly, and Helena moved more slowly. It was not unusual that she was last. It was hard to find any alone time on the trail, and it was easier to simply lag behind to find a few moments of solitude.
“Oh my God!!” Helena heard Lourdes cry out.
“Huh!” Peter breathed out.
“No, not really,” Tawna fretted. “This isn’t what it looks like.”
With a little ducking and weaving Helena looked past the group to see what everyone was upset about.
“Oh, no…” Helena couldn’t believe the vision ahead of her. The trail abruptly ended under a huge amount of mud, rock and upturned trees.
“Oh, yes,” Miss Jan said softly. She was clearly having an out of body experience. Her eyes were glazed, and she tipped her head to the side and squinted, as if that would change what she saw. “It is what it looks like.”
The mud ahead was beyond the scope of a normal mess. Clearly a large percentage of the hill had slid into the small canyon below. The mud extended as far as the eye could see before abutting with another hill, which was too far away to see if the trail picked up there.
Miss Jan rummaged in her backpack and brought out binoculars. For the first time since the unlikely adventure had begun, Miss Jan looked as if she had no idea what to do.
“Well, what do we do?” Tawna demanded.
“I’d say pray, but I’m an atheist,” Miss Jan answered. “We are going to have to try to walk around it and pick up the trail on the other side.”
“Walk down there?” Lourdes was clearly horrified.
“Do you want to walk over the mud?” Peter wanted to know.
All of them craned their necks to look down the hillside where the mud was lost in thick trees and bushes.
“We should head back the way we came and have someone come get us,” Ray said confidently. “This is ridiculous.”
“That is not how we do things anymore,” Miss Jan told him. “We take care of ourselves, we don’t hope others help us. We’ll be slow and careful. Watch where you put your feet. There will be lots of small holes and loose rocks.”
“It’s an adventure,” Peter said cheerfully. The whole disaster in front of them was only a small obstacle to him.
Helena had respect for his enthusiasm. The whole trip was clearly agreeing with Peter, and that made it more palatable for her also. Walking down the steep hill and trying to walk around the mudslide didn’t look safe to Helena. Miss Jan obviously didn’t want to do it either, but there just wasn’t a choice.
With a sigh Miss Jan turned to walk down the hill.
“Follow me,” she said.
At first the going was slow, but workable. There were a lot of small sapling-sized trees that caught Helena’s feet when she didn’t look, but as long as she watched carefully she was able to keep up. Lourdes was behind her, and Ray lagged back, being almost pulled forward by Tawna.
“This whole thing is stupid!” Ray ranted. “If there’s a problem we could go back to Dad and he could keep us safe. There is no way we need to do this! We could turn around and go back. Please, Mom!”
Tawna didn’t bother to try to reason with him, she just kept her hand on his arm and kept him moving forward. Helena had wished for years all three of them would go back to Ray’s father, but it was impossible. She knew for a fact that Ray’s father was a spoiled playboy who had never wanted kids. He had only married Tawna when she was pregnant with Lourdes and he had never been any kind of father to Lourdes or Ray. He hadn’t even paid child support when Tawna divorced him. Tawna had been working at Helena and Peter’s school to pay tuition for her own kids. The fantasy that Ray’s father could rescue anyone from any trouble would have been amusing to Helena if it wasn’t so horribly pathetic. She hated listening to Ray’s weak-minded delusions. And she hated Tawna for not knocking them out of him.
“Watch out for a little drop off on the other side of this rock,” Miss Jan called back. Gently she sat down and eased herself over it, tipping a little at the bottom from the weight of the backpack.
Without missing a beat Peter hopped down the “drop off” and maintained a brisk pace that kept Miss Jan scrambling to keep ahead of him. Helena was really proud of him for not being a complainer. So far Peter had risen to every challenge, large or small, with marvelous resilience. She followed Peter’s example, took a small leap down, and was pleasantly surprised that she was unhurt. Behind her, Tawna and Lourdes lowered Ray, who was afraid to jump.
“Ray is almost two years younger than Peter,” Helena tried to remind herself, as she was feeling smug. “It’s not fair to compare.”
Peter had always been ready for the next problem life handed him. Their mother had always insisted that Peter and Helena could handle anything with their superior DNA, and although Helena had always taken that as an excuse their mother made to ignore them, maybe she was right.
“Wait for me, Peter!” Helena called, pretending to be excited. Mostly she wanted to give Miss Jan a breather while Peter waited. Helena was becoming quite sorry for Miss Jan, since Tawna had turned out to be as much of a kid that needed watching as the four actual kids.
“Hold on, I need a drink,” Helena pulled a long swig from her water bottle when she caught up to Peter. Miss Jan was breathing deeply in the sun, surrounded by shoulder height tree saplings and brush, and looking like she appreciated the break. Looking over her shoulder Helena could see that Lourdes was almost caught up with them but that Ray and Tawna were still lagging.
“Everyone good?” Miss Jan asked as Tawna and Ray finally made it to the rest of the group.
Everyone nodded, even Tawna and Ray, although both of them wore such sour expressions on their faces that they actually looked as though they had been eating lemons.
“It’s getting a lot more damp,” Miss Jan told them. “Please watch your feet closely.”
Everyone nodded again, although damp seemed like a wildly optimistic word for the mud that oozed up from the grass and sucked at their boots.
“Let’s go!” Peter champed at the bit to head down the hill farther.
The seriousness of deviating from the trail in a place where they could not call for help of any kind did not seem to bother Peter at all. Helena wondered if he was foolish or brave.
Miss Jan nodded, and they began to move. More than twenty minutes passed, not unpleasantly. It wasn
’t too hot or too cold and the sun shone gently on them. Then they reached the bottom of the mudslide. As far as Helena could see, a line of mud stretched against the marshy grasses at the bottom of the mountain.
“Let’s have a snack,” Miss Jan encouraged everyone. With some quick work everyone soon had an energy bar in their hand.
“Can I have another one?” Ray asked before everyone was finished.
Helena wished she could knock him down and pound his head into the mud a couple of times. Clearly, she was on edge. She concentrated on breathing deeply in between bites of her snack.
“No, we need to get around this mess as soon as we can,” Miss Jan frowned. She took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, clearly trying not to panic. “This has already taken two hours to get to the bottom and we aren’t even around it yet.”
The bottom of the hill was extremely damp with freezing water from spring runoff.
“Oh, my God! A wolf!” Lourdes shrieked with delight.
Everyone whipped their heads in the direction Lourdes was looking. There was not just one wolf at the bottom of the trail, but several. As if they were playing freeze tag the entire group stayed in the exact positions they had been in when they spotted the wolves. Lourdes was frozen in delighted awe, but everyone else sensed that the wolves were checking them out.
Five large wolves were in a tight group, so close to each other that some of them were touching.
“Don’t look them in the eyes,” Miss Jan warned quietly. “Just back up slowly.”
As they began to back up, so did the wolves, until they were lost in the trees.
“That was amazing!” Lourdes had clearly viewed the wolf encounter as a spiritual experience.
“It was something,” Miss Jan said.
It was almost six hours from the time they left the trail until they found it again. The late afternoon sun showed Miss Jan the trail and Helena had sworn Miss Jan, a devout atheist, had crossed her chest in gratitude.
“Can we stop now?” Tawna wanted to know.
“We need to press on,” Miss Jan shook her head. “That took most of the day, and we have to be careful with food now that we’re going to be on the trail an extra day.”
That was not news anyone wanted to hear.
“Really?” Lourdes murmured.
“Really,” Miss Jan said firmly. “Besides, I’m afraid the wolves are following us.”
“Why would they do that?” Tawna demanded, as if Miss Jan was clearly a wolf spokesperson.
“Maybe because Ray lags behind and looks like a good target. Or maybe the earthquake made them bold. Maybe they smelled our fear about losing the trail. Maybe they were going in the same direction as we are anyway.” Miss Jan’s voice sounded really tight.
Helena formed a mental picture of Miss Jan swinging from a large rope over a deadly precipice and Tawna pushing her every time Miss Jan was about to land safely on one side.
“We’ll do whatever you think we should,” Helena said firmly.
“Suck up,” Ray grumbled. Tawna never corrected Ray’s annoying comments, but Helena didn’t care anymore.
No one said anything else. Miss Jan began to move forward and so did everyone else, shuffling toward the trail. Helena’s calves hurt, and her feet felt heavy. Peter was still right behind Miss Jan, leading the pack as much as he could without plowing over her, but Peter wasn’t the playful puppy who had charged down the hill around the mudslide. The sun got lower and the shadows lengthened as they walked.
“This is a good place to make camp,” Miss Jan told everyone when they caught up to her in a very small clearing. “Peter and Ray, can you make the fire?”
“Peter can,” Ray sulked.
Peter shrugged and picked a spot for a fire, locked eyes with Miss Jan to get her approval, and got to work on the fire.
“Ray, Lourdes go filter water to cook with,” Miss Jan handed Ray the water filter and gestured toward a nearby stream. She began to spread out food to eat and fretted. “We are short six power bars.”
“It’s not a big deal,” Tawna said breezily. She was sitting on a log with her legs stretched out looking like an R.E.I. model, even though she’d been through a long ordeal with everyone else.
“Yes, it is,” Miss Jan told her. “Each of those bars is a whole meal for someone. That’s six meals short. If we can keep to our schedule for the rest of the way, we will just be a little hungry when we arrive. If we have more delays it becomes more serious.”
“It’s just six, don’t worry about it,” Tawna said in a bored tone of voice, which Helena took to mean that Tawna had taken the six power bars and given them to Ray and Lourdes at different times.
“We have to be much more careful,” Miss Jan said firmly.
Helena thought that just maybe, by the tone of Miss Jan’s voice, she was aware of where the power bars had gone. She smiled just a little. A grown adult calling Tawna out on something was pretty rare. It occurred to Helena that some things were changing for the better.
By the time the fire was high enough to give off heat it was cold enough to need the heat. It might be the middle of June, but in the Alaskan wilderness it was thirty-four degrees outside.
“It’s a great fire,” Helena told Peter as they warmed themselves together.
“Thanks,” Peter answered. “I keep trying to remember that this isn’t a fun adventure, but I keep forgetting and having fun making fires, hiking, avoiding wolves…”
“Oh, if you see a wolf again you better make sure I don’t,” Helena warned him. “It was cool to see them, but it was freaky. I don’t want to run into them in the dark.” Goose bumps covered her arms as she remembered the wolves’ crafty air.
“You don’t have to worry,” Peter laughed. “Lourdes will run toward the wolves while we’re running away.”
“That sounds like the best plan. She probably thinks we can just get a wolf to replace Perry.”
“We’ll be like two wolf killing Chuck Norris clones,” Peter predicted. “It’ll be fun.”
“I always wanted to be just like Chuck Norris,” Helena said sarcastically. “It’s every Texas girl’s dream.”
“This is your dinner,” Miss Jan came up to them with two packages of something. “Pot roast. You can heat it up over the fire or eat it from the bag.”
“I’ll heat mine up,” Peter went to get the cookware Miss Jan kept in her pack.
“Do mine too!” Helena called after him. He turned back to take the package from her hand before going to the fire.
“He seems to think all this is the best adventure of his life.” Miss Jan shook her head with a smile. “I wish I could have taken him to Philmont Scout Ranch with my son and his friends, or Sea Base to scuba dive. I asked your father about getting him into scouting, but neither of your parents had time. It would have been so good for him.”
“He’s having fun doing this,” Helena said.
“This is more serious than anyone realizes.” Miss Jan frowned a little. “Scout trips would have been with lots of other boys his own age and been more safe.”
“Are we ever going to be really safe again?” Helena wanted to know.
“Your mother is trying very hard to come up with some solutions to what’s going on with Project Plan B, but I doubt there is anything we can do other than wait out the mess that may be coming. The Hollisters are pretty scary people.”
Peter returned with a large pot that he emptied both his and Helena’s meals into. Expertly, he set the pot over some hot coals. Miss Jan nodded approval with a slight smile.
“You could have been an Eagle Scout, Peter,” Miss Jan sighed.
“No chance of that now at all?” Peter asked.
“I don’t think we are ever going to live in a world like we did before,” Miss Jan said. “But I would love to be wrong. I would love to go to your Eagle Court of Honor.”
“I won’t have to worry about finding a prom date,” Helena thought out loud. “If the world ends, I mean.”
; “Sweet girl, you were never going to have to worry about finding a Prom date,” Miss Jan smiled kindly.
“I’m fifteen and I haven’t had a boy ask me out at all.”
“That’s because you’re out of their league,” Miss Jan said.
“Lots of prettier girls than me have boyfriends.”
“There are not lots of prettier girls than you,” Miss Jan said with a small shake of her head. “And there aren’t any girls who are smarter than you are. When you put those things together with your quiet demeanor, you are very intimidating to young men.”
“It would be nice to be not so intimidating,” Helena said. “But I guess it doesn’t matter right now.”
“No, your social opportunities are extremely limited from now on.” Miss Jan frowned. “The four of you and Duane are going to have to learn to get along.”
“This is the best we’ve ever gotten along,” Helena said to Miss Jan. “On this trip we haven’t insulted anyone, or yelled, or broken each other’s stuff. This is the best we have ever been.”
“That is a little worrisome.” Miss Jan frowned. “Because we are going to spend a long time without contact with the outside world. I don’t know how long for sure.”
Helena’s heart raced with Miss Jan was being so candid.
“Couldn’t you even guess?” she asked hopefully.
“Project Plan B was supposed to launch on January first next year. It was almost completely ready. It has been in Beta testing for two years now. Assuming that none of the warnings your parents put out are taken seriously, it isn’t impossible that Project Plan B will launch on schedule. Without your parents that will be very rough, but it could be pushed forward without them.”
Miss Jan paused, and Helena did her best to look interested so that she would continue.
“Then it would take at least a year to chip the world.”
“A year?” Helena was surprised.
“That’s if you only do people under thirty-five.”