With each step, she tested the ground with a toe before putting down the entire boot. The pine-needle carpet crackled softly—still too loudly—beneath her feet. Her fingers felt the thicket’s end before she saw it. She took a frightened and hesitant step away from the vegetation, her hand dislodged . . . and she was unmoored.
Fog rolled around the pines like a current as Neena waded into the dark sea. She swam between the trees, arms outstretched, hands grasping at nothing. She shuffled forward in meek increments. Each time she moved, the other footsteps moved, too. The sound was in her head. It wasn’t real. Was she alone or had they returned?
Panic screamed at her to run, but she fought it, afraid of alerting the stranger to her location, afraid of running in the wrong direction, afraid, afraid, afraid—
Her toe tapped against a low stone. The rest of her boot came down with confidence, but another stone was touching it, and the rocks clattered together. Startled, Neena tripped over a third rock, kicking it, only to realize she was standing inside the campfire circle. She shot off and sprinted several feet, expecting to crash into the tent.
All she found was more fog.
“Neena?”
Neena darted toward the familiar voice. Her outstretched hands smacked into nylon. Scrabbling for the door flaps, she lunged inside and feverishly zipped them closed behind her. “Somebody is out there,” she hissed.
Josie didn’t respond.
“There were footsteps.”
“Yeah,” Josie said at a regular volume. She was fuming. “Yours. That’s why I called out.”
“Shh!”
“Seriously?” The question wasn’t, Are you being serious? But, Are you seriously kidding me with this same fucking joke? Neena wrapped a hand over Josie’s mouth, and Josie let out a muffled cry. The force of Neena’s pounding heart against Josie’s back made Josie stiffen in alarm. She fell quiet. Neena released her.
The girls sat—almost touching—in petrified silence.
Their ears strained. Wind. Insects. Leaves. As the seconds ticked into a minute, Josie shoved Neena away, incensed.
“I swear,” Neena said, still whispering, “somebody was out there.”
Josie flumped noisily back into bed. “It’s not even warm anymore,” she grouched, meaning her sleeping bag.
“I swear,” Neena said.
Perhaps it was the note of desperation that gave Josie pause. Finally, she lowered her voice to match. “Are you sure it wasn’t a deer?”
“No. It was a person.”
Josie remained skeptical. “I bet it was a deer.”
“It wasn’t . . .” Neena said through clenched teeth, “. . . a deer.” Now that the threat had seemingly passed, anger rushed back in. She yanked off her boots and crawled into her sleeping bag. “And it wasn’t a bear, either.”
The silence was hostile but brief.
“Okay, then you probably heard the person from the other tent.” Even though Josie was humoring the idea, her tone was frosty. “And you probably freaked them out as much as they freaked you out.”
Neena seethed because the explanation made sense. Hell, maybe Josie’s first guess was correct, and it was a stupid deer, and her imagination had gotten carried away in the fog. What did a deer sound like, anyway? Or maybe it was an elk. What was an elk? Was it just a larger kind of deer? She hated how ignorant this trip made her feel.
The temperature continued to drop, and Neena shivered in her wet clothing. Fog had saturated the cotton, refusing to let it dry. Until now, she’d never understood the purpose of wicking fabrics. It seemed against common sense that a synthetic would dry faster than a natural fiber, but, clearly, she was wrong again.
A rock underneath the tarp jammed into her hips. Her useless T-shirt pillow made her neck crooked with knots. Her head still throbbed from the crying headache.
It wasn’t a deer.
Two faces materialized in her mind: the young teenage girls who had been found murdered on a hiking trail a few years ago in Indiana. One of the girls had managed to use her phone to secretly record audio and video of the man that police believed to be their killer. The news story had been chilling—the idea that you could be out with your best friend, doing something as basic as taking a stroll through the woods, with no idea of what was waiting for you on the other side of the bend.
The fog curled around the tent like the tail of a sleeping wolf.
Her thoughts drifted to the fourth hiker here in Pisgah, the one suspected of murdering his friends in Hot Springs. The one still on the lam. Earlier that day, the boy on the trail who had reminded her of Win had teased them about a man who raided these campsites at night, but . . . sometimes jokes were based on rumors. And sometimes rumors were based on truth.
Nobody is out to get me.
The fog nudged and bumped against the tent.
Nature isn’t out to get me.
The fog was merely a low-lying cloud that had rolled in. This was a normal meteorological phenomenon that happened in the mountains. I’m falling asleep on a cloud, she tried to convince herself, and it’s idyllic.
I’m falling asleep on a cloud.
I’m falling asleep on a cloud.
Trembling, Neena repeated it until she believed it. Until she fell asleep.
THE HISTORY OF American forestry was rooted in Pisgah. The Cradle of Forestry, located twenty miles south of Deep Fork, was the country’s first forestry school, and it still existed to this day. Josie had gone there on a field trip in the third grade, where they had sifted through decaying leaf mold to search for creepy crawlies. Her favorite sneakers with the rainbow heart shoelaces had gotten muddy.
Josie hadn’t felt cradled by the forest then, and she didn’t feel cradled by it now as the first rays of light pierced through the canopy. She had managed two, maybe three, hours of restless sleep, hounded by stressful dreams and intrusive thoughts. She wasn’t an early riser. On the rare day without school or work, she slept well into the afternoon, unlike Neena, whose parents always guilted her out of bed by eight o’clock.
Josie checked her phone, which was still attached to the charger.
5:51 a.m. How obscene.
Like a reflex, her fingers opened the weather app, forgetting that it wouldn’t be able to connect to a cell tower. The blue light of her screen froze and then blackened—but not before she noticed the battery indicator.
“Shit,” she said.
Neena stirred at the muttering. “What is it?” She sounded groggy but coherent. Her body was curled into a tight ball, and Josie suspected that she’d had even less sleep.
“My phone. It was at thirty-one percent, but it died. Just like that.” Josie checked the charger’s cord, but both ends were firmly attached. She pressed the charger’s buttons. None of its lights came on. “The charger’s dead, too.”
“What?” An arm reached out from the confines of Neena’s sleeping bag. It snatched up her phone. “Mine won’t even turn on,” she said a moment later.
“Shit. Shit.”
“They were fine last night.”
Josie put on her glasses to inspect the situation more clearly. “Maybe the cold killed the batteries? I’ve heard that can happen.”
“The charger’s dead, too?”
“That’s what I said.”
“But . . . how is that possible?”
“I guess it also lost its charge in the cold. Or, I don’t know. Maybe we forgot to charge it before we left.”
“You forgot to charge the charger?”
“No! I remember doing it.” Josie’s thoughts swam. Yesterday morning had been a blur of preparations. “I’m just saying . . . I don’t know. No. I’m sure it was the cold.”
“So, what?” Neena lifted her head. “That’s it?”
Josie threw up her hands. Do you see a charged phone anywhere?
“Oh my God. Just when I thought this trip couldn’t get any worse.”
Even though Josie felt the same way, it still smarted to hear Neena say it. “So, what do you want to do?”
“What do you mean? They’re dead. There’s nothing we can do.”
“I meant, today. Do you want to keep hiking? Or do you want to go home?”
Neena sighed. Her fingers templed against her forehead. “I don’t know.”
Neither of them spoke. The silence was tense.
“Well,” Josie said. “We still have a map. And the trail has been pretty obvious, so far.”
“Except for this campsite.”
“Yeah, but we’d be staying in an open area tonight. We could put the tent anywhere.”
“Look at you, suddenly the optimist.”
Josie reddened. “I’m just saying, if you want to keep going, we can keep going. We still have the printouts. The only things we’ve actually lost are our cameras. But if you want to head back—”
“Do you want to head back?”
“I don’t know. I don’t care! That’s why I was asking you.”
“Well, I don’t care, either,” Neena snapped.
And that was the moment Josie realized she’d been hoping to salvage the trip. She’d wanted Neena to salvage the trip. She’d wanted Neena to beg and fight for it, but Neena wasn’t going to push Josie to do anything anymore.
At an impasse, the girls forced themselves from bed. The atmosphere was sulky and dismal. Smoke still smothered the air. Josie peeled back her socks to examine her feet in the low light. They were swollen and ripe with tender blisters that would have to be popped.
After locating a safety pin inside the first-aid kit, she cleaned it with a baby wipe. Her skin, too. Neena remained silent but observed the surgery with attentive eyes. Josie refused to be seen as weak. With a hiss and a wince, she stabbed the ball of her right foot. Clear fluid spurted onto her sleeping bag. Neena grunted in nonjudgmental disgust as Josie coaxed out the rest of the liquid, then jabbed the other sacs in quick succession. Gingerly, she cleaned and bandaged each wound. When she pretended that it didn’t hurt, it hurt a little less.
Wishing she had room in her hiking shoes to wear both pairs of socks, Josie pulled only the thickest back on. She loosened the shoelaces and wriggled her feet inside the shoes. It would have to do. The temperature seemed to be above freezing, but barely. Maybe the low forties. If so, it was almost ten degrees lower than what had been forecast. Josie caught Neena eyeing the extra clothing layers that Josie had stripped off in the middle of the night, as well as Josie’s backpack, which had been plumped for pillow usage. Josie shoved her hat back on for protection against the morning chill.
Neena turned away with a tiny shake of her head.
“What?” Josie said.
“Nothing.” But Neena was shivering, and her lips were tinged violet.
It’s not my fault you didn’t listen when Win said it would be cold. On any other day, Josie would have felt bad for Neena. She would have apologized for being unaware that Neena was freezing and would have offered her the extra clothes.
Today, she would do neither.
Josie unzipped the tent and stepped outside into the early light. Though the fog had rolled along to other mountains, it had left behind a glistening sheen. High in the treetops, the elaborate weavings of the fall webworm moth sparkled in the dew. Down on the ground, the marshmallow remnants of her uneaten s’more had glommed onto the pine needles. An army of industrious ants teemed over the unsavory memory. She shuddered, grateful that insects were all it had attracted.
The girls plodded away to relieve themselves. When Josie returned, she dug out the filtration system and gathered their water bottles.
Neena materialized a few minutes later. “Breakfast?”
Josie held up the equipment.
“Great.” Neena slumped, dejected. “This’ll be fun.”
Josie headed for the spring, but, after a few seconds, Neena still wasn’t following. She paused to find Neena staring at their campsite.
“It just feels weird to leave all our stuff,” Neena said.
“Who’s going to take it?”
The girls glanced up the slope. The yellow-gold tent appeared undisturbed from the previous night. The structure was soundless. Lifeless. It made Josie uneasy, although she couldn’t pinpoint why. Neena was also staring at the campsite with an unsettled furrow in her brow. Eager to get the filtering over with, Josie limped on.
Eventually, Neena trudged along behind her.
They hiked the five minutes to the spring without a word, reacquainting themselves with every ache, chafe, and bruise that had worsened overnight. Their task required filling a liter-size bag and then squeezing the water through a small filtration device directly into their bottles. Josie unrolled the bag and began to collect water.
“So . . . we didn’t decide. Are we staying or going home?” The “we” left a bitter flavor on Josie’s tongue. An off note.
Neena shrugged.
“That’s not an answer,” Josie said, exasperated.
“Why is it up to me to make the decision?”
The accusations from their fight were still raw. Josie angled her face so that Neena wouldn’t see the tears pricking her eyes. “Fine. I think we should keep hiking.”
“Fine,” Neena said. “We’ll keep hiking.”
“Fine,” Josie said, embarrassed at her own childishness. Aware that she’d made the wrong choice for the wrong reason.
* * *
• • •
The spring was only a few inches deep, and it was taking forever for Josie to fill the bag. The trickle out of the PVC pipe had created a shallow pool. Or maybe it was a stream. It was impossible to tell where the water ended—or if it even did. Neena couldn’t fathom why Win had recommended this for their water source. The only reasonable explanation was that the flow had diminished since the last time he’d seen it, which begged the question: What else had changed out here?
The air resonated with the monotonous din of mosquitos and stinging yellow insects. Her head buzzed, fatigued and headachy, on the same frequency. Already she regretted the decision to keep hiking. She’d only agreed because she didn’t want to be the one who backed down. What were they doing out here, wasting time by pretending that their friendship was still functional? She should be packing boxes at home. Savoring this final week with her family. Drinking water from a tap.
Her gaze hadn’t left the bag. “Oh my God,” she said, thrusting a large leaf at Josie. “Use this to help scoop, or we’ll be here all day.”
Josie seemed hurt and taken aback, but Neena didn’t care, because her idea worked. The bag filled faster, and they were able to filter their first liter. In a resentful and protracted silence, the girls swapped turns and then lugged the bottles back uphill to the campsite. When Josie inquired about the bear canister, Neena pointed in its direction. Get it yourself. She plopped into a camp chair, shook her inhaler, and puffed.
“Really?” Josie didn’t even have to raise her voice. “This was your idea of far away?”
Neena swiveled, startled. Under the spell of night, it had seemed far away, yet the canister was nestled beneath a pine that was twenty feet away, at most. Shame washed over her. Holding in her medicinal breath, she struggled for an excuse but failed.
Josie shook her head with disgust, as if Neena weren’t speaking because she was unwilling. Neena exhaled slowly. She sipped her water, swished out the inhaler taste, and spit. Now she was unwilling.
Though neither girl was a coffee drinker, the chilly morning campsite felt like the right time and place for a cup of instant. Unfortunately, they hadn’t thought to bring any. Breakfast was a protein bar each. Tuesday was supposed to have been oatmeal day—the protein bars had been rationed for tomorrow—and the warm meal would have been nice
. But Neena didn’t want to remind Josie or ask for any favors. And she certainly didn’t want to keep hiking. But if Josie could keep going, she sure as hell could, too.
Taking turns inside the tent, they bathed with more baby wipes and a shared stick of deodorant. Win had warned them that bringing it would be pointless—it added weight, and the scent wouldn’t last long, anyway. Judging from yesterday’s odors, he was right.
Neena’s hips were bruised like rotting plums. Shivering and goose-bumped, she exchanged her T-shirt for the flattened pillow T-shirt. A sweater would have been a better option, preferably one of those thick Icelandic woolly ones. But at least this shirt was dry. Between the puddles and sweat and fog, Neena had been moist since their arrival. She zipped her hoodie back up and hoped the sun would dry it out.
Josie shed her hat and underlayers and changed shirts, too. Both girls wore the same jeans as yesterday, although Josie’s weren’t damp. Her skin was blotched and ruddy from a slight burn. They both applied sunscreen and gallons of bug spray.
Tent and chairs were returned to their waterproof sleeves. It was harder to pack without helping each other, harder to stuff the sleeves with everything unfurled back to its full size. But the girls each worked alone. Once again, the food was loaded into Neena’s pack. Josie had promised to carry it today. Neena wondered if Josie had forgotten, or if she was deliberately choosing to keep Neena’s pack heavier.
They were ready to leave sooner than expected. It had taken a lot longer to set up the camp than to take it down. Neena glanced upward through the pines. The yellow-gold tent was still without any signs of life, but it was early. And if the tent’s owner had been the person in the fog, then they’d returned late. It made sense that they would still be sleeping.
And yet. There was quiet, and there was empty.
“Where are you going?” Josie asked.
Neena climbed the slope softly, not wanting to disturb the mysterious camper. As she drew closer, and the campsite seemed more and more unoccupied, her curious steps grew confident. Two chairs similar to their own sat neatly around a similar rock circle. The seats were dusted with pollen and leaves. The stones and ash were cold.
The Woods Are Always Watching Page 8