by Karina Halle
He tugged down his newsboy cap and looked at the ground. “I don’t blame you if you think I’m a freak now.”
“Dex,” I said carefully. “I’ve always thought you were a freak.”
He chuckled, still avoiding my eyes.
I decided to bite the bullet and be honest with him. Even though the mountainous woods wasn’t the most practical place for confessions, it was only fair.
“And I guess I’m a freak too. Because something happened to me. I’m different now too.”
He looked at me sharply. “What?”
I gave him a quick smile and shrugged. “It’s hard to explain. Ever since I went into the Thin Veil, I’ve…I’ve been able to project my thoughts. At least to Ada, and maybe Maximus.”
His body stiffened at the mention of his name but I continued, “and I don’t think they can hear it all the time. And I don’t think anyone else can hear it. But, so far, this just seems to be the way it is. People can hear my thoughts.”
A slow smile spread on his lips, causing the dimples in his cheeks to deepen. “I know.”
I jerked my head back. “You know?”
He kept smiling and pulled down at his cap again so I couldn’t see his eyes.
“Jerkface,” I said, punching him on the arm. “You know? You know? How could you…oh God. Oh my God. Dex, can you hear what I’ve been thinking?”
He licked his lips lazily before answering. “Yes.”
I gasped. Then I hit him again, harder this time. “Fuck you!”
“What?” he exclaimed, grabbing his arm. “It’s not all the time. Only sometimes!”
“What sometimes?” I asked through gritted teeth. “Tell me!?”
Oh dear lord, what did Dex hear?
“Nothing too personal, don’t worry!”
I raised my fist at him and he shied away. “I’m being serious. I’ve only heard you a few times. Like, the other day, you were comparing the woods to Lord of the Rings. Stuff like that.”
I thought back at all the times when I was certain he could hear what I was thinking. I felt raw, exposed and mortified. I wrung my hands together. “This is terrible.”
“It’s not. Really, it isn’t.”
I speared him with my gaze. “Why didn’t you tell me before?”
He rubbed at his chin. “I wanted to know the truth.”
“The truth about what?”
He pursed his lips and looked down at my boots. His eyes were flashing from some internal monologue. It was a pity I couldn’t hear his thoughts. How fucking unfair was this?
“I wanted to know how you really felt about me,” he answered, his words barely audible.
My breath hitched and I was surprised at the butterflies rolling around my insides.
“And…what did you find out?”
He slowly met my eyes. He looked crestfallen with brows pressed together. “That you don’t know.”
My tongue felt thick in my mouth and words failed me. I just looked at his face, the way his eyes sparkled sadly, and wished above everything he had figured me out. I wanted him to tell me how to feel because I sure as hell didn’t know.
He touched me on the arm. “Come on, we have to keep moving.”
We had to leave that conversation under those towering trees. We pushed on through the grey.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
When we finally made it out of the forest, we weren’t at all surprised to end up in completely unfamiliar territory. Not that we knew the area or anything, but we were even higher than where we had camped. Traces of snow coated the trees just north of us and the landscape was full of moss and loose shale. A steep mountainside bled onto our new path and we had to navigate over boulders and rocky outcrops as we made our way across.
Dex thought he had the map figured out, so we followed that best we could. We could always hear the roar of the river we had seen yesterday, but so far it never made an appearance. We just pressed on, him ahead of me, our backpacks straining, feet aching, only stopping to rest and eat something. We were running low on water too, another reason why we hoped to come across the river again.
Even though Dex told me to forget about the show, every time we had a break, I took out the camera and filmed our surroundings. It might have been fatalistic on my part, but in case something ever did happen to us, I wanted people to know what happened and where it happened. Plus, as I told Dex, it wouldn’t hurt to have footage of the places we had been, in case we did a complete circle by accident.
“So what do you think, kiddo?” he asked as he passed me a packet of trail mix. We were sitting on a boulder near where a patch of trees flanked the rocky slope. The sun never came out from behind the clouds but I could tell by the weak light that it was around noon.
“You tell me,” I said wryly.
“I can’t. I told you it doesn’t work like that.”
“Too bad.”
“How do you think we’ll get out of this one?”
I took the map out of his jacket pocket and peered at it. Landmarks were drawn, directions were given, but none of them made any sense to someone who didn’t know the area.
“We’ll get out of it.” I wasn’t lying. We had to get out of it. Aside from my cheekbone, which was luckily only lightly bruised, and my abs which burned from where Mitch’s foot was, we were in good shape. We had food and sooner or later we’d find water. We had space blankets and extra clothes. The cabin was less than a day’s walk away, if only we could figure out what direction to go.
To be honest, I just didn’t want to think about the severity of the situation. I needed to stay focused and be positive, otherwise I’d start dwelling on the fact that with each passing second we didn’t come across the path we took, it looked more and more likely that we would end up spending the night outdoors and without any shelter.
Dex chewed and nodded at the forest. “I’m thinking we might not be making it back before dark. Maybe we oughta prepare for that. Do you remember your survival skills from grade school?”
“Could you hear me thinking that?”
“No,” he said, dusting the crumbs off his hands. “We’re just on the same level more than you think.”
I sighed. I really, really, really did not want to think about preparing for this. To prepare was to give up and I wasn’t done yet. We could still do it. It was still early.
“What about Christina’s map?” Dex asked.
Oh yeah. Fucking forgot about that.
I fished it out of my inner pocket. It looked almost like her dad’s but instead of just being drawn freehand, it looked like Christina had actually taken the time to trace an authentic map. It was a lot more legible and legitimate.
The two of us spent the next five minutes comparing the maps to each other and then to our landscape. Our faces were side by side and I fought the ridiculous notion I had of kissing his cheek, just to taste him, to feel his stubble on my lips. Ever since he’d saved me from Mitch, I was having these weird flashes of tenderness for him. Then I’d remember the whole “I can hear your thoughts” thing and I’d retreat, feeling flustered and hot.
There was also the “you’re lost in the mountains so none of your feelings are important or appropriate” thing too.
“Hold on a minute,” Dex said suddenly. He snatched up the map and got to his feet, his eyes darting from the page to the mountain that loomed yards ahead of us. He then looked at the fringe of forest and tilted the map accordingly.
“I think we have something here,” he announced, sounding cautiously optimistic.
I joined him at his side, peering over his arm excitedly. “What, what?”
He pointed at the map where a squiggly line marked “river” snaked around to the right. To the left of it was an X marked in the trees and even further left was an area dotted with circles, marked “boulder field.”
“This,” he said, waving his arm in front of us, “is the boulder field. Erratic leftovers in the moraine. You know, the glacier, when it retreated back.
”
I followed his eyes. It was true. We had been resting on one boulder but when you really looked around, we were surrounded by them.
“And those hollows in the bedrock, the way they disappear into the trees over there, those are the corrie glaciers she’s marked.”
“Wow, you paid attention in geography.”
“I had to in order to sleep with the teacher.”
I snorted with disgust. “You were a pig back in high school too?”
“Hey, geography may have just saved our lives!”
I rolled my eyes. “So now what?”
“Now we walk up there,” he pointed at the map past the X, “and we find that damn river. Get some water. Then we follow it down to here and that’s where this, the path, meets it. Then it’s smooth sailing, kiddo.”
I couldn’t help but grin. His face returned it. And we stared at each other in one of those slow-motion movie moments where the two actors keep smiling until things get awkward.
Without wanting to waste a single second, we quickly dropped our gaze and proceeded to shove the trail mix in the backpack. I wanted to keep filming now that I knew we were going to be OK, so Dex picked up both the guns and led the way toward the fringing forest, like some bad-ass Rambo. And speaking of ass, it was looking good.
We figured we couldn’t get lost if we stuck to the edge of the mountain, where the boulders and loose rock ran into the forest. All we had to do was follow that edge for a bit – distance was a bit hard to figure out – and we’d eventually meet the river.
Because the slope was hard to get footing on, we walked in the forest at the edge, so there was enough light. The glacial thingies that Dex had pointed out meant there were a lot of caves and hollows in the rock face and some of them jutted out into the forest. We navigated around them carefully, taking our time but wasting it all the same. The caves were dank and smelly and water dripped off the moss that hung to the outer rims. I wasn’t sure if they were caves that actually led into the rock face or they were just shallow engravings made by an old glacier but they were creepy enough to make me want to move further into the forest so we didn’t have to walk around them so closely. But Dex pointed out that the further we strayed from the mountainside, the more likely we would get lost again.
I swallowed my fears and kept on, cringing every time I had to lean my hand on a slimy rock or I caught a glance of a fathomless entrance into the mountains, spiderwebs floating in the archway. I thanked my lucky stars we looked at Christina’s map because knowing our lackluster survival skills, one of those gross caves would have ended up being our shelter for the night.
That said, her map was still a bit confusing. For example, the area we were walking in was labeled with an X while every other point of interest on the map had a few words about it. There was the area where Rigby found the footprint, a place she’d seen the sliced up deer, the section near the cabin where she was attacked. But the X was just an X. It usually marked the spot, but what spot?
“Hey Dex?” I began to say when I ran right up into his back. He’d stopped in front of me.
I looked up and saw the reason why. We had wandered into a cliff-face that cut us off our chosen path completely. It shot out into the forest in a ragged line of rock that disappeared into the trees.
“That’s convenient,” I said, adjusting the straps on my backpack with my free hand. It was feeling heavier by the minute and a pool of itchy sweat had gathered under the edge of my hat.
“Guess we have to go around it,” he said and started picking his way through the brush, following the long, stony trail of the outcrop. We got to where it tapered off into the woods, then rounded the corner. The rocks trailed back again so it looked like we were back on track until a few minutes of pushing through the underbrush.
That’s when we came across another jut of rock. It cut through the middle of our path just like the one before, only it stretched out longer, its ridge soaring high above our heads with no signs of stopping. You couldn’t even see where it stopped into the trees.
“Fuck,” he muttered under his breath.
“Yeah,” I said slowly. “It’s probably the wrong time to bring this up, but I was just noticing on the map the giant X that’s drawn where we are. And, uh, I have no idea what it means.”
“Uh huh,” he said absently, scanning the rock face before us and the way it stretched into the mountain side, disappearing into another fathomless cavern.
“So what do you think it means?”
“I don’t know, isn’t there a legend or something?”
I looked down at the map. It was harder to read now that we were covered by the tall trees and the mountainside had blocked out the hazy sunlight, but from what I could see she hadn’t provided any kind of legend.
“I don’t think so.”
I flipped it over in my hands. Lo and behold, on the back, at the bottom corner of the page in light pencil were a few sentences. The first one said Sorry if it’s not clear, I didn’t have much time. You’ll want to explore all the spots I’ve noted if you want to get a glimpse of the creature for your show. I’ve marked the caves where I think the creature lives with a big X.
Oh. Fuck.
“Uh…” I started, my mouth flapping uselessly.
Dex sighed. “I suppose we’ll just have to go around this motherfucking thing now.”
“Uhhhhh,” I tried again. “Oh shit. Dex. Shit.”
He finally brought his attention to me, folding his arms across his chest. “What is it?”
I wiggled the paper in the air. “Shit, fuck, shit.”
“Oh really?”
I thrust the map into his hands and jabbed my finger at the writing at the back.
He looked it over and sucked in his breath.
“Ah, just your regular old Sasquatch breeding caves. Maybe we should try and get out of here?”
“You think?” I whispered harshly.
The smug look on his face vanished. He gave me a quick nod.
“You all right with running for a while?”
“Oh I can run,” I told him, getting a better grip on the camera. There was no room in the pack for it so I had to make sure to hold on tight. Then I remembered my plan and quickly pushed the SD card out. Dex watched, perplexed, as I brought the tiny baggie and card holder out of my jean pocket and stuck the card in them. Then I shoved the bag and card into my inner pocket.
“What the?” he asked, a brow cocked to the heavens.
“You think I’m going to lose all my footage if things go wrong?” I asked.
“Clever girl,” he remarked with a wry smile. Then he nodded toward the dark forest and we took off running along the edge of the intruding cliff face.
We ran along it for a few minutes, him just ahead of me, both of us traversing mossy outcrops and sliding boulders. The occasional tree would scoop down toward us with open branches and we had to duck under those as well, my hair and clothing getting caught and torn as we went.
I was starting to wonder just how long this rocky arm would go for when Dex suddenly drew to a stop. He held his arm out, blocking me from running past him, and took the safety off the shotgun.
I swallowed hard, my lungs wheezing, my heart racing up to speed.
“What is it?” I croaked. I looked around us but only saw the same old trees and dim light.
He didn’t say anything but motioned for me to be quiet.
I clamped my mouth shut, trying to control my breathing. I couldn’t hear anything except my heartbeat and that in itself was overpowering.
Then it came through. That low, bass-like growl. Inhuman and otherworldly.
Supernatural.
As soon as I realized it was coming straight ahead of us, I heard another sound. A high-pitched snort like something sniffing the air excitedly. It was followed by something even worse: the sound of branches breaking. Whatever it was, it was running and running toward us.
Dex took the safety off the rifle and thrust it into my h
and, then we both ran back the way we had come. We were heading toward the cave again but we didn’t have much of an option. We crashed through the underbrush, stumbling over logs, sliding over rocks until we came across a very thick row of bushes that hugged the side of the bedrock.
He slid to a stop and reached out for me to stop, careful not to set off the guns. There was the rockface beside us, the caves in front of us, the beast somewhere behind us and another arm of rock across from us. We were as good as cornered.
Dex climbed deep into the brush and I followed. It was like crawling into a thicket, nothing but harsh branches and leaves blocking your way. When I was little I remember trying to make a fort out of a bramble bush in our yard. Even armed with clippers, I still wasn’t able to do it. Now I was forcing my way, ignoring the pain as my body bent the branches, and made it work for me.
Once we were both fully merged in the bush, protrusions poking every inch of us, I followed Dex’s lead and lowered myself until I was lying flat on the ground. The guns were to the sides of us, and I kept one hand on my rifle just in case. I was pretty confident that if something walked past the bush, they wouldn’t see any sign of us. We couldn’t see much ourselves except for the ground right in front of us and only about half a foot off of that. Branches and leaves blocked the rest.
Dex’s hand moved over until it was on top of mine, the camera safely tucked between us. He squeezed my hand and I could only see the shine of his eyes glinting in the darkness. He was trying to tell me not to worry, not to panic. But my heart and lungs weren’t having any of that. I was trying not to make a sound while breathing, yet my chest gasped for oxygen and my heart was racing a mile a minute, my pulse threatening to leap out of my veins. I prayed that no matter what these creatures were, that they weren’t vampires. I’d be totally fucked.
We waited like that, our breaths quiet and controlled as possible, feeling hidden yet immeasurably vulnerable at the same time. We waited, wondering, until we heard a branch break a few feet away from us.