Isaac waved his stick in lazy circles at me. He looked like he was planning something, and it probably wasn’t something good. “Just be back in time for dinner, kids.”
I was overcome with the urge to warn her about Isaac, but I waited until Chloe and I got all the way down to the beach. What would I say, exactly? That he gave me the creeps? That was obvious. Or should I tell her what had happened? The thought made me hot and suddenly nauseated. What would she say? Or, more importantly, what would she do? Tell Oscar? Confront Isaac? I wasn’t sure I wanted to find out, and even though I knew we were out of earshot, I whispered when I spoke. “Maybe you shouldn’t push him like that.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean,” I said. “Like that.”
“Mmm.” Chloe pursed her lips and looked at me sideways. “Not my fault I have better insults.”
“Yeah, but I think we should be nicer.” I shuddered again, remembering the pressure of his knee between my legs as he pinned me against the tree like a bug.
“What for?”
“What do you think would have happened to us if Isaac hadn’t caught that fish?”
“You probably would have.”
I thought about that. “I didn’t remember to grab the rod and reel and tackle. Isaac did.”
“Yeah, right before he ran off and left us.”
I remembered what she had said when we found her that night. He left me. He left me. “What happened out there?” I asked, louder than I intended.
“I don’t know.” Chloe shook her head, either not wanting to tell me or really unsure. “I just know he’s a jerk.”
He’s more than that, I thought grimly. “Come on,” I said, wringing the bandage dry. My hands were so cold they hurt.
I gave Chloe back the bandage, my hands throbbing, and shook them to get the blood flowing. And this is the warmest the water is probably going to get. What are we going to do when the weather turns?
So far all the days had been extremely warm, warmer than average, but the image of snow covering us as we slept popped into my head. We had no tents, only sleeping bags. “We need to make a shelter.”
“Huh?”
“You know, like a hut or something. In case it rains again.” What I didn’t say was in case we are out here for a while.
“A hut?” Chloe pulled on her tank top, then her waffle-weave thermal shirt, and topped it off with a navy blue hoodie. We’d all taken to dressing in layers. I could have used a ski hat, mittens, and a scarf. Maybe one of those balaclava things. During the day it was fine, but the nights were cool, almost chilly.
“Yeah.” I chose my words carefully. “This morning when I woke up, I could see my breath.”
Chloe nodded. “I actually read a wilderness-survival handbook after I signed up for this. They said most people get into trouble because of two things: exposure and dehydration.”
“Well, we got the hydration part okay. What else did it say?”
“Oh my God!” Chloe yelled.
“What’s wrong?”
“Not what’s wrong! What’s right! I can’t believe I forgot!”
“Huh?” I had no idea what she was talking about. There didn’t seem to be anything right.
But Chloe was already crutching back toward the trees, hobbling along like a drunken peg-leg pirate. “C’mon! I’ll show you!”
* * *
“This! This is what I forgot about!” Chloe tugged a small black zipper almost hidden on the underside of her pack. When it opened, another layer extended like an accordion, expanding to reveal a second compartment. “I can’t believe I forgot.” She pulled out an orange nylon bag, just like the one Chris had put our cell phones in. “It’s a survival kit.”
“What?” Isaac jumped up, almost knocking over the pot. “You forgot? How could you forget something like that?”
“I got this backpack at the last minute. I was going to use my old one, but it wasn’t big enough.”
“Huh?”
“What’s in it?” Oscar asked, his face brightening with hope. It was a nice thing to see.
“I don’t even know.” Chloe opened the kit. “My uncle Jimmy gave it to me. He was in the army. He’s the one who loaned me his pack. He just said, ‘There’s even an e-kit on the bottom.’ At the time I didn’t know what he was talking about.”
“An e-kit?” I wondered out loud.
“Uh-huh,” Chloe snorted. “I guess it stands for ‘emergency.’ ” If she was embarrassed, she didn’t show it.
“Your uncle was in the army?” Isaac’s question was almost a whisper.
“Yeah,” Chloe said. “In Iraq. First Gulf War. He’s retired now, though.”
“My dad was too,” Isaac replied, staring at his hands. “Medically retired.”
“Open it up.” Please let there be food.
Inside, the contents were displayed in their separate compartments. A plastic whistle. A waterproof matchbox with wood matches. A small mirror. A small first aid kit. An insect head net. A plastic water bag. Four food packets. A miniature LED flashlight. A tiny tube of sunscreen. A bundle of wire. Iodine tablets. A thin foil blanket. A candle. A compass.
Oscar grabbed the compass, delighted. He held it out straight armed and turned in a circle, watching the dial to find north. He stared. He turned. He looked at it and shook it. “This is broken.” He shook it once more to make sure.
“Let me see.” Isaac flipped the compass around in his hand and frowned. “Must have gotten crushed or something.”
Chloe unfolded the tinfoil sheet. “This is a body sheet, I think. It can keep us warm.”
“It’s only big enough for one person,” I pointed out.
“We can take turns using it,” Oscar said. “Or just save it for whoever needs it most.”
“Or we can all zip our bags together and cuddle.” Isaac gave me a quick look before he handed me the compass.
It had indeed been crushed. The red needle never wavered, no matter what I did. “Actually, I was thinking we should build a shelter.”
“You were thinking again, huh, Dodd?” Isaac slid the bundle of wire into one of his zippered pants pockets. “Don’t strain yourself.”
“What’s that wire for, anyway?” Oscar asked, giving Isaac a hard stare. He hadn’t missed the look Isaac had given me. Oscar was too smart not to notice, and I wondered briefly if he knew what Isaac had done on the beach with the towel. He doesn’t know what Isaac did to me. What would happen if he knew?
“Snares.”
“Snares?”
“That’s what I said.” Isaac palmed the matches as well. “Don’t you know what a snare is, Wiener?”
“It’s a trap.”
“Sí. Tú es muy correcto.”
Is that supposed to be Spanish?
“So you know how to make one?”
“What do you think?”
“I think no,” Oscar replied and crossed his arms.
Isaac laughed. “You’re right; I don’t. But then again, that never stopped me before.” He turned on his heel, heading toward a thick grove of jack pine. He unraveled the wire as he walked, leaving us to enjoy our newfound presents. “Have fun building your log cabin.”
Day 6
Night
After Isaac left with the snare wire, we started on a shelter with the entrance facing the beach, but an hour later it still didn’t look like much, more like a fort a bunch of little kids would make, if that bunch of kids were all slightly drunk.
We stacked aspen limbs on top of each other to make a wall positioned to face the woods. Oscar and I did the same on each side, using sharp rocks to dig a foot-deep trench in the sand to support the wall, which eventually got about four feet high.
“Now the roof?” Oscar wiped the sweat from his neck.
“Give me a minute.” I sat down, exhausted. My palms were burning and itchy with sap.
“Maybe you could lay the thin leafy branches over the top,” Chloe said, taking a break from her w
histle blowing. Oscar had told her to stop. She’d been blowing it every five minutes, and now my head was ringing like I’d been kicked. “Those pine ones are nice and wide.”
“Yeah.” I rubbed my hands together, trying to remove the oily resin. “But we don’t have a hatchet to cut the branches. Too bad there wasn’t one in the emergency pack.” I remembered Oscar’s book. Brian survived with just a hatchet. I shook my head. If Brian had been real, he would’ve ended up dead.
Oscar gave me a look, and at first I couldn’t figure out what it meant, but then I realized I’d been talking out loud. Like a crazy person.
It was almost dark when we finished, but Isaac still had not come back.
Chloe alternated between watching the woods and watching the fire. The whistle hung low around her neck, and she played with it absently. She peered inside the shelter’s entrance. “So are we all going to fit?”
“It’s wide enough if we all sleep in a row,” I answered, “but who’s gonna sleep next to Isaac?”
“I’ll pass.” Chloe screwed her face up like she’d caught a whiff of something rotten.
Even Oscar wrinkled his nose, considering the possibility, then looked at me.
What would Isaac do if I were curled up next to him? “Not me!” I yelled. “No way, no how, no thanks.”
“Maybe we should draw straws.”
“Or pick a number.”
“That’s stupid.”
“I pick eight.” Isaac stepped into the circle on the opposite side. “Eight’s my lucky number.”
The bright glow of the fire made the woods behind us invisible, and a person could sneak up on you that way. It’s like someone looking into a house with all the lights on inside at night. They can see you, but you can’t see them, watching from out in the dark.
How long has he been standing there?
Long enough.
“We built a shelter,” Oscar explained.
“I see that.” Isaac curled up the remaining wire into a tight circle around his wrist, and I guessed by his face that he hadn’t caught anything. “It looks more like a pigpen.” He stuffed the coil of wire back into his pocket. “Then again, a pen has four sides, so I don’t know what the hell that mess is supposed to be.”
“It’s better than nothing.”
“Thanks, but no thanks,” Isaac replied slowly, looking at each one of us in turn. “I’m not sleeping in that.”
He grabbed his sleeping bag from where it hung on the low branch of an ash tree. It was thinner than mine, I noticed, obviously worn, and I doubted its warmth. Mine was rated to ten degrees below zero, insulated with some weird material NASA probably invented, but what kind of crazy person would want to sleep outside in that kind of weather? By contrast, Isaac’s didn’t look much warmer than a flannel sheet.
“Here,” I said suddenly. “Use this.” I tossed the folded thermal wrap at him and he caught it, but not before I saw his face. A look I recognized. Once I thought it was embarrassment, but now I knew it for what it was. Shame. He turned away without thanks.
What did he hear me say? Doesn’t matter. Just don’t piss him off. Don’t even give him a reason. People like Isaac always seemed to be looking for exactly that, any excuse to explode.
I turned away and crawled into the shelter.
* * *
Why am I in the middle? At least with only the three of us I had plenty of room.
Oscar had zipped the two thickest bags together—making them into a giant pocket we had to slide into. Since mine was still damp, it was hung above us across the top, anchored on each side by flat rocks. It only covered about a third of the shelter, but I had to admit it was warmer here, if not slightly claustrophobic. But if it rained again we’d still get soaked. What if it snows?
“Snug as a bug in a rug,” Chloe joked as she eased herself in.
“Hey, Wiener,” Isaac called out, his voice sounding very close. “What’s it like to finally have a threesome?”
“When I do, you’ll be the last one I tell,” Oscar replied.
“Touché, Wiener!”
“Perverts,” Chloe snorted. She turned over on her side and in ten seconds seemed to be asleep.
I couldn’t understand how she could fall asleep so quickly. I stared up at the sky, which was not a sky of stars at all, but a dark shadow of cover. Every cell in my body was awake, a fuzzy tingling of anticipation I thought I’d lost. But here it was again, and I didn’t know whether to be relieved or guilty.
My entire body thrummed with that energy, feeling myself so close to Oscar that my breath caught in my throat as though I had choked on it.
And Oscar turned toward me, the heat of his body pressing against my own. “What is it?”
Say something. His face was only inches from mine. I could just move into him. Just move. Just move.
I tilted my head forward.
“Holy shit!” Isaac screamed.
I sat up. We all did, the three of us rising up like puppets on a string.
“Sonsabitches!”
It’s just a joke. He’s just messing with us. But my body didn’t agree, and I didn’t think Isaac was that good of an actor. It was something. Something big.
Still, I sat there motionless, fighting the tingle in my legs.
Oscar pushed the bag off, crawled out the opening, and flipped over on his side, like a soldier exiting a bunker that’s under fire.
“What is it?” Chloe grabbed my arm. “What do we do?”
Chloe couldn’t run away. Not yet. The whites of her eyes glowed in the dark.
“Stay here.” I dug into my pocket and retrieved the knife, pulling open the longest blade. “Use this if you need to.” It looked pathetically small, but Chloe curled her hand around it appreciatively. “Give me your whistle.”
I crawled out the way Oscar had—forward on my elbows, toward the lake. Once outside I still didn’t hear anything. I rolled onto my side, panic doing strange things to my body. My head felt light and empty, but my legs were lead weights.
Get up. Get up. Get up and move.
I crouched behind the wall of logs and peered over. The fire was steady, and Isaac stood in front of it, staring over the flames. Oscar was next to him, crouched down like a catcher behind home plate.
I stared, only seeing a solid wall of black beyond the fire.
Then the black moved.
Oh my God, what is it?
I blew the whistle—hard. The shrillness pierced my eardrums like a hot needle.
Branches shuddered and snapped, sending the leaves moving back and forth like a massive black wave. Something large was moving out there, and I could only hope that it wasn’t coming this way. It rolled past us, and in the glare of the fire, all I could make out was a dark hulk of something crashing through the bushes.
“Emma!” Oscar grabbed my shoulders and pulled me back, but I barely heard him. I was blowing the whistle with everything I had. “Get back!” He flung a large rock into the dark.
“Shit!” Isaac yelped. “What is that?”
I spit the whistle out of my mouth as Oscar flung a stick in the same direction as the rock, and I waited until I heard it crash to the ground. “Something really damn big, I guess.”
“You guess?” Isaac stared at me, but I couldn’t tell if he looked pissed or amazed. “Why the hell did you blow that whistle?”
“I don’t know. I thought the noise would scare it away.” I took another shaky breath and held it.
“We don’t even know what it was!”
“I think it might have been a bear,” I said. I couldn’t really think of another animal that was that big, except maybe a moose. At least I hoped to God it was an animal.
“That was a stupid thing to do! What if you pissed it off?”
Oscar spun around and glared at Issac. “What would you have done, oh mighty hero?”
“I’ll tell you.” Isaac considered the question. “I think I would have shit my pants and hoped the bear was so disgusted he wouldn’
t eat me.”
Chloe popped her head out of the shelter. “Do you think it’ll come back?”
“Better not.”
“If it thinks we have food it will,” I said. “It probably smelled the fish.”
“I cleaned off the log with boiling water.” Isaac crossed his arms in defiance. “I’m not stupid.”
It’s not your stupidity that concerns me. “Well, it’s probably hungry. And it might come back.”
“Then we need to do something,” Oscar said.
“Like what? It’s not like Johnson here can walk.”
“Why don’t you mark a perimeter then?”
“How?”
“You know how. You know, mark your territory.”
“You mean like you’re trying to do, huh, Wiener?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Of course you don’t. Besides, I don’t have to go right now.”
“Why? Did you already piss your pants?”
Still shaking, I crawled back in by Chloe. I gave her the whistle, and she handed me my knife.
“I can’t believe you did that.”
“Me either.”
“Why did you?”
“I don’t know.” I shrugged, glad she couldn’t see my face in the dark.
“I wish I had your confidence.”
I pulled the cover up to my chin. “Most of the time I don’t.”
Chloe patted my hand. “Could’ve fooled me.”
“Hey, ladies.” Isaac stuck his head through the entry. “Room for one more.”
It wasn’t a question. We shuffled closer together, and Isaac crawled in on the opposite side, next to Chloe. Her teeth flashed a wicked grin at me in the dark when Oscar crawled in next to me. His hand brushed my elbow, running up the length of my arm, and though it may have been an accident, I decided to take it as in invitation. After all, we could die tonight. We might very well die tomorrow.
I grabbed his hand and rolled toward him, burying my face against his shoulder. His body stiffened in surprise, then relaxed in such an easy way it felt like we had done this before, and his other hand curled securely around mine. Neither of us spoke; I didn’t look at his face and enjoyed the feel of his chin resting on the top of my head.
“We’ll take turns keeping watch,” Oscar said into my hair. “In case it comes back again.”
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