by Roxie Noir
Present Day
“You’re the one who was so hot to trot yesterday,” Wilder says, towering over me as we both stand in the doorway of the hunting cabin, looking out at the dawn.
“Hot to trot?” I murmur, not moving, just staring out at the mostly-frozen lake that nearly killed him. “Who are you, my dad?”
“Gross,” he laughs.
Wilder puts one hand on my shoulder, slides his thumb onto my bare neck, massages one of the tight muscles there.
I let him. Part of me still feels like this is dangerous, like we shouldn’t be touching each other at all, like I shouldn’t be falling for this anymore, but that part might be stupid.
It’s nice. It’s been ten years. I’m different now, why can’t Wilder be different too?
He can act like this now because there’s no one to see, that part of me whispers.
Out here he doesn’t have to explain that he actually likes the weird girl. The wolves and squirrels don’t give a shit if the awkward nerd is his girlfriend.
He’s being nice because it’s a secret.
I swallow hard, trying to shove all those feelings down along with the shock of nerves and apprehension I feel about leaving the cabin, but it’s pretty obvious that no one is coming, at least not in the next couple of days, and there’s no method of communication in there.
My ankle’s taped again and doesn’t hurt nearly as much when we first got here. Wilder’s clothes are all dry. We ate plenty of disgusting store-brand canned chili, we took the sleeping bags.
And we found the road. It’s a fire road, hardly more than a couple of ruts through the forest, but it’s ten times better than trying to find our own way through the trees and bushes only to end up on a cliff we have to go around or at a body of water we can’t cross or something.
If we just go, it looks like a two-day hike. A long and miserable two days, yeah, but only two days and then maybe, probably, civilization at the end.
We hope there’s civilization at the end. If not, I don’t know.
“I’m gonna miss the wood stove,” I admit.
“C’mon, Squeaks,” he says, and pushes me gently forward, down the three rudimentary steps and to the mostly-frozen, half-muddy ground. “On and into the wild. We’re almost there.”
“We’re not,” I point out. “We’re technically not that much closer than we were when we first—”
“Just walk,” he says, his voice steady and calm.
I think about arguing, but instead I adjust the pack on my back — I’ve got the smaller one that we found in the cabin, Wilder’s got the big one that I had before, since his is at the bottom of the lake — and I start walking.
We walk. And walk. And walk, until my ankle screams and I think my feet might fall off, and then I walk some more.
The road is easier, at least, rudimentary as it is. It’s still just dirt, and it’s full of things to trip over in the just-melting snow, full of mud and holes and all that stuff, but it’s nice to know that we’ve got the way out in our grasp.
As we walk, we talk. Wilder tells me about realizing that he wasn’t going to get into college, and if he did get into college he was just going to fail out, so he infuriated his father and joined the military. He tells me how now Flint Holdings will probably go to his younger brother Grayson, because his dad doesn’t think he can handle it.
Later that night, we zip together the sleeping bags and huddle together, still in most of our layers and our coats. The wolves are howling again, but they’re further away now. I think.
We walk another day. I tell him about how my life was hell after prom, how I became a hermit in my parents’ house just so I wouldn’t have to see anyone while I took enough summer school classes to get my diploma and then a semester’s worth of courses at Solaris Community College before somehow miraculously getting into Stanford mid-year.
I tell him how that wasn’t a piece of cake either, but it was better than Idaho. Anything was better than Idaho, back then.
We talk about basic training and flight school, how the Navy actually has more planes and pilots than the Air Force. We talk about going to therapy and actually getting diagnosed with an anxiety disorder and how it felt like finally someone gave me a user’s manual to my brain.
We sleep in the sleeping bags again, too cold and too exhausted to do more than sleep.
Day three dawns darker than the first two, and even as we’re packing up the sleeping bags, re-taping my ankle, and eating cold store-brand chili, it feels like something is wrong, like the light is different, like there’s something bad coming.
It feels like I’m being watched by eyes I can’t see, like behind every tree is some vague menace that I can’t name or understand, but that’s definitely there.
I don’t mention it to Wilder, because I don’t want to sound crazy. Even if I’m not a wilderness survival expert like he seems to think he is, I know that constant cold and hunger and exhaustion can mess with your brain. I wonder if I’m having a low-level hallucination — not enough to have a chat with someone who’s not there, but enough to feel like reality is different.
Wilder seems uncomfortable too, but he doesn’t say anything. Maybe he doesn’t want to make me worry, either, so we walk for most of that morning in silence. Comfortable silence, but still silence, filling our water bottles every time the fire road crosses a stream.
It’s a couple hours after we leave that there’s a break in the trees overhanging the road and I look back at where we came from. I’ve been doing that every so often, trying to spot the ridge where we crashed so I can see how far we’ve come already.
Only this time the skyline looks different, like there’s another set of mountains behind the ones we came from and it takes me a moment to realize what it is: storm clouds.
Massive, ugly, heart-twisting storm clouds. They’re tall, taller than the mountains beneath them, sharp shadows delineating each and every fluffy, dangerous billow. Their undersides are so dark they’re nearly black, making the midday sun look strange and pale.
I just stop, fear prickling through my limbs.
They’re so far away, I tell myself. You don’t even know that they’re heading in your direction, they’ll probably blow right on past or go somewhere else.
“They’re twenty miles off,” Wilder says, standing next to me, staring in the same direction, like he’s echoing my thoughts.
I hope he’s right. I hope we’re both right, but I don’t know that I believe it.
“How far are we from the valley mouth?” I ask.
He sighs, adjusts his hat on his head. The maps we were looking at are at the bottom of the lake, so I know it’s a guess at best.
“Not that far,” he guesses. “A few miles, maybe?”
I just nod and don’t ask the other question that’s on the tip of my tongue, because I know he doesn’t know the answer: what then? Is there anything out there then?
We just keep moving. I make a rule that I can only look over my shoulder at the clouds every five hundred steps, so I count to distract myself.
The valley mouth looked obvious from higher up in the mountains when we first saw it, but now that we’re close there’s no real way to tell. The mountains just keep looking like mountains, high and forbidding, and it seems like they go on forever. We could be through already and maybe we wouldn’t know.
Maybe the whole thing was a false hope. The clouds behind us keep getting closer, the sunlight getting paler, like it’s being sucked away.
Then we hear the noise.
It’s late afternoon, the sun on the decline. The wind is picking up just enough that we’ve both noticed but haven’t said anything to each other, because what is there to say? What is there to do except keep walking, counting my steps, looking over my shoulder every five hundred so I don’t jinx it?
But we both stop, stand there, still as stone, and just listen.
It doesn’t happen again. There’s nothing but perfect, crystalline silence, the slig
ht crackle of birds hopping from branch to branch, the faint drip of the snow just starting to melt from the trees.
“It was the wind,” I tell Wilder, still holding my breath.
He tilts his head, turns in a slow half-circle, listening.
“Are you sure?” he murmurs.
I go silent again.
“No,” I finally say. “But I don’t want to get my hopes up.”
He nods, and we keep walking. I’m pretty sure we’re at the mouth of the valley that we could see from the cabin, only it doesn’t look like that close-up. Close-up it just looks like it opens onto more mountains and then mountains behind that, all white peaks shot through with gray, wispy clouds around them, nothing more to see anywhere.
We walk until we hear the noise again, maybe thirty minutes later, and this time it’s not the wind. This time it’s louder, more of a grunt than a whisper, and my heart leaps in my chest when I hear it.
“That was a truck!” I shout, grabbing Wilder’s arm.
He goes still, listening, his eyes searching through the trees over my head like he’ll be able to see something there.
“It was,” I whisper, grabbing him harder. “That was the sound of a semi engine-braking, it used to wake me up all the time at night when I was a kid because we lived near this highway—”
It sounds again, the unmistakable deep stutter that’s so obviously mechanical, and I start laughing, one gloved hand over my face.
“I think you’re right,” Wilder says, a smile ghosting across his face.
“I know I’m right!” I yelp, letting him go and practically hopping up and down with excitement. “It sounds like it’s right through those trees, I bet we could cut through and—”
“Stay on the road,” he says.
I eye the trees to my right just as I hear the truck’s groan again, further away now, fading into the distance.
“Imagine breaking an ankle when we’re this close,” he points out. “Come on. We’ll hit the main road, I’m positive.”
I’m tempted to argue with him, but I’m too giddy, too happy that maybe my days of being cold and hungry and in pain are almost over, that maybe I’ll spend tonight in a real bed wearing something besides the same outfit I’ve worn for longer than I want to think about.
Just as I let Wilder’s arm go, a single drop of something lands right on my nose, like it’s mocking me. I blink in surprise, then wipe it away with one finger as Wilder frowns, his eyes on the sky over my head.
“Shit,” he says quietly, and I turn.
The black sky is closer, though up this close it’s more of a hard steel gray, the color of shark skin. It’s moving, undulating, and as we stand there more drops fall, dotting the sleeves of my coat. I can’t tell if they’re freezing rain or just regular rain, but I know they’re not snowflakes. It’s just a little too warm for that at this lower elevation, this time of year.
“We gotta move,” Wilder says, adjusting the pack on his back. “Come on.”
Chapter Thirty
Wilder
This is bad. There’s a heavy feeling in my gut, and there has been all day, watching the storm get closer and closer. It’s got that ugly, dangerous color, and worst of all it’s not even dropping snow.
Snow would be one thing, but now we’re at a low enough elevation that, at this time of year, it’s just above freezing during the day. That means the snow is dropping rain that’ll freeze at night, or it’s dropping freezing rain. Snow would be almost okay, nice and fluffy and easy to brush off your jacket.
But that doesn’t work when the precipitation is liquid. This stuff sinks in, no matter how waterproof your gear is. At night it’ll probably go below freezing, but the ground will be wet and we’ll be wet and that’s dangerous as hell.
We have to get to that road, and we need to do it while it’s still light. I’m tempted to take Imogen’s suggestion and go through the woods, but we’ve come so far that I don’t want to find ourselves on a cliff again or have her step in a hole, finally snap her weak ankle.
“Slow down,” she gasps behind me.
Imogen’s limping pretty bad, even though I’ve been re-taping her ankle every morning. She hasn’t said a peep, but I know it has to hurt.
“Sorry,” I say, slowing my pace to wait for her. “I got excited.”
She just nods, droplets of water adorning her hat.
“I know,” she says. “Me too.”
We keep moving. The fire road we’re on slopes gently downhill, staying close to the base of the mountain. I think we walked out of the valley today, or at least what we thought was the valley — with no map it’s hard to tell, and God knows I’ve been focusing mostly on putting one foot in front of the other.
We’re silent. The precipitation starts coming down a little harder. The light gets lower, and I can’t tell if it’s because the sun’s dipped behind the mountains or if it’s the storm cloud overhead, but either way it’s not good. Time passes, maybe an hour, maybe more.
Suddenly, the road we’re on forks. One branch goes straight, still hugging the mountain, but another branch curves right, through the trees and more sharply downhill. It’s the first time in days we’ve had a choice, and we both stop, look at each other.
“That one,” Imogen says, pointing to the sharp downhill.
We haven’t heard another truck sound, but I follow her lead anyway even though I know that the road we heard might have curved earlier, might be miles away by now, but we slog. It gets muddy. Our trail crosses a couple of streams and we have to hop carefully from rock to rock so we don’t dunk our feet in the cold water.
I carry Imogen over one because I don’t think she’ll make it with her ankle.
And then, just when I think we should have stuck to the other trail, it’s there in front of us.
Salvation. Rescue.
Heaven is a two-lane blacktop with a thick yellow dotted line down the middle, the trees on either side of it lashing back and forth as the wind picks up, cold half-frozen rain pelting down even harder.
We stop and stare. Imogen shoves her glasses up her face, dotted with water droplets, and we both look left, then look right, then look left again.
“It’s a road,” Imogen says, even though we obviously both know it’s a road. “Did your map say which way we should walk?”
“The map wasn’t even sure there was a road here,” I say.
“Pick one.”
The wind picks up again, shaking slush out of the tree branches, snow sodden with freezing rain. The light is getting dimmer by the minute, and we haven’t heard anything since we heard a truck engine braking an hour or two ago.
We might be sleeping outside again, this time in the cold wet. We’re both hungry, we’ve been walking for three days now, and even though she won’t admit it I can tell that Imogen is flagging.
“Left,” I say.
We walk down the middle of the road, and it’s mercifully faster than the trail we’ve been on for the past few days. Imogen’s limp is better on the asphalt than it was on the uneven dirt, but she’s still limping. I’m shivering, she’s shivering worse.
Come on, I think. We didn’t get all this way just to freeze to death on a highway.
The sun goes down, I think, though it’s hard to tell with the storm slowly picking up, the wind driving the rain into the creases of my coat, slowly creeping through the layers I’m wearing until it’s chilling me, right next to my skin.
Imogen’s trudging along next to me, and I have the urge to reach out and take her hand, but I know we’re both warmer with our hands shoved in our pockets.
“We should think about stopping soon,” I finally say. “The sun’s nearly down and it’ll take us a while to figure out shelter.”
She doesn’t respond.
“Hey, Squeaks,” I say, trying to fire up some kind of reaction from her, but instead of listening to me, she takes a step forward, staring down the highway. Then another step, and I squint into the near-dark, trying to
figure out what she’s so intent on.
Then I see it: white lights playing on the trees to one side of the road, moving and flickering.
It’s a truck, two blazing headlights barreling through the darkness, and it comes around a bend and then it’s headed straight for us, the rain nothing but sharp lines through the light.
“Hey!” Imogen yells, waving both her arms over her head.
She limps forward, hops, tries to jog, limps faster.
“HEY!”
The truck doesn’t slow down, just keeps barreling toward her, but I can see the set of Imogen’s shoulders as she stands dead in front of it, letting it bear down. Now she’s waving her arms, screaming at it, and it’s getting closer and closer in a horrible game of chicken that I know she can’t win.
“STOP!” she screams, still waving. “Goddammit you fucking asshole just stop, please just fucking stop, just stop, please—”
The truck’s horn blares, practically sending a shockwave through the night, but it doesn’t look like it’s slowing down at all. A million possibilities run rampant through my head — drugs, guns, military stuff, illegal shit — as I sprint forward to Imogen.
She screams. I shout. The truck honks again, and then I grab her and pull her to the side of the road, just barely out of the way of the truck.
We stumble through the mud and gravel as the huge vehicle whooshes past, misting us with even more water, so close we can feel the breeze of its wheels.
Fuck, that was close. The first thing we do when we find civilization and we nearly get hit by a truck.
“He saw me!” Imogen shouts, my hand still around her arm. “That motherfucker saw me, he had to see me—”
I pull her in, close my arms around her, press my face against her hair because she’s right. I know she’s right, and we’re both so cold and so tired and so hungry that in the moment, standing in front of a truck seemed anything but insane.
“I know,” I murmur.
Imogen bursts into tears. She wraps her arms around me and just sobs.