“Are those real?”
She looked at the passports in mock seriousness.
“They better be. I paid enough for them. Never know when you’re going to have to leave the country.”
“And if the border patrol spots them as fake?”
She contorted her face dramatically, to show how hurt she was by his question.
“I’m telling you, these are totally legit. I’m officially a citizen of Mexico, Canada, and, of course, the United States. You think after the way we treat Mexicans, that if the shit goes down in our country, they’re just gonna welcome us across their borders? As they say in Spanish, no. And the Canadians…they might seem like a bunch of tree huggers, but I guarantee they’ll close their borders, too. Anyone with only an American passport is going to be screwed. After we finish up in Alaska, we need to get you set up, too.”
“We can talk about this later, but I’m fine for now with my real American passport.”
Zana put the passports back in her bag, then reached out and set her cool hand on Trent’s thigh.
“The least of our troubles is going to be getting me in and out of Canada. If anything, I’m worried they might try to stop you. You do look kind of…suspicious. Make sure you’re polite when we go through the border check. Canadian jails are pretty bad, from what I hear.”
Trent just looked at her, his face stolid.
Then they both burst out laughing, and Trent felt his shoulders relax again.
When they pulled up to the Canadian border, the crossing was anticlimactic. The border guards, accustomed to travelers using their country as a short cut to get to Alaska, didn’t search the car or even ask Trent and Zana anything other than the purpose of their visit.
Zana used her US passport and had to almost beg the guard to stamp it. She might have owned three passports, but she’d never used any of them before, and Canada was her first time out of the United States.
As they drove away from the border, Trent was pleased to see the grin on Zana’s face as she marveled at the red ink stamp that proved she had indeed visited another country.
With the border crossing behind them, Trent started thinking of finding a place to spend the night. After another twenty miles, they hadn’t seen a single motel that fit their criteria, but they soon came upon a campsite where plenty of RVs were turning in.
Zana did a quick search on Trent’s phone and saw that the next motel was another thirty or so miles away.
“I’m tired of motels anyway,” she said. “Let’s be crazy and camp out for the night. We’ve got sleeping bags and a tent. Might as well practice using them.”
Trent looked at her with both eyebrows raised. She was right. They’d stopped at the local Las Vegas pawn shop and bought a pair of brand new sleeping bags and a zip-up tent just to be prepared.
“It’s probably going to get in the 40s tonight,” he said.
“We can zip the bags together and keep each other warm. It’ll be fun, and a lot cheaper than a motel.”
Trent was shaking his head and laughing as he turned off into the campsite area and drove to the main office.
They both got out of the car and stretched, happy to be walking around and not cooped up in the car.
The manager met them outside. He was a tall, stocky man with plenty of grey hairs sticking out of places they shouldn’t.
“How’re you folks, tonight? Single campsites are right down the road there. Just keep going and take a right at the restrooms. We’re not too full up tonight, so I can offer you a spot with neighbors or without.”
“We’d prefer to be alone,” Zana said, without hesitation.
Trent tried to suppress his grin as they followed the man into the office and paid for the night in cash.
“You look like a nice couple,” he said, “but I gotta go over the rules anyways. No glass bottles. No drugs. No hunting. No open fires after midnight, and before that, only in a designated pit. If you bring it in, you take it out. Restrooms are down the road, like I already told ya. And be respectful of your neighbors, even though you ain’t gonna have any. We try to keep it quiet after midnight around here. Got all that?”
They both nodded as the man pursed his lips and looked up to his left, as if he were trying remember something.
“Almost forgot. Keep your food and trash in the tent with you or hang it up as high as you can in a tree. We don’t have much of a bear problem around here, but it’s better to be safe than sorry.”
“I couldn’t agree with you more,” Trent said. He wondered what the man, and Zana for that matter, would say if they knew about his experience with the grizzly back in Whittier that had ended up killing the enigmatic old man, known only as the Elder.
The manager looked at Trent, like he could almost hear his thoughts.
“You two have a good night, now, and welcome to Canada,” he said.
Trent and Zana waved to him as they left the office. After a short drive, they arrived at the campsite the man had assigned them.
They unloaded their sleeping bags and the tent and opened them on the ground next to each other. The site was in a small clearing, so the half-moon gave them enough light to see what they were doing, even with the car and its headlights off.
“This is beautiful,” Zana said, craning her neck back to look at the stars.
Trent sat down in front of the empty fire pit, and she joined him.
It felt good to be outside for once. His stiff back might make him regret his decision to sleep on the hard ground the next morning, but for now, he was happy, and all the experiences of the previous week faded away as they stretched their legs and stared up at the stars.
Zana turned over on her side and looked at Trent as she drew herself closer.
“Want to start a fire?”
“I’m not sure I have the energy to gather the wood and get a good fire going. I can barely keep my eyes open, and we still have to put the tent up.”
She rolled on top of him, her frame light on his chest.
“I wasn’t talking about that kind of a fire, silly.”
He must have been more exhausted than he’d realized. Normally, he never would have missed such an obvious hint.
He drew her to him and kissed her deeply.
She pulled back and laughed.
“Thought you were too tired to start a fire?”
“I’m not that tired,” he said, as he pulled her down on top of him again. First, they wriggled their shoes off and then their pants. After that, they hastily zipped their sleeping bags together and hopped inside.
Within seconds, they were entwined, both of them naked, except for the silver pendant he wore around his neck that Christina had given him. He had almost taken it off several times, but it still meant something to him, and he didn’t want to lose it.
Even with the pendant on, for the first time, his thoughts didn’t turn to Christina even once, as they were having sex.
When he awoke, the moon had gone behind the clouds, and it was pitch dark and cold. He reached his arm out of the sleeping bag and felt around on the ground until his hand touched their tent still rolled up in its duffel. He made a mental note to put the tent up first, next time.
He turned to where Zana lay. He grazed her shoulder with his fingertips, and she stirred. He exhaled quietly and waited for her to fall back into the rhythm of sleep. As he listened to her breathe, he was amazed that, as close as she was, it was so dark that he couldn’t see her at all.
Chapter 10
THE LAST THING Trent wanted to do was to leave the relative comfort of their double-zipped sleeping bags.
But nature was calling.
He put on his boxer briefs, gritted his teeth, and slipped out from their bedding as quietly and as smoothly as possible.
He stood in the middle of the clearing, in only his underwear, and crossed his arms against his bare chest. His mind told him that it was cold outside, but he wasn’t shivering. Even so, he wanted to get back to the warmth of Zana and
their sleeping bags as soon as possible.
He was tempted to urinate just far enough away so that that neither Zana nor he would step in it in the morning. But logic told him that he should pee far enough away from where they were sleeping so that animals wouldn’t get wander to close while investigating the smell of his urine.
With the moon hidden behind thick clouds, it was still pitch black outside, and he couldn’t see a thing. He inched his way along with his hands in front of him, wishing he had taken the time to find a lighter. As his bare feet padded on the ground, he felt each stiff blade of dead grass and every twig underfoot.
At twenty steps away from their car, his hand brushed something that felt like coarse hair. He pulled his hand back, startled from the sudden contact but soon realized that it was simply pine straw hanging from a tree.
Exhaling as quietly as possible, he moved on, trying to remember the location of the tree to help him find his way back.
A second later, his foot sunk into a shallow indentation in the ground. It wasn’t deep at all, but it was enough to make him lose his footing and stumble to the ground.
He got up slowly and brushed himself off.
After only a few more steps, he decided that he had gone far enough.
He licked his finger and held it up to test the direction of the wind. The last thing he wanted was to return to camp with a drenched leg.
Adjusting his stance accordingly, he relieved himself and decided that there was a certain level of freedom that came from peeing in the woods in the middle of the night in Canada.
He smiled as he finished.
When he turned to walk away, despite having a superb sense of direction, he realized that he’d lost his bearings when he fell and now wasn’t sure how to get back to camp.
Cursing under his breath, he calmed his mind and focused his thoughts.
He knew that he had taken twenty tentative steps before falling. After that, he had taken only three more before deciding it was time to pee. That meant that he could be as close to the campsite as twenty-three steps or as few as seventeen steps away. Either way, as long as he didn’t fall again and get turned around, he could test out a couple of directions, returning to the same place to start again each time, until he got it right.
Or maybe he would get lucky and the moon would come back out so he could actually see where he was going.
Before he went anywhere, he reached up with his hands and felt another overhanging branch of pines. He snapped it off the tree and laid it where he had just peed.
His re-start point was set.
Trent took his best guess at the direction of the camp and started with a single, tentative step. His foot landed on what felt like a pinecone, and he almost let out a yelp.
Deciding that his current vector wasn’t the right direction, he took a step back until he felt the branch on the ground and started off in a different direction.
He was several steps along his latest path when he heard the rustling of leaves and the displacement of undergrowth to his left.
Trent’s adrenaline spiked, and his primitive drive to survive began to take over.
But the dark spirit that was attached to him remained dormant.
He heard the sounds again. There was something large in the woods next to him—a creature maybe ten feet away that was moving quickly. Whatever it was, the thing did not have the same problem seeing in the dark as Trent did.
He didn’t want to alter his direction without going back to his re-starting point, so he continued on, speeding up his pace and worrying less about stepping on something sharp or running into a tree.
He looked up at the sky, but he saw nothing other than solid, uncompromising blackness—a complete lack of light that seemed supernatural and unearthly. Not a single star could be seen.
He heard the same sounds again to his left, but this time they were no more than five feet away. The creature was closing in on him.
As Trent’s brain raced for a solution to his situation, the wind shifted, and the stench of rotten fish and wet fur washed over him. He had smelled that cocktail of odors before, back in Whittier, when a massive grizzly had walked within inches of him and Christina before it had descended into the burnt-out Buckner Building to kill the Elder.
Trent still couldn’t see whatever was stalking him, but he now knew that it was some kind of a bear and that it was dangerously close.
The dark spirit inside him still didn’t stir.
If the spirit’s only mission was to seek vengeance, maybe it would come back and attack the bear after it had ripped Trent to pieces.
The thought of the spirit exacting revenge on his behalf after he was dead did not give Trent any satisfaction, nor did it help him suppress his instinct to run away as fast as he could—the worst possible action he could take.
Slowly, he placed one foot in front of the other and continued on. Before he had gone even four more steps, a horrid thought flashed into his mind.
What would happen if he did find his campsite? It was bad enough that he was about to be mauled to death by a bear. But he couldn’t let that same fate befall Zana.
Trent stopped walking and faced the direction from where the noise had come.
He looked up at the pitch black sky again, hopeful that a shard of moonlight would break through the clouds.
But it remained as dark as a pit in hell.
He heard heavy breathing interspersed with an occasional huff only a few feet away from him.
With a sigh, he readied himself for the worst. If he faced the bear here, maybe it would at least leave Zana alone.
He took a deep breath and charged with all of his might in the direction of the animal.
In the instant he was crossing the stretch of utter darkness, he laughed inside as he remembered being so badly beaten by Bob and his two friends back in Montana—three men who, together, were nowhere near as strong or as vicious as a single bear.
Two steps into his attack, Trent ran face-first into a huge body of sinewy muscle and coarse hair. He looked up, smelled the creature’s foul breath, and saw two red eyes glaring down at him. The eyes were savage and powerful, and they burned with a rage he had never before encountered so intimately.
It was hard to tell in the complete dark, but from the size of the thing that he had just bulldozed, it had to be a grizzly.
He waited for the dark spirit in his head to come to his rescue—to save the body of its host.
Still, nothing surfaced.
Trent braced himself, without any real hope of survival, to be torn to pieces.
Instead, the beast did not move. It only continued to breathe on Trent and to glare at him with those damn eyes.
Trent gathered his courage and met the bear’s gaze head on, an act that went against every sane piece of advice ever given to anyone about surviving an encounter with a wild animal.
When he stared into the depths of those blood-red eyes, Trent’s face turned from one of impending doom to one of recognition and then confusion.
Aside from the red glow, he recognized that the eyes of the bear looking down on him were actually his.
Chapter 11
WHEN TRENT AWOKE, the sun was rising, and the clouds overhead were blurred and blended into the light blue sky.
He was still in his boxer briefs and had spent the night on the ground, in a bed of pine needles. Despite the cool morning air, he wasn’t the least bit chilled. He felt invigorated and recharged.
He blinked his eyes and looked up to see Zana standing over him with a curious look on her face.
“What happened to you last night? Didn’t like sleeping with me in our cozy little sleeping bag setup over there?”
She motioned with her hand. Their sleeping bags were only a few feet away.
Trent propped himself up on one elbow and brushed pine straws from his skin. He shook his head back and forth slowly, and checked with his hand to make sure the pendant Christina had given him was still around his neck.
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“I got up to go to the bathroom, and it was so dark I couldn’t see. I got lost and saw a bear.”
Zana knelt down next to him and felt his forehead.
He smiled at the touch of her warm hand. At least she was unharmed.
“I tried to keep it away from our camp.”
She looked back again at their sleeping bags only a few feet away.
She gently touched him on his shoulder—the one with the bite.
“My hero,” she said with a smile that turned to a frown.
“What happened to your hands?” she said.
He didn’t understand what she was asking about until he looked down and saw that his knuckles were covered in dry blood.
“I don’t remember,” he said as he looked at his bloody hands like they belonged to someone else. He rubbed some of the blood off his knuckles. The skin of his hands weren’t injured at all. He felt around his body for wounds or sore spots and found none.
“It must have happened when I attacked the bear.”
Zana raised one eyebrow.
“It was here,” he said. “I know what a bear smells like.”
She stood back up and brushed the dirt from the knees of her jeans.
“In that case, I thank you very much for saving my life. But please don’t ever leave me alone like that again.”
Trent nodded his head and got to his feet.
He walked a few feet toward the forest, but he didn’t see any obvious signs of a bear. No tracks. No droppings. No clumps of hair. And no lingering smell. But he hadn’t imagined it.
He looked ahead and saw a broken branch of pine needles on the ground. At least that part had been real.
Maybe all of it had been.
He could have run into the bear and fallen backwards, maybe hit his head. The bear could have left him for dead. Or maybe he had been mauled and had healed already.
In his new, crazy life, that was possible, too.
But the eyes of the creature—there had been no mistaking them. They had been his own.
“We have to get going,” Zana implored, “unless you wanna pay for another day here. And I’m hungry, too.”
The Whittier Trilogy Page 36