I can hear it in the silence, in his voice, in mine: Eat me. Eat me. E A T. M E.
I shove the thought down, because if I give in now, I’ll regret it later.
Then again, if I die now, I’ll die on a nauseated, empty stomach, and how shitty does that sound?
I blow out a breath and shake my hands, and even that movement makes me feel weak. Like I’ve wasted some very essential energy.
I trudge forward, snow leaking past the ankles of my hiking boots, wrapping my feet outside the leather so they’re freezing inside, even though they’re mostly dry.
Neither of us talks.
We’re exhausted, I think.
But also . . . also, I don’t know if either of us knows what to do with last night.
We’ve said too much; I think we can both feel it.
Like this mountain, the quiet dark and terror of survival being a question mark forced us both to tear ourselves open for one another’s benefit. And now neither of us knows exactly what to do with the pieces.
The only thing to do is shut the fuck up.
I wonder if he’s thinking about my inability to friendship, if he’s wondering if I’m just an absolute, isolated freak, if he’s thinking about bisexuality and pansexuality and the feeling of his teeth on my skin.
I’m thinking about all of it and very intentionally trying to think about none of it, and the distance between us is tangible.
He walks several paces ahead of me all day.
We’re moving slowly, too slowly.
Slowly enough that it feels like we’re hardly covering ground at all.
Not that covering ground matters much, does it?
We don’t even know where we’re going.
Toward water, hopefully, but I don’t know. Neither of us knows where that water might be or if there’s a river within twenty miles.
I shudder, struggling not to give into total despair, but I hate this. Being aimless.
Floating like this means . . . means things could go anywhere. Things could be getting worse, for all I know. For us, for the people we left behind. I’ve been so focused on Jonah and me that I’ve barely even thought about them. The pangs of hunger in my stomach are swiftly joined by pangs of guilt.
I shudder again and feel my teeth begin to chatter as the white world stretches around us in dots of trees and swaths of frigid emptiness.
“You alright?” Jonah grunts.
“Yeah,” I say.
We both know it’s a lie.
We walk in the quiet snow as the sun rises and warms the mountain, just a little. Not so much that I’m not shivering but enough that the warmth on my face drowns out, for just a half a second, the sharp sawing of hunger in my belly.
Two degrees, difference is enough.
Enough to allow me to walk one more step, then two. Three.
God.
I’m so fucking tired.
Tears start pricking at the backs of my eyes, and the last thing I want to do is cry. Wasting water seems stupid, and showing any more vulnerability in front of this boy feels absolutely impossible.
I won’t cry.
Keep it together.
Keep it the frick together.
I zone in on walking—one foot in front of the other. One step at a time. One breath, one inch, one foot. I am focused on the movement and the silence. Then I freeze.
“Jonah,” I say.
He grunts. He’s done nothing more eloquent than grunt all day.
“Stop.”
“Listen, Hallie—I stop, I’m never moving again.”
“No,” I say. “Jonah. Do you hear that?”
“Hear what?” he says.
He stops, and I suppose this is the moment of truth as to whether he ever moves again.
“OH,” he says. He swivels his head to face me, eyes wide and hopeful for the first time since we got into this mess, and says, “Where? Where’s it coming from?”
He’s frantic, practically spinning in circles, because what we hear is running water.
I struggle to breathe.
I shut my eyes and listen.
“There,” I say, and I just start power-walking toward the burble. It’s to the west, and it’s not as close as I want it to be, but it’s there. Oh my god, it’s there.
Everything in my head is screaming at me to break into a run—that the quicker we get there, the quicker, well . . . that we’re there.
The quicker we can drink.
The quicker we can have a freaking route, a plan.
But my muscles have other ideas.
Jonah and I walk as quickly toward the sound as our bodies will allow, and when I see the stream in the distance, my legs nearly give out.
I don’t even feel bad sobbing right now, vulnerability be damned.
Jonah’s fucking crying, too.
When we see the sparkling bank, he does break into a run, and I’m not far behind him. It’s stupid, probably, but I can’t help it.
I swear, I wouldn’t be capable of more excitement if a helicopter landed in front of us and offered us a ride back to paradise.
We reach the riverbank, and Jonah drops to his knees to fill his water bottle. I do the same thing, pouring the sweetest water I’ve ever tasted down my throat.
It’s not rushing, which is nice, because, I don’t know. Maybe we can like . . . catch fish or something. I don’t know the way this works.
The point is it’s moving, giving us a path to follow, and we’re drinking.
“Be careful,” says Jonah, even though I don’t think he’s really being particularly careful. “Take it slow, man, you’re probably dehydrated, and—”
“Jonah,” I say between mouthfuls of water.
“Hm?”
“EMT,” I say.
“Right,” he says. “Right.”
He breathes out, nostrils flaring, and stares at his water bottle like he’s physically holding himself back from downing the entire thing in a single swallow.
Suddenly the world is slow and languid, and I can feel energy seeping back into my muscles. Can feel the pangs in my belly subside enough for me to think.
Not enough, not really.
It’s false.
But it’s something.
It’s . . . hope.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
WE SIT ALONG THAT riverbank for far too long—like we’ve reached the Promised Land, we can stop now, MAZEL TOV YOU’VE COMPLETED THE FINAL LEVEL.
As long as we stay here, we can live in that reality: the one in which we’ve reached the end. The one in which the final challenge is over, or, at the very least, our odds of survival have jumped by 40 percent, not by like . . . 2.
It doesn’t matter.
Suddenly, when the whole world around you wants to eat you or starve you or close in on you piece by piece and you don’t know if you’ve got two hours left or a day or a week or your whole life, things begin to feel shockingly temporary.
It feels . . . urgent, almost, to focus on every single thing happening to you at this very moment. Because, not to sound like a cheesy motivational speaker or something, but because suddenly, this might be it.
This might be the last drink I take, or the last time I discover something, or just the last afternoon I’ve got.
And if it is, it’s important.
To just slow the hell down and languish in it.
“We should . . .” Jonah starts. He’s still sitting, running his fingers over one of the few dry spots on the mountain. But he’s looking up at the sky, and I’m wondering whether the sun is still on its journey up or if it’s already on its way back down.
“Yeah,” I say. “Yeah. We should . . .”
Neither of us wants to be the one to say it.
But I guess languishing in it, though it fits nicely with my whole newly discovered carpe diem thing, doesn’t fit particularly well with logic. It doesn’t interlace well with the goal of, you know, staying alive.
We have to keep moving.
T
he fact is that both of us are freaking starving, and the longer we wait to crack into the last granola bars in our bag, the slower we move.
The farther away everything seems.
The fact is that the longer we sit here in the cold, the stiller and cooler our blood gets, the harder it will be to get moving. The less the influence of that sudden water in our systems. The less the influence of the thrill of adrenaline at discovering the thing we’ve been looking for.
It would be foolish to waste the motivator of hope.
I am the first to stand.
Jonah looks out over the river, and I shut my eyes against the bright white and the sharp tingling in my legs and toes. I listen to the water rush.
When my eyes open, they find Jonah, hands in his pockets, standing next to me. He’s staring at the water, blinking, mouth a grim line.
Jonah is a thousand miles away.
I say, “What?”
He shrugs. “Nothing.”
I wait a beat. This is our dynamic, right? He’s reticent and I’m chatty and I should probably just let him keep his thoughts to himself.
I say, “It’s not nothing.”
Jonah purses his lips and blows out a long, long breath through his nose. He mutters, “Jesus Christ.”
“What?”
“I’ve been stuck away from civilization on a mountain for four days, and still, I can’t get any peace.”
I roll my eyes and shove his shoulder and his lips tick up for a heartbeat.
He says, “I don’t know what I thought would happen when we found water.”
I watch the river roll by.
“I guess it just seemed like . . .”
My breath clouds on the air. I say, “A finish line.”
“Yeah.”
We start moving.
It’s a quiet walk; neither of us has much to say, or if we do, I don’t think we’re interested in saying it.
It’s too much, the questions are too big, the stakes are too high. And it’s so stupid, but the disappointment of finding the river this many days into this fucking nightmare and not finding a whole town attached to it is too breathtaking.
Not like that’s what I actually expected to happen.
But it seems like . . . it seems like everything is vast and empty and impossible.
So we don’t say much.
The glittering white landscape just spreads. And spreads and spreads, scrub brush and pine trees and aspens occasionally breaking up the white-as-a-men’s-rights-meeting-in-Idaho panorama.
Jesus.
I’m getting so sick of white.
We crunch along in the cold, cold quiet, far enough from the river that it doesn’t spray us, but close enough to keep it in our periphery. We’re not risking losing it again; it may not be the key to paradise, but it’s the only lifeline we have.
At least we know it’s possible to get back here, if a hunter rigged a blind. That somewhere along the line, someone came out here. With gear. On purpose.
That and the water mean something, dammit.
It goes like that, me being quiet and contemplative, Jonah somehow managing to kind of be aggressive about it, until broad daylight shifts into evening.
The quiet, even though it’s empty, even though it makes it almost impossible to focus on anything but the gnawing pain in my stomach, branching out to my limbs, my head, god, my head, is kind of peaceful, almost. I can begin to trick myself into thinking it’s just a hike, just a cold-ass, poorly planned outing, and we’ll be curled up in the bed of a truck in a couple hours. He’ll have brought a thermos of cocoa and a couple blankets and we’ll watch the stars and he’ll try to seduce me and I’ll say, “Jonah, I bet you do this for all the girls—” and be totally into it when he laughs that fucking sexy laugh, even when the hard ridges of the truck bed dig into my back, and—
He hisses, “Hallie.”
It’s barely above a whisper, but it’s so sharp and sudden, and I’m so deeply, pervily lost in this sex fantasy, that I jump.
Am I delirious? Is this what delirium looks like? Thinking about banging in a truck bed while you slowly drift off into starving freezation? Freezing starvation. My gosh.
Jonah, I realize, has thrown his arm and is about to clothesline me if I take another step. I say, “What? What is—oh. Shit.”
Just ahead of us, maybe a hundred yards up, is a moose.
A moose—a real, live bull with huge antlers coming out of his head and hooves the size of a Clydesdale’s. And here’s the thing—I don’t know if you know this—but moose are goddamn huge. Like. GARGANTUAN.
I knew it in my head, but I didn’t really know until this very moment, but Jesus Fucking Christ, this thing, at the shoulder, is tall enough to do dunk contests.
And he’s gotta weigh, like, a ton. Not in the metaphorical way. Like literally two thousand pounds, or something approaching it. He’s so huge that he doesn’t look real.
I breathe, “Oh my god.”
Jonah says, “They have terrible eyesight. He might not even see us. So just . . . just back away.”
“I don’t know, man, it looks like he sees us.”
“Well, their noses are pretty killer.”
“How do you know so much about moose?” I say in a tense whisper. Like that matters. Who cares.
I’m backing off step by step and he’s just a couple inches in front of me, slowly stepping back. “Scouts,” he says through his teeth.
“Right. Right. Well. Should I be huge and scary? Should I—”
“No,” he says, eyes on the massive creature in front of him.
The moose begins to approach us and I can feel my heart rate rise. My pulse is murderously hard and fast in my veins.
His ears pull back and I may not know moose, but it doesn’t look great for us.
“Fuck,” Jonah whispers.
“What?” I say.
“Go,” he says.
“Just like—”
“Fucking go—run!” he says, just as the moose charges.
Oh my god.
Oh my god, I’m running and wishing more than anything that I had calories in my system, that I had something more than the bare minimum energy required to function right now. That my fight or flight reflex had something to build off besides pure instinct.
Walking made me want to fall; running seems like literally punching fate in the nose. Any step and I will plummet into the ground.
The bull makes a loud, horrifying noise, and JESUS I cannot be killed by a MOOSE. I can’t go out like that.
FUCK.
The snow crunches over and over, and I don’t know if it’s my boots or Jonah’s or the moose’s hooves, but he’s coming and he’s furious and we didn’t go over this! We didn’t go over measures for a goddamn moose attack.
We’re veering closer to the water, I can feeling the drop in temperature, the rise of the sound to our left. Jonah is beside me, closer to the river than I am. I move to correct our course, but the snow is a little thinner here and I can gain ground faster.
God, my muscles hurt, my lungs burn, every breath I draw in hits like a razor and I hate it, I hate it.
I hear the pounding of hooves behind me and I think, There is no way to outrun this. There is no way. We are going to die. We survived an avalanche and days starving in the snow, and a MOOSE is going to take us out.
The moose’s hooves.
His furious snorts and sounds.
The rush of the freezing water.
And then I hear the very worst sound in the world—a splash.
It takes me a tenth of a second to see that Jonah has disappeared beside me and we’re closer to the riverbank than we thought, and god, when did it get so dark?
“JONAH!” I scream.
It’s not like the river is deep, not like it’s the kind of current that can sweep you away, really, if you have any strength at all left in you—which who knows if Jonah does—it’s the wet. It’s the cold. It’s the fact that it’s absolutely freezing up here
and getting wet means fucking death.
I stop to find him, and he’s pulling himself up out of the water violently, like he’s furious.
“JESUS, HALLIE, RUN,” he manages, because there is a livid wild animal running after us, but I can’t leave him, I can’t.
I say, “JONAH,” and he struggles forward, running as fast as he can, and thank god his legs are long and he works out, oh my god.
I force myself not to think about the consequences for the future. About him dripping and shivering while he runs, about his growling and gritting his teeth and what I think might be blood on his shin. About the pallor on his face and the blue in his lips.
I think about now, this very second.
Because if this moose catches us with his antlers or his hooves or whatever the hell he wants to kill us with, we will die.
It’s not much of a question; it’s a given. Neither of us is strong enough to survive that and worry about the potential effects of Jonah being dripping wet in the cold.
The immediate concern is the seven-foot behemoth barreling toward us.
I run.
I run
And run
And run
And run.
Eventually, the thundering slows.
The terror subsides and I can see more than the barren landscape in front of me, can feel more than the adrenaline pushing through me.
I slow down, and the instant I do, my muscles rebel.
I can see the moose trotting back off to the hell from whence he came, and for a second, I’m so freaking thrilled to have lived that I forget about Jonah’s fall.
I turn toward him to say, “WE SURVIVED,” and celebrate, and then I remember.
He is shaking, and yeah, he is bleeding—three shades paler, teeth chattering, hugging his arms around him.
“Oh god. Jonah—”
“Hallie,” he says. He throws his arm out for balance, catches my gaze in his hollow one, and drops.
CHAPTER TWENTY
I AM CONVINCED THAT if I weren’t totally jacked, Jonah would have frozen to death out here.
There’s a little cave a couple hundred yards off, but it requires dragging his six-foot-tall ass through the snow while he freezes up, ice forming on every article of clothing on his limp body. He’s completely unconscious, and I do not let myself think about the potential outcomes of that. That maybe he’s a step from death and, in twenty minutes, his heart will stop beating altogether and I’ll be left alone to rot (or, I guess, be perfectly preserved) up here in the Rockies.
The Liar's Guide to the Night Sky Page 13