The Wild

by Owen Laukkanen

  “So,” he says, and she can hear the mischief, hear the smile in his voice. “Are you sure you want to be good?”

  * * *

  She’s felt this way before.

  That hollow oh shit feeling, like you’re suddenly falling.

  Like the ground you’ve been standing on has suddenly dropped away.

  Like you’ve been ambushed, straight out of the blue, and now you have a decision to make, and neither answer is easy.

  Do you:

  Play along and be fun even though you’re not sure, or

  Resist and be awkward and probably blow your shot?

  Dawn has been here before.

  * * *

  It was Julian last time.

  It was Julian and they were standing in the parking lot outside some club, and Dawn didn’t know him yet but he said he had pills to share, so she’d gotten her hand stamped and followed him out, and he’d led her through the lot and around back of the club and into an alcove, an emergency exit near, like, a dumpster and probably hundreds of rats.

  And he did have a stash—he showed her, he had plenty—and he swore it was good shit, but the way he looked at her, Dawn could tell he wanted something and it wasn’t money, even though she kept offering to pay him for it.

  But it wasn’t just that—like, it wasn’t just transactional.

  Julian was cute, in the lights of the club, in a Sons of Anarchy dirtbag kind of way. And Dawn was in one of those moods where no matter how many vodka sodas you drink it’s still not chasing the demons from inside your head and you just really need something stronger.

  But it was cold in the parking lot, and the alley was deserted. And in the harsh light from the streetlights and security lights, Dawn could see that Julian wasn’t just old, he was, you know, old. Like, way too old to be even talking to Dawn, let alone plying her with illicit substances.

  And she could see how the Sons of Anarchy dirtbag look wasn’t just some hipster disguise.

  But somehow, Dawn still wanted to impress him. She didn’t want to be the lame chick who didn’t play along, who chickened out at the last second.

  She stared at Julian, suddenly far too uncomfortably sober, and she studied the gleam in his eyes and tried to imagine just how far he would want to go, and how she could mitigate this suddenly far too uncomfortable situation.

  And Julian grinned back, like he had all day, like it didn’t matter to him either way, but she sure as hell wasn’t getting high on his shit without paying a price for it.

  You know what happened.

  BUT THIS IS DIFFERENT.

  “I think I want to be good,” Dawn says. “I’m sorry.”

  (Because Dawn knows you always have to, like, apologize, if you’re a girl and you’re not sure you want to do what a boy wants you to do.)

  And Dawn can almost hear the disbelief spread all over Warden’s expression, hear the deafening echo as his eyes blink in shock and he realizes this girl who clearly likes him and who’s alone in a tent with him as a storm kicks up outside, this girl who he thought was a sure thing…

  This sure thing isn’t exactly so sure.

  And Dawn knows Warden isn’t really the type to have to deal with rejection too much. Not with those eyes and those abs.

  She wonders if she should have just opted for the tarp. And hypothermia.

  Warden kind of stiffens and waits there a beat, and then he backs off and lies down and lets out a puff of air. “Okay,” he says. “Suit yourself.”

  “I’m sorry,” Dawn says again, but Warden doesn’t tell her it’s okay, or that she has no reason to be sorry.

  He just puffs out another long puff of air. “Good night.”

  DAWN LIES AWAKE.

  Warden is snoring within a couple of minutes, because of course he falls asleep quickly, because he’s a guy and he doesn’t have to worry that he’s somehow screwed everything up just by not wanting to fool around.

  (Or by wanting to fool around, for that matter.)

  He doesn’t have to worry that tomorrow morning Dawn’s going to tell Brielle and Kyla what a slut he is, and act like they really did something they didn’t, or tell Brielle and Kyla that he came onto her and she turned him down because he’s too ugly, or fat, or he smells bad.

  He doesn’t have to worry that his whole reputation (albeit in this stupid, self-contained Out of the Wild messed-up ecosystem) is ruined because he did or didn’t do what a girl wanted.

  He’s not a girl.

  Hence, he’s snoring, while Dawn lies awake.

  And after Dawn’s reminded herself there are bigger things going on than how she didn’t mess around with the cute guy, her mind pushes Warden aside and focuses on the bigger picture instead.

  She’s scared.

  The storm is howling outside, battering the walls of the tent. She would no shit be dying of hypothermia if she’d slept under the tarp.

  (She hopes Christian is okay, up at the summit.)

  She’s scared of the mountain and scared of this storm and she’s scared of what Warden’s proposing to do.

  Abandon the counselors.

  Set out into THE WILD on their own.

  Escape everyone and everything that got them here to this disaster.

  Dawn is scared that Warden won’t be able to do what he promised.

  And a part of her is scared that he will.

  * * *

  She sleeps eventually.

  She’s too tired not to. It’s been a long day. It’s been a long week.

  It’s been a long life since Cam and Wendy had her kidnapped.

  Even the storm and Warden’s incessant snoring can’t keep her awake forever.

  Eventually, Dawn drifts off.

  It’s a deep, dreamless sleep.

  And when she wakes up, it’s daylight, and Warden is gone.

  WARDEN HASN’T GONE FAR.

  Dawn can hear his voice outside the tent, and she can smell and hear a fire burning, and hear Brandon and Evan laughing, and Kyla saying something sharp and probably hilarious.

  (She doesn’t hear Lucas, and she thinks about their little tiff last night, keeps running her mind over it like you run your tongue over a sore tooth, and she thinks about what happened between her and Warden last night, too, and tries to figure out how she should feel about it all, and then she unzips the tent flap and looks out at the tarn and she forgets about Lucas and Kyla and Warden and even Amber.)

  Because there’s snow.

  Everywhere.

  * * *

  Two things happen when Dawn pokes her head out of Warden’s tent:

  A big pile of snow collapses from the top of the tent onto her head and down the back of her shirt, and

  A fluffy white snowball creams her in the face.

  Dawn shrieks at the snow down her back, but the sound comes out muffled because her mouth is full of snow from the snowball, and she hears Warden laughing as she ducks back into the tent.

  “Wakey-wakey, sleeping beauty,” he calls, but not unkindly. “Your breakfast is getting cold.”

  It’s at that moment Dawn realizes she’s ravenously hungry and that whatever Warden and the others are cooking over the fire smells delicious.

  She pulls on her jacket and her boots and steps out into winter, where the storm has abated but the snow is still falling, peaceful but steady, and everything, tents and boulders and mountain, is covered in a fresh blanket of snow.

  “Holy crap,” she says, looking around, dazed.

  (The top of the Raven’s Claw is obscured by clouds. The ridge opposite is visible, though, and it’s a pristine layer of white, rendered dull and muted under low-lying gray cloud and the snow.)

  It’s a strange, quiet world.

  “Crazy, right?” Warden says, and he hands her a mug of so
mething hot and steaming that smells just like coffee. “You would have died under that tarp last night.”

  Dawn takes a sip, and it is coffee, and she wants to kiss him again or at least ask him where the hell he found it; she hasn’t had coffee since she left Sacramento.

  Warden winks at her. “Christian’s secret stash,” he says. “I figured he’s not going to miss it.”

  The mention of Christian makes Dawn look up at the Raven’s Claw again. Warden follows her gaze. “He’s fine,” he tells her. “Like I said, he would have been cold last night, but he had shelter up there. But if he has any sense, he’ll come down to a lower altitude where it’s warmer, so we need to get moving, right?”

  He’s smiling at her, the kind of smile that instantly makes her feel five or ten degrees warmer.

  Hell, even Brandon and Evan aren’t looking at her like they’re secretly laughing, like Warden’s been telling stories while she’s asleep in his tent.

  (They’re too busy throwing snowballs at her.)

  Dawn sips her coffee, and the coffee is good. And for a moment she forgets she was ever worried about anything.

  “Where’s Lucas?” she asks.

  Kyla rolls her eyes. “He’s fine,” she says. “He’s in his tent. I just brought him coffee and breakfast.” She gives Dawn a look like woman to woman, like she knows Lucas is sulking and she knows why.

  Dawn feels herself go red and changes the subject. “Did Alex leave already?”

  It might be Dawn’s imagination, or it might not be, and even if it isn’t her imagination, it might mean nothing or it might mean more, but she thinks she sees a shadow cross Warden’s face for a second.

  “He’s gone,” Warden says. He gestures down the trail, across the trench and to the ridge opposite, back toward headquarters. “He left for help early this morning. So as soon as we eat breakfast, we’ve got to pack up and go. Put some distance in before the rescue team arrives.”

  Dawn shivers. She squints across the trench at the ridge on the other side, looking for any sign of Alex, like maybe footprints or the telltale yellow of his Bear Cub jacket, but she can’t see anything.

  “Hurry up and eat,” Warden says. “I’ll pack our stuff and then we’ll hit the trail.”

  The word eat reminds Dawn that she’s ravenous. She doesn’t know where the others found bacon, but she can smell it cooking, and she wants it.

  And she forgets about Alex, for the time being.

  THE FIRST PART of Warden’s escape route is the same way they took to get up to the Raven’s Claw in the first place. They have to drop down into that very deep, narrow trench that separates the tarn from the ridge on which Dawn embarrassed herself by crying about her nana to Warden.

  If they were going back to Out of the Wild headquarters, they would climb out of the trench and up onto the ridge and continue south.

  By Warden’s reckoning, they need to follow the trench east as it swings around the base of the Raven’s Claw and eventually joins the river that they’ll follow northeast to the highway.

  It’s still early morning when they set out from the tarn and start down into the trench. Dawn’s backpack feels weird on her shoulders after going the better part of a day without wearing it. Her legs, though, and her feet still remember how much hiking sucks. She’s feeling her blisters within the first fifteen minutes.

  Only nineteen and three-quarter miles to go.

  Lucas falls in beside her. He doesn’t say anything for a little while, as they navigate the steep trail. Then he glances at her. “So we’re really doing this, huh?”

  Dawn shrugs. “I guess so.”

  “You really trust Warden to get us out of here?”

  “He saw the counselors’ map,” Dawn says. “He has a photographic memory.”

  “Ah,” Lucas says. “Right.”

  “Anyway, why did you come if you don’t trust him?” she asks. “You could have gone back to headquarters with Alex if you’re really that worried.”

  Lucas hesitates.

  “I just think we all need to be careful,” he says.

  Dawn looks over at him, and Lucas meets her eyes, and Dawn can see he’s as nervous as she is. “We’ll be fine,” she says, though she doesn’t quite believe it. “In a couple of days, we’ll be back in civilization.”

  They stop for water when they reach the bottom of the trench and prepare to branch off from the trail back to headquarters. They’ve dropped maybe six hundred, seven hundred feet, back below the tree line, and it’s warmer down here and darker, overgrown by trees and moss and ferns. There’s less snow, just patches here and there; the trench is only about forty feet wide.

  Dawn has to pee. She curses herself for not going before they left the campsite, but in her defense the whole Pack was waiting on her, and anyway, she didn’t really have to go.

  She has to go now, though. She tells Lucas to tell the others to wait for her a minute, and then she slips off into the trees to find somewhere private.

  It seems like an embarrassing inconvenience at the time. Within minutes, it will have life-changing implications, for Dawn and for everyone else.

  DAWN FINDS HERSELF AT THE BASE of a cliff. She can just hear the sound of the Pack’s voices in the distance, but she’s far enough away that nobody will accidentally get a show if they look in her direction.

  The cliff extends high above Dawn, reaching back up toward the Raven’s Claw and the tarn and the trail, a sheer, uninterrupted drop. There’s a pile of snow at the base of it, and a couple of fallen logs that Dawn thinks she could lean against as she pees. She pushes her way through the forest toward those fallen logs, and she’s halfway to where she wants to be when she sees it.

  And she wouldn’t even see it if she hadn’t slipped a little bit, nearly tripped over a hidden root and stumbled forward and had to catch herself on a tree branch before she face-planted, but she was already almost on the ground anyway, and from her position more or less on her knees, she peered forward underneath the fallen log that was her objective and directly at the bottom of the cliff and the boulders and big piles of snow at the base of it.

  And that’s where she sees it.

  She’s not even sure what it is, not at first. Just a flash of color in an otherwise monochrome land, color too bright and vibrant and obnoxious to occur naturally in nature.

  This color is chemical. Cooked up in a lab. Probably created out of plastic and some assortment of weird poisonous dyes. This color stands out amid the white and the black and the various shades of gray, even though it’s just a scrap mostly buried in snow and obscured by rocks and trees.

  This color is yellow, bright yellow.

  It’s the color of Alex’s Bear Cub jacket.

  DAWN HAS NEVER SEEN a dead body before. Not in person.

  Aside from that little scrap of jacket, Alex is almost completely buried in the snow. He’s buried enough that Dawn can almost fool herself that it’s only a jacket she’s seeing, not a body.

  Almost, but not quite.

  Dawn picks her way cautiously up to the scrap of yellow jacket, as if it’s somehow going to come to life and, I don’t know, attack her or something.

  “Hello?” she says, and her voice shakes and she’s irrationally embarrassed about that, somewhere in the part of her brain that isn’t cold and really scared and still kinda has to pee. The scrap of yellow jacket that may or may not be attached to a body does not respond.

  Dawn creeps up right beside the scrap of yellow jacket that may or may not be a body, and it doesn’t move, and there’s too much snow to tell straight away if it’s a body or not.

  She nudges the snow with the toe of her boot and it doesn’t really give very much, but it certainly feels squishier than a rock.

  It feels like a person who has been lying under the snow for a while.

  Dawn t
ries to kick the snow away, but she’s uncoordinated and graceless and she nearly slips and falls onto the scrap of yellow jacket that may or may not be a body, so she stops trying to kick the snow away.

  She looks around the bottom of the cliff as though someone is going to show up to make this any easier.

  As far as she can tell, she’s alone.

  She crouches down in the snow beside the scrap of yellow jacket that, let’s face it, is probably attached to a body. Holds her breath. Reaches out with a fair amount of, you know, trepidation, and wipes some snow off the jacket.

  There’s enough give underneath the jacket that she knows it’s not rocks under there. Someone or something is wearing this jacket.

  Dawn brushes more snow off, and there’s a zipper and a couple of pockets, which really sucks because it means she’s touching the front of the jacket, which means somewhere above where she’s touching, well…

  There’s going to be a face.

  IT TAKES SOME TIME, but she does it.

  It takes a lot of breathing through her nose and trying not to be sick, and trying to tell herself that even if this is Alex under all of this snow, he’s dead now, completely dead, and he can’t do anything to her.

  She wraps her hand in the sleeve of her jacket. Holds her breath again and kind of looks away. Reaches out to where she imagines the face should be, and as, lightly as she can, brushes the snow clear.

  She lets out her breath.

  Tries to well up her courage. Be a damn Grizzly.

  Dawn forces herself to look at the body. At the face.

  It’s Alex.

  At first glance, he looks normal.