The Hike (3 page)

H
e walked briskly back down the mountain, along the tight, barely blazed trail to the east. Even though he saw no evidence of anything useful in that direction, he was still operating under the reasonable notion that he was close to salvation.
How lost could I be? I'm in America.
Acting like a castaway in the middle of resort-area Pennsylvania was a ludicrous idea. He was tired and frightened, but also embarrassed for himself.
What kind of idiot dies because he got lost outside a fucking hotel?

The mountain seemed to slope down forever. At one point, he had to lie belly-down on top of a large boulder and slowly lower himself to the ground below. Darkness was wrapping around the mountain, but he could still make out most everything in his immediate vicinity, namely trees. One tall, shedding tree after the next. It was a street fair of trees. He kept up a brisk pace down the mountain but was failing to stave off the cold. It was here now, freezing up the sweat in his shirt fibers and sending waves of chilled air up his shorts. And this was just the start. It was gonna get colder. It was comical how easily the cold could get to him. Put him in a climate-controlled house with ample
light and heat, and he could pretend to be a hardy man. But a couple of hours in thirty-degree weather and he was basically as helpless as a kitten. It would take nothing to kill him. The weather could do it. The dogfaces could do it. An infected mosquito could do it. He probably wouldn't even last this night if he didn't find safe haven.

He pressed on, unwilling to give up and freeze his ass off trying to sleep on a mountaintop, with the dogfaces ready to pick him off at any second. Then, suddenly, the ground leveled out under Ben's feet and the path opened up wide as a promenade. There were no tire treads of any kind. The space between the trees was flat and clear and continued straight to the east. This was a path that clearly led
somewhere:
preferably somewhere with a warm shower and a hot bowl of soup and a phone charger and a kind police officer who was good at taking notes.

He broke into a delirious, hopefully final run. He figured that one last push would be enough to get him there. But soon the horizon sealed off the sun for good, and whatever it was Ben was hoping to find—a gas station, a road, a diner—refused to show itself. His second wind began to fade. He couldn't make out much in the way of signposts or memorable path markings, and his energy was flipping back over to despair and the horrifying realization that he was becoming
more
lost.

Hours passed as he straggled forward, the moon his only companion. He was on the verge of breaking down in tears once more when he finally saw the path open up to a campground on the right. It was a clearing, with a dead fire pit in the center and a circle of folding golf chairs around it: the kind with nylon armrests and little mesh cup holders for your beer. There was also a small red tent over to the side.
People
. Real, living people with human faces might be in that tent. He was saved.

“HELP! HELLO?! HELP ME, PLEASE! DEAR GOD, HELP!”

Ben reached the campground and stood in front of the small pup tent. It could hold two people. Definitely no more than that.

“Hello?”

No answer.
You can't knock on a tent.
He stepped cautiously toward the opening and unzipped the entrance from the ground up. He peeled back the flap and all he saw inside was a blue backpack, a shrink-wrapped case of bottled water, and a small, fleecy red blanket. That was it.

“Anyone there?” There was clearly no one inside, but he asked anyway out of sheer hope. Then he dove for the water. Thirsty, yes. He was thirsty. And hungry. God, he was so hungry and thirsty now. Once the thought occurred to him, it became his only thought. His stomach hadn't been this empty in ages. He had forgotten what
real
hunger felt like: irritating, miserable, lovesick for food. He could eat a barn.

Inside the backpack he found a bag of potato rolls, two packages of hot dogs, and several pouches of gas station beef jerky. Good enough. He ate every last potato roll in the bag and guzzled down three of the little water bottles. Hunger and thirst had now been addressed.

Next: warmth. Running in those flimsy shorts in the bitter cold had deadened his poor legs. The front pocket of the backpack had a small BIC lighter inside, which was a profound little miracle. The fire pit was nothing more than a circle of flat ashes, but there were plenty of dry leaves and sticks to be had around the clearing. He could build a fire, although building a fire meant submitting to the idea of staying there. All night. He would be giving up, putting himself in danger, and officially making himself the world's dumbest lost person. But his body was dead, the backpack offered him no flashlight, and the woods surrounding him presented absolutely no other forms of life. There was no decision to be made, really. He felt around his pockets and
realized his hotel room key was gone. It must have fallen out when he was running away. He'd never be able to go back for it.

“Oh, no.”

He grabbed leaves by the handful, taking care to avoid the moist, matted-down ones under the top layer of brush. He crinkled and crunched the leaves before dropping them into the center of the pit. After he had a nice pile of tinder built up, he went for the sticks, laying a dozen flat and then arranging more of them in a cone on top of that. Ben's old man liked to build fires almost as much as he liked getting shitfaced, and he would let Ben help with the chore when he was a little kid. This was back before the divorce, when his parents were still living together in Minnesota, before the old man snapped and drifted away from Ben and his mom down a lazy river of ten-dollar vodka. He and his dad would drag in bundles of logs from the cord pile outside their house, then take old newspaper sheets and roll them up, tie them into Nantucket knots, and put them on the hearth. Then they would stack the logs on top, crisscrossed. Then his old man would light the thing and Ben would stare at it, grabbing for the poker anytime the fire died down—always stoking it, always mindful of it, always wanting it to stay alive and vigorous.

At the campsite now, he flicked the lighter a few times to get a flame, but the striker wheel chafed his thumb tip and he sucked on it to soothe the pain. One last try and the leaves finally took, spreading the flames out and sending an elegant plume of smoke up above the trees.

Maybe someone will see the smoke and come rescue me
, he thought.
Or come kill me.

It was night, and even if any Good Samaritan saw the smoke, it wasn't like they would come running. This was America. No one was lost in America. If they saw the smoke, they would say, “Looks like someone's having a fire!” and then go have a burger. Resigned, he took off his shoes and peeled off his filthy socks and put his clammy, puffy
white feet close to the fire to reanimate them. It felt good to make fists with his toes. The time had come for him to collapse in a heap. He could have slept upside down, he was so tired. Temporarily free of the dogfaces, his basic needs—food, warmth, rest—were crashing down on him in waves. Sleep was gonna be miserable, but he needed to recover some strength to get up and start running again. The tent was in decent shape, even if it offered little protection from the weather. Not that big a step down from the hotel room. But he couldn't sleep in it. It would be too easy to spot. He would have to use the tent as a decoy. He let the fire die to keep the dogfaces from spotting him, and then he found a downed tree ten yards behind the tent and cowered behind it, covering himself with the little blanket and topping the blanket with brush to keep it camouflaged. Every sound coming from the woods sent a fresh surge of tremors through his body.

He turned on his phone. It was now 12:03
A.M.
There were a few family photos and videos on the phone. Not many: It didn't have enough space for him to keep the old ones for very long (he would download them onto his computer back home for safekeeping). But some were better than none. He wanted to conserve battery power, but he had to see Teresa and the children one more time, in case something came for him in the middle of the night and never let him see them again.

He opened the photo gallery and saw a picture of the kids dressed up for Halloween: nine-year-old Flora in a vampire costume; six-year-old Rudy in a puppy outfit; and three-year-old Peter, holding a trick-or-treat bag but not wearing a costume, because you can only keep a costume on a three-year-old for so long. And then he saw his wife, crouching down beside the children, the only one disciplined enough to smile for the camera. There were a few more pictures in the album, but that was all he had now. Just thumbnails.

He opened up the Videos app and, with the volume at its lowest
setting, watched Rudy swinging from a tree while wearing only one shoe, screaming his head off. “I'M SWINGING WITHOUT A SHOE!” The boy said it over and over and laughed every time. Ben wasn't much of a videographer. Before smartphones, he never bothered to buy a video camera, because he didn't want to be one of
those
dads, always trailing behind his kids with a camcorder like a complete dipshit. But now all phones came with a camera built in and, man, did those kids like to watch videos of themselves. So he took a few videos and kept them in his archive. It was such a weird thing: all those hours and weeks and years he spent with them . . . Now he could boil down their lives to these random little capsules of their existence. He missed them all so terribly. It was like he had been gone for months.

When he stopped the video because he couldn't take missing them any longer, he saw one bar in the top left corner of the screen.

A signal.

He called his wife right away and she picked up.

“Ben?”

“Teresa!” he whispered. “Teresa, I'm lost! I love you! Please send . . .”

The call cut out. Worse yet, the single bar disappeared and the “Searching . . .” returned.

“No. Nononononono. NO!”

He leapt up from behind the log and held the phone aloft, scouring for the signal. If it was there before, it would be there again.
Where is it? Where is the fucking signal?
He wished he could see all the radio waves and gamma waves and X-rays wafting around in the air so he could hunt the signal down and scream every last profanity at it.
Fuck you, you fucking piss shit stupid cunt signal.
He circled the extinguished fire pit and waved the phone around, making sure it covered every patch of air around him, but it was no use. After five minutes of twenty-first-century desperation, the phone gave out. The screen went black and the wheel began to spin.

“No! Fuck you, NO!”

He booted it back up a few more times as he paced, only to watch it die again and again. Eventually, all he got was a graphic of an empty battery and a little plug icon. It was dead.
He
was dead. He went back behind the log and pounded at the ground until exhaustion bested him and he passed out.

It wasn't long before he woke up again. Still night. Without the phone, he had no clue what time it was, but he could feel a fire blazing nearby. Someone had built it. Lit it. And then . . .

Someone was playing a guitar. Next to the fire. They were right there. He could hear the strumming.
What if it's the dogfaces? What if they've found me and are just toying with me now?
They would cut his face off. They would cut off his feet and drag him to their little spot in the woods and do whatever it was they did with footless corpses. He would be ground up, defiled, maybe eaten. There was no way of escaping them this time. Not in the shape he was in.

Then he heard a woman giggling. A
woman.
It was a woman playing the music.

He popped up from behind the log and saw a blond girl sitting cross-legged on a blanket by the fire with an old acoustic guitar on her lap. She wore a blue fleece and black workout pants and snug hiking boots, and around her were a bunch of empty beer cans and wine bottles. Her face was red with cheerful drunkenness.

Ben ran to her. “You have to help me!”

“Are you all right?” she asked.

“No! No, someone has . . .” but he forgot what to say. He remembered this girl now. This was Annie Derrickson. From college. She hadn't aged a day. Literally. She was still twenty-two years old. She still had the faded blond hair and the pointy nose, and the smooth, mottled, creamy white skin that Ben wanted to glide across.

“Annie?”

“Ben? Why are you here?”

I was here for a business dinner and then I got lost in the woods and two men chased after me with knives and I really want to go home and see my family please help.
That was what he was prepared to say, but his mind was being wiped clean. He tried to snatch hold of the memories before they were gone, but it was no use.
Business dinner? There's no business dinner. Lost? You're not lost. Your wife and kids? You don't have a wife and kids. Job? You don't have a job. Men with knives chasing you? No one's chasing you. Don't be silly.

Ben looked down at his knee. The scars from his ACL surgeries? Gone. His skin felt softer and smoother. There was no longer a wedding ring on his hand.
But
why would you have a wedding ring on your hand? You're twenty-one years old. You're not tired. You're not lost. This isn't a crisis. This is exactly where you want to be, Ben. Isn't it? Alone, with
her
?

“Do you want a beer?” she asked.

“Yeah. Yeah, definitely.”

She stopped playing the guitar and reached over for a lukewarm can of cheap beer. Ben drank it all in one gulp. Any beer was good beer.

“Why are you here?” he asked her, stifling a burp.

“For the party.”

“What party?”

“The party!”

“Where are we?”

She gestured to the trees. “In the woods, dummy!”