The Hike Read Free

getting the call and screaming out in horror and dropping her phone to the ground in shock. He had to look back. He couldn’t resist it any longer.
    The killer was twenty yards away, a healthy distance and yet not comforting to Ben at all. The man was twice Ben’s size and had a big butcher knife in his hands. Even from this distance Ben could see that the edge of the blade looked cleaner and newer than the rest of the knife, ground down by a fresh sharpening, now gleaming and ready to hack through bone and skin and tendons and whatever else got in its way. The man would catch him, and then Ben would see the man’s sickly green eyes and feel his awful dog breath and watch the knife plunge into his body and that final moment would linger into his afterlife and well beyond.
    Now Ben wasn’t bothering to form the word “HELP” when he screamed. He was screaming purely . . . all random, soft, extended vowels spewing out like vomit. He had no control over it. He could hear the maniac still laughing behind him. And then he heard him say what sounded like. . . .
    â€œI’ve been waiting for this since the day you were born.”
    He spotted bizarrely arranged piles of sticks off to the side as he blitzed down the path, structures he had never seen before. Maybe this killer, this
dogface
, had been waiting for Ben the whole time. Trapped him. Maybe he would be gutted and lashed to those sticksand left for a faceless dog to chew on. Ben turned to look again. The distance between them had grown to thirty yards and he was praying he would be able to get back to his signpost and turn up the mountain and leave that man in the dust for good, then make it to the hotel and call the cops and get in his car and go home and never ever ever come back here.
Thanks for everything, Pennsylvania, but fuck you eternally.
    Just when Ben was getting his hopes up about escaping, another man leapt into the trail ten yards in front of him. Also in a dog mask. He had a knife, too. Through the holes in the dog’s skinned-off mouth, Ben could make out the second man’s lips and teeth. He was also laughing and smiling and clearly deranged. Ben screamed again in holy fright. He was throwing his screams, as if they were a last-ditch weapon for him to hurl at the madmen.
    Run right at him.
That was Ben’s first thought. Ben played football when he was a kid. Fullback. Not a great player, but not an embarrassing one either. Whenever they were facing a team that had a really good defensive lineman, his coach always used the same strategy:
Run right at the guy. Don’t let him chase you. Don’t try to fool him. Just bowl the fucker over and take him by surprise.
There was a killer in front of and behind Ben now, with the treacherous mountain slopes on either side of the path, waiting to trip him up and render him easy prey. There was only one real option: the football option.
    So he kept running. He imagined having a football in the crook of his arm and then he barreled forward, screaming for war.
    The second dogface didn’t expect that. By the time he was rearing back with the knife, Ben was already knocking him down. Stiff-armed him flush on the chin and dropped him like it was nothing, like he’d been waiting all these years to play one final, perfect down. If he had diagrammed it and practiced it for a week, he couldn’t have executed it better.
    He was running so fast now that his muscles felt like they were exploding, sending random bits of stray tissue to other parts of his body where those bits didn’t belong. He looked back and the first dogface was hunched over the second dogface thirty yards away, then forty, then fifty, and then out of view entirely. Soon, he didn’t hear them at all. He was extending his lead. He was gonna make it back to the hotel. He was gonna live.
    But when he scoured for the two split-trunk trees marking his way up the mountain, he couldn’t