The Hike Read Free Page A

find them. The trail bent to the right instead of the left, as he had originally anticipated, and now he was seeing bigger maple trees and other things he hadn’t recognized on the way in: odd rock formations, uneven slopes, patches of thick mud. A family of deer began sprinting alongside him, their bodies melting into the trees and then reappearing again. He looked down the mountain and saw no signs of a road, or of any McMansions at all. They were all gone. Everything . . . everyone . . . was gone.

CHAPTER THREE
THE MOUNTAINTOP
    B en took his phone out in midsprint for the time (4:02 P . M . ) and a clear signal, but there were no bars. It was still “Searching . . .” The longer it searched, the more quickly the battery would drain. He became frantic—all hard breaths and shaking limbs—running faster down the trail, searching for another glimpse of road or chrome or man-made structures, but nothing materialized . . . nothing he could recognize from the previous hour. Keeping one eye on the path, he opened the Maps app on the off chance that the phone would finally pick up a tower signal, but it only showed a single blue, pulsing dot, with the world waiting to be filled in around it.
    â€œHELP! ANYONE?! HELP!”
    Nothing. He fumbled the phone to the ground, he was shaking so hard.
    â€œShit.”
    He picked the phone up and kept running. The adrenaline had worn off a bit since he had eluded the two dogfaces, and now the terror was sinking in well after the fact, taking up full residence in his mind. He didn’t feel as if he had outrun them at all. They still felt present—partof the atmosphere—along with the dead girl and her mutilated legs, the exposed bits of her veins and bones and flesh coloring the leaves below like a pair of paintbrushes.
That poor girl’s mother.
The images and sounds became clearer to him and hardened into firm memories as he continued to run.
I’ve been waiting for this since the day you were born.
In his mind, he could see their hideous Rottweiler faces mouthing the words. God, how he
hated
Rottweilers. He scanned the mountain above for any tiered birdhouses or log benches, but nothing came into view. The path shot forward with no discernible end in sight.
    But how far could he really be from the hotel? He wasn’t some crazy distance runner, and he hadn’t been out
that
long. If he went to the top of the mountain and doubled back, he’d happen upon the hotel again, right? It would be back in the same direction of the dogfaces, but surely he would discover something eventually (although that would be true if he continued in
any
direction, since he was just seventy-five miles outside of New York City). He looked down at the phone and still the blue dot pulsed, and pulsed. He tried his wife again, but the call cut out.
    This is a dream. This is not a physically possible situation, which means all I have to do is wake up.
If he just gave his brain a light tap within the dream, he would stir, and eventually float back up to the surface of his consciousness. He woke up from nightmares like this on occasion. So he screamed out, “AHHHHHH!!!” as loud as he could. Seemed like a real scream. Seemed like it was really him doing the screaming. Here. In real life. Not a dream. Shit.
    At a loss, Ben spied a narrow tributary of the path that branched off up the mountain. Maybe the killers would rush by it without noticing. He turned and began to climb hastily, desperate to maintain separation between himself and the dogfaces. It was not a graceful climb—lots of slipping on leaves and awkwardly jumping around fatbranches and thorny weeds—but still he managed. He came to a lull between two peaks, mountains rising up on either side, the path turning to the right. He could make out a small peak behind him where the hotel
should
have been. But there was no esker anymore. The topography was completely