The Hike Read Free Page B

different. Now he was both terrified
and
pissed off.
    Back home, he liked watching survival shows, and now he remembered one of the key tips: If you’re lost, search out the highest point possible, so you can get a layout of the ground below. Made perfect sense. He followed the path to the right and up toward the small peak, pushing through the choked corridor of tangled sticks and mossy rocks and low-hanging conifers that refused to offer him soft needles to brush against. It was much harder labor than he was accustomed to, and he was rapidly succumbing to fatigue. His knee was throbbing now, and he was getting a nasty case of Museum Feet. There were little burrs all over his pants. Flecks of mud peppered his shoes and ankles until he had one smooth layer of filth covering everything below his knees. But he kept going because he knew that if he stopped moving, the dogfaces would find him and cut him up.
    The sun was going down as he reached the top. This mountain was still well below the tree line, with spruces and lichen-coated pines blocking his view in every direction, all impossible to climb. He tried to get a decent view down below, but the light was fading and he couldn’t make out any houses or hotels. No roads. No lights. No smoke rising up from chimneys. He took out the phone and it was still “Searching . . .” The battery was now in the red. It would die within an hour if he kept it on, but he couldn’t fathom turning it off just when he needed it the most, when he needed the fucking thing to
work.
He tried his wife again and there was nothing on the other end.
    â€œCome on. . . .
Come on,
you fucker.”
    He kept expecting to hear the laughter of the dogfaces return, butfor now, he couldn’t hear a thing: not a bird or a squirrel or a tree swaying in the wind. There was only him and his dying tether to the rest of the world.
    There was a compass in the Utilities folder of the phone’s operating system, one of the few things that didn’t require a stupid signal to function. Facing back down the hill, toward the murder scene, was west. West was bad. East seemed better. He would head east until he found something. There was a rock nearby to rest on, so he opened up the Notes app and jotted down “craggy rock” for a signpost. Then he pressed hard on the power-down button on top of the phone, swiped across the screen to turn it all the way off, and watched as the screen gave way to a spinning white wheel in the center of a black void, spinning into nowhere until it finally died, too.
    Ben put the phone back into his pocket, sat down on the rock for a moment, and cried into his T-shirt.

CHAPTER FOUR
THE FIRE
    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 amplelight and heat, and he could pretend to be a hardy man. But a couple