by Harper Lin
He was entering the first stages of hypothermia.
“Butch, you go across first and test it.”
Neither of the kids had said anything during all of this. They were getting worn out. I glanced at my watch. Sunset in less than two hours. The temperature would drop, and Quinten would be in serious trouble.
I worried about the rest of us too. Tired and with little food, what would we do at night? Sooner or later, one of us wouldn’t be able to go on—most likely Quinten, followed closely by myself. My back still ached, although I had walked out some of the tension. I could handle it as long as it didn’t get worse again. My real problem was fatigue. In our situation, there was no remedy for that.
A snap of wood brought me out of my worries and added a new one. Butch had been walking across the flimsy bridge, balancing on the two thin logs and avoiding the thick rotted one in between, when the left one snapped under his weight. He cursed as he fell, landing hard on his right knee as his left leg went all the way into the water. He crawled the rest of the way on the remaining two logs.
Great. Now father and son would both get hypothermia.
“I’ll help you across, Grandma,” Martin said, examining the log bridge with a dubious eye.
“I don’t think it can take both of our weight. I’ll go first, and then you go.”
I got on my hands and knees. As painful as that was, I knew if I tried to walk across, I’d slip and wrench my back again. A third twist like that and I might be out of commission.
Every inch was agony, but I made it across. Martin came next, crawling like I did, as Quinten stamped his feet to get warm, teeth chattering.
“All right,” I said with more determination than I felt. “Let’s eat all the rest of the food and make a final push for the bridge.”
“Let’s eat while we walk,” Quinten said and let out a loud sneeze. “I need to warm up.”
“Can’t we build a fire?” Butch asked, shaking his soaked leg. The poor boy looked like he had wet himself.
“Orrin would see the smoke,” Martin said.
We set out, none too quickly. Within half an hour, the sky had grown visibly dimmer. The temperature had dropped as well. I estimated we had about an hour of daylight left.
At least the valley we were in ran relatively straight and level. Although there was no path, and Quinten was moving more and more slowly, shivering all the way, we were moving forward.
That wouldn’t be enough. The librarian was beginning to lag behind, his eyes hooded, half-asleep on his feet. Drowsiness was another symptom of hypothermia. And Butch was complaining that he was cold too.
Once the sun set and the temperature cooled even further, father and son would be in serious trouble.
The stream curved around a rock promontory that we had to skirt and climb at an agonizingly slow pace.
“Let’s take a break,” Quinten said, stopping at the summit. His words came out slurred, another sign that he was losing core body temperature.
“We can’t. If you stop moving, you won’t get started again,” I said. I nudged him along. He moved forward like an automaton.
As the others descended the far side of the promontory, something made me look back the way we had come.
Just in time to see someone run into the woods some distance behind us.
I only saw him for a second. That was enough. He was a burly man dressed in camouflage pants, a dark-brown hunter’s jacket, and a broad-brimmed hat, rushing into the woods and out of sight. He looked to be about six foot two with short blonde hair. He appeared to be in his late thirties.
Orrin Hitt.
My heart hammering in my chest, I noticed something even worse: the logs from our bridge floating down the stream.
He had known we had come this way, perhaps intended it all along, and he had just gotten rid of our only escape route.
He was coming for us, and he’d catch us before long.
THIRTEEN
“He’s coming,” I said as I crested the hill and hurried down to join them.
The others turned and stared at me.
“He’s followed us. He’s on this side of the stream, and he’s pulled away the bridge.”
“We have to run!” Martin said, eyes growing wide.
“We can’t outrun him.” And by “we,” I meant “me.”
And Quinten. He was shaking like a leaf now.
I stopped and looked around. We were still high enough to see a fair amount of the surrounding countryside. The stream continued straight, as wide as ever, with a steady flow that told me that it had become deeper. To our right rose the side of the valley. Up ahead, there was a break in the trees where a little side stream splashed down the slope to join the main stream. Next to it, about two-thirds of the way up, I could see a little clearing in the trees. I couldn’t see what was there, but I noticed the slope steepened at that point.
That gave me an idea.
“Let’s go,” I said. “We’re going to give him the slip.”
As soon as we got down the other side of the hill and were on the level again, I glanced back the way we had come. Our trail was not very clear, even to my trained eye. This close to the stream, there was little grass, and the only mark of our passage was the occasional bent-back bush or snapped twig. I wondered how good Orrin was at tracking.
Maybe he didn’t know how. A simple hiker wouldn’t, and if he was a hunter, he would have brought his rifle.
Those were pretty slim assumptions to bet my life on, but I’d done so before on slimmer assumptions.
“We’re going up the side of the valley.”
“My dad’s getting tired,” Butch said.
“It’s only for a little way.”
I spotted the perfect place to move off the trail: another tumble of rocks where rivulets of water flowed down the valley side.
“Be very careful to step on only the rocks,” I told them. “We don’t want to leave a trail.”
Martin and Butch leapt from rock to rock like mountain goats, their weariness torn away by fear. I had to pick my way more carefully. The rocks were slippery with rain. Quinten fell almost at once, picked himself up, then fell more seriously a hundred yards up the slope.
He got up slowly and trudged along, holding his wrist. As numb as he was, he must have smacked it pretty badly to feel it at all.
Covering up the marks he had made in the mud as well as I could, I told everyone to veer left.
“Where are we going?” Martin whined.
“I’m not sure, but if we’re lucky, we’ll get someplace where we can warm up and avoid Orrin.”
We were in luck for once, and it turned out I was correct. After linking up with the stream I had spotted, we followed it uphill for a bit until we came across the opening to an old mine in a steep part of the slope. This was the clearing of trees I had seen from the hilltop. The miner had cut down trees immediately in front of the mine entrance, and only thin saplings had grown in their place.
Peering through the flimsy boards, I saw that one of the wooden posts about ten feet inside the entrance had collapsed, causing part of the roof and wall to give away. I beamed my flashlight past the pile of rubble and saw the rest of the tunnel wasn’t in much better shape.
I turned to them. The boys looked at me eagerly, hoping I had a plan. Quinten stood slumped, eyes hooded, shivering and indifferent. He was too far gone to help much, and now that we had stopped, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get him moving again.
“Hopefully Orrin didn’t notice we left the riverside. He’ll assume we’re following it out of the park like we have been all along. He’s following a false trail now.”
“But when he doesn’t catch up to us, won’t he figure out we climbed up the side of the valley?” Martin asked.
“He will, but he won’t know where. That gives us some time. Everyone, take your packs off.”
“Time to do what?” my grandson asked.
“To build a fire. We need to warm ourselves up.”
As if to emphasize my point, Quinten let out a sneeze.
“Won’t Orrin see the smoke?” Butch asked, echoing Martin’s question from earlier.
“Not the way we’re going to build it. Butch, tear these boards off. They’re pretty dry thanks to the overhang. Oh, and pry out the nails. We’ll want those. Be careful. Use a rock to tap on the sharp ends of the nails to drive them out of the wood. Martin, go see if you can find some kindling that’s more or less dry. Don’t stray out of sight.”
We got the boards off quickly enough and piled them just inside the mine alongside a pile of rusty nails. Cautiously, I crept into the mine, eyeing the cracked and eroded ceiling as I did so. The support post had come entirely loose and lay on the floor, partially covered by fallen bits of the wall and ceiling.
“Quinten, come in here and fetch this.” I said this in a whisper, as if my voice might make the whole place come down.
“I’ll do it, Dad,” Butch said.
“No, you break up the boards, and be careful with the nails. He needs to keep moving.”
Butch’s face grew serious. He must have figured out what was happening to his father.
Quinten fumbled to remove the stones, his movements clumsy. I gave him room and moved out of the mine, glancing all around. Martin was a few yards away, a bundle of sticks under his arm.
The clatter of falling rocks inside the mine made me spin around, a sharp pain going up my back at the sudden move.
Quinten stumbled out, covered in dust and holding his shoulder.
“What happened?” I asked.
“Dunno,” Quinten mumbled.
I looked past him and saw some new rocks on the ground and a fresh bit of erosion on the wall. He must have banged against it.
I probed the wall with my spear. A few more flakes came off, but nothing major.
“Butch, your father managed to clear most of that debris away. See if you can pull that beam to the entrance.”
Much as I hated putting him in danger, if we didn’t get a good fire going, his father might be dead by morning.
Butch moved carefully into the mineshaft the ten feet it took him to get to the beam. He lifted it, checking all around him, then pulled it to the entrance where he had stacked the boards.
I should have had him do it in the first place. I’d been foolish to have a man suffering the clumsiness and drowsiness of hypothermia do such a dangerous job.
I should have had them pull away both the log bridges as well. Maybe Orrin wouldn’t have known where we had gone. At least it would have slowed him down a bit.
Mistakes. A whole string of mistakes. Was I getting hypothermia too? I was cold and weary but didn’t feel unusually so.
Unfortunately, the person with hypothermia was often the last to know about their state.
Martin came back with the kindling. “Sorry, it’s all wet,” he said. “I couldn’t find any dry stuff anywhere.”
“That’s all right.”
I used my survival knife to sharpen several of the longer sticks and had the boys use them as poles to set up the tarp over the entrance of the mine. Then I got them to pile up the leaves that had blown into the mine and had stayed dry. I added a roll of toilet paper to this heap and piled the broken boards on top. I lit the tinder and had Quinten use his spare shirt to flap at the fire. The breeze fanned the flames, and soon it was burning merrily.
“Keep flapping that shirt,” I told the librarian. “You need to keep moving, and it will put most of the smoke into the mine instead of up in the air.”
“Some’s still going up in the sky, Grandma. Won’t Orrin see?”
I studied the smoke that managed to drift out around the tarp. “It isn’t much, and it’s getting dark. Gray smoke against a gray sky? Hopefully he won’t see.”
“Gray smoke against green trees,” he corrected.
“True enough, but we’re not done yet. Butch, shove that beam so the end is pressed against the fire. It will catch and burn slowly. As it burns away, push it little by little into the fire. And keep feeding boards into the fire as long as they last. Oh, and put those sticks Martin gathered close in so they dry. You and your dad stay close to the fire, too, so that you’ll warm up and get dry.”
“What can I do, Grandma?” Martin asked.
“You and I are going to set some traps for Orrin.”
He looked at me in disbelief.
I had him gather some sticks and sharpened them on both ends while he used one of the Swiss Army knives to hack away at the earth to make little pits the size of a man’s boot. In each of these pits, we stuck a spike at the bottom and on the sides, then covered them with twigs and grass. We set these traps all around the perimeter except for the two routes that were the easiest to approach the mineshaft—a little gully to one side that angled up the slope to open out close to the mine entrance and the path we had taken directly across from the little stream.
Here, we got more creative. Cutting off the straps from the backpacks, I tied them end to end to fashion a rope. To one end, I tied a rock wrapped in a shirt with nails sticking out of it in all directions. I instructed Martin, my champion tree climber, to scurry up one of the trees and tie the other end of the rope to a branch. We then stretched out the rope with the spiked ball at the end and secured it to the crux of a branch on another tree with a few twigs.
Then I used some string I had in my survival pack as a tripwire to set across the path, running to the business end of my trap. If someone tripped over the wire, it would yank the twigs away that were holding the spiked ball, and it would swing down, hopefully hitting whoever approached our position. We made two such traps, one for each likely approach to the camp.
I say “we” and “I,” but it was really Martin doing all the work under my instruction. I stood painfully on the sidelines, leaning against a tree, my forehead beaded with sweat thanks to the agony of my back.
Martin did everything he was told in stunned silence. By the time we finished, it was fully dark, and we headed back to Quinten and Butch by the fire.
“You wouldn’t believe what my grandma knows how to do!” Martin said, his eyes bright in the firelight. “We’ve set traps all over this place. Orrin better hope he doesn’t find us. We’ll get him for sure!”
I wished I shared his confidence. The traps were crude, and a shortage of nails meant there were enough gaps in our line that the killer might pass right through without setting off anything. But it was the only protection we had.
“How did you learn how to do all that stuff?” Butch asked. “Were you in the Special Forces or something?”
Martin turned to me. “Yeah. How do you know that stuff?”
“Never mind,” I said in a quiet voice. “How are you feeling, Butch?”
“Better. My pants are dry. I stuck my wet leg real close to the fire like you said, and it dried pretty quick. I burned my shoelaces, though.”
An honors student, to be sure.
I turned to his father. “And how are you feeling, Quinten?”
He had gotten into his sleeping bag and lay close to the crackling fire. His wet pants and underwear were laid out by the fire, steam rising from them.
Quinten nodded wearily. “Better. Not shivering anymore. Tired, though.”
“You just get some rest.” I snapped my fingers. “Didn’t you say you have some cornmeal in your pack?”
“Yeah.”
I rummaged through his pack and found the cornmeal as well as a light frying pan I remembered him using. I instructed the boys to find a flat stone to put on top of the fire and set the pan on it. I mixed the cornmeal with a bit of water. Unfortunately, Ms. Chipper had the powdered milk, baking powder, sugar, oil, and everything else you need to make cornbread, but at least it would be edible. We were too hungry to be picky.
Pretty soon, I was stirring a lumpy mass resembling badly made polenta. It looked thoroughly unappetizing. Still, it was food. My stomach grumbled. Quinten’s stomach grumbled. Martin’s sto
mach grumbled. Butch drooled in a most disgusting manner.
Butch’s head jerked to one side. His eyes went wide, staring out into the darkness. The drooling cut off sharply.
“What was that?” he whispered.
I set aside the spoon and picked up my spear. We were all looking out into the shadows now.
“You heard something?” I asked, my voice hushed.
Then I heard something, too, a faint rustling coming from the direction of the gully.
I took a few steps away from the fire, angling to the side so as to get into the shadow of the mine entrance. Since the fire was actually just inside the mine, I didn’t have to go far before the darkness swallowed me.
Butch and Martin stayed where they were, Butch clutching his Swiss Army knife and Martin his big stick.
They looked vulnerable and very lonely in the flickering light of the fire, the only adult in sight lying listlessly in his sleeping bag.
I strained my ears, trying to catch any sounds above the crackling of the fire, the boys’ heavy breathing, and the patter of rain.
There it was a again. A rustling of leaves. It was definitely coming from the gully.
And it sounded closer than last time.
FOURTEEN
We stood in silence, ears perked, eyes straining to see into the inky black of a rainy night.
I squeezed myself into the shadow cast by the edge of the mineshaft. The light from the fire cast a bright glow out into the night like a shimmering flashlight. In contrast to that, I should be invisible to whoever was coming up that gully.
I hoped.
The boys and Quinten remained in sight. I felt like screaming at them to get out of view, but it was too late. Orrin, assuming it was Orrin, would have spotted them by now. I was sure he didn’t have a gun. That wasn’t his style. He liked to crush people—Thomas with a blunt object smacked over and over again against his head and two attempts to crush us with falling rocks. This man didn’t just want to kill people; he wanted to break them.
And that was what he wanted to do with us. With my grandson.
