On the Free

by Coert Voorhees

  Suddenly, Santi takes off down the hill. He does an awkward hop-jump, lurching forward every time his bare foot touches the mud. Three hops later, Santi disappears into the curtain of rain, and Victor spins in the other direction.

  Now’s his chance.

  But what if there’s really someone down there? And what if it’s Amelia? And what if she has her pack with her?

  Damn it.

  He follows the sound of Santi’s voice downhill, to the edge of a thunderous river.

  Santi points his headlamp across the water, the beam flashing off of something—the reflective stripes of a jacket?

  Amelia. Clutching the side of a boulder like it’s a raft, a dark torrent of water at least fifteen feet across rushing between them and her. Santi’s light flickers back and forth across her body. Just like Victor, she’s fully clothed. Shoes, jacket, pants, everything. Fully clothed, which means she must have gotten dressed after the mudslide. Which means she still has her stuff. Which means she still has the map.

  Victor turns off his headlamp and watches the two of them screaming at each other in the rain.

  What comes next looks like it happens in slow motion. A roar from above, and a curtain of black, and then she’s gone.

  Victor flees uphill, scrambling away from the deafening noise. He trips on a splintered branch and crashes to the ground, slamming into a boulder and bouncing onto his back in the mud. Rain fills his mouth as he struggles to catch his breath, and he coughs and his chest throbs and for the second time tonight, he gives up.

  21

  “Two peanuts were walking down the street,” his mom said, starting with a joke. “One was a salted.”

  Victor said nothing. Couldn’t even make eye contact. Just stared at the bowl of apples in the center of the kitchen table. Plastic apples, because an entire bowl of real apples would rot now with only two mouths to feed.

  His mom filled the silence with a nervous laugh, little staccato bursts. “You don’t like that one?”

  “It was funny when I was six,” Victor said.

  He knew what was coming. He’d known it was coming for a long time now. His mom had started dropping hints here and there. In the months since his dad had left, Victor had noticed her becoming increasingly worried—paranoid, even—that she wouldn’t be able to provide the kind of male guidance he needed. A couple of weeks before, she’d pointed to a bikini model in a beer commercial on television and asked if the model was his type. If he had a type.

  “I don’t want to be here just as much as you don’t,” she said.

  Victor laughed. His mom did too.

  “I guess we should just get right down to it.”

  “Okay,” Victor said.

  The pause was excruciating.

  “Okay,” his mom said.

  Victor pulled his eyes away from the apples just long enough to see his mom looking up at the ceiling as she often did before settling on a punishment. As if seeking guidance from a higher parenting power. The instant her head came forward, his eyes returned to the decorative apples.

  “Okay,” she said again. “Well, here’s the thing. When two people love each other, they are ready to start a physical relationship.”

  Victor could almost feel the heat coming off his face. But he said nothing. He wondered if this would have been any easier coming from his dad.

  “And when that happens, when they’re ready . . . it’s almost like you think of nothing else . . . You still there?”

  “Unfortunately,” Victor said.

  “So, when it comes time to . . . the man puts his penis into the woman’s vagi—”

  “Mom, I’m eleven years old. I know about—”

  “How much do you know?”

  “A lot,” he said with an uneasy laugh. What kind of a question was that? How much could there be to know?

  “And where did you learn it?”

  “Friends,” Victor said. “And the Internet.”

  “Oh, good Christ.” His mom whistled through her teeth. “Okay then, let’s hear it from you.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Either you’re telling me what you already know, or I’m telling you what I think you need to know.” She laughed. “And trust me, my version is longer.”

  “I know about sperms and eggs and then the uterus and the baby and the umbilical cord and the baby coming out and all of that.”

  “What about menstruation?”

  The bowl of plastic apples was no longer enough. Victor put his arm on the table and lowered his forehead to the crook of his elbow. “I don’t want—”

  “We can’t finish ‘The Talk’ without covering menst—”

  “Stop saying that word,” Victor said into the wood.

  “You know you can come to me, right? You can talk to me about anything you want.”

  “Maybe I could just die right here? Would that be okay with you?”

  “He should be here,” she said. “I’m so sorry. He should be doing this.”

  Something in her voice made him want to see her face, and so he looked up, and there was his mom. And she had tears in her eyes and she wasn’t laughing anymore. “It’s not your fault, honey. You have to know that.”

  22

  The night lasts forever. Victor and Santi suffer beneath the uneven canopy of the largest pine tree they can find. Their tent is useless, so they huddle together and wrap their sleeping bags around themselves—first Victor’s, then Santi’s, which spills insulation from a gash in the toe. They don’t sleep. How could they sleep? They say nothing to each other because there’s nothing to say.

  Dawn reveals a barren stretch of earth at least a hundred feet wide. The forest around them is gone, replaced by boulders and exposed roots and tree after tree snapped in half. The ravine trickles innocently once again, a full thirty feet to the east of where it had been the night before.

  And here they are, under a cloudless sky. The air still holds its morning chill, but the sun has peeked over the ridge, offering enough warmth to dry their clothes, which they’ve spread across the field of debris.

  “We have to go back down,” Santi says. His voice is raspy, hoarse from an hour spent screaming in vain for the others. “Back the way we came. We know that route. We know how long it’s going to take.”

  Victor shakes his head. Just once, cautiously. He has a welt over his right eye and maybe a broken rib, or at least a bruised one. “There won’t be anyone there for us.”

  “But at least we can figure out the way.” Santi sits barefoot on his pack, whipping two socks in the air to make them dry faster. He found his other boot within the wreckage of their tent, but his heels still look like raw hamburger.

  The tent itself is beyond repair: poles snapped in half, gashes throughout the fabric. Their food lies in a pile next to the empty packs. A bag of bagels, some cream cheese and peanut butter, a block of cheddar, two sleeves of saltines, dehydrated beef stew to serve four, two packets of instant oatmeal, six granola bars, a baggie of powdered milk, twelve packs of hot cocoa, and a half-filled gallon bag of trail mix.

  “Amelia had the radio. She and Jerry had maps,” Victor says. “We just have to find their packs—”

  “We have our own packs. We have food. We can salvage the sleeping bags and go back the way we came. We don’t need a map.”

  “We do,” Victor says. Impatience makes his skin itch. He needs to get moving. His clothes are dry enough, as is his sleeping bag.

  “I saw her get washed away, Victor. I watched it happen. We don’t know if it’s safe to go stumbling around out there.”

  “Go down, then,” Victor says, knowing now for certain that he should have left last night when he had the chance. “If you’re going to be a pussy about it.”

  “How is this me being a pussy about it? We’re lost in the fucking woods—”

  “We’re not lost—”

  “Stranded, then. You like ‘stranded’ better? We’re stranded in the woods. We have no tent. We have no map.�
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  “You guys?”

  The voice comes from behind Victor. A girl’s voice.

  Amelia. On the other side of a fallen tree, looking like she’s crawled out of a fresh grave. Her hair is matted to the side of her head in a giant muddy clump. More mud covers her jacket and jeans. She holds her left arm tight against her stomach.

  Still barefoot, Santi leaps awkwardly over toward her. “You’re okay! Are you okay?”

  “It’s just you, isn’t it?” She holds up one hand before he can touch her. “Just the two of you.”

  “And you,” Santi says, still with his arms outstretched as if offering a hug that he realizes she’s not going to accept. “How are you even alive?”

  Amelia looks out over the mudslide. Her eyes go wide, and she starts to breathe faster.

  Santi turns back to Victor and gives him a ‘What do I do?’ look. Victor returns it with a shrug.

  “We haven’t found the others yet, but we will,” Santi says, like a dumbass, full of false hope.

  “Come on, man. You spent half the morning screaming for them and got nothing. They’re gone.”

  “If she survived, maybe they did too.” Santi calls out, “Celeste, Rico, Jerr—”

  “Not Jerry,” Amelia says abruptly. She turns to look downhill again. “He invited me to his wedding.”

  Her shoulders tremble silently up and down, and she begins to wipe her eyes with the muddy heel of her good hand, leaving dark streaks behind.

  “You’re okay,” Santi says, then points to her eyes. “You, um. You have a little . . .”

  Amelia rubs her face against her shoulders but doesn’t get all of the mud. Santi reaches up and wipes her cheek with his thumb.

  “I don’t mean to be insensitive or whatever,” Victor says, “but do you know where your pack is, Amelia?”

  She says nothing.

  He tries again. “Where’s your backpack?”

  Santi glares at him, but what is Victor supposed to do? The clock is ticking.

  Finally, Amelia looks down and shakes her head. No pack.

  “Victor wants to keep going,” Santi says, “but we don’t have a map or a radio, and I think we should go back the way we came. It took us three days to get here. We can get back in two if we hurry.”

  “But like I told you,” Victor says, “there’s nothing for us at the trailhead. They shuttled the van over to where we were supposed to come out.”

  “We need to stay on the trail we know, the one we came in on. This place is remote, but not that remote. Not like we’re in Alaska. It’s a trail! There might be other hikers.”

  “And there might not.”

  “We could wait here,” Amelia says.

  “Wait for what?” Victor says.

  “Help?”

  Victor has to laugh. “Nobody knows we’re here. Nobody is looking for us.”

  “Besides,” Santi says, “you’re injured. We need to evacuate you back down.”

  “I’m okay,” she says softly.

  The seconds feel like minutes. Victor heads toward the food pile and grabs the bag of bagels, the peanut butter, and the cheddar.

  “What are you doing?” Santi says.

  “Putting food in my pack.”

  Santi steps to him, and Victor’s hand instinctively goes to his back pocket. Santi stops, and Victor sees the recognition in his face.

  “Are you going to stab me?” Santi asks him.

  “You guys,” Amelia says.

  Victor can feel the handle through the denim of his pocket, and he’s trapped. What the hell was he doing, reaching for the knife? He just wants to grab the food and get on his way, but now he can’t back down, thanks to this asshole. “I’m not going to do anything you don’t make me do.”

  “You guys—”

  “You don’t think we’re dealing with enough right n—Ah, damn it!” Santi’s trying to be the tough guy, but his bare foot steps on something sharp, and he hops backward.

  “I want my share of the food,” Victor says. “That’s all.”

  Amelia screams it this time: “You guys!”

  “What?”

  She points back from where she came. “I think I saw Jerry’s pack.”

  Victor forces himself to wait as Santi pulls on his socks and boots.

  Amelia leads them downhill. A hundred feet later, there it is, half-buried, upside down in the mud. The gray waist belt sticks up like a dorsal fin next to the shredded trunk of what used to be a shrub. Victor should have seen it earlier.

  Without a word, he and Santi set their fingers into the ground, but the mud is packed so tightly that they might as well be scraping at concrete. Five minutes into it, they’ve only dug a couple of inches around the pack.

  “Screw this,” Victor says. He grabs the waist belt and pulls as hard as he can, but it doesn’t budge. He props his right foot against a small boulder and tries again; a sharp pain flowers in his chest every time he pulls, but he keeps going. Again. Again. Again.

  “Dude, enough,” Santi says.

  Victor is panting now, the sun directly on him. Sweat trickles down his cheek. Since when did it get this hot so early? “I can get it.”

  “Enough!”

  Amelia taps him on the shoulder. Victor flinches but releases the waist belt and throws his hands into the air.

  “We just have to keep digging.” The concern in Amelia’s voice is tinged with something that sounds a lot like suspicion. Is Victor getting paranoid? “It’s going to take some time,” she continues.

  “What time?” Victor says. “You guys think that someone is magically going to show up and rescue us? What, like in a helicopter? Is that it? All we have to do is wait here, have some cheese and crackers, and everything will be just fine. Well, everything’s not going to be fine! We’re fucked. Everything we planned is fucked.”

  “Why don’t you go sit down,” Amelia says.

  “I’m not your dog.”

  “You’re going to have a heart attack or something,” Santi says. “Take some deep breaths. She and I can handle this.”

  Victor watches them from atop a massive gray rock, cursing himself for losing control. He should have been patient. He should have waited until the backpack was almost free, should have positioned himself conveniently right next to the top pocket, should have been there to unzip it and reach inside for the map. But he didn’t do any of that, and now there’s nothing for him to do but wait.

  Of course, when the pack does come free, Santi’s the one to unzip the top pouch, and of course the map is there, and of course Santi pulls it out and hands it to Amelia. After untying the rope that’s still attached to the pack’s carry loop, Santi slings his arm under one shoulder strap and leads them back up.

  Victor dismounts the rock and follows, cracking his knuckles one by one. Amelia is so close as they walk, barely three feet ahead, uphill of him so that the map in her hand is basically right in front of his face. He could snatch it so easily—what would she and Santi do? Fight him? Broken arm and gimpy feet?

  “We need to pool our stuff,” Santi says when they reach their scattered clothes. He spreads their tent’s shredded rain fly along the uneven ground and begins removing the items from Jerry’s pack. “Take stock of what we have, divide it up.”

  Amelia stares at Santi for a moment before kneeling down and helping him lay out the man’s things. She can’t do much, so she basically just straightens out the stuff after Santi puts it down. The two of them work silently for a minute, and then Amelia turns to Victor.

  “You want to get started?” she asks him.

  “We don’t need to pool anything,” Victor says. “We have our packs, we know what’s in them. I just don’t see why we have to unpack everything—”

  Santi scoffs at him. “If you’re embarrassed about the porn you brought, don’t worry about it. No judging, right, Amelia?”

  “In case you haven’t noticed,” she says, “I don’t have my pack. I don’t have anything.”

 
Jerry’s pack yields a small first-aid kit and a half-empty fuel bottle but no stove, which must have washed away along with the cooking pots and everything else in the makeshift kitchen. There’s almost nothing to add to the food pile: three sleeves of Ritz crackers, a half-empty bag of trail mix, an unopened pack of Reese’s Pieces. There’s also an empty water bottle with a half-inch-thick circle of duct tape around it.

  “I should have let him carry more food,” Santi says with a wry smile.

  At the bottom of the pack they find Jerry’s clothes. Three T-shirts, two pairs of shorts, a pair of hemp-looking sweatpants, three pairs of boxers, socks, long underwear, a hoodie, and a baseball cap with the logo of two guitars making up a yin yang.

  “That’s a lot of hemp,” Victor says, nodding to the pile.

  “Let me borrow your knife,” Santi says, holding his palm out.

  “What?”

  “Your knife. Can I borrow it?”

  Still unsettled, Victor looks from Santi’s outstretched hand to the stack of Jerry’s clothes.

  “Whatever,” Santi says. He shakes his head and picks up one of Jerry’s shirts—light blue with the faded image of a tent beneath the words Lyons Folk Festival. He digs his fingers into one of the little holes around the collar and tears the shirt down the middle with a rip which, coming as it does in the middle of nowhere, sounds way louder than it should. Then another rip as he peels a single strip from the rest of the shirt.

  “What are you—” Victor starts.

  “Saw this in a movie once.” Santi turns to Amelia and nods to her arm. “Where does it hurt the most?”

  “My wrist and forearm, mostly,” she says.

  He folds the larger piece into a triangle and lays her arm on the cloth, one corner of the triangle at her elbow, before tying the other two corners around her neck. Then he ties the remaining strip of T-shirt around her body, just above the elbow of her bad arm, immobilizing the sling against her chest.

  Amelia winces through a smile. “Look at you, Mr. Wilderness First-Aid Man.”