by Roxie Noir
“The few wolf attacks against humans have largely been in liminal areas, where humans encroached on wolf territory and the wolves were therefore acclimated to a human presence, making them less afraid,” she says, sounding like a sleepy academic paper. “I would hardly call this a liminal environment.”
“Whether or not it’s fucking liminal isn’t really the point, the point is that I can hear them right now—”
“Liminal means transitional,” Imogen points out.
“I know what liminal means,” I snap, even though I didn’t.
“Those wolves are very unlikely to take any interest in us, and frankly, I think the risk of us accidentally falling off a cliff in the dark is far greater than the risk of being attacked by wolves,” she says.
Imogen raises her hand to her face like she’s going to push her glasses up, only to remember she’s not wearing them.
“You know anyone who’s survived a wolf attack?” I ask.
“I don’t know anyone who’s been attacked by wolves, though I do know several people who study them and have—”
“I do,” I say. “He’s got a huge chunk missing from his right side, no left eye, and his thigh is so fucked up he’s gotta use a wheelchair most of this time.”
“Was he fucking with the wolves?” Imogen asks, her voice flat.
There’s another howl, crystal fucking clear and I swear to God it’s getting louder.
“No,” I say. “He was outside Yellowstone on a hunting preserve, tracking a deer or some shit when out of nowhere this wolf came and—”
“The wolf was also on a hunting preserve?” Imogen says, sounding bored.
I swallow, fists curled into balls in my pockets.
Sorry, am I boring you with my talk of vicious predators attacking? Am I just that uninteresting?
“If it was, it was likely already quite acclimated to humans and that’s why it felt comfortable attacking one,” she says.
Now I’m pacing back and forth in our little hollow, turning at every snap of a twig, imagining yellow eyes coming out of the forest at me, Mason’s story of being knocked down and dragged around by a wolf in Wyoming haunting me.
I’ve seen the man’s scars. He used to be a high-powered executive, the guy behind a wildly successful chain of pancake houses in the Midwest, and now he’s in a wheelchair and terrified of dogs.
“Wolves don’t want to deal with humans,” she goes on, turning her face away, like she’s looking for something though I know for a fact that Imogen is blinder than a bat. “Same with mountain lions, grizzly bears, and whatever else you feel like being afraid of right now.”
There’s another howl, and I swear to God it sounds like it right on the other side of this boulder.
“Besides, those wolves are probably miles away,” she says, sounding distracted. She’s looking at the ground, raking her gloved hands over the pine needles, feeling along carefully. “Wolf howls can carry for miles, so could you stop pacing and help me find my—”
Something snaps beneath my boot, and it’s definitely not a leaf or a twig or a branch. I freeze. Imogen freezes.
“Are you fucking kidding?” she whispers.
Imogen scrambles to her feet, throwing the yellow parachute off, hands held in front of her as my stomach drops to my feet.
She shoves me away and I stumble backward as she crouches down, face close to the ground as she picks up her glasses in the dark, cradling them like a dead bird.
“Shit,” she whispers, sinking to her knees. “Fucking shit, Wilder.”
She turns them over, held close to her face, my stomach churning with guilt and anger.
“You goddamn moron,” she says, her voice clogged with tears. “What the hell am I going to do now?”
“Don’t you have a backup pair?”
“Not here!” she says, her voice rising in pitch. “No, I didn’t bring a backup pair of glasses to the middle of the wilderness because I didn’t think I’d be walking through the middle of the Canadian Rockies while you ranted at me about wolves!”
“The fuck were they doing on the ground?” I ask. “That’s where you put shit that you want stepped on—”
“Where else do I put them?” she says, her voice edging between high-pitched and whispered, obviously about to cry. “That’s all there is here, Wilder, unless I’m supposed to somehow jury-rig my glasses into the trees with a pulley system so they don’t get crushed by the only other idiot around for miles?”
“Try not putting black glasses down on the dark ground in the middle of the night!” I snarl, my voice also rising. “You’ve got a whole backpack, the hell is wrong with putting them in there?”
Her breath hitches in her throat, her lips trembling as she looks down at the glasses in her hands. I think she’s crying, but it’s dark and she’s still kneeling so it’s hard to see.
“Fuck it,” she mutters, and drops them on the ground again. “Fuck this. Fuck you, Wilder, I hope you get eaten by wolves and I hope they eat your non-essential organs first and it takes you a long time to die.”
She storms off, arms out in front of her, stumbling over the uneven ground, toward the nearest stand of trees.
“Imogen,” I call, her glasses still at my feet, watching her disappear into the dark. “What the fuck are you doing?”
I don’t get a response, but she disappears between some trees, her footsteps suddenly fading, the anger knotting in my stomach. I stand there, breathing hard, clenching and unclenching my fists until the snaps finally drift into nothingness and Imogen is either gone or very still, the night once more dead quiet.
The wolves howl again, and even though I’m freezing cold a trickle of sweat makes its way down my spine as I look up, through the trees. I can barely see anything past them beyond the vague shapes of mountains and my guess that we’re heading down into a valley between two craggy peaks.
I hate this. They’re all fur and teeth and claws, perfect killing machines, and I don’t even have my gun because I don’t take it when I fly into Canada. If one of those things were to jump from the shadows right now, I’d be defenseless against it.
I wait, wondering if that thought alone might trigger a wolf attack.
It doesn’t, so I bend down to pick up Imogen’s glasses from where she dropped them and hold up them up in the pale, watery moonlight.
They’re in two pieces, the frame snapped right where it goes across the bridge of her nose, and it’s the right piece that’s had it worse. The left lens looks more or less fine — guess I didn’t step on that part — but there’s a single crack catching the moonlight diagonally across the right lens, and the right arm is bent back at a wrong, funny angle, but it all still seems attached.
Carefully, I bend the arm back and forth, and nothing snaps off. It’s probably not too bad, but as I stare down at the pieces in my hands I think of Imogen, blindly batting her way through trees in the dark.
In a forest full of rocks and sticks and logs, a million things to trip over, a million holes to fall into and twist her ankle even worse than it already is, not to mention the wolves—
Fuck.
I unzip a compartment on my pack, slide the broken glasses in, grab the flashlight. We’ve only got one and I have no idea how old the batteries are, so I don’t want to use it too much, but this seems like as good a reason as any, so I flick it on.
Instantly, I’m half-blind, looking away from the beam and blinking. Anything illuminated is blinding and anything not illuminated is pitch-black, giving me the creeping sense of being watched from all sides.
I shake my head and scramble up the side of the hollow we were in, showering down pine needles and entering the copse of trees, sweeping the beam of light side to side.
“Imogen,” I call out softly.
The wolves howl again, like they’re responding to me. I nearly turn off the flashlight, but then I remember what Imogen said, that they’re probably miles away and not even interested in us.
“Imogen,” I call again, pres
sing onward.
There’s a light breeze, and it showers snow gently down around me, shaking it loose from the tree branches above. She can’t have gone far, not blindly in the dark. Not in the few minutes since she stormed off.
I walk through the trees, slowly, calling her name. Every time I shine the light beam over a log or lump in the ground, my heart lurches for a moment as I think it’s Imogen’s body.
At last, there’s a sniffle off to my left. I swing the light around and there she is, sitting on the ground slumped against a tree.
“Dammit, ow,” she says softly, holding up one forearm to block the light, so I shine it at her feet in apology, but not before I can see that she’s crying.
I’ve only seen her cry once before, and that was my fault too. I click the light off, and the two of us are just there, together, her breathing ragged while my eyes adjust to the dark.
She’s so small right now. Tiny, even, huddled against the tree, her frame swathed and swamped in layers and layers of puffy black material, the only thing keeping her from a certain hypothermic death out here.
I step forward, hold out one hand. Her eyes narrow in the dark for just a moment, and then she turns her head away, like she can’t see me.
“I’m fine,” she whispers.
“Come on,” I say.
“I can find my way back.”
I’ve still got my hand out toward her, just waiting.
“Imogen,” I say.
She exhales hard, her head tilted back against the tree, her face pale against the darkness.
“I know,” she says, though I have no idea what it is that she knows.
“Don’t make you call you Squ—”
“Wilder,” she says, her voice a warning as she opens her eyes, looks at me.
My hand doesn’t waver, still held out to her as she tries to focus her eyes on it.
“Don’t call me that,” he says, her voice softer now. “I didn’t like it then and I fucking hate it now, so just let it die. Okay? Please?”
“You never liked it?” I asked, keeping my voice low and quiet. “Not even once?”
“Does it matter?” she asks, her voice still tear-soaked.
I don’t answer her, but it does. Because I know she did. Because Squeaks was a secret between the two of us, the soft breathy sound she made the first time I got her panties off.
Squeaks was what I whispered to her in the hall sometimes at school, the single word that made her flush bright pink and shove her glasses up, and I know she liked it. I know she liked having a secret, liked knowing that behind the backs of everyone who was cooler and richer than her, Wilder Flint had a nickname for her based on how she sounded when he made her come.
Until everything crashed and burned, her breathy voice playing over the loudspeakers. The door slamming behind her as I followed, only to watch her run away.
Imogen sighs, her eyes shut, and then reaches out and takes my hand. I haul her to her feet, her eyes glistening in the moonlight as she shoves her knuckles against them like I don’t know she’s been crying. She swallows hard, inhales deep, straightens her spine.
“I’m pretty blind without my glasses,” she says softly, her voice a confession. As if I didn’t know already.
“I’m pretty blind in the dark,” I say. “Between the two of us we’ll be all right.”
I take her hand again, and she lets me. My night vision is coming back after the flashlight-blindness, and Imogen holds out her other hand in front of herself like she’s warding off spirits as I guide her around stumps and past rabbit holes, pine needles softly crunching under our feet.
Then we’re there again, at our hollow, and she climbs down backward holding onto my hand and we get under the parachute and the tarps again.
The stars blaze. The wolves howl.
“If they wanted to kill us we’d already be dead,” Imogen says. “We can’t see in the dark and we can’t hear for shit, so we’re pretty much the bottom of the food chain.”
“Comforting,” I say, and wiggle closer to her.
We should take off our coats, pile them on top of us, share body heat.
Imogen snorts.
“It wasn’t supposed to be comforting, just true,” she says. “Anything out here could kill us before we knew, so you can’t worry about it, really.”
“You’re telling me not to worry?”
I hear her smile.
“Weird, right?”
“Right.”
Chapter Eighteen
Imogen
I wake up to full sun hitting my face and the sensation that for the first time in days, I might actually be almost warm, or at least not so thoroughly cold that I can barely think. I stay where I am for a moment, blinking, the pine needles pressing into my face and body, my eyes feeling sandpapered.
And I have the vaguest recollection of Wilder putting his arm around me, pulling me in as I fell asleep.
“We should get moving,” he says.
He’s already up, sitting on the ground not far away, chewing and swallowing something.
“The sooner we go, the more daylight we’ll have,” he says. “And the sooner we can find water, the sooner we’ll be at a lower—”
“I know,” I say, still blinking. Every single part of my body feels unpleasant, like my muscles are filled with something stickier and more viscous than blood and it’s hard to move them.
He moves suddenly, and at the last second, I see something flying toward me and I flinch, deflecting with my arm as something small and light smacks into me and then falls to the ground.
“Sorry,” Wilder says.
I pick it up, hold it close to my face. It’s a granola bar. I’m starving, so I tear it open and sink my teeth into it before I can even start wondering how many we have left and whether I should be eating this one at all.
It’s not very good. Cinnamon and banana and cardboard, tastes like, but I don’t really care.
Wilder moves again, getting off the ground. His fuzzy shape comes toward me, and I squint at him, like it’ll help.
“Hold still,” he says, and crouches in front of me.
I freeze, mid-chew, unsure of what’s about to happen.
Cold plastic hits my temples, and my glasses slide onto my face. Suddenly he’s right there, crouching in front of me, his fingertips brushing my face.
“Oh,” I say through a mouthful of granola bar.
“I couldn’t fix the lens,” he says, running one finger over the frames. “But I found a tent repair kit in my backpack, and that did well enough for the rest.”
There’s a crack running diagonally through everything over my right eye, splitting Wilder in half, and I take off the glasses and hold them close to my eyes, examining.
They’re as good as they’re going to get: held together with rugged, bright orange nylon, clearly glued on. But it’ll work, much better than nothing.
I put them on, relief settling in the bottom of my stomach. Last night I laid awake for at least an hour after the second time I tried to go to sleep, just imagining how I was going to get down this mountain.
It would be slow. I’d fall constantly, talk to trees instead of Wilder, totally unable to see tree stumps or pits in the ground or logs beneath the snow, waiting to trip me. Everything would be a death trap and Wilder would have to lead me carefully, at a snail’s pace.
I worried about whether he’d just leave me. I worried about whether he should just leave me so at least maybe one of us could make it out.
“Thanks,” I say, sliding them back onto my face, a little uncomfortable and a little crooked.
Wilder pauses. He looks at me, from eye to eye, and I take another slow bite of my terrible granola bar, stomach making a rumbling nuisance of itself.
“I’m sorry I stepped on them,” he says.
It’s the first time Wilder’s ever apologized to me, for anything.
I have no idea how to respond, so I just tear off another hunk and keep chewing.
; All we do that day is walk, through a grindingly familiar landscape: cold, trees, snow, gray sky. We still don’t find water, and even though I remember what I said about energy yesterday, I find myself shoving handfuls of snow into my mouth as I go, letting my body heat melt them as I trudge along behind Wilder.
We don’t talk much. My mouth is too dry, and even though it’s deadly cold, I’m sweating a little, afraid of getting dehydrated.
And I’m thinking about the past. He’s making me think about it, my mind wandering all over the place as we walk downhill, trudging through the snow and making our own switchbacks as we go.
Even though he may as well be the marshmallow man right now, wearing ten puffy layers. Even though I can barely see him, just a backpack swaying in front of me and a coat.
Come on, Squeaks.
I hate him.
No. I just wish I hated him.
But instead I’m watching him walk, knowing that he has a nice butt under all that.
I’m thinking about why he called me Squeaks, the sounds I made in the passenger seat of his dad’s Mustang, his tongue in my mouth and one hand in my panties.
What if you were going to die? I think.
If you were definitely for sure going to die, you’d fuck him again.
I’m probably right. But death still isn’t assured, and my self-esteem is currently worth more than whatever Wilder’s got to offer.
I don’t realize he’s stopped until I literally smack into him, though he barely moves when I do. The man is solid like a wall.
“You lose your glasses?” he asks without looking at me. “Not my fault this time.”
“Sorry,” I say, not bothering to answer the question.
I swallow, my mouth so dry it’s sticking together strangely, and step up next to Wilder.
That’s when I realize we’re at the edge of a steep drop-off. Not a cliff, but not a hill, and in front of us is a long, steep, wide curve cutting into the side of the mountain, downed trees and rocks and dirt splashed through the snow, all parallel lines pointing downward.
An avalanche. Recent enough that the snow hasn’t covered the debris again, an ugly scar slashed down the side of a mountain.
