The Hike (Book 1): Survivors

by Quentin Rogers

  All his senses were immediately alert and his heart was pounding even before he started sprinting towards her voice. Patrick didn’t recall undoing the buckles or taking the shoulder straps of his backpack off, but it was no longer on his back and he had left the trail to run straight to where Makenzie sounded like she was at. Patrick’s body took over all action instead of his mind thinking what to do as he shirked limbs, ducked under branches, and jumped rocks and down trees while sprinting to Makenzie.

  Her scream had only lasted a couple of seconds and had stopped well before Patrick reached a small clearing that intersected back with the trail. He slowed ever so slightly as he reached the edge of the clearing and surveyed the surroundings. He broke into the clearing on a rise where he could see across the small meadow of tall sweet grass sprinkled with spring mountain flowers. Patrick’s senses were on overload as he tried to pick out any sign of Makenzie and whatever had caused her to scream, but there was no sign of her. The light was getting even dimmer, and he thought that he should have caught up with where she had been. His pounding heart leapt up into his throat and another wave of fear washed over him.

  “M-A-A-A-K!” Patrick yelled for all he was worth as he dug in and sprinted across the meadow towards the point where the trail exited the meadow.

  As he hopped over a fallen tree in the middle of the tall grass, he caught a glimpse of her light blue jacket on the ground on the trail only several feet past the clearing. As he closed the few hundred-foot distance between him and the jacket, he began to see it better in the waning light and he realized that the jacket was moving. Makenzie was wearing the jacket with her backpack still on and was down on all fours kneeling over something. She turned her head around to look at Patrick while remaining on her hands and knees when she heard him approaching. Patrick could see pure fear on her face and in her eyes. There was also a small amount of blood dripping from her nose in a small stream.

  “Dad...” she almost whimpered as he reached her and half dropped, half slid on his knees to her. Patrick wrapped his arms around her and squeezed for just a brief second before turning his attention to what she had been kneeling over. Having Makenzie back in his arms started Patrick’s crash back down from his heightened state of awareness and fear. Almost immediately he felt his heart pounding in his ears not from fear, but from physical exertion. His injured knee began to scream with sharp shooting pain that seemed to be non-existent when jumping over logs and rocks just moments ago,.

  Looking down, Patrick saw what had instilled fear in his daughter. It was a dead man. A day hiker by the looks of it. He was laying on his back in a somewhat awkward position with one of his legs folded under the other. He had a blank dead stare that looked off into the timber to the right of the trail. He wore jeans, hiking boots, a light rain jacket, and had a tan camouflage fanny pack around his waist.

  “What happened?” Patrick asked turning his attention back to his daughter. They both were still kneeling next to and over the top of the dead man as Patrick turned her head up to the sky using his hand gently on her chin. He was trying to see what had caused the blood coming from her nose. He couldn’t see any real damage or cuts as the blood was coming from inside her left nostril and running down the curvature of her upper lip in a thin stream. After a second she pulled her head back and away from Patrick’s hand, buried her face in his shoulder, and started to sob.

  “I fell…” she started between sobs. She started a few more times, but couldn’t get out more than those couple of words between her heaving breaths.

  “Whoa, whoa” Patrick said trying to soothe her by holding her tighter. “Slow down. It’s okay Darlin’. Slow down.”

  “Is… Is he… Is he… okay?” she stammered between sobs.

  “I don’t think so,” Patrick told her in a low voice. He could tell immediately when he first saw him that he was gone. Patrick hadn’t seen many dead people in his life, but once you had seen death you could recognize it easily. “Slow down now. Deep breaths,” he continued to coax her while he held her close.

  The dead man looked to be in his early thirties. He was slender with no real apparent striking features. Patrick assumed that he didn’t spend much time in the outdoors based on his designer jeans and the rain jacket that appeared to be brand new. Just looking at him while comforting his daughter, Patrick couldn’t tell what caused his demise.

  After a moment or two, Makenzie got her breathing under control and pulled her head back from Patrick’s shoulder some and looked up at him. Although she thought she was a teenager going on an adult, she looked to her dad in that moment like his little four-year-old girl that had fallen and scraped her knees while trying to learn to ride her bike without training wheels for the first time. Her nose had mostly stopped bleeding and was now mixed with tears and snot that she began to try to wipe off as she started to tell her dad what happened.

  “I was just trucking along, trying to get back to the car” she started again with only a few small sobs breaking up her words. She leaned back on her haunches and then slowly stood as she continued with the story. “It was getting kind of dark, and I tripped and fell.” She gently kicked the dead man’s outstretched leg with the toe of her right hiking boot to emphasize what she must have tripped on. “I fell and hit my head hard. When I opened my eyes, I saw …him,” she said looking down at the corpse. She gingerly touched the side of her face where her nose and check meet and continued “I must have hit my cheek on his chin when I fell, because when I opened my eyes his face was right there.” Her last words trailed off a little bit and she didn’t move or breathe for just a second. Patrick started to imagine how this incident was going to impact Makenzie.

  Patrick leaned his weight back and tried to stand as well to better comfort Makenzie. But his injured knee physically gave out and let out a loud pop when he was about half way up. Intense shooting pain shot from his knee all the way up his back as he fell backwards to his rump and let out an uncontrollable groan of agony. Though Patrick’s eyes were tightly closed, he saw intense white light. The pain was almost unbearable as he lifted his body and tried to situate his leg so it wasn’t bent back behind him like the dead man lying next to him.

  Makenzie was there trying to help her dad, but Patrick couldn’t open his eyes or even tell himself to breathe until he was firmly sitting on his rear and his leg was stretched out beside him. As soon as he was situated, the sharp pained numbed somewhat but he felt bile rising in the back of his throat. Patrick leaned over and away from his body just enough, right before he vomited most of the fish and oatmeal that he had eaten earlier in the day in a few short heaves. Afterwards, Patrick leaned all the way back onto the ground, and clasped his hands together over his face. He squinted his eyes and gnashed his teeth trying to make it through the pain.

  After a few short moments, Patrick collected himself enough to be able to tell that Makenzie was kneeling beside his head on the opposite side of the dead man and vomit. She had her hand on his chest and was sobbing again.

  “Sorry, Mak,” Patrick said through gritted teeth.

  “What are you sorry for?” Makenzie responded. “I heard your knee pop like a branch breaking. It was my fault that we’re even up here. It’s my fault that you fell in the first place and hurt your knee.” Her voice rose with each sentence and her tone became terser as she finished “and it’s my fault that I tripped over this dead guy!” With that she collapsed over the top of her dad with her face on his chest sobbing again.

  “Whoa,” Patrick said. He put his arm around her the best that he could while lying on the ground and her laying over him in an awkward position. Patrick chose his words and rate of speech carefully because it felt as if he spoke too fast, he most likely would vomit again. “Listen. None of this is your fault. I’m sorry for dragging you up here, for spending the night on top of the mountain on a rock, that you had to even see this dead guy, and for what I’m about to ask you.”

  She lifted her head from her dad’s chest and snif
fled her running nose while looking at him in the eye. After a second, her questioning gaze turned from wonder to defiance. “No,” she said somewhat defiantly. “No. No. No. No. No.” she said in quick repetition and hid her face in her hands.

  “Listen Mak…” Patrick started, but she jumped to her feet with her face still hidden in her hands.

  “No Dad!” she half-screamed. “I’m not walking back to the car in the dark by myself after just tripping over this dead guy!”

  Patrick let her words hang in the air for a moment while he gritted his teeth and tried to make it through the next wave of pain from his knee. “Okay Makenzie. Settle down Darlin’” he said trying to soothe her some. “First thing’s first. Why don’t you drop your pack, get your flashlight out, and walk back up the trail and see if you can find my backpack.” After looking at him almost distrustfully out of the corner of her eyes for a few seconds she started to comply.

  “I’m not sure where I left it, but if you just follow the trail and look back through the woods towards this spot I’m sure that it can’t be that hard to find,” he told her. It was almost fully dark and Makenzie’s LED flashlight cut easily through the darkness as she found it and snapped it on. “I’m going to need the Ibuprofen out of the first aid kit in my backpack if I’m going to make it through this pain,” Patrick told her as she put stuff back and resituated her back pack.

  She stood and looked back down the trail that she had just walked minutes ago and appeared hesitant to take the first step. “It’s okay,” Patrick said trying to comfort her. “My backpack can’t be that far. You were just out of my sight when you tripped, so it is probably just off the trail up in that next stand of trees.” After another moment of hesitation, she started back down the trail slowly and cautiously without saying a word.

  Patrick collapsed back and closed his eyes. The waves of intense sharp pain were starting to subside, but they were replaced with a steady dull pain that was different. Not any better, but just different.

  Chapter 6

  It was dark. The stars were starting to come out, but the moon wasn’t anywhere to be seen yet. Mackenzie’s flashlight was the only thing that let her see the trail in front of her. Mackenzie remembered one night back in Nebraska when her dad had told her about how cool the stars were up in the mountains, but she didn’t really understand what he meant until that first night at Lake Helen. That night at the lake the stars filled the sky, and Mackenzie had been amazed how you could somehow see so many more stars than you could back in Nebraska. The stars were just coming out, and as Mackenzie left the little meadow that she had been in the stars didn’t shine through the trees at all.

  She walked slowly and carefully down the trail and moved the flashlight beam back and forth across the forest floor looking for her dad’s backpack. All she could think of was opening her eyes and seeing the dead man’s face in hers. That and the feeling of his lifeless body beneath her. Mackenzie realized that she normally would have been freaked out and scared half to death of wolves and bears if she was traipsing along in the forest at night by herself, but that dead man’s face was all she could think of. The more she thought of it, the more weirded out she got. Now Mackenzie was only moving a few steps forward at a time because she was shining the flashlight down at her feet to move forward, then stopping and shining the flashlight through the trees looking for the backpack. That way she wouldn’t trip over another dead man on the trail.

  Mackenzie had gone a lot further than what she thought she could have when her freak out meter hit maximum and she was just about to turn and run back to her dad without finding his backpack. While thinking about the dead man’s face again she got the willies down her spine, and her shoulders uncontrollably shook back and forth. When Mackenzie shook, the beam of the flashlight moved quickly across something yellow that reflected quite some ways off the trail. She stood like a statue on the trail because she wasn’t sure what the yellow reflection was for sure. Mackenzie was hopeful that it was her dad’s backpack, but all the animals and creatures that she could dream up in a matter of seconds that could lurk in the middle of the forest filled her thoughts and pegged her freak out meter way above maximum.

  Mackenzie was sure that it was only seconds, but it felt much longer as she forced herself to slowly move the flashlight beam from the ground to the area where she had thought she had seen the reflection. Nothing. Maybe she had imagined that she had seen it in the first place. If it was an animal or creature, maybe it had moved and was stalking her as she stood there frozen in the middle of the trail. She got the willies again and the flashlight shook in her hands. This time she saw the reflection again considerably left of where she had thought she saw it before, but she was immediately able to tell that it was her dad’s backpack.

  Mackenzie made her way back through the forest to the backpack very carefully and slowly. She swung the flashlight left, right, and behind her as she walked towards the pack. It was eerily too quiet, and she was sure that something wasn’t right. On the hike up the mountain a few days ago, Mackenzie had been listening to tunes most of the time, but when she didn’t have her ear buds in she noticed that there was always some kind of sounds from squirrels, birds, or other critters living in the forest. There weren’t any of those sounds now. Mackenzie’s breathing and heart beating were the only things that she could hear when she stopped and concentrated. When she stepped on the pine needles or snapped a twig on the ground it seemed like it was the only noise in the forest.

  Mackenzie finally reached her dad’s backpack and it surprised her how heavy it was when she hoisted it onto her shoulders. It took almost all her strength to lift it onto her shoulders, and she wasn’t sure if she could even make it back to her dad with all that weight. She argued with herself about whether to just walk straight through the woods to him as he had done when he heard her scream, or turn back around and walk to the trail again the way she had just came. Even though it was probably quite a bit further with the heavy backpack, Mackenzie decided to walk back to the trail so that she didn’t risk getting lost and started that way. The backpack wasn’t adjusted for her, so the part that is supposed to go around your waist hit Mackenzie in the butt with every step. It wasn’t just annoying, but it began to rub a raw spot on her butt by the time she made it back to the trail. She found out that if she leaned way forward the backpack wouldn’t rub on that spot, so she made her way back down the trail towards her dad hunched forward awkwardly. She shown the flashlight just the few feet in front of her so that she could see.

  When she reached her dad and the dead-man, she flung the pack off her back and plopped down on the ground next to her dad immediately.

  “You okay?” her dad asked between gritted teeth. While Mackenzie was away, he had scooted back away from the dead man a few feet where the trail sloped some so that he could rest at an incline. With the flashlights beam, Mackenzie could tell that he was still in a lot of pain. His face was completely flushed and beads of sweat lined his forehead even though it was cool in the early evening. She didn’t answer right away because she was winded and was trying to catch her breath. “Slerk!” he said as he raised his hand up to cover his eyes from the flashlight’s beam that was shining at him. It took a second for Mackenzie to realize what he was saying, but then she remembered the climb up to Bomber Mountain and she chuckled a little. Her dad always had a way of making her smile.

  Feeling a little more at ease from her solo adventure, Mackenzie moved the flashlight’s beam towards his injured knee and asked him how it was doing between her winded gasps.

  “Hurts bad,” was all he would say about it. “How come you are breathing so hard? You okay?” he asked.

  “Your pack’s heavy,” she responded now starting to get her breathing under control.

  Mackenzie stood and pulled the pack over to him to where he could reach it from his somewhat sitting position. She sat down next to him and shined the flashlight so he could see what he was doing. He first grabbed his headlamp out
of one of the side pockets and put it on his head.

  “Slerk,” he said smoothly as he pointed to the headlamp and nodded his head with pouty duck lips. This time Mackenzie did more than chuckle. She did a full-out belly busting laugh followed by a full set of giggles as he continued to go through his pack. The giggle fit was just coming to an end as he washed several Ibuprofen down that he found in the first aid kit with a big swig from his water bottle.

  He continued through his pack and pulled out a belt knife. He unsheathed the knife and cut through his jeans just above his injured knee. He grimaced and groaned as he moved his leg back and forth to work the knife around, and when he was done the cut edge remaining on his jeans was extremely crooked and ragged like a little kid had done it.

  The light from her dad’s headlamp and Mackenzie’s flashlight shown on his knee while they both bent forward to inspect it. It was swollen, but it really didn’t look any worse than it had a couple of days ago. His knee looked better than it had when he first hurt it because the scrapes and sores were beginning to heal on his skin.

  He held the knife out to Mackenzie and she instinctively reached out and grabbed it. “Put it on your belt,” he said in that commanding tone that she loathed.

  “What do you mean?” Mackenzie asked. She wasn’t grasping what he was trying to tell her.

  “Put that knife on your belt. It may come in handy,” he repeated.

  “Dad,” Mackenzie said trying to speak slowly because the pain must have been making his comprehension worse than normal. “I don’t know how to use a knife and I don’t have a belt.”

  He stretched his arm back out to her with his palm open and she put the sheathed knife back in it. He rummaged through his pack some more and unsheathed the knife. He cut a few feet of rope off a roll, put the knife back in its sheath, and handed the knife and the rope back to her without saying a word.