The Wild

by Owen Laukkanen

  She surveys the ground as she does.

  And then she makes a terrible discovery.

  I DON’T KNOW IF YOU REMEMBER this part.

  On the outbound hike? Before Dawn nearly fell and Warden caught her and saved her life and gave her that big lecture about making sure her pack was on the right way?

  Before Dawn noticed that Warden had the greenest eyes she’d ever seen?

  Before all that, but just barely, Dawn maybe noticed how Warden was lagging behind the rest of the group, when usually he walked at the front.

  You know, like a leader.

  But that day, when they traversed the ridge going north toward the Raven’s Claw, Warden lingered near the back, and for the briefest of moments, Dawn wondered why. But then she got distracted.

  She forgot about it.

  What did it matter, anyway?

  Well, here’s why it matters: Warden was destroying those rock cairns. He was kicking those piles of rock over. Rendering them useless, just more random scree on the top of the ridge.

  And I’m sure if you asked Warden why he was doing it, he’d just shrug and fix his green eyes on you and grin mischievously and tell you he was sowing the seeds of chaos. Wreaking havoc.

  Causing mayhem.

  There’s no rational point to doing what he did, except that maybe he wanted to mess with Christian and Amber, get the group a little lost on the way back from the mountain, screw everything up and sit and laugh at the consequences.

  Warden didn’t know that Christian and Alex would die, obviously. He didn’t know it would be Dawn and Lucas, specifically, whom he’d be screwing over.

  He didn’t realize that messing up the rock piles would within a few days confer on Brandon and Evan a significant strategic advantage in a particularly high-stakes race back to headquarters.

  No.

  But I bet if you’d told him, he would have been pretty damn pleased with himself.

  DAWN STARES DOWN AT THE PILE of rocks at the top of the path up the spine of the ridge. She recognizes the rocks, as weird as that sounds. She can see how this pile was once something more.

  A cairn.

  A guidepost.

  An essential marker on their way to safety.

  And now it’s just rocks.

  Dawn and Lucas struggle down the face of the ridge and rejoin the path at the bottom. Mercifully, the path winds through some low alpine lichen for a while, and it’s easy to follow and kind of protected, so it’s not as cold down here for a few minutes.

  And Dawn starts to think about how Brandon and Evan won’t have the cairns to guide them, either. So they’ll have to slow down a little bit, assuming they aren’t actual bloodhounds who can just follow Dawn’s and Lucas’s scent.

  Even Warden, who has his photographic memory, is bound to be slowed down by this weather. So it’s not like the missing cairns give the bad guys a huge advantage.

  Not really.

  Except that all it takes for Brandon and Evan (and Warden) to win is if Dawn and Lucas can’t make it to headquarters.

  And right now, it’s starting to get dark.

  It’s cold.

  And it’s wet on the ridge.

  And Lucas is starting to stumble when he walks.

  No matter how Dawn and Lucas die, if they die, Warden wins.

  And no cairns means the odds of dying up here increase exponentially.

  NIGHT’S STARTING TO SET IN. It doesn’t feel to Dawn like a full day should have passed already, but it has, and they’re still on the ridge and still probably another day’s hike from headquarters.

  Her feet ache so bad she would gladly cut them off. The blisters on the soles of her feet have blisters. Her knees are in pain from the constant up and down on the rocks, and her thighs burn.

  She’s hungry. Starving. They’ve stopped a couple of times for handfuls of trail mix and rehydration candies, but it’s not nearly enough, and as Dawn walks she thinks about food and it’s torture.

  She thinks about pizza and cheeseburgers and onion rings and Cherry Coke. About butter chicken and pad thai and sushi. A whole Italian feast: lasagna and spaghetti and fettuccine and chicken Parm. About hot bowls of ramen and pho and shepherd’s pie and pork chops and steak.

  She thinks about restaurants. All of her favorites and how if she ever gets out of here she’s going to visit each and every one of them, one after the other.

  McDonald’s.

  In-N-Out.

  The Cheesecake Factory.

  Olive Garden.

  P.F. Chang’s.

  That little Indian joint down the street from her house that Cam and Wendy order takeout from.

  Dawn is going to eat ALL of the things. And when she’s done, she’s going to march into a Dairy Queen and order a delicious Blizzard, a real Blizzard, and eat it and think about this stupid mountain and all the snow, and just be warm and enjoy her ice cream.

  This is what Dawn thinks about, fantasizes about, the images she can’t chase from her head as she staggers across frozen rock and snow and feels her stomach gnawing at itself and how her whole body is getting weaker and weaker.

  She needs to stop and rest and slow down and sleep and eat and change out of her wet clothes and just be warm and calm and not moving and not afraid for a while.

  But none of this is a possibility.

  There is only more hiking.

  It’s getting dark outside, and Dawn’s hungry.

  But there’s nothing on the ridge that can help her.

  IT’S A FEW HOURS AFTER DARK when Dawn starts to suspect they’re lost.

  This is never a good feeling to have and it’s especially bad when you’re halfway to freezing to death atop a cloud-laden mountain.

  She and Lucas are navigating by flashlight and that’s not a good feeling either, even with the cloud cover, because what if the clouds suddenly shift, just a little, and Brandon and Evan walk across the ridge and see the beams of light and know where they are. But Dawn keeps looking back and she doesn’t see beams behind her, so maybe she’s dumb to be worried about that. The being lost thing, though, is a serious concern.

  There doesn’t even seem to be a trail anymore. It’s like Lucas is just following the rocks and staying on top of the ridge and hoping it’ll lead them to where they’re trying to go.

  Which is not the worst idea in the world, given the geography and how the trail tended to follow the ridgeline. But still, Dawn can’t shake the feeling that something’s gone wrong, somewhere.

  “Hold up,” she tells Lucas. She shines her headlamp around and sees only snow and rock and Lucas, and Lucas looks tired and somehow much thinner than even this morning, as though every step he takes is leeching strength in the form of body mass.

  (And he still won’t let her see where Warden’s knife cut him.)

  “Are you sure we’re headed the right way?” Dawn asks.

  Lucas shines his flashlight around. “Yep,” he says, after a beat. “I think so.”

  “I don’t see a trail,” Dawn tells him. “You don’t think, like, we might have gotten mixed up somewhere?”

  Lucas shines his flashlight at a piece of windswept rock. “There’s the trail right there,” he tells her.

  Dawn follows his gaze. She doesn’t see a trail.

  “We’re wasting time,” Lucas says, in the way that boys sometimes do when they’re sure of themselves and sick of having to explain. “Come on, Dawn. We don’t want those guys catching up.”

  The thing is, boys use that tone that Lucas is using when they’re sure about something, and when they kind of want you to know that you’re NOT HELPING by asking questions.

  But just because someone’s sure doesn’t mean that they’re, you know, right.

  (Boys especially.)

  And it can be hard to d
ifferentiate between when someone actually knows what they’re talking about and when they just think they know.

  Cases like this, for instance.

  But Dawn, in this instance, really has no idea if they’re lost or not. And Lucas sounds pretty damn sure.

  So, really, what’s her choice?

  Stand and argue?

  Or trust Lucas?

  Dawn decides that she has to trust Lucas, even though she has her doubts. “Okay,” she says, shrugging. “If you’re sure.”

  “I’m sure,” Lucas says.

  He starts forward again, and Dawn follows.

  In hindsight, she’d have been better off standing her ground.

  A COUPLE OF HOURS LATER, it’s clear that they are lost.

  And by clear, I mean that the ridge they’re standing on has come to its logical conclusion, and its logical conclusion is a sheer drop into pitch black with no conceivable way of descending it.

  “It’s too dark to tell,” Lucas tells Dawn as they stand at the precipice. “The trail could be down there, like, lost in the fog. Like, just beyond our flashlight beams, or whatever.”

  Dawn looks around the barren ridge and picks up a piece of rock about the size of a grapefruit. She throws it over the edge of the cliff, and she and Lucas both listen to hear it hit something. They listen for a long time.

  They listen for so long that Dawn starts to believe maybe the rock already landed and they just didn’t hear it.

  But then the sound wafts up, faint and far away, of a rock striking more rock and clattering away into nothing. The rock might as well have landed on the moon, for how far it traveled.

  It’s a million miles down.

  Dawn and Lucas, they’re standing at the edge of an abyss. And there was no abyss on the agenda for the outbound leg of the hike.

  They’ve dead-ended, somehow.

  And that’s horrible news.

  By this point, Dawn is shivering. Uncontrollably. Her teeth are chattering like you only see in cartoons. Her fingers and her toes and her nose are all numb.

  She can hardly think straight. But with about the last of her brainpower, she remembers how the ridge they were hiking to get to the Raven’s Claw a few days ago joined with another ridge, somewhere along the way. Both ridges combined in, like, an upside-down Y, so she’d barely noticed them coming together.

  But where the ridges came together on the outbound leg, they would have to branch apart on the return trip. And now Dawn realizes how easy it would have been for her and Lucas to take the wrong leg of the Y. The stub end. Especially in the dark, and with no cairns to guide them.

  It’s impossible to say how far they’ve come along this incorrect ridgeline, only that it’s clear they’ll have to go back.

  But Brandon and Evan are back there.

  And it’s cold. Very cold.

  Suddenly, Dawn wants nothing more than to just lie down and sleep, but however beaten down she’s feeling right now? Lucas is worse.

  Lucas is pale. His lips have a blue tinge to them and he’s shivering even though he’s trying not to show it. He’s clutching his jacket at the spot where Warden’s knife stabbed him, and his movements are slow, like he’s numb from the cold or from blood loss or both.

  “I think we have to find shelter,” he tells Dawn, and his voice is scary weak, and he can’t meet her eyes.

  Dawn looks around at the barren rock and doesn’t see how shelter is possible. “Where?” she asks.

  Lucas rubs his forehead. “I think I saw a little protected alcove back there,” he tells her. “It should keep us out of the wind, anyway.”

  It’s their only hope, Dawn knows. They can’t stay out here any longer. Now that they’re not moving, the cold’s really settling in: bitter, life-sapping cold, blasted into their faces by an unrelenting wind.

  And it’s clear that Lucas can’t make it much farther.

  She nods, weakly. Turns around. “Let’s go.”

  Fifteen minutes later, they’re huddled inside a shallow crevice, shielded from the wind on three sides by the rock. Dawn lets Lucas go first and then crowds in behind him, and the gap in the rock isn’t quite deep enough to fit them both, so she still feels the wind at her back as she squeezes in and crouches beside him. Still, it’s marginally warmer here, and if they huddle together, they can probably survive the night.

  Dawn lies there and shivers and feels Lucas shivering beside her. It’s not windy in this little crevice but it’s open at the top and the temperature is still falling. Their clothes are wet and they’re on top of a mountain.

  And Dawn is so tired but she can’t fall asleep, not until her mind has forced her to think about all of the things that have gone wrong.

  Like, from the very beginning.

  From the moment she killed her dad.

  That’s what Dawn thinks about, lying there in the cold.

  DAWN DIDN’T KILL HIM ON PURPOSE.

  (Duh.)

  But it’s her fault that he’s dead.

  It’s her fault and she lives with it and it comes back and haunts her, and that’s why she gets stoned and fucked up so much, because it’s only when she’s fucked up that the guilt goes away.

  There are no pills on this mountain, and no whiskey or gin.

  There’s just guilt.

  And the cold.

  HOW IT HAPPENED WAS STUPID.

  She’d gone to the movies with her two best friends, Madison and Olivia. They went to the late showing of the most recent Avengers.

  It was supposed to be a girls’ night and they were supposed to stay over at Madison’s house afterward, but Olivia knew these guys who were having a party, including this one guy, Scott, who was a little bit older and a little bit of a d-bag and who had way more than a little bit of a thing for Olivia.

  So they went to the party.

  The party wasn’t much of a party.

  The party was Scott and his two sketchy friends playing video games in Scott’s basement and stealing pulls from a bottle of Jameson. Dawn walked into that basement and took one look at the boys and figured out it wasn’t really her scene.

  But she kept her mouth shut, because Olivia liked Scott.

  And Dawn didn’t want to seem like the lame one in the group.

  (Dawn was like fourteen at this point.)

  (She’d had—maybe—a wine cooler or two at this point in her drinking career.)

  (She’d never gone shot for shot over whiskey with three boys who were bigger and older than her. But she tried—oh, she tried—and it wasn’t long before Dawn was quite shit-faced.)

  It was at this point that the party began to break up. Olivia paired off with Scott and disappeared to his room. Madison and this other guy, Ryan, started making out on the couch.

  That left Dawn, and contestant No. 3—and it’s a testament to that Jameson that Dawn doesn’t even remember his name.

  (Nor does she really remember how she wound up on top of him.)

  What Dawn does remember, though, is that—before things got too heavy—she threw up. It was gross. It was whiskey and movie popcorn and, like, M&M’s. Plus Wendy’s famous tuna casserole and the school cafeteria’s mystery meat.

  And it was everywhere.

  Needless to say, that put a dent in the party.

  Contestant No. 3 immediately fell out of love. Scott threw a fit. And Dawn decided it was probably in her best interest to leave.

  Now, Dawn’s father was a sensible parent.

  “I know there are going to be parties when you get to high school,” he’d told Dawn and Bryce. “And I know that some kids are going to experiment with alcohol.”

  (He said it in that dad way where it’s immediately uncool and mortifying, but the message was on point.)

  “I just want you to know,” he told Dawn
and Bryce, “that if you’re ever stranded somewhere and you need a ride home, we’ll come get you.”

  “No questions, no judgment,” he told Dawn and Bryce.

  “Anytime, day or night.”

  IF SHE’D CALLED for a taxi, Dawn would still have a father.

  If she’d taken the bus, or just crashed on Scott’s front steps.

  If she hadn’t had so much whiskey, and just been a good daughter.

  If she’d done literally anything else, her dad would still be alive.

  DAWN’S FATHER Did the Right Thing.

  Without hesitation.

  He answered the phone when Dawn called him, and he told her he’d be there to get her in a couple of minutes, and he ended the call and picked up his car keys and set out to find her.

  He didn’t find Dawn.

  He never made it to Scott’s house.

  The police told Dawn and Wendy and Bryce that the guy who ran the red light had a blood alcohol concentration more than twice the legal limit.

  They told Wendy her husband was dead in an instant.

  The other driver walked away from the crash and straight into the back of a Sacramento PD cruiser.

  He went to jail for a while, but he’s alive.

  Dawn never saw her father again.

  Except on nights like this, when she’s guilty.

  And she doesn’t have anything strong enough to chase the guilt away.

  EVENTUALLY, DAWN FALLS ASLEEP.

  It takes a long time and she’s not even sure how it happens, and it’s likely she wouldn’t even realize she’d fallen asleep except that something happens to make Dawn suddenly very conscious of the fact she’s awake.

  Like she was lying there in a dream state of cold and wetness, some kind of trance, without ever realizing she’d drifted off.

  It’s only when she comes back to the crevice that Dawn realizes she was gone.