The Wild

by Owen Laukkanen

  So eff the switchbacks.

  Dawn veers off the trail and onto the slope. It’s steep and wet and littered with fallen trees and stumps and branches. It’s impossible to navigate, but somehow Warden is doing it. Dawn knows her only hope is to try to do the same.

  She slides down the muddy terrain, trying to avoid downfall and blowdown and all of the other names for fallen trees that she heard Christian and Amber use.

  She grabs at living trees as she descends, using them to slow her fall and guide her. She collides into massive trunks hard, her breath stolen from her, bounces off them and keeps dropping. Meets up with the trail again as it switches back and forth, leisurely, but ain’t nobody got time for that, not now.

  There’s no telling how long the drop down the mountain will take, now that Dawn’s off-trail again. It’s quicker than the switchbacks, anyway. Assuming she can stay upright, which she can’t. Not on a ruined ankle and two failing knees. Not exhausted to the point of hallucination. Not on a carpet of mud and roots and loose rock.

  Dawn loses her balance. Her arms pinwheel, searching for something to break her fall. Her arms come up empty. She crashes to the earth and tumbles down the steep slope.

  The fall fucking sucks.

  It hurts like a mother. Over and over and over again. Dawn closes her eyes and tries to protect her head and collides into things and pinballs off them and keeps falling.

  She reaches for trees as she passes them and her hands grasp at the earth and come up muddy and it does nothing to arrest her descent.

  She knows she’ll keep falling until she hits something big, something hard.

  Something that might kill her if she hits it hard enough.

  There’s nothing she can do but continue to fall. And hope that her body can withstand the impact.

  DAWN COLLIDES WITH A TREE.

  It’s massive. It’s probably a hundred years old, maybe more. It’s been standing in the same place for more than a century, and it sure as hell isn’t moving for Dawn.

  She crashes into it hard. Like, concussion hard. Black-out-for-a-minute-and-wake-up-confused hard.

  Dawn hits and blacks out and then she comes to. Her brain’s more or less jelly and she couldn’t tell you her last name. All she knows is that she has to keep running. There’s a problem, though. She can’t.

  Dawn’s reached her breaking point.

  She’s tapped out. Exhausted.

  Her whole body feels broken and she can’t focus her thoughts. Her mind is swimming; she’s weak from hunger and exertion and she hurts all over from the fall.

  Standing is not an option anymore.

  Running? Forget it.

  Dawn can barely keep her eyes open.

  She can hear Warden up the hillside above her. He’s crashing around like a real-life grizzly bear. It’s impossible to say how far he is, but Dawn knows he’s getting closer.

  She knows her only option is to hide and hope that Warden doesn’t see her.

  But that’s not what happens.

  DAWN SEES WARDEN up the slope at more or less the same moment Warden sees her.

  She can tell that he sees her because he slows down. And smiles.

  It’s that evil smile again. The real Warden smile.

  The smile that says I’ve got you, and I’m going to hurt you.

  But something happens at the same time as Dawn sees Warden smile. The same time as Warden begins his slow, steady, victorious descent.

  Dawn hears something else, something behind her.

  Downslope.

  Dawn hears movement.

  There’s somebody else on the trail.

  THERE’S NO POINT in trying to hide anymore. Dawn screams for her life.

  “Help! Help me, please!”

  With every last ounce of strength she can muster, Dawn screams for help.

  Above her, Warden continues to descend. He doesn’t speed up, and he doesn’t slow down. He just drops, slowly and steadily.

  And Dawn keeps screaming.

  * * *

  Whoever it is on the trail?

  They hear Dawn.

  They stop moving, and then they call back, “Hello?”

  A man’s voice. A voice Dawn doesn’t recognize. But that doesn’t matter.

  She screams for help again.

  * * *

  Warden keeps dropping. He’s twenty feet away now, and Dawn keeps turning to look up at him and then screaming again. And as he gets closer, she screams louder, more desperate, until it’s barely words coming out but just something primal.

  It tears her throat raw.

  But it doesn’t stop Warden. Warden keeps coming. He keeps coming and in Dawn’s eyes he’s not even close to the boy she thought she could be falling for.

  He’s a monster.

  And her screams don’t hurt him.

  He’s ten feet above her now. Coming down fast. Whoever’s on the trail is crashing up through the bushes toward them, but they’re too slow, too late; Warden will get to Dawn first.

  Dawn looks up at Warden and doesn’t even see life anymore in his eyes. Doesn’t even see a smile. Just grim, deadly determination. Like a shark.

  He’s almost on top of her, and Dawn closes her eyes. She stops screaming, even.

  It’s over.

  All she can hope is that Warden kills her quickly.

  But then Warden walks past her. She feels him brush past as though she isn’t even there. Listens as he continues down the slope of the mountain toward the innocent bystander who’s coming up toward them, drawn by Dawn’s screams, and hoping to help.

  Instantly, Dawn knows what Warden is thinking. She’s too exhausted to move, but the bystander is a threat. She knows Warden means to neutralize that threat. She knows once that’s over, he’ll come back for her.

  Dawn starts screaming again. Loud as she can.

  This time, she’s screaming at the bystander to run.

  THE MAN DOESN’T RUN. Not in time, anyway. Dawn hears him say something as Warden appears on the slope above him. She can’t make out the words, but his voice is confused.

  She can’t hear if Warden answers.

  She hears the man’s voice again and this time it’s not confusion she hears, but fear. And then pain. And then she can’t hear the man’s voice anymore, just the sound of something hard slamming against something soft, over and over and over again.

  And then she hears nothing at all.

  * * *

  He’ll come back for her now.

  Dawn knows this.

  She knows the innocent bystander is good and dead, and as soon as Warden is sure of it, he’ll come back up the slope to where she’s lying here fully spent, and then he’ll finish her off.

  Maybe fast, or maybe slow.

  She looks around for a weapon. There’s nothing but soggy tree branches and soggier mud. There’s not even any half-decent rocks.

  You can’t kill a monster with mud.

  Already, Dawn can hear Warden moving back up the slope through the bush. She knows her time on this earth is growing extremely limited.

  She knows her only hope is to come for Warden first.

  To use her own body as a weapon.

  And she knows she has no time to spare.

  Just standing up is the most challenging thing Dawn has ever done in her life. Her arms feel like jelly and her legs don’t exist, but somehow she manages to pull herself up and lean against that hundred-year-old tree that nearly killed her, and she stays there for a half second to catch her breath and blink the tears from her eyes.

  She listens to Warden coming up the slope and knows that he must be only a few feet down from the other side of the tree.

  She knows it’s time.

  She forces her mind to forget about the exhaustion. Pushes of
f from the tree and steps out from around it, nearly collapsing when she puts her whole weight on her legs.

  In fact, she does collapse.

  Falls back to the ground and hits so hard she thinks she might die.

  But it’s not a big deal, Dawn collapsing.

  Because when she falls, she takes Warden with her.

  WITH THE LAST OF HER STRENGTH, Dawn throws herself down the slope toward Warden. He’s off guard, off-balance; he doesn’t see her coming. Not until she’s in the air, until she’s nearly on top of him.

  Then his eyes go wide and he puts up his hands to defend himself.

  But it’s too late. Dawn’s coming down, and Warden can’t swat her away. She wraps her arms around him and carries him with her, stealing his balance and sending him tumbling backward.

  She holds on to him as best as she can as they roll down the slope. But the slope is too steep and they’re falling too fast. Sooner or later, they disengage. Uncouple. They tumble down the hillside together, but apart.

  Dawn catches a glimpse of something orange on her way down. A glimpse of a face, bloody, eyes open and unseeing.

  She knows it must be the bystander and that the bystander is dead.

  Then she collides into something and the pain is all-encompassing, and Dawn blacks out again.

  SHE WAKES UP ON THE TRAIL. Somehow, they’ve come to rest on one of the switchbacks.

  Dawn can see the dead bystander in his orange jacket fifteen or twenty feet off the trail, upslope. She can see an Out of the Wild logo on his baseball cap. And when she looks closer, she can see it’s Steve.

  Steve, the guy who picked her up from the airport.

  Who brought her into this mess.

  Dawn feels no satisfaction at seeing him dead. But she doesn’t feel anything else, either. She’s just numb.

  She lifts her head a little bit and looks around and sees Warden. He lies a few feet from her, on his back, his neck skewed at a crazy angle. He’s bleeding.

  He’s not moving.

  But from the rise and fall of his chest, Dawn can tell he’s still alive.

  She knows this is not a good sign. She’s seen too many scary movies to believe this is over. She knows the only way to really end this story is to kill Warden dead and make sure he stays that way.

  She doesn’t have a weapon, but Warden seems to have dropped his knife, and Dawn knows she could crawl over to him and just, you know, cut off his air supply or something. Crush his windpipe. Something brutal and awful and guaranteed effective.

  She has enough strength to kill him. Barely. And Dawn knows that’s what has to happen.

  But Dawn isn’t a killer.

  Dawn has done a lot of bad shit in her life.

  She’s cut class and partied and hooked up with weirdos. She’s been rude to her mom and her stepdad and her teachers. She ran away and shacked up with a drug dealer.

  She got drunk and threw up on some guy and that’s why her father is dead.

  If you asked her, Dawn would tell you she’s not a good person.

  But Dawn isn’t a killer.

  Not like this.

  She shoved Brandon off that cliff, sure, but that was different. That was a fight.

  That was him or her.

  Warden’s unconscious. He doesn’t look like a monster anymore. He looks like a teenager. A fragile, broken boy. Dawn can’t crush his windpipe.

  She can’t strangle him to death.

  (But you and I both know that’s going to come back and bite her.)

  THE OUT OF THE WILD GUY, Steve, must have a radio.

  That’s Dawn’s thought. That’s her rationalization for not killing Warden. She’ll crawl up to the dead guy and take his radio and call for help, and hopefully Warden will stay unconscious or even die on his own.

  She won’t have to kill him.

  That’s her plan.

  She has to crawl on her stomach and her hands and knees and she’s covered in mud by the time she gets up to the dead guy, and her legs are mostly useless, so it’s her arms pulling her up the slope, but at this point, Dawn’s arms are more or less useless, too.

  It takes a long time.

  The dead guy lies on his back with his head up the direction of the slope, and Dawn can see how Warden stabbed him a bunch of times and then he must have hit him with a rock for good measure. The dead guy is in fact Steve, and from this angle he doesn’t look very old or particularly tough; he looks surprised and, I don’t know, offended that Warden actually killed him.

  But that doesn’t matter now.

  What matters is the radio. Dawn finds the handset strapped to the dead guy’s belt. It’s a little bit bigger than a cell phone, and it looks intact. She pulls it out of the dead guy’s holster and fumbles for the on switch.

  (She’s never used a radio before, but she’s hoping if she just starts calling for help someone will figure out the rest.)

  Dawn locates the on switch. And the button you push to transmit a message.

  She’s about to transmit her very desperate message, when—

  (you guessed it)

  —Warden.

  WARDEN GRABS DAWN’S LEG AND PULLS.

  He drags her away from the dead guy and down the slope again. He’s barely able to stand, hunched over and glaring at her with blood coming down his face, and his neck still skewed in that weird way.

  He’s favoring his left arm, too, so maybe that’s broken. Either way, he looks like he had the shit kicked out of him, and bad, but Dawn knows he’s still stronger than her by a mile. She knows that he means to kill her.

  He drags her down the slope toward the trail, but this time Dawn isn’t too worried. She isn’t worried that Warden’s stronger than her. She isn’t worried that he’ll have no problem killing her. She isn’t even kicking herself for not crushing his windpipe when he was unconscious.

  No, as Warden drags her back down toward the trail, Dawn’s actually feeling pretty chill about the whole situation.

  Why?

  Because Dawn found something more than just the radio when she went up the mountain to the dead guy.

  She found Warden’s knife, too.

  The knife he stole from Christian. That he used on Lucas and Brielle. The knife that’s still slick with his sweat, and their blood.

  And as Warden drags her down on her stomach and flips her over onto her back on the trail, Dawn grips that knife, tight.

  And at just the right moment,

  she leans up

  and jams that motherfucking blade

  right into his chest.

  THERE’S NO COMING BACK from that, not even if you’re the kind of semi-indestructible final-boss bogeyman who tends to populate stories like these.

  But Dawn stabs Warden again, just to be sure.

  She stabs him until he staggers away and collapses and lies there on the trail on his back, and she holds on to the knife and watches him and you’d better believe it’s a long freaking time that she does, until she’s sure he’s not moving, not breathing, not playing dead and just waiting for her to turn her back.

  Dawn lies there, for maybe an hour or even longer, and Warden doesn’t move, and neither does the other dead guy, and the mountain around them is silent.

  And then finally, when Dawn’s sure, she crawls back up the slope for the radio.

  NOW, THIS IS THE PART where I tell you everything turns out okay. The right people survive, and the main character learns a valuable lesson, and everything is just fairy-tale perfect from here on out.

  But you and I both know that’s not how this works.

  I WILL TELL YOU THAT KYLA walks out of the woods.

  So does Evan.

  (He walks straight to a jail cell, and he walks out in handcuffs, but still, that motherfucker walks.)

 
; His buddy Brandon flies out in a body bag. So does Warden, of course. Hooray, right?

  Yeah, well.

  So does Lucas.

  DAWN’S BACK AT HEADQUARTERS when they bring in the bodies.

  She’s sitting at a cafeteria table drinking hot tea and eating whatever she damn well feels like—i.e., chicken fingers with ranch dressing—and wearing dry clothes.

  (The only spare clothes they had to give her were Polar Bear blue.)

  (#MostAdvanced.)

  (Dawn figures she’s earned it.)

  She’s sitting there surrounded by concerned and very solicitous Out of the Wild staff members and counselors, and by a bunch of suits from the head office who are already looking at her like she’s a mid-seven-figure lawsuit liability.

  Dawn can hear the hushed whispers as the suits study her. As they try to figure out what it’ll take to keep her quiet.

  She doesn’t care about that. Not right now.

  Not with the helicopter landing outside.

  BRIELLE DOESN’T WALK OFF the mountain. She doesn’t fly out in a body bag, either.

  Brielle is hurt bad. She’s unconscious. The paramedics are saying stuff like brain swelling and blood loss. As soon as the helicopter off-loads Kyla and Evan and the bodies, it takes off again, this time headed for civilization, a hospital.

  Someplace where someone can save Brielle’s life.

  The paramedics are also saying that if Kyla hadn’t stuck around to take care of Brielle, she never would have made it off that ridge. That Kyla gave Brielle first aid as best she was able, kept her stable until help arrived.

  Kyla walks off the helicopter amid Brandon’s and Lucas’s bodies. She follows Evan off the aircraft. Evan is in handcuffs.

  Kyla is not.