The Wild

by Owen Laukkanen

  Kyla finds Dawn where she stands just off the helicopter landing pad. They share a glance with each other, but neither says anything.

  Then Kyla walks past and into the Out of the Wild headquarters.

  She, too, is swarmed by the counselors.

  She, too, is eyed by the suits.

  * * *

  It falls to Dawn to fly out with the next batch of rescuers. A second helicopter, headed for the Raven’s Claw Fart Mountain—

  (RIP Lucas).

  Dawn’s the only one who can tell them where Amber fell. She’s too tired to explain it and she doesn’t know how, anyway. So they give her a helmet and hustle her into the helicopter, and the helicopter takes off and speeds away from headquarters.

  It doesn’t take long to get over the terrain. What cost the group hours and days takes minutes in the air. Dawn sits at the window and looks out over the forest, the valleys and the ridges. She can see the spur ridge where she and Lucas tried to hide for the night. And she can see the cliff where he died saving her life.

  She can pick out every lake and campsite and grueling traverse, and none of it looks as bad from up here as it did down there.

  It looks small. Easy.

  It looks like nothing.

  Fart Mountain, though, still looms. It’s still scary. It still makes Dawn shiver, just looking at that bare rock jutting up high from the snow.

  She gives the helicopter pilot directions to the backside of the summit, and she can see the ledge where Kyla froze and where Amber fell helping her, and at the base of the ledge she can see a patch of orange jacket sticking out of the snow, and she knows that it must be Christian’s body and that Warden must have pushed him off the ledge.

  But she doesn’t see Amber.

  Dawn searches the ground underneath the ledge and doesn’t see the counselor, as hard as she looks, and for a moment she thinks she must be mistaken, it must be some other ledge, they’re in totally the wrong spot.

  But then she sees it, just by straining her eyes: a patch of green hidden in the shadows amid the snowy white northern slope of the mountain. And it’s lime green and unnatural and she knows it’s Amber’s jacket and that Amber is down there.

  But the jacket isn’t moving.

  The helicopter hovers overhead and the green jacket doesn’t move, just lies there mostly buried in snow, and Dawn stares out the helicopter window and then she starts to cry, and it’s not just for Amber but for Lucas and Alex and Brielle and even Kyla, even Christian a little bit, for Brandon and Evan, too.

  And even for Warden.

  She’s crying because no matter how bad things seemed at the beginning, she’d never in her life imagined this terrible end, all the dying and anger and bloodshed and fear.

  She’s crying because she wishes she could just go back to last week, when they were all setting out on the trail to Fart Mountain, when all she had to worry about was cooking food and pumping water and dodging angry bears, and maybe choosing between two cute boys.

  She’s crying because her friends are dead, and her enemies, and because it freaking sucks to have enemies, living or dead.

  And now Amber’s dead, too.

  EXCEPT AMBER ISN’T DEAD.

  The helicopter team lowers a rescuer on the end of a wire, and Dawn watches as he approaches the patch of green that is Amber’s jacket. And she listens on the radio as he describes what he’s seeing.

  And at first he’s telling the rest of the rescuers that the woman isn’t moving, that he sees no signs of life.

  But then he pauses, and his voice gets excited.

  And when he comes back, he’s telling everyone he can feel a pulse.

  (Amber’s alive.)

  And this only makes Dawn cry harder.

  DAWN’S MOM AND STEPDAD are waiting for her.

  Back at headquarters with a group of other parents who mostly look either angry or sad.

  Cam and Wendy look relieved.

  They’re waiting when Dawn steps off the helicopter, which takes off again immediately to ferry Amber to a hospital.

  Cam and Wendy stand close to each other, Cam’s arm around Wendy’s shoulders like they’re the perfect parents, like Cam’s always been Wendy’s husband and Dawn’s dad never existed. They watch Dawn step off the helicopter and look relieved to see her, and Dawn supposes they are relieved, but that’s not really her concern at the moment.

  She skirts Cam as he reaches out for a hug. Goes to Bryce instead, her little brother, who lingers in the background, wide-eyed, looking around as though he had no clue stuff like this actually existed.

  Dawn hugs him.

  “Don’t ever let them kidnap you,” she tells him.

  Bryce hugs her back. Hard, like he’s still a child, like he’s as yet unaware that he’s a six-foot-plus behemoth who could crush Dawn with one hand.

  “Are you okay?” Bryce asks.

  Dawn lets him envelop her and she holds on for dear life.

  “I am now,” she says.

  Cam and Wendy are waiting when Bryce lets Dawn go.

  Dawn’s not ready to speak to them yet.

  She skirts Wendy as Wendy reaches for a hug. She crosses the helicopter landing area to the headquarters building, where a gaggle of suits stand in a huddle, still watching her, still adding up the bill they’re going to face when this goes to trial.

  Dawn picks out the guy with the nicest-looking suit. He’s middle-aged and blandly handsome and has black hair going gray.

  “I’m not going to sue you,” Dawn tells them.

  The men blink.

  They look at each other.

  The man in the nicest suit says, “You’re not?”

  Dawn shakes her head. “No,” she tells him. “Just don’t make me go home”—she gestures to Cam and Wendy—“with them.”

  The men look over her shoulder at Cam and Wendy. The man in the nicest suit clears his throat.

  “Ah,” he says. “Where would you like to go instead?”

  Dawn doesn’t hesitate.

  “Chicago,” she says.

  “First class,” she says.

  Then she turns around and sees Bryce.

  “And I want my brother to come, too.”

  SO THERE YOU HAVE IT.

  Dawn goes to Chicago to stay with her nana. Nana is thrilled to see her. Dawn breaks down and cries a little bit, but then she pulls it together. For her nana’s sake.

  She still cries a lot when Nana can’t see her.

  Bryce comes, too. He stays for a while and then he goes home again, but Dawn makes him promise not to ever get kidnapped. She makes him promise to call her if he ever needs anything.

  Bryce tells her he’ll call her. Then he gets in the taxi. Dawn watches him drive away and wonders if she should feel guilty. If she should go back with him.

  But she doesn’t.

  She stays with her nana. She cooks and keeps the house tidy and goes out for groceries, and she and her nana go for walks to the park and play cribbage and watch old movies on Netflix.

  She spends her nights on the phone. She’s not calling her parents.

  She’s not calling Julian.

  She calls Bryce.

  She calls a hospital in Seattle, where Amber is.

  Mostly the nurses tell Dawn that the counselor is still unconscious. But they’re hopeful she’ll be awake soon.

  And Dawn FaceTimes with Brielle, who’s back home in Oregon. And they talk about how fucked up it all is, what happened on those mountains, and how it’s still fucked up now, in the aftermath.

  They make plans to meet up somewhere when all the chaos dies down.

  “It feels like a bad dream,” Brielle says once, and on her phone Dawn can see Brielle’s scars, the bruises on her face. “Now that we’re home, it kind of feels li
ke it never really happened.”

  Dawn understands.

  She kind of feels the same way.

  But it did happen, all of it, and she won’t ever forget.

  SOMEDAY, DAWN PLANS TO VISIT the graveyard where Lucas is buried. She’ll cry at his headstone and thank him for saving her life. She’ll tell Lucas’s dad how his son was a hero and he would have been great in the army.

  But she can’t do it yet. Can’t face Lucas’s parents.

  It just hurts too much.

  She’s not strong enough.

  So she keeps calling the hospital where Amber is recovering. She tries to enjoy her time with Nana and forget about what happened out there in the wild.

  It’s nice, but it just doesn’t feel right.

  Not quite.

  And then one day, Cam and Wendy show up at Nana’s front door.

  DAWN’S PARENTS LOOK DIFFERENT, standing there on Nana’s porch in Chicago. Wendy looks older than Dawn remembers. Her roots are showing and the crow’s-feet around her eyes are deeper.

  Cam looks smaller. He looks tired. He has his arm around Wendy and he holds her close, and the two of them look at Dawn standing in Nana’s doorway and they seem to nudge closer to each other, and Cam holds Wendy tighter.

  And Dawn can see that her mother is scared. And Cam is scared, too.

  They’re scared of Dawn, both of them, and it just feels so…

  wrong.

  DAWN’S FIRST INSTINCT is to hug Wendy, and even Cam.

  Her second instinct is to slam the door in their faces.

  She does neither.

  She stands there and stares at Cam and Wendy, and Cam and Wendy stare back, and neither of them says anything, and Dawn tries to be tough, tries to remind herself that it was Cam and Wendy who had her kidnapped in the first place.

  That it was Wendy who replaced her dad, who fell in love with Cam too soon.

  That she should hate them both for what they’ve put her through, for ruining her life even before the kidnapping.

  But Cam and Wendy look so old, and tired, and scared.

  They look like they’ve been lost in the forest, too.

  And Dawn realizes she can’t hate them, as much as she wants to. She realizes, to her horror, that she actually feels kind of guilty.

  “I’m not going back to Sacramento,” she tells them. “Just so you know.”

  Wendy and Cam glance at each other. “We’re not here to bring you home,” Cam tells her. And he squeezes Wendy’s shoulder again. “We just want to see for ourselves you’re all right.”

  Beside him, Wendy begins to cry.

  And Dawn feels even worse.

  THEY CALL AN UNEASY TRUCE, Dawn and Wendy and Cam. They go out for coffee.

  They go out for coffee, and as they sit across from each other amid a sea of hurried, stressed-out Chicago people, and sip their drinks, Wendy dabs at her eyes and doesn’t say anything, and Dawn watches people go by, and she doesn’t say anything, either. And eventually, Cam clears his throat.

  “It must have been so scary,” he says. “Out in the wilderness.”

  Dawn sips her coffee and doesn’t reply.

  And after a long silence, Cam tries again. “We would never have sent you,” he says, “if we knew, Dawn; they swore to us it was safe.”

  Dawn still doesn’t answer. She knows that he’s trying, but she’s just not here for it. She doesn’t want to give him an inch.

  And Cam knows it.

  He blows out a breath and drops his head into his hands. And Dawn can see how Cam’s lost weight and how skinny he looks and how his whole body shakes when he cries. And she knows he feels guilty, too.

  After a few awkward minutes of Cam pretending he isn’t crying and Wendy dabbing her eyes and Dawn alternately feeling embarrassed and trying not to cry herself, Cam wipes his eyes with the back of his hand. He looks around the coffee shop and pushes back his chair. “I’m sorry,” he says again.

  “I’ll let you two talk things out,” he says.

  “I’ll just—I’ll wait outside.”

  CAM STANDS.

  He puts his hand on Wendy’s shoulder and rests it there for a moment, and then he squeezes, and Wendy kind of leans into his hand, without looking at him, and it’s a tiny gesture, but Dawn can see how it comforts her mother.

  She can see how her mother needs to be comforted.

  And then Cam stands up straighter, and he smiles once at Dawn before he turns toward the door, but it’s a sad smile, kind of forced, like it actually really hurts him to have to walk away.

  To have to leave Wendy when she’s in such a state.

  And, maybe, to have to leave Dawn.

  Dawn thinks about what Brielle said, up on the ridge, about how Dawn didn’t wind up in Out of the Wild because her dad died, or because Wendy met Cam. She thinks about how stupid she felt when she told Brielle her reasons and Brielle shot them down.

  You’re here because you don’t know how to cope, Brielle said.

  Because you chose drugs and some asshole named Julian instead of dealing with your feelings like an adult.

  Dawn misses her dad. But that’s not Cam’s fault.

  It’s not Wendy’s fault she found someone new.

  Dawn knows this now, and maybe she always did. Maybe she’s just finally sick of pretending she doesn’t.

  And Dawn tells herself this doesn’t mean anything, not yet. It doesn’t mean she has to listen to him, or that he’s replacing her father.

  It doesn’t mean she has to go home to Sacramento.

  (It doesn’t even mean she has to like Cam yet.)

  She isn’t sure where they all go from here, and she’s not dumb enough to think all her problems are solved.

  (They’re not.)

  She’s not even sure she’ll be okay, not yet.

  But Wendy sets down her Kleenex and reaches across the table and takes Dawn’s hand in her own, and it’s warm and familiar and good and comforting.

  And Dawn doesn’t feel so alone, for once, and maybe that’s enough for now.

  Cam’s at the door to the coffee shop, waiting to leave as some hipsters barge in. And Dawn takes a deep breath and calls his name as he’s standing there.

  “Cam,” she says. “Come back. You can stay.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  First of all, shouts to my agent, Stacia Decker, and my editor, Wendy Loggia, and to all of the wonderful people at Delacorte Press who helped shepherd this book from a dream into reality.

  Thanks to Jason Parent and Darren Morneau for being there when I climbed my own personal Raven’s Claw, and for being ready to run back to headquarters for help when it all went south.

  Thanks to Cam and Wendy M. for being lovely, and to Kyla Dawn for the inspiration.

  And finally, thanks to my family—Mom, Dad, Andrew, Terry, Laura, and Little E—for being the raddest in every possible way.

  © SASSY MAY

  OWEN LAUKKANEN has been nominated for the Anthony, Barry, and Thriller Awards. A former commercial fisherman and professional poker journalist, he lives in Vancouver, Canada, and spends most of his free time adventuring in the wilderness with his rescue pitbull, Lucy.