Ali stopped and got off her bike to catch her breath. She had been about to take a break anyway, but was disturbed by the roadblock. She realized she could get in trouble if she went on, yet she was not in the mood to give up. She had always been headstrong and, ever since her mother had died, had made it a point not to quit anything she started.
The sign was a square of hard cardboard, not metal. Feeling rebellious, she tore it off the bar and folded it and stuffed it in her daypack. If she got caught, she could always deny she had seen the sign. She hated to lie to anyone, but these were the same guys who were murdering her forest. It was not like they would arrest her or anything.
“They might,” she said aloud. They might do exactly that. Then she would have to call her father, raise bail, appear before a judge, and maybe have her picture on the front page of the local newspaper. Worse things could happen, she decided.
Ali heard a truck approaching from the direction of town. She knew it was not a car because it was making too much noise. A minute later the gas guzzling, air polluting vehicle came around the bend and stopped in front of the roadblock. Mr. Ted Wilson—Sharla Wilson’s dad, a so-so friend of hers at school—got out of the truck and smiled when he saw it was her.
Like Sam at the sandwich shop, Ted was one of the few adults in town who didn’t mind being called by his first name. He was not paranoid about losing face or anything stupid like that—not like most of the teachers at her school, who had trouble seeing the students as real people, instead of hyperactive creatures that had crawled out of holes in the ground.
Because Breakwater was so tiny, she had been going to the same school since she was six, and the place was beginning to feel like a cage. It would be another year before she could move on to Tracer High, which was located in a town ten miles south of Breakwater. She was looking forward to the change. Except for hanging out with Cindy and Steve, she kept mostly to herself at school, spending her lunch hours in the library reading. She wasn’t a snob—she hoped she wasn’t—but she just wasn’t interested in the same things as most of the kids her age. For example, she could not watch MTV without getting a headache, although she loved music. She was learning to play the piano, and her teacher said she was a natural talent. The only problem was, she did not own one; she had to practice on the one in Cindy’s living room—usually while Cindy was watching MTV.
“Hi, Ali. What are you doing here? Or do I need to ask?” Ted said.
“Just out for a little ride, is all,” she said innocently.
“Sure. You’re going up to the logging site. What are you going to do this time? Tie yellow ribbons around the trees we have to cut down?”
“Red ribbons.” She added, “You don’t have to kill the trees, you know. You have a choice.”
Ted was a friendly man, tall and thin, a bit of a scarecrow in his walk, with a face that somehow reminded her of a hero in a cartoon. His jaw was just a bit too strong, his gray eyes a little too round; nevertheless, he had a quick smile that was disarming, and he was always fair.
“It’s my job,” he said. “The world needs lumber. How could we build houses without it? Where would we get paper from? Besides, for every tree we cut down, we plant a sapling.”
“It will take ten years for those saplings to grow,” she began, before stopping herself, knowing it would be useless to argue with him. Ted knelt beside her.
“As you get older, Ali, you’re going to discover many things in this world aren’t fair. It’s the way it is. The best you can do with your life is to try to fix those things—”
“Then I can ignore the roadblock and go up to the site?”
He held up his hand. “You didn’t let me finish. You should work to fix things that can be fixed. You know as well as I that you’re just going to get in the way at the logging camp. You’re going to annoy the guys, and eventually somebody’s going to have to grab you and stuff you in a truck and drive you down the mountain.”
“I have my bike. I can get down myself, thank you.”
“No, Ali.” Ted stood and looked up the mountain. Clouds continued to hug the trees, gray ghosts drifting through branches, painting the entire area with gloom. Ted added, “The road’s quiet now but in two hours there’s going to be traffic. Lots of trucks barreling down here with full loads. Today we start our big push along the ridge. You know where that is. You’re not going to be able to ride up there and then back down. You could force a truck to swerve to avoid you, and cause an accident.”
Ali knew he was right. The road was narrow, the turns sharp. A truck could catch her by surprise. She was fooling herself when she thought she could make a difference.
Still, she did not want to go back home, not today. There was something special about today. She felt it in her heart, and she had learned to trust her heart ever since her mother had died. Sometimes, she felt, it was all she had left to trust.
She lowered her head and looked appropriately crushed.
“Okay,” she said.
Ted gave her a suspicious glance. “Ali?”
She looked up. “I understand what you mean, about causing an accident and all. I don’t want to do that.”
Ted looked over her shoulder. “What have you got in your pack?”
She backed up a step. She hadn’t stuffed the no trespassing sign down deep enough. “My poncho,” she muttered.
Ted reached out and plucked the folded cardboard from her pack.
Ali added, “And a stupid sign that would probably have blown off the roadblock and littered the environment if I had not taken care of it.”
Ted read the sign and sighed, and then folded it and put it in his pocket. He knew she had torn it off the roadblock, but didn’t say anything. Again, he knelt beside her.
“Take care riding back down,” he said. “Don’t build up too much speed on the turns. The road is damp, you might slip.”
She nodded. “Sure.”
He patted her shoulder, stood and walked to his truck. However, he paused before climbing inside. “Ali, I don’t say this to upset you, but you look more like your mother every day.”
The remark did not bother her. People often told her that. “You went to school with her, didn’t you?” she asked.
“From kindergarten to the last year of high school. She was a great woman.” He opened his truck door. “Tell your father hello for me.”
“I will. Thanks, Ted.”
“Thank me by listening to me.” He added, “Please move the roadblock while I pass. But be sure to put it back.”
“I will.”
The roadblock was light. She had no trouble pushing it aside as he drove past. He waved to her before he disappeared. She put the roadblock back like she promised. She could only assume that all the trucks that came down the mountain later in the day would have to stop and move it out of the way. All to keep people like her out. It seemed like a stupid system.
She had to make a decision. Ted was right about everything he’d said. She would just get in the way at the camp; she could get run over; they would cut down the trees no matter what she said.
Plus the hour climb had already tired her out. She’d slept lousy the night before. She’d had this nightmare where bats kept pinching her and telling her how tasty her blood was. She never watched horror films; she didn’t know where the dream had come from.
Yet the feeling to go on persisted. She could not explain it; she simply felt she had to get to the logging camp.
“But I can’t cause an accident,” she said. Ted knew his business. Two hours from now the road would be jammed. If she continued up the mountain, someone would stop and order her back. They would not be as nice as Ted. She would probably get yelled at and feel bad the rest of the day. That would be no fun.
Ali came to a decision. The logging camp was not really farther up the mountain. The site was three miles west of where she stood. The road snaked around to get to it, going east and then north, before circling back. In a way, cutting across the forest wo
uld be like taking a shortcut to the camp, only it would be through the trees instead of on the road.
Not that such a hike scared her. She had grown up beside the forest; she trusted her knowledge of the area. And it would be nice to go for a walk after wearing her butt out on the bike.
Ali rode back a hundred yards and hid her bike off the road in a pile of bushes. No one would steal it; no one would even see it. Alongside the road, one spot looked pretty much the same as another. She was careful to memorize where she put it.
There was a Mars bar wrapper on the ground, beside her bike, and she picked it up and stuffed it in her pocket. She put people who littered in the same league as those who designed nuclear warheads.
She started hiking what she hoped was due west, slipping between the trees, stepping over the dew-covered grass, wishing she had a compass, but certain she would hear the lumberjacks when she got close to the camp. It was a massive forest; she knew enough not to underestimate it. If she got lost, she could die, and that would be no fun either.
Ali thought of Ted’s last remark as she hiked. Like her mother, her hair had plenty of red in it, but her mom’s had been much lighter, filled with a bright sheen that literally took Ali’s breath away. In the sun, it used to look as if it were on fire. On the other hand, her mother’s positive mood might have had something to do with that brightness.
Her mom had been a happy person, always joking and laughing, up until the week before her death. Had a part of her sensed she was going to die? Ali remembered vividly the last days of her life, how quiet and withdrawn she became. It was almost as if an evil stranger had sent her a letter announcing the soon-to-be accident. . . .
Ali fingered the tiny scar on her forehead, hidden by her hair, as she recalled that night. Then she angrily pushed the thoughts away.
“There’s no point!” she scolded herself. She was alive and healthy. She had her father to love, her good friends—Cindy, Steve—to have fun with. Her mother was in heaven now, or in some beautiful place.
Restless, she resumed hiking, increasing her speed.
Tall for her age, Ali had been told since she was a baby that she was pretty, which made her pretty sure that she wasn’t ugly. Still, it was hard for her to look in a mirror and not feel confused. It was as if she remembered herself looking different, somehow older and more important. Once she had tried to explain the feeling to Cindy and her friend had told her to stop eating junk food and see a counselor.
Sometimes she worried, when she stood in front of the mirror, that she tried to see herself as her mother. Cindy had told her that was another sign of mental illness, but Ali didn’t know about that one. Her mom had been a true beauty.
Still, as Ted had said, she had a lot in common with her mother. They shared the same green eyes, the same small nose set in the middle of an oval face. They even had the same smile—wide, a little wild.
Of course she didn’t smile much these days.
“Stop thinking about it!” she yelled at herself again.
Ali tried concentrating on the forest. She had not planned to hike; for that reason she had on her Nike’s, not her boots. The shoes were lighter, they gave a better feel of the ground. As long as she didn’t twist an ankle, she would be fine. And it was pleasant to feel the soft earth beneath her soles. Sometimes, just getting away from all the concrete and asphalt made her relax. . . .
Suddenly Ali froze in mid stride.
A chill passed over her, from the inside, not the outside.
She did not see anyone. She could not hear anyone. Indeed, seldom had the forest appeared so still. It was as if the birds and the insects had fled the area. Yet the sudden feeling of being watched was overwhelming. She moved in a circle, searching through the drooping branches.
“Hello?” she called.
Nothing. Except the feeling, something close.
“Who’s there?” Her words hung in the air before dying in the dense woods. She called louder. “I have a gun!”
Like anyone in his right mind—even an ax murderer—would believe that a thirteen-year-old chick with an obsessive environmental outlook was carrying a handgun in her daypack. It would be better to keep her mouth shut, she decided, rather than yelling into the woods and telling whoever was stalking her exactly where she was.
She did feel like she was being stalked. Whoever it was, they seemed to be behind her, in the direction of the road. She tried to think how long she had been hiking. Twenty minutes? That meant the road was a half mile away, and the camp was at least two and a half miles distant.
“Oh no,” she moaned. She regretted not having listened to Ted. She feared to go back the way she had come, but to continue forward meant she had to move farther from the road. Both choices scared her.
She was positive something was there. She trusted her intuition. It had been right so often before. She sensed a presence behind her. It was as if a magnetic field reached from deep inside her brain, and through the trees, and touched the . . . creature.
Or creatures.
Momma, Poppa, and Baby Bear?
No, something much worse.
She could not see them, but feared they could see her. Her white sweater was not helping matters. In the thick forest it was like a hello-please-don’t-eatme flag. Quickly, she reached for her olive-colored poncho. The thing was cheap vinyl, not warm, but at least it allowed her to blend into the trees. From past experience, she knew the poncho would not cover the collar of the sweater; she would still be easy to spot. So she pulled off the sweater before she put on the poncho.
The moment she changed clothes she felt a change in the mood of the creatures. They had paused to study her, but now they were anxious to catch her and eat her.
Ali heard a branch break. A bush crumple.
Dropping her sweater, she turned and ran toward the logging camp.
The next ten minutes were a blur. She felt trapped in the oldest of all nightmares: running from the unseen monster, the creature that kept getting closer no matter what one did.
Yet her terror gave her speed. She leaped over fallen logs, cut through thick branches, jumped over puddles. She ran flat out for a mile without even thinking of stopping.
It was not fair, she thought. She was a good person. She was trying to help the forest, and now she had things chasing her and wanting to eat her.
Ali scraped her leg on a dead bush, felt a branch rip a hole in her pants. She slipped on a rock, went down, got up, kept running, not even sure which way she was going.
A second branch cracked behind her. She heard a growl.
“No!” she cried as she kept running.
She entered a grass clearing and the noise behind her stopped. She was halfway across the meadow before she realized it. Slowing, she glanced behind, saw trees, just trees, standing tall and straight like guards whose only concern was to keep the clearing safe from intruders. Only they had let her in because they wanted to protect her.
Ali came to a complete halt, her breath roaring in her ears. She was not entirely sure why, but she felt safe in the meadow. The monsters appeared afraid to come out in the open.
She stood unmoving for several minutes, until her breath slowed and her nerves began to calm down. A ray of sun burst through the clouds, the warmth delicious on her face, causing her to relax further. In the distance, she heard the lumberjacks and their loud saws. Before the day began, she would never have imagined how happy she would be to hear such a sound.
She was still scared, though. She could not stay in the meadow. She had to get to the logging site. Ted could always give her a ride back to her bike.
What exactly was chasing her? She didn’t believe in hairy monsters, not really, but a family of bears wouldn’t have stopped just because she ran into a meadow.
She looked at the sun, wondered if it was the light that had caused the creatures to stop. If that was the case she had better keep going. Already the clouds were returning.
She hurried across the meadow and reen
tered the trees. They were not as thick in this part of the woods, and narrow beams of sunshine were able to reach all the way to the forest floor, lighting up the green moss and the yellow daisies. Up ahead, the sound of the lumberjacks grew louder; another mile and she would be safe.
Minutes later, the woods suddenly thinned and she came to a cliff. The drop was sudden, at least fifty feet, and a big surprise. She knew the woods but not this exact spot. The edge was made of sharp rocks and cracked boulders, and it looked like it could give way any second. In the distance, through the trees, she could see the outline of several logging trucks. They were still a half mile away, maybe more.
The cliff was a pain. In both directions, left and right, she could not find an end to it. She decided to go to the left, north. Although it was covered with a layer of dead pine needles, the ground appeared more stable in that direction. But with every step forward, she listened behind her. The sun vanished behind a cloud, and a gray arm stretched over the mountain.
She did not hear anything, she told herself.
The ledge narrowed. On her left a stone wall began to grow in height, until soon she was standing below and on top of a cliff. Two cliffs? What would she run into next?
The wall on her left was smooth, dark, probably made of granite. She could not see past its top. Unfortunately, the cliff on her right—the lower one—continued to grow more frail, and she found herself hugging the wall, afraid the whole ledge would fall apart.
How ridiculous it would be, she thought, to escape the monsters and get within shouting distance of the logging site and then die because of a stupid slip.
The gloom deepened. The side of the cliff was exposed. A slapping wind came from below, and she felt a chill in her arms and chest. Already, she missed her sweater.