The Hike

  Don’t slow down. Don’t slow down even for a second.

  Ben cried “HELP!” again and again but all he could hear was the growing laughter of the man behind him. His face grew deep red. He felt like he was about to start bleeding out of his eyes. He considered taking out his phone but that would only slow his progress, and his goal at the moment was to not get caught. The path stretched out ahead, but he could barely see it now because his mind was presenting him with a slideshow of terrors: the dog-faced murderer closing in, the future sight of his own mangled body, his wife getting the call and screaming out in horror and dropping her phone to the ground in shock. He had to look back. He couldn’t resist it any longer.

  The killer was twenty yards away, a healthy distance and yet not comforting to Ben at all. The man was twice Ben’s size and had a big butcher knife in his hands. Even from this distance Ben could see that the edge of the blade looked cleaner and newer than the rest of the knife, ground down by a fresh sharpening, now gleaming and ready to hack through bone and skin and tendons and whatever else got in its way. The man would catch him, and then Ben would see the man’s sickly green eyes and feel his awful dog breath and watch the knife plunge into his body and that final moment would linger into his afterlife and well beyond.

  Now Ben wasn’t bothering to form the word “HELP” when he screamed. He was screaming purely . . . all random, soft, extended vowels spewing out like vomit. He had no control over it. He could hear the maniac still laughing behind him. And then he heard him say what sounded like. . . .

  “I’ve been waiting for this since the day you were born.”

  He spotted bizarrely arranged piles of sticks off to the side as he blitzed down the path, structures he had never seen before. Maybe this killer, this dogface, had been waiting for Ben the whole time. Trapped him. Maybe he would be gutted and lashed to those sticks and left for a faceless dog to chew on. Ben turned to look again. The distance between them had grown to thirty yards and he was praying he would be able to get back to his signpost and turn up the mountain and leave that man in the dust for good, then make it to the hotel and call the cops and get in his car and go home and never ever ever come back here. Thanks for everything, Pennsylvania, but fuck you eternally.

  Just when Ben was getting his hopes up about escaping, another man leapt into the trail ten yards in front of him. Also in a dog mask. He had a knife, too. Through the holes in the dog’s skinned-off mouth, Ben could make out the second man’s lips and teeth. He was also laughing and smiling and clearly deranged. Ben screamed again in holy fright. He was throwing his screams, as if they were a last-ditch weapon for him to hurl at the madmen.

  Run right at him. That was Ben’s first thought. Ben played football when he was a kid. Fullback. Not a great player, but not an embarrassing one either. Whenever they were facing a team that had a really good defensive lineman, his coach always used the same strategy: Run right at the guy. Don’t let him chase you. Don’t try to fool him. Just bowl the fucker over and take him by surprise. There was a killer in front of and behind Ben now, with the treacherous mountain slopes on either side of the path, waiting to trip him up and render him easy prey. There was only one real option: the football option.

  So he kept running. He imagined having a football in the crook of his arm and then he barreled forward, screaming for war.

  The second dogface didn’t expect that. By the time he was rearing back with the knife, Ben was already knocking him down. Stiff-armed him flush on the chin and dropped him like it was nothing, like he’d been waiting all these years to play one final, perfect down. If he had diagrammed it and practiced it for a week, he couldn’t have executed it better.

  He was running so fast now that his muscles felt like they were exploding, sending random bits of stray tissue to other parts of his body where those bits didn’t belong. He looked back and the first dogface was hunched over the second dogface thirty yards away, then forty, then fifty, and then out of view entirely. Soon, he didn’t hear them at all. He was extending his lead. He was gonna make it back to the hotel. He was gonna live.

  But when he scoured for the two split-trunk trees marking his way up the mountain, he couldn’t find them. The trail bent to the right instead of the left, as he had originally anticipated, and now he was seeing bigger maple trees and other things he hadn’t recognized on the way in: odd rock formations, uneven slopes, patches of thick mud. A family of deer began sprinting alongside him, their bodies melting into the trees and then reappearing again. He looked down the mountain and saw no signs of a road, or of any McMansions at all. They were all gone. Everything . . . everyone . . . was gone.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE MOUNTAINTOP

  Ben took his phone out in midsprint for the time (4:02 P.M.) and a clear signal, but there were no bars. It was still “Searching . . .” The longer it searched, the more quickly the battery would drain. He became frantic—all hard breaths and shaking limbs—running faster down the trail, searching for another glimpse of road or chrome or man-made structures, but nothing materialized . . . nothing he could recognize from the previous hour. Keeping one eye on the path, he opened the Maps app on the off chance that the phone would finally pick up a tower signal, but it only showed a single blue, pulsing dot, with the world waiting to be filled in around it.

  “HELP! ANYONE?! HELP!”

  Nothing. He fumbled the phone to the ground, he was shaking so hard.

  “Shit.”

  He picked the phone up and kept running. The adrenaline had worn off a bit since he had eluded the two dogfaces, and now the terror was sinking in well after the fact, taking up full residence in his mind. He didn’t feel as if he had outrun them at all. They still felt present—part of the atmosphere—along with the dead girl and her mutilated legs, the exposed bits of her veins and bones and flesh coloring the leaves below like a pair of paintbrushes. That poor girl’s mother. The images and sounds became clearer to him and hardened into firm memories as he continued to run. I’ve been waiting for this since the day you were born. In his mind, he could see their hideous Rottweiler faces mouthing the words. God, how he hated Rottweilers. He scanned the mountain above for any tiered birdhouses or log benches, but nothing came into view. The path shot forward with no discernible end in sight.

  But how far could he really be from the hotel? He wasn’t some crazy distance runner, and he hadn’t been out that long. If he went to the top of the mountain and doubled back, he’d happen upon the hotel again, right? It would be back in the same direction of the dogfaces, but surely he would discover something eventually (although that would be true if he continued in any direction, since he was just seventy-five miles outside of New York City). He looked down at the phone and still the blue dot pulsed, and pulsed. He tried his wife again, but the call cut out.

  This is a dream. This is not a physically possible situation, which means all I have to do is wake up. If he just gave his brain a light tap within the dream, he would stir, and eventually float back up to the surface of his consciousness. He woke up from nightmares like this on occasion. So he screamed out, “AHHHHHH!!!” as loud as he could. Seemed like a real scream. Seemed like it was really him doing the screaming. Here. In real life. Not a dream. Shit.

  At a loss, Ben spied a narrow tributary of the path that branched off up the mountain. Maybe the killers would rush by it without noticing. He turned and began to climb hastily, desperate to maintain separation between himself and the dogfaces. It was not a graceful climb—lots of slipping on leaves and awkwardly jumping around fat branches and thorny weeds—but still he managed. He came to a lull between two peaks, mountains rising up on either side, the path turning to the right. He could make out a small peak behind him where the hotel should have been. But there was no esker anymore. The topography was completely different. Now he was both terrified and pissed off.

  Back home, he liked watching survival shows, and now he remem
bered one of the key tips: If you’re lost, search out the highest point possible, so you can get a layout of the ground below. Made perfect sense. He followed the path to the right and up toward the small peak, pushing through the choked corridor of tangled sticks and mossy rocks and low-hanging conifers that refused to offer him soft needles to brush against. It was much harder labor than he was accustomed to, and he was rapidly succumbing to fatigue. His knee was throbbing now, and he was getting a nasty case of Museum Feet. There were little burrs all over his pants. Flecks of mud peppered his shoes and ankles until he had one smooth layer of filth covering everything below his knees. But he kept going because he knew that if he stopped moving, the dogfaces would find him and cut him up.

  The sun was going down as he reached the top. This mountain was still well below the tree line, with spruces and lichen-coated pines blocking his view in every direction, all impossible to climb. He tried to get a decent view down below, but the light was fading and he couldn’t make out any houses or hotels. No roads. No lights. No smoke rising up from chimneys. He took out the phone and it was still “Searching . . .” The battery was now in the red. It would die within an hour if he kept it on, but he couldn’t fathom turning it off just when he needed it the most, when he needed the fucking thing to work. He tried his wife again and there was nothing on the other end.

  “Come on. . . . Come on, you fucker.”

  He kept expecting to hear the laughter of the dogfaces return, but for now, he couldn’t hear a thing: not a bird or a squirrel or a tree swaying in the wind. There was only him and his dying tether to the rest of the world.

  There was a compass in the Utilities folder of the phone’s operating system, one of the few things that didn’t require a stupid signal to function. Facing back down the hill, toward the murder scene, was west. West was bad. East seemed better. He would head east until he found something. There was a rock nearby to rest on, so he opened up the Notes app and jotted down “craggy rock” for a signpost. Then he pressed hard on the power-down button on top of the phone, swiped across the screen to turn it all the way off, and watched as the screen gave way to a spinning white wheel in the center of a black void, spinning into nowhere until it finally died, too.

  Ben put the phone back into his pocket, sat down on the rock for a moment, and cried into his T-shirt.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE FIRE

  He walked briskly back down the mountain, along the tight, barely blazed trail to the east. Even though he saw no evidence of anything useful in that direction, he was still operating under the reasonable notion that he was close to salvation. How lost could I be? I’m in America. Acting like a castaway in the middle of resort-area Pennsylvania was a ludicrous idea. He was tired and frightened, but also embarrassed for himself. What kind of idiot dies because he got lost outside a fucking hotel?

  The mountain seemed to slope down forever. At one point, he had to lie belly-down on top of a large boulder and slowly lower himself to the ground below. Darkness was wrapping around the mountain, but he could still make out most everything in his immediate vicinity, namely trees. One tall, shedding tree after the next. It was a street fair of trees. He kept up a brisk pace down the mountain but was failing to stave off the cold. It was here now, freezing up the sweat in his shirt fibers and sending waves of chilled air up his shorts. And this was just the start. It was gonna get colder. It was comical how easily the cold could get to him. Put him in a climate-controlled house with ample light and heat, and he could pretend to be a hardy man. But a couple of hours in thirty-degree weather and he was basically as helpless as a kitten. It would take nothing to kill him. The weather could do it. The dogfaces could do it. An infected mosquito could do it. He probably wouldn’t even last this night if he didn’t find safe haven.

  He pressed on, unwilling to give up and freeze his ass off trying to sleep on a mountaintop, with the dogfaces ready to pick him off at any second. Then, suddenly, the ground leveled out under Ben’s feet and the path opened up wide as a promenade. There were no tire treads of any kind. The space between the trees was flat and clear and continued straight to the east. This was a path that clearly led somewhere: preferably somewhere with a warm shower and a hot bowl of soup and a phone charger and a kind police officer who was good at taking notes.

  He broke into a delirious, hopefully final run. He figured that one last push would be enough to get him there. But soon the horizon sealed off the sun for good, and whatever it was Ben was hoping to find—a gas station, a road, a diner—refused to show itself. His second wind began to fade. He couldn’t make out much in the way of signposts or memorable path markings, and his energy was flipping back over to despair and the horrifying realization that he was becoming more lost.

  Hours passed as he straggled forward, the moon his only companion. He was on the verge of breaking down in tears once more when he finally saw the path open up to a campground on the right. It was a clearing, with a dead fire pit in the center and a circle of folding golf chairs around it: the kind with nylon armrests and little mesh cup holders for your beer. There was also a small red tent over to the side. People. Real, living people with human faces might be in that tent. He was saved.

  “HELP! HELLO?! HELP ME, PLEASE! DEAR GOD, HELP!”

  Ben reached the campground and stood in front of the small pup tent. It could hold two people. Definitely no more than that.

  “Hello?”

  No answer. You can’t knock on a tent. He stepped cautiously toward the opening and unzipped the entrance from the ground up. He peeled back the flap and all he saw inside was a blue backpack, a shrink-wrapped case of bottled water, and a small, fleecy red blanket. That was it.

  “Anyone there?” There was clearly no one inside, but he asked anyway out of sheer hope. Then he dove for the water. Thirsty, yes. He was thirsty. And hungry. God, he was so hungry and thirsty now. Once the thought occurred to him, it became his only thought. His stomach hadn’t been this empty in ages. He had forgotten what real hunger felt like: irritating, miserable, lovesick for food. He could eat a barn.

  Inside the backpack he found a bag of potato rolls, two packages of hot dogs, and several pouches of gas station beef jerky. Good enough. He ate every last potato roll in the bag and guzzled down three of the little water bottles. Hunger and thirst had now been addressed.

  Next: warmth. Running in those flimsy shorts in the bitter cold had deadened his poor legs. The front pocket of the backpack had a small BIC lighter inside, which was a profound little miracle. The fire pit was nothing more than a circle of flat ashes, but there were plenty of dry leaves and sticks to be had around the clearing. He could build a fire, although building a fire meant submitting to the idea of staying there. All night. He would be giving up, putting himself in danger, and officially making himself the world’s dumbest lost person. But his body was dead, the backpack offered him no flashlight, and the woods surrounding him presented absolutely no other forms of life. There was no decision to be made, really. He felt around his pockets and realized his hotel room key was gone. It must have fallen out when he was running away. He’d never be able to go back for it.

  “Oh, no.”

  He grabbed leaves by the handful, taking care to avoid the moist, matted-down ones under the top layer of brush. He crinkled and crunched the leaves before dropping them into the center of the pit. After he had a nice pile of tinder built up, he went for the sticks, laying a dozen flat and then arranging more of them in a cone on top of that. Ben’s old man liked to build fires almost as much as he liked getting shitfaced, and he would let Ben help with the chore when he was a little kid. This was back before the divorce, when his parents were still living together in Minnesota, before the old man snapped and drifted away from Ben and his mom down a lazy river of ten-dollar vodka. He and his dad would drag in bundles of logs from the cord pile outside their house, then take old newspaper sheets and roll them up, tie them into Nantu
cket knots, and put them on the hearth. Then they would stack the logs on top, crisscrossed. Then his old man would light the thing and Ben would stare at it, grabbing for the poker anytime the fire died down—always stoking it, always mindful of it, always wanting it to stay alive and vigorous.

  At the campsite now, he flicked the lighter a few times to get a flame, but the striker wheel chafed his thumb tip and he sucked on it to soothe the pain. One last try and the leaves finally took, spreading the flames out and sending an elegant plume of smoke up above the trees.

  Maybe someone will see the smoke and come rescue me, he thought. Or come kill me.

  It was night, and even if any Good Samaritan saw the smoke, it wasn’t like they would come running. This was America. No one was lost in America. If they saw the smoke, they would say, “Looks like someone’s having a fire!” and then go have a burger. Resigned, he took off his shoes and peeled off his filthy socks and put his clammy, puffy white feet close to the fire to reanimate them. It felt good to make fists with his toes. The time had come for him to collapse in a heap. He could have slept upside down, he was so tired. Temporarily free of the dogfaces, his basic needs—food, warmth, rest—were crashing down on him in waves. Sleep was gonna be miserable, but he needed to recover some strength to get up and start running again. The tent was in decent shape, even if it offered little protection from the weather. Not that big a step down from the hotel room. But he couldn’t sleep in it. It would be too easy to spot. He would have to use the tent as a decoy. He let the fire die to keep the dogfaces from spotting him, and then he found a downed tree ten yards behind the tent and cowered behind it, covering himself with the little blanket and topping the blanket with brush to keep it camouflaged. Every sound coming from the woods sent a fresh surge of tremors through his body.