The rangers’ access track looked nothing like the trail. It cut straight west, as flat as the dwindling valley would allow; no trees, shrubs or vegetation grew in the brutal, man-made corridor. Silence reigned. Clouds didn’t even float overhead. It felt like I was walking on the side of a sterile patch of road instead of the wilds. I didn’t like it.
I stumbled upon the buck after an hour.
From a distance I dismissed it as an odd colored hillock or a boulder buried in the dirt. As I got closer, I noticed the cohesion in shape. The too-similar proportions. What I’d mistaken for dead moss was fur, matted and clumped with dirt. I wasn’t taken aback by a dead animal—good Southern boy I was, I’d done my fair share of hunting. But every part of it was still there, antlers and all. If a hunter shot it, they’d have broken the beast down and taken it home. If a pack of wolves did it, there’d be nothing left but bones and cartilage. It could have been sick. Stumbled into the corridor in a fever-daze. I rounded the huge beast’s legs.
“What the . . .?”
A six-inch gash cut open the meat of its face down to the bone. A dozen more cuts ran the length of its neck, matting the thick hair with dark red. Its throat gaped; a carpet of still-slick rust matted the grass beneath. The stink of iron hung heavy in the hot summer air, stomach-turning, insistent. The huge animal’s eyes bored into mine, glazed over and buzzing with flies. I popped my shirt over my nose, choosing my own stink over the still-damp blood. The lesser of two evils. For the second time in as many days I approached a corpse, inch by inch.
This wasn’t an accident.
A long, thin handle protruded from the wet, crimson ruin beneath the buck’s head. A hunting knife, it looked like, the ten-dollar kind you can pick up at just about any sport store from here to Seattle.
I took a step closer, reaching for the weapon almost on instinct.
A single, high-pitched laugh floated toward me from the woods.
The sweat on my back went cold. I looked up and around, but the wall of pines stood silent, still.
“Hello? Is someone there?” I called. The seconds ticked by in chilling slowness. My hand hung outward, still reaching. Like this wasn’t real. Just like the man from the trees last night. Just my head, just the way I was looking at things.
Another giggle. Too high to be a man’s. A child’s laugh.
No way. I whipped the pocketknife from the shoulder strap of my pack. The blade was only four inches long, but its weight in the palm of my hand anchored me.
“Who’s out there? Come on, this is fucked up!”
He moved out from the cover of the pines—a whisper of motion. The glint of his eyes, staring at me. A child, no older than ten. I couldn’t see his face, just his eyes, creased in an unseen smile.
“Wh-what are you doing?” I asked.
The flesh around his eyes stretched tighter, his smile widening. I lowered the blade. Just a kid. I wasn’t gonna hold a knife on a kid, was I?
“You come out here, right now! Hey!”
Yeah? And then what, Josh?
I’d cross that bridge when I came to it. For now, though, I wanted him out, in the open, where I could see him.
“I see you.” His high-pitched singsong voice floated from the depths of the forest.
“What?” Sand packed my mouth, dried it out.
“I see you.”
The knife in my hand trembled. He ducked down beneath the tree, out of sight.
I craned my neck, trying to see where he went. “Hey!”
I looked around. Too much space, too much space surrounded me, thirty feet clear of trees in every direction. Ghosts hovered in my peripheral vision, but when I spun to face them, nothing.
“Hey!”
My voice echoed in the service corridor, tremulous. A bird cawed from the shoulder of the mountain, but the pine trees were silent. I waited, adjusting my sweaty grip on the knife, heart in my throat. One minute ticked into two, then ten.
I had to get out of there. Everything about the spot felt wrong. The mutilated buck, the service road where nothing grew. The dead silence. I hitched my pack higher on my shoulders and did what I was best at; I ran.
I headed along the service road straight west, each step spiking my heart rate. My blood ran hot in my ears and every passing second I expected to hear another giggle floating from the forest . . . but none came. After a couple of empty miles I calmed down enough to put the knife back on my shoulder strap and have a rational check-the-facts.
Some kid, playing a prank. That made sense. Bedal was probably, what, twenty miles away? Odds were good it had been a bored kid camping with his family in the woods nearby, seeing how much he could scare the average hiker. He didn’t attack me, didn’t sprout wings or fangs. He was a kid, not a fuckin’ demon. I’d done plenty of stupid shit as a kid. I inhaled a shaky breath, nodding. It checked out. The facts aligned. I had just looked at it the wrong way. I had to find the right way to look at it.
And the buck?
That, I didn’t have an explanation for. That one stumped me. But the deer lay dead and behind me, and the kid was long gone, and I needed to cool my goddamn jets. I walked, breathed, and tried to calm down.
I thought of Mr. Neery’s mailbox. Did my dad ever buy him another one? We moved to Atlanta with my aunt after the funeral, but we went back for a few visits over the years. I couldn’t remember if Mr. Neery ever put his mailbox back up. Strange, isn’t it, the things you keep with you? I could still remember my dad holding me on Mr. Neery’s back porch, rocking back and forth. I remembered the look on Dustin McElroy’s face, standing in his baseball uniform, watching the blaze. But not the mailbox.
The road ran five or so miles before emptying out onto the shoulder of a highway. The pavement looked fresh-laid, smooth as a new nickel, which felt unusual; if I had a dollar for every piece of shit backwoods road I’ve threatened my axles with, I’d be a millionaire. This one looked . . . new. Inviting. I’d never hitchhiked before, and was somewhat nervous about the prospect, but I stuck my thumb out anyway and started trudging along the shoulder. At the sound of a motor I turned and slapped on my best ‘I swear I’m not a serial killer’ smile, only to watch a shiny Subaru drive right past. After three-quarters of a mile another engine rose behind me. I sighed and turned to see a battered and dingy eighteen-wheeler huffing along the road. The driver waved and rolled to a stop beside my outstretched thumb. A balding man in his late forties with a grizzled beard shot with gray and a wicked farmer’s tan craned his neck to see through the passenger-side window.
“Where ya headed?”
“Uh . . . Bedal.” I squinted against the sun.
A cloud passed over the driver’s face. “That’s where I’m headed, so it’d be kinda shitty of me to make ya walk. Hop in.”
I nodded and unstrapped my bag, tucking it behind the passenger seat amid a ruin of Red Bull cans and loose CD cases. After a quick thought, I palmed the pocketknife from one strap, slipping it in a pocket. You never can be too careful. I wasn’t a serial killer, but I didn’t have a guarantee this guy wasn’t.
“You doin’ the PCT?” the driver asked as the Chevy croaked back to life. A bobbleheaded Jesus Christ stuck to the dash above the defunct-looking radio nodded in frantic greeting.
“How’d you guess?”
The driver chuckled. “You got that ‘scarcely fed and walked hard’ look about you. I do the local delivery route between the Canadian border and Walla Walla, so I know the vibe.”
“Get a lot of us out this way?”
“Nah, not so much down here. Trail runs north, right? Up ’round Glacier. I’ll see six or seven of yous around these parts, usually stopping in Bedal to pick up food or what have you before they hop back on the trail in town there.”
“Oh, so there is a trail in town? Leads to the PCT?” It wasn’t that I didn’t trust Appletree; I just wanted to double-check.
“Yessir. I forget the name of it, but it’s east of town, picks up with the Crest trail ’bout ten miles in. The owner of the general store there, Ronnie, helped fund it with the state. He said it was for th’ community but between you, me, and the rattlin’ Jesus here”—the driver booped the bobblehead—“I think he did it to bring in some business to his shop. He wanted to put a sign up along the main trail where it heads into town, advertisin’ his general store to hikers. Imagine he weren’t none too pleased when the rangers told him it’s all national land up ’round them parts and he couldn’t throw up a billboard.”
“I imagine so.” I considered asking him about the kid from the woods, but no way he’d know what I was babbling about. I’d come off as a crackpot.
It was a kid, playing a prank. The more I said it, the more I believed it. I forgot about the buck; it didn’t matter, in the grand scheme of things. Things die. The buck, Green-Eyes. That’s the way the world worked.
Even as I told myself this, I ignored the queasiness lurking in the pit of my stomach. I ignored the smell of sizzling wallpaper clinging to the inside of my nostrils.
Things die.
The peaks of the Cascades cracked skyward, dusted with early-season snow. I leaned back and enjoyed both the view and not being on my feet for a change. The driver ranted about something as we drove. Politics, I think. I missed the opening thread of his monologue and now just nodded my head at all the right points. He needed no conversational aid from me. The first houses began cropping up along the side of the road about three miles in. Small, tidy, and respectable, set back a way from the highway behind ivy-covered fences.
The center of Bedal was a pleasant surprise from the small-town boonies I expected. Five or so storefronts hunched around a four-way stop, watched over by a lone streetlight. A Shell station with a sign in the window advertising monster energy drinks offered gas at a reasonable $2.94 a gallon. A telephone pole sported a crow’s nest crown next to a fifties-style chrome diner. chucks was scrawled above the door to the diner in dead neon loops. A window box beside the door boasted a collection of thin plants straggling for sunlight. A pair of trucks occupied most of the packed-dirt parking lot.
A post office sat silent beneath the stars and stripes waving from a flagpole—in case visitors forgot what country they were in. A Ford Bronco with a too-small doughnut tire on the front right axle and a fresh coating of mud was parked out front. No police station; I guess they borrowed one from a neighboring town. Houses, set against the trees.
A two-story lodge with a sheltered patio sat across the street from the Shell. A mountain of firewood bundles filled one side behind a sign selling them for seven bucks a bunch. A little steep for tourists and car-campers, but out here you didn’t have another option. The sign over the porch said general store.
Two roads crossed at the four-way. The highway, running north-south, and a smaller residential type. To the east, it crossed a rusty bridge over a river running low this late in the summer.
A brand-new sign stood beside the road with the PCT logo on it and an arrow pointing east, over the bridge. I didn’t want to be in the real world any longer than necessary. In the real world, I had to be Josh. Josh had to deal with the shit show with Deb. Josh had to remember those nightmare-laced nights listening to his mom scream. On the trail . . . well, those things still existed, but I didn’t have to deal with them. Those were Josh’s problems, not Switchback’s.
“This is the place.” My driver-friend pulled into the hardpan of the diner parking lot. “That there,” he said pointing to the general store, “is Ronnie’s. He’ll have whatever goods you’re looking for, likely as not.”
“How’s the food in there?” I thumbed toward the diner. This close to the double doors I could smell rye toast and hot butter, and I had to wipe my mouth to keep from drooling. I hadn’t had anything to eat since that mediocre turkey casserole the night before. My stomach rumbled.
“It’s good, from what I’ve heard.” The driver glanced at the shiny chrome diner. “Run by a lady named Sarah—try the Reuben, folks say it’s the best around.”
“Thanks.”
“Wait—before you go.”
I paused, fingers on the door handle. It looked like he was debating saying what really lingered on his mind. Real quick I hunted for a way I could politely tell him I didn’t care and go, before he found the words. The Reuben danced on my mind.
“Look . . . be careful.”
“Of . . .?”
“Last few months, coupla people gone missing. No one’s talking ’bout it, but I seen the posters. You can keep that look you’re giving me, kid, I ain’t saying there’s a serial killer on the loose. Just be careful. I’ve driven through here enough to know there’s something weird about this stretch of road. Don’t trust easy.” He licked his lips. He had the kind of wide-eyed insistence of your average flat-earther.
All right, weirdo. “Right. Uh . . . thanks.” I jumped out of the truck and grabbed my pack. The general store could wait. I’d been eating freeze-dried food in a bag for two weeks.
Papers and notices plastered the front window near the door. Pull a tab for guitar lessons. Pull a tab if you’re looking for a tutor. A “looking for lodging” ad right next to an “offering lodging” ad, which I found hilarious. In the top right corner fluttered a pair of Missing Person notices, faded from rain and wind. One featured a selfie of a woman grinning from a hammock. A tattooed astronaut waved from her upper arm. The printed block letters were tough to read, faded as they were. It looked like she’d been missing from the Mt. Pugh trail since . . . holy shit, last August? The paranoid driver warned me about something that went down last year? I snorted and hauled open the door and stepped into a different decade.
Dead or soon-to-be politicians and actors decorated the quilted stainless-steel walls. JFK and Eisenhower, Sidney Poitier, and Jack Lemmon. The tables were spotless white linoleum dressed with napkin dispensers, ketchup, and mustard. An industrial air con spat out air cool to the point of chilly; a wave of goose bumps broke out on my arms. At the wraparound bar four patrons sat on plush bar stools, feet resting on a polished chrome rail. A bell above the door announced my arrival.
I waved, trying to stand in front of my bulky pack as much as possible. “Afternoon.”
One of the patrons, an older man with wild hair and goatee to match, turned to give me the once-over. He eyed the pack I tried to shield behind my legs. “Just off the Crest Trail?”
“Yessir. Stopped in town to resupply and grab a hot meal before I get back on the trail.”
“Sarah!” One of the four shouted, without turning around. “Got you another one.”
The door to the kitchen swung open and a large woman wearing a blue apron bustled out, coffeepot in one hand and plate in the other. She fixed the loudmouth with a glare and scowled.
“Now what have I told you about shouting in my shop, Jeremy Ulysses Cranson? Were you raised in a barn?”
“Sorry, ma’am,” Mr. Cranson muttered, dropping his gaze to his mug of what I assumed was coffee.
“Sure you are. Here’s your burger, Andrew. Extra pickle, no onion.” She slid the plate in front of the man with the goatee. I caught a quick glance of a toasted bun bursting with lettuce and tomato beside a mountain of fries. My stomach gurgled audibly.
“Hey there.” The waitress wiped her hands on a clean white towel. “Go on and stick your bag beside that umbrella stand there, come and have a seat. Can I get you some tea?”
“Oh, uh, no tea. Coffee, if you have it, please, and thank you.” I hopped up onto a stool, rubbing my hands together. Sarah slid a laminated menu across the counter as she poured a cup of coffee, which she set in front of me. It tasted amazing. Going from five cups of coffee a day in the real world to two cups of instant-in-a-bag a week had been a rough transition.
The menu was standard diner fare. Burgers and sandwiches with the occasional lackluster salad thrown in for good measure.
“You come far today?” the man who got in trouble, Cranson, asked me. I couldn’t tell if he feigned his interest or offered it as penitence for his past offense. The waitress, engaged in slicing a magnificent-looking apple pie, appeared not to hear.
I shrugged. “Not too bad. Ten miles or so.”
“Howf the rail ‘iss time of ‘ear?” the man with the goatee mumbled around a mouthful of burger.
“I’m sorry? I didn’t quite—”
“You’re not the one who should be sorry, sweetheart,” Sarah interrupted, narrowing her eyes. “Andrew honey, swallow your food and then talk, before you choke. You know as well as I do it’s Benny’s day off and he’s down the river fishing, so you’d prob’ly die before he got up here to give you the Heimlich. What are you thinking, dear? See anything you like?”
“I’ve heard good things about the Reuben.”
“Yeah you have,” one of the quiet patrons chimed in. He grinned over the edge of his mug. Behind his bushy black beard a silver tooth gleamed at me. “Nobody does up a Reuben like Sarah. Like heaven.”
“Oh now, you stop it, Mike, you flatterer.” Sarah flapped her hand, but a blind man wouldn’t have missed the blush and smirk of pride. “One Reuben, coming right up. You want fries?”
“Yes please.”
“Well aren’t you polite.” She gave me a smile, and my menu disappeared quick as it appeared. “Anybody else need anything? No? I’ll be right back with your sandwich, sweetheart.”
She vanished behind the swinging door into the kitchen.
“How’s the trail this time of year?” Andrew repeated, after swallowing.
“Not too bad. Pretty hot, especially down around Cle Elum.” I found most people asking about hiking conditions want to talk about the weather. They bore of elevation and mileage five words in, but they’ll talk about your average summer storm for hours. “I was actually at a lake just below Cloudy Peak when the craziest thing happened—”
“You catch any rain up around the Pugh Lookout?”
See? The fucking weather, of all things.
I shook my head. For a brief, fluttering second I considered telling them about Green-Eyes, about the raccoon ruining my campsite, but I decided against it. They didn’t care, ultimately. No one cared. It’s like when someone casually asks you how you’re doing. They don’t want to hear how you’re doing. They want you to say “fine” so they can tick off the little box next to your name and carry on with their lives.
“Nah, must’ve just missed it. What are you guys up to today? Working?”
“How’d you get into town? Didn’t walk, didya?”
“Uh, no. No, I caught a ride with someone about fifteen miles down the road.”
“Bad way to go ’bout it if you ask me, walkin’,” Cranson murmured, sipping his coffee. “Lotta people skittish about hitchin’ around these parts, but I find it to be the most effective way of getting around beyond hoofin’ it.”
“That’s because your car is a piece of shit, Jeremy.” Mike rolled his eyes. “You got no choice.”
“That’s not true!” Jeremy protested over the snickering from the others. “I’m waiting on that alternator to come in the mail, then the Camaro will run like a dream.”
“Oh, you have a Camaro? What year?” I asked. Mr. Neery owned a Camaro, but he’d had to sell it a few years before the fire. He let me sit in the driver’s seat when my parents were over visiting—I liked pretending I was a NASCAR driver.
“You’ve been waiting on that alternator for what, three weeks now? Where’d you order it from, space?”
“I didn’t know it’d take this long when I ordered it, sheeit.”
“Uh-huh,” Andrew said, unconvinced. He leaned over Jeremy to me, his grin still twitching the corners of his goatee. “You gonna swing by the general store, across the way?”
“Planning on it.” I took another sip of coffee. Damn, it really did taste amazing. “How’s their selection over there?”
“Hey, when you do, tell Ronnie that Andy said the game’s on at ten. He’ll know what I mean.”
“Oh there’s a game on? Football or baseball?” The regular season was due to start any day now, and I had my Falcons jersey pressed and ready. Ryan’s arm looked good in the preseason—I thought we had a real chance for a playoff bid. We were due for a ring any season now. Shit, if the Saints could do it, so could we. Buncha alligator-eating cousin-kissers.
“Wouldyer also tell him to quit fuckin’ around and call me about that alternator?”
“Nice try, Cranson. Don’t blame it on Coors, we all know you’re the one that cocked it up.” Mike reached for his coffee, shaking his head. When he smiled wide, the silver tooth glittered, gilded onto his grin.
“Are you—” I hesitated, not wanting to be rude. “Are you guys, like, ignoring me on purpose, or . . .? I’m not sure if I said something offensive?”
I waited for a response . . . but Andrew just blinked at me. His expression didn’t change. The same smile still hovered on his lips. I leaned in, unsure if he was acting odd, or if I was the butt of a joke I didn’t understand. The seconds ticked by in a silence growing uncomfortable. A gnat whined through the air.
I waited for a response . . . just like I had when I was standing in the service corridor in the woods, waiting for another giggle, my heart rate increasing, ticking like a bomb against my sternum. The air turned colder; I shivered.
The kitchen door swung open and Sarah saved us all from looming awkwardness, bustling out with a plate that she set in front of me.
“Here you are, sweetie. Eat up; you look like you need it. Mike, you want a top-off? Jeremy, ready for that burger yet?” She bustled down the bar, chatting with her customers, leaving me in blissful peace. The Reuben was delicious. Crispy, salty, and juicy. The fries were shoestring, no doubt out of an Ore-Ida bag, but I didn’t care. I ate every fatty scrap, listening with half an ear to the small-town gossip from down the bar. So-and-so got caught drunk at work, so-and-so fell in the river fishing, et cetera.
“My, my, someone was hungry,” Sarah said with a smile, swinging back down to my end of the bar to grab my empty plate. “How’d it taste?”
“Oh, amazing,” I said, lacing my hands around the dregs of my coffee to soak up any leftover heat—still a touch cold inside. “Top three I ever had, honest.”
“You’re a sweetheart. Want another cup of coffee before you hit the road? Maybe some tea? I make it myself.”
I did, but the morning had turned to afternoon outside and I didn’t want to risk the general store closing early. Small-town shops did it all the time, especially in mountain towns. The owner has an empty shop, wants to go home and have a beer? Hey presto, closing time at three today. I paid for my meal plus a fat tip and slid off my stool.
“You guys have a good one,” I said, retrieving my bag.
“Take it easy, partner,” Mike said with a wave. Nobody else looked up.
The bell on the door chimed as I walked out.