I have no idea how long I was out, but I awoke with a start to pitch blackness.
Was that a cry? Was someone calling my name? Was it someone coming to rescue me?
I sat up, cracked my head on the tree root, swore, rubbed my head and listened. Nothing. Silence.
Surely Mom and Dad would yell a few times. Many, many times. They wouldn’t yell just once, then shrug their shoulders and head back. Would they?
A terrible, terrible worry had been growing in my head. Would Mom and Dad remember our conversation about those two survival books and actually, conceivably think I’d meant to walk into the forest and live off the land? They would never think that. Would they? Maybe they thought I wanted to be like that kid in My Side of the Mountain who left the city to try his hand at surviving in the Catskill Mountains. Maybe they’d come around in a few months, expecting me to make them Christmas dinner, forest-style.
Of course they wouldn’t think that. This was me, Flynn. Their son. They knew me. I laughed out loud. But the laugh sounded forced and artificial. And it only started as a laugh: by the end, it was a sob.
It was so dark that I had to put my hand up to my eyes to make sure they were open. My hand was shaking with cold, my whole body shivering. It was incredibly, stupidly cold.
Somehow I had to get through this night without freezing to death.
“Covers, some kind of covers,” I muttered, feeling around like there might be a feather duvet or a wool blanket within reach.
I crawled out of my little hole and groped around the base of the tree. A mass of cold dead leaves gave off a dank, earthy smell as I clawed them into a pile. I stuffed them down the arms of my hoodie, then zipped it right up and shoved leaves up the front and back as far as they would go. It actually worked pretty well if I didn’t move around too much—I tended to shed leaves at the slightest movement. It vaguely reminded me of a padded Incredible Hulk costume I had when I was five. Only in that costume, I looked jacked and superpowerful. Or so I’d thought when I was five. In my current outfit, I just looked odd and desperate, but I didn’t care.
My legs were a bigger problem. The bottoms of my jeans were freezing into two icy cylinders. I tucked my hands up my sleeves and beat at the bottom of my jeans, trying to thaw or at least soften them.
I groped some more and found a few pine branches at the bottom of a nearby tree. I dragged them over to my little hovel and covered my legs and feet. I curled up again against the tree. It was, admittedly, not perfect. Slightly less comfortable than a feather duvet. But it blocked some of the wind. I was still miserably cold, but not quite as miserably cold as I had been.
I refused to think about any insects that could be on the leaves. Insects? Don’t make me laugh (then sob). Insects were the least of my worries.
Where were Mom and Dad? Seriously, where were they? It had to be the middle of the night now. I had an absurd mental picture of them sitting around the fire at Joe and Ellen’s, talking and laughing, and then one of them saying, “Wow, 3:00 AM already! We should probably be going. Wait—where’s Flynn?” Crazy. Of course they had missed me; of course they were looking for me. It was just that it was night and absolutely black out here in this lonely forest.
Inky black. In the city, it’s never pitch black. There are streetlights, house lights, car headlights. Lights. And there are always a few people around, no matter how late it is. Some places, like airports, hospitals and McDonald’s, even stay open 24/7. But out here, I couldn’t even see the moon. Or even one star. It had been a cloudy day, I remembered.
I slumped against the tree with my eyes open. I knew they were open because when I shut them tightly for a while and then opened them again, I could distinguish slight shapes in the gloom. Pitch-black trees against a charcoal sky. I had to stay awake, had to listen for the sounds of the huge rescue operation that was likely under way.
I began to hear distinct noises. The river was a constant background sound, but it seemed to be getting louder. The wind would build up steam, whine and moan, then die down. And you might think trees are silent, but they creak and crack, and they drop cones and branches and leaves. The tree I was sheltering under even vibrated slightly in the wind. This will sound stupid, but for the first time in my life, I actually thought about trees as living things. I mean, I’d always known they were alive, but now I really felt them living.
“Hey, tree?” I whispered to the one I was resting my back against. “Thanks. Thanks for letting me hang with you, and being big, and…you know, having my back and everything.”
There were other noises. Ones I feared. Animal noises. Scuffling, scurrying noises. Small creatures stupidly bustling and banging around with the sole purpose, it seemed, of waking up predators.
Shut up, you stupid, scurrying things. Do you have some kind of creepy rodent death wish? Do you want to be a midnight snack? Do you? Nothing is so important to do that it can’t wait until morning. So just curl up quietly in your hole in the ground or in a tree or something.
I heard an owl hoot and saw a dark shadow take off from a tree and soar noiselessly away. Speaking of sinister night fliers, I wondered if there were bats out here. I tightened my hood.
Once I heard another far-off howling sound. Not the kind of sound that lulls a kid to sleep, let me tell you.
I lay there, red-eyed and alert, teeth clenched and chattering, stiffening in the cold. I jumped at every faint sound. There was no way I was going to sleep. I would stay up all night long. All I had to do was hang on until morning. Everything would be better in the morning. Someone would find me in the morning. If Mom and Dad had given up, surely Joe and Ellen would take a turn, and when they got tired, maybe somebody would alert the authorities.
“Aaooooowwww…” The far-off coyote or wolf howled again, like that last annoying kid who just will not shut up at a sleepover even though everyone else is ready to sleep.
And that was when I had a feverish thought that made my goose-bumpy skin pucker and get even goose-bumpier: wolf or werewolf?
I thought of a movie some of my friends and I had seen last week at a “horror-thon” at Nick’s place. We’d all laughed at it then, but right now that werewolf seemed very, very plausible, slinking through the darkness, desperate, so desperate, for the taste of blood…
I whimpered. The trees cracked and moaned and shivered around me.
The taste-of-blood idea made me think of vampires, and vampires made me think of zombies, and zombies made me think of orcs, and orcs made me think of homicidal maniacs in hockey masks, with chain saws…
“Stop it!” I said out loud. I dug my chipped fingernails into my bloody hands. “Just stop it. Get a grip on yourself, Flynn. It’s a forest. Just a forest. Joe and Ellen live out here.”
I needed something to occupy my skittering mind. Something that didn’t involve monsters and blood. I tried counting backward from a thousand, but I kept losing my place. I went through the times tables, something I’d never done except for marks. They were remarkably soothing, but once I got up to twelve times twelve, I was pretty much at the limit of what I could remember.
Then I did what I always did at home if I couldn’t sleep. It was my own version of counting sheep.
Okay, NHL. Hockey teams. Western Conference teams. I closed my eyes and started listing them slowly. Flames, Oilers, Avalanche, Stars, Kings, the Wild…Predators…Coyotes…I swallowed nervously and looked around. This was not helping.
Moving right along to the Eastern Conference: Leafs, Bruins, Sabres, Red Wings…Islanders, Rangers. I jumped at a loud crack. Uh…Senators…There was a quick, light scurrying sound up a nearby tree. Uh… Senators…
It was no use. Everything but raw fear (which has a metallic taste, like blood) kept slipping out of my mind as I startled at each new sound.
Finally, I gritted my chattering teeth, stared into the blackness and waited for morning.