SHE WAKES UP ON THE TRAIL. Somehow, they’ve come to rest on one of the switchbacks.

Dawn can see the dead bystander in his orange jacket fifteen or twenty feet off the trail, upslope. She can see an Out of the Wild logo on his baseball cap. And when she looks closer, she can see it’s Steve.

Steve, the guy who picked her up from the airport.

Who brought her into this mess.

Dawn feels no satisfaction at seeing him dead. But she doesn’t feel anything else, either. She’s just numb.

She lifts her head a little bit and looks around and sees Warden. He lies a few feet from her, on his back, his neck skewed at a crazy angle. He’s bleeding.

He’s not moving.

But from the rise and fall of his chest, Dawn can tell he’s still alive.

She knows this is not a good sign. She’s seen too many scary movies to believe this is over. She knows the only way to really end this story is to kill Warden dead and make sure he stays that way.

She doesn’t have a weapon, but Warden seems to have dropped his knife, and Dawn knows she could crawl over to him and just, you know, cut off his air supply or something. Crush his windpipe. Something brutal and awful and guaranteed effective.

She has enough strength to kill him. Barely. And Dawn knows that’s what has to happen.

But Dawn isn’t a killer.

Dawn has done a lot of bad shit in her life.

She’s cut class and partied and hooked up with weirdos. She’s been rude to her mom and her stepdad and her teachers. She ran away and shacked up with a drug dealer.

She got drunk and threw up on some guy and that’s why her father is dead.

If you asked her, Dawn would tell you she’s not a good person.

But Dawn isn’t a killer.

Not like this.

She shoved Brandon off that cliff, sure, but that was different. That was a fight.

That was him or her.

Warden’s unconscious. He doesn’t look like a monster anymore. He looks like a teenager. A fragile, broken boy. Dawn can’t crush his windpipe.

She can’t strangle him to death.

(But you and I both know that’s going to come back and bite her.)