thirty-two:
wednesday, late afternoon

Download the spirit of Devo. Be tough, find food, stay hydrated.

Another day, another slog.

The distance wasn’t that bad. At the end of the trudge would be Trudy and her kitchen.

Hunger nagged at Allison’s insides, but it wasn’t true hunger, just a body grumbling about lack of routine. She wasn’t that tired, just pissed off she didn’t have a horse. She wasn’t that wet, but her bone marrow was starting to slosh around.

Sunny Boy.

The dogs.

Dillard.

And company.

Why didn’t they come after her? Was she being followed now? Doubtful. She gave an occasional look over her shoulder, but the woods were too wet, too inhospitable.

So why cut the horse loose—or steal it? At least she’d have some good leads for the cops, if they could be bothered.

Allison snaked her way through dense woods, picking her way up slopes packed with dead trees, soaked barkless trunks as slick as black ice. Keeping a straight line was dicey. Continually checking on her bearings, maintaining a set distance from the open valley, was exhausting. She would stick to the cover for another hour or so and then maybe risk making better time in the open, back on the trail.

Allison’s legs screamed from the uphill work and her feet, thank you very much, would rather be settled in a pair of stirrups. She didn’t take horses for granted, did she? Even at walking speed, they were faster than a human and they made the work look easy. At least, they rarely complained or balked, didn’t ask for much in return.

Allison slipped into a semi-trance. Legs moved, brain evaluated the course for the next few steps, legs moved, eyes checked the trajectory against the open field to the south, legs moved. All negative thoughts were banished, cancelled, forbidden. At the mere first syllable of mental complaint, she slashed at the body of the word with a hot sword fresh from the fire. Bad thoughts were not allowed to gain traction. Every step, in truth, was easy. Putting all the steps in a row in one compressed effort was the hard part. She could use a quart of water but she wasn’t utterly dry. She wasn’t marching off a landing craft at Omaha Beach. She wasn’t scaling K-2 without oxygen. She was walking in the Colorado woods in the rain and she’d be home, pending a random mountain lion attack, for dinner. The trance sucked her down, pulled her under into a quiet, small zone where problems were identified, run through triage for a quick and precise evaluation of their true risk factors, and just as quickly dispatched to the back of the waiting line and told to get real.

She pictured in detail, down to the order of the drawers in her dresser, her Iowa childhood bedroom. She went step by step through helping her mother prepare a Sunday roast. She saw the lumps of butter in the mashed potatoes. Allison remembered names from her senior high school class, 73 in all. She made it to 29 when the names went fuzzy and blank. She switched to working on a list of her hometown streets and then thinking with obscene clarity about her parents and the terrific gift they had offered by allowing her to disappear, essentially, into a broad and rugged landscape and step away into another world where her basic functions consisted of riding a horse in the mountain woods of Colorado, helping hunters set up camp after riding a horse in the woods of Colorado and helping hunters pack out their kills by riding a horse in the mountain woods of Colorado.

Except, of course, no horse.

Not this time.

She thought about the half-corpse, went over every detail in her mind, replayed arriving at Lumberjack Camp. She pictured the teenagers. She thought about the half-corpse and the sticks and the houndsman and the trail and then the trail vanishing. She wondered if the Lamott shooting investigation might be closer to done and would that mean they might shift their attention to the half-corpse? She wondered if they gave a shit about the half-corpse, a sad body from the woods with no name and no witnesses and no dramatic cell phone video. The half-corpse had no constituency, no advocates. She wondered if it was fair that certain celebrity shootings and celebrity attempted murders and celebrity murders drew more cop resources than others. If you are going to get murdered and you want your killer caught, she thought, make sure you’ve got some good public relations buzz before you get whacked.

The trance eased. The rain, too. Sun chewed its way through the raindrops and lit up a high ridge. The footing turned less sponge-like. Her body caved to the steady pace of work. She was so tired she might turn Colin down if he asked. But a meal by Trudy and drinks by Mr. Hornitos might put her back in the mood, as long as she wasn’t required to perform any Twister-style positions. Why shouldn’t every body part end up the day as sore and ready for rehab as all the others? As Colin liked to say, it doesn’t count unless it hurts.

Allison moved to the open valley. She had seen nobody all afternoon. It was time to declare herself, at least for the moment, un-pursued.

She allowed a ten-minute break on a high spot. She scanned the view behind the binoculars, the only useful manmade object in her possession. No elk, no deer, no mountain lions. If all went well, she figured to reach Trudy’s front door by 10 p.m., time for a fashionably late dinner in Paris or Athens, if not in the U.S.A.

She scanned ahead too—and quickly found a lone rider on horseback.

Apparition.

Mind playing tricks.

She was in the Sahara and this was a Bedouin in search of his next oasis.

Just because she had thought of Colin in the past ten minutes didn’t mean she could conjure him up. The figure was a bouncing dot on the trail, but his riding style was unmistakable, as tall as he could sit and as natural, as one-with-horse as a man could get. The combination of living things was a magical meld. He was coming down a long, straight draw. He was moving in earnest.

The horse had the muddled colors of a dirty roan, like Merlin. Horse and rider disappeared from view as the trail pulled them down out of sight through a thick stand of aspen, shimmering and drenched in the spackled bits of sunlight.

Suddenly, they were right there, the pungent sweat of a horse happy in her nose.

“What the hell—”

With the apparition taking on three-dimensional form and sounding like Colin McKee, every repressed ache came roaring to life.

“You came,” said Allison.

“Of course,” said Colin.

“How did you know?”

“How did I know what?” Colin’s embrace was the hug of the century. “Are you okay?”

“But how did you know?”

“Sunny Boy,” said Colin. “He showed up a couple hours ago, winded and worn out. Lead rope had been sliced clean. There was a group out hiking, came across him walking down the trail. Like he was out for a Sunday stroll. They couldn’t tie him up or leave him so they turned around and started heading back and when I came across them—”

Colin stopped.

“You were out,” said Allison. “Looking.”

“I’ve got some sandwiches,” he said. “And water. Plenty. The hikers took Sunny Boy back.”

These words were being said over her shoulder. She had his neck in an elbow-powered vice grip.

“Come on,” said Colin. “We can ride double.”

Inside, her body was singing or dancing. Or smiling. If non-verbal expression was possible, say, by bones.