It came very simply as a soft ping and the appearance of a “1” in the view counter beside his video. Someone else was out there. Someone had watched the video. Someone had heard his message. He checked his cell, checked his email — nothing — just that solitary “1” on the computer screen. It stared at him for hours.
Loeb was awakened from a dreamless sleep by music, a song he despised. In the “before” time, he had chosen it as his ringtone for someone not in his cell’s phonebook, someone unknown and therefore not worth his time. He cursed the phone, pressing all the wrong buttons before the call went to voicemail.
Night had come to the city. The Parkway was beautiful at night. He had always thought that but had never really taken the time to appreciate it when time was not the issue. Now, with time the only issue, he connected to his voicemail. There was one message. He recognized the voice, a woman he had met once, an admirer of sorts, someone infatuated with his mind as well as his body. “Call me, Philip,” she said simply. “You know the number.” He stared at the phone. The date stamp was two weeks old. He had been in the airport and was tired of waiting in the security line to be screened. He had ignored the call then as he often did. One view, one missed call, no message — the commercials, the test patterns, and his recording played over and over.
The smartest man on the planet realized he was also the hungriest. He showered, dressed, took the elevator down to the restaurant, put on a CD from the collection behind the maître d's station, and listened to classical music while making dinner. What his cooking lacked in culinary skill, he more than made up for with a bottle of wine from the Freedom’s cellar. Loeb was drinking the last of it when the out-of-place intruded — the sound of a door opening and a chill gust of air from the lobby.
The Survivalist
Bowen closed his eyes and listened to the helicopter blades chopping the air above. He saw everything: the gleam of the sun on the craft as it dropped below the clouds, its shadow moving across the bright snow-covered hills, the faces of the passengers in the windows looking down at the pristine forest. He saw it all. He had acquired his inner vision from Little Feather, the old Apache tracker. He had lived with him for a year in the wilds. Little Feather taught him about the forest, about people, about life and death.
Bowen opened his eyes when he heard the first crunch. The waiting was over. The buck was eating the apples laid out on a tree stump next to his hide. Thick falling snow was forming a white ridge on the animal’s back as it stood motionless and alert. Once the six-point whitetail determined that it was safe, the doe and the young ones hiding in the nearby brush would follow. They were beautiful creatures. Bowen was not hunting them. He had been waiting in his hide in the woods for hours for no other reason than to be close enough to touch one.
Bowen was a survivalist who lived in the mountainous forests of Western Maryland. He offered classes on the subject to anyone willing to shell out $2,000 for a week in the wilds. If they were good enough, students learned how to start fires with a bow drill, how to find their way without a compass, and how to endure their own purification in a sweat lodge. He had written two books on the subject and had become something of a celebrity after tracking down and rescuing a lost child in the mountains, succeeding where the National Guard, a team of trackers with dogs, and an implanted GPS had failed.
Over the years, his business had grown to a staff of five and his lone cabin into a complex protected by ten-foot razor wire and security cameras. There was a mess hall, a dorm with heat and running water (so the paying customers who were learning how to survive off the land could come back at night to a hot shower and a warm critter-free bed), and several hundred acres of real wilderness.
It was four days before Christmas and this was the last class before a two-week break. Bowen was more than looking forward to it. He could smell it as clearly as the musk of the nervous buck beside him. Bowen, the man who made his living teaching others to survive without society, was going to spend his vacation with a woman who never set foot outside the city, the only person in the world he cared about — Carmen. Theirs was an intermittent and unusual relationship, but that was Bowen.
He had taken the group a day’s walk from camp and taught them to build shelters to survive the night. Most fared pretty well. The class exercise this last day was to sneak up on a deer and get close enough to touch it. Bowen was waiting there for them. The class was still several hundred yards away, laboring closer behind their camouflage, but making far too much noise. Soon the deer would decide that the danger of the unfamiliar sounds outweighed the temptation of the apples, and class would be dismissed. He closed his eyes and thought of Carmen, of the scent of her perfume and the milky softness of her skin.
The deer bolted, and three crows were flushed from their roost by a loud crack. He heard the student swearing as the deer disappeared over a rise, and he imagined the crows winging off, becoming mere black specks on a vivid winter sky. But the vision was wrong — his class was no longer in it — the crunching twigs, the soft whispers, the rustling leaves were gone, and at 12:21:12 p.m. on 12|21|12 silence spread through the forest like the panic of a student as he was spun around blindfolded and told to find his way back to camp without the use of his eyes.
Bowen searched for his class. He found where they had been. He found signs of all eight of them. He found the last blade of grass one had crushed in an effort to sneak closer to the deer, but he found no tracks leading away, no bodies, no blood. They had simply vanished.
Bowen was not a religious man. His parents had raised him in the church. He couldn’t remember which. It didn’t matter. They believed in a God who would return to judge the world and he did not. What he believed in were signs, in cause and effect, and for him, life was simply a trail that man followed to its end.
He hiked until dark and built his shelter against an outcropping of rock on a steep hillside with a view of the valley. The forest was home to many animals in winter, yet Bowen hadn’t seen a single one since leaving his hide. Whatever happened to his students had scared them all off. There was no sleep for Bowen that night.
He returned to the complex the next morning and found his staff and students gone. They were there one moment and gone the next, just like his class. Outside his office, a boot print and a spidery pattern in the snow told Bowen that someone had been bending over tying his shoelaces when he’d vanished. In the mess hall, he saw where a group sat down at the table, had been enjoying their midday meal, and then were gone. Everywhere he searched, the effect was the same. The cause was unknown and there was no trail.
Bowen picked over some cold food in the mess hall, weighing his options. He called Carmen several times and left messages. There was no answer at either the Ranger Station, the police in the town on the other side of the mountain, or the Maryland Highway Patrol. He spent the rest of the day packing from a mental list of what to bring to the end of the world. That was what his instincts told him he was facing. Whatever had happened in the woods was just the beginning.
Bowen’s repeated phone calls to Carmen went unanswered, but he stuck to his plan — pack the Rover, get to the city, pick up Carmen, and drive as far south as his gas would take them. If they could make it as far as the Carolinas… He knew a place on the water down there, a nice place. It would be tough on her, but they would survive, and if they ran into any trouble along the way, he was ready.