"Fine." She trembled, and she didn't know whether it was from the chill mist of the creek or her anxiety. She held the light while Elliott guided his damaged bike through the water, carefully choosing his steps on the mossy stones so his shoes would stay dry. He slogged through the mushy black mud of the opposite bank and stood above her, lost in the dark web of wood and vines.
"Come on, Carolyn. I can't see anything."
She took one look behind her, half expecting to see a crazed black bear or a red wolf or even a mountain lion, then navigated the rocks and headed up the embankment. She slipped once, going to her knee in the lizard-smelling mud, but Elliott grabbed her upper arm and tugged her to solid ground. Then he dragged the bike up and wheeled it into the bushes.
"Do you want to have a snack?" he asked. "An energy bar or something?"
"I want to get out of here."
"Let's look at the map one more time."
Carolyn nodded and gave the penlight back to her husband. She recognized that she had literally and figuratively passed the torch, but she didn't care. Truth be told, she was nearly in tears. So much for her run as Margaret Thatcher or the Republican Hillary Clinton.
They moved a little away from the water and gathered around the penlight as if it were a battery-powered campfire. Somewhere above them, the moon had risen, but its reassuring glow was filtered into a teasing gauze by the treetops. Elliott was studying the map when Carolyn heard the scrape and rustle of leaves.
"Did you hear that?" she asked, her heart a wooden knot in her chest
"Just the wind. Or maybe a raccoon."
"The wind's not blowing. And raccoons don't get that big." Carolyn was struck by the image of a mutant, man-sized raccoon, reared up on its hind legs, crazed yellow eyes blazing from a bandit mask. The image should have made her chuckle, at least on the inside. Instead, the tension increased its grip on her internal organs. And, goddamn, she suddenly had to pee.
She didn't relish peeling down her nylon shorts and squatting in the darkness, further exposing herself to whatever was out mere.
"Okay, if we're right here, and can make three miles an hour, we should make it to the main road by eleven o'clock. Then we can find a house and call for a cab or something."
The idea of walking up on a stranger's porch and knocking was almost as scary as the filing that was or wasn't following them. "I don't think they have cabs out here."
"Maybe the police. Or the Happy Hollow office."
Elliott must be scared, too. Otherwise, he'd never admit to oth-ers that he'd made a mistake. Carolyn's knowledge of his failure was one thing, he could gloss that over in the coming week and eventually have her believe getting lost had somehow been her fault. But here he was, ready to tell the local sheriff's department or the rental cabin management that he'd wandered off with no respect for the wilderness, that his modern-day James Fenimore Cooper act had gone bust, that a Yankee engineer with a wristwatch calculator couldn't navigate the ancient hills. Carolyn couldn't wait, even if it meant he'd be surly until they made it back to White Plains.
Mostly, she couldn't wait to see a streetlight.
Because the noise was back, closer, to the right now.
"You heard that?"
"No." He said it so firmly that it sounded like self-denial.
"It's closer."
His face contorted in the dying orange orb of light. "Listen, Carolyn. This is the twenty-first century, not the goddamned Blair Witch Project. In real life, people don't get stalked by cannibalistic hillbillies or eaten by wild animals. And, last I heard, aliens don't have secret landing sites in the Appalachians. That's the Southwest desert, remember? Ergo, there is nothing following us and I'm trying to solve this little problem you created and get us safely back to civilization."
Leaves rustled ten feet ahead of them, behind a gnarled evergreen. Despite herself, Carolyn moved closer to Elliott and clung to his arm. He stiffened and smirked.
"I'll get us out of here," he said. "Have I ever let you-"
The penlight died and darkness rushed in like water flooding a ruptured bathysphere. It was almost as if the light had warded off the other sounds of the night, because the still air was filled with chirring, scratching, and creaking. Beneath those came the ragged whisper of breathing.
Caroyln's eyes adjusted to the dim moonlight just in time to see a large black shadow hover beyond Elliott, and then her husband was ripped from her grasp. He gave a wet gurgle, as if a freshet had erupted between the granite stones of his face. One of his legs flailed out and struck her kneecap, and he gave a bleat of pain. Drops of liquid spattered on Carolyn and she screamed. The air stirred above her head and she looked up to see a curved and dripping grin of metal catch the distant eye of the moon. The grin descended and bit with a meaty thunk, and all Carolyn could think was that the meat must have been her husband, that arrogant engineer with a fondness for college football, the Bush clan, plasma television, and pharmaceutical stocks.
The scream jumped the wires from her brain to the ganglia low in her spinal cord, a place encoded during the Paleozoic Era when flight meant survival and the higher thinking processes shut their useless yammerings.
She ran blindly, branches tearing at her hair, heedless of the trail's direction. The moist hacking continued behind her, but she scarcely heard, because her eardrums protected her high-order brain. She was an animal, scrambling through the leaves, guided by instinct as she ducked under branches and dodged between scaly oaks and beech. She couldn't see but she didn't need to see, because her eyes were jiggling orbs of deadweight in her skull and a more primitive sight led her onward. All knowledge was in her skin, mind given over to flesh, she was aware of nothing but the roar of wind through her throat and the pulse in her temples and the dark sharp thing at her back and-
She didn't see the maple with the low branch, because her eyes had shut down, but she did see the bright yellow and green sparks that exploded like fireworks on the movie screen of her forehead.
Carolyn was unconscious as the goats gathered around her, and her useless, high-order brain stayed mercifully absent as her true-blue Republican blood leaked into the land of legends.
Chapter Nineteen
The general store was crowded with a mix of locals and tourists. Odus, his ball cap tipped low and a toothpick between his teeth, stood by the sandwich counter and waited as Sarah rang up the purchases of a chubby boy in too-tight nylon biking shorts and tank top. The customer's shoulders were pink and peeling, the sign of a spoiled city boy getting too much sun on vacation. The boy's dad stood beside him in a red sweatsuit that was meant to portray athleticism but instead gave the impression of a sausage that was about to bust out of its skin. Sarah bagged the boy's mound of candy bars, pork rinds, and lollipops.
A bluegrass band was tuning up in the park across the road. A Solom community group had bought four acres along the river that were now cleared and grassed, with a band shell at one end. From early summer until the end of October, weekly shows were held in the park. The music was either bluegrass or traditional old-timey, though the general store hosted occasional debates about the difference between the two labels. Odus picked some mandolin himself and even sat in on some local recording sessions, but he didn't like performing in front of people.
Sarah looked away from the register and frowned at him. He gave a small nod that said, "We need to talk after you take care of business."
Sarah paid rapt attention to the customers, smiling as if she appreciated them for more than just their money. A six-pack of Mountain Dew, two cups of overpriced coffee, a microwave burrito, a honey bun, a bottle of sunblock, a rustic birdhouse, a basket made of entwined jack vine, a stack of Doc Watson CDs, and two bags of Twizzlers changed hands before Sarah got a break. She picked up a dusting cloth, came to the sandwich counter, and began wiping down the dewy glass.