Still, the bridge was the first chance of a dry crossing she’d seen, and she reasoned that at least she would be able to hang on to the ropes if she felt less-than-sturdy. If she crossed on rocks or some such thing there wouldn’t be any ropes to grab onto if she felt herself falling.
She slid her real foot onto the bridge and felt the whole thing wobble as soon as her weight pressed in.
“Screw that,” she said, her heart pounding as she stepped back. “Besides, what happened to shaking off the dogs? You’ve got to go in the water if you want to do that.”
Red tried not to talk to herself because it reminded her too much that she was alone but sometimes words just fell out of her mouth, like they were trying to remind her that she could still speak.
She shrugged her pack up and down to shift the weight a little bit and decided to go on until she could find a shallow place to cross.
As she walked she started to get the so-tired-she-was-delirious feeling, the feeling that everything ached (but especially her stump, she really did need to rest it for a while) and her eyes were going to wink shut of their own volition.
Soon she would fall down on her face and pass out. It was inevitable—she was pushing herself too hard and too far and she just needed to cross the damned stream and find somewhere she could rest for a while and stop thinking, because the more she thought, the more she worried, the more she drove herself into crazy circles trying to anticipate every possible bad thing that could happen and avoid it.
“Just someplace to put my head down for a while, that’s all I need,” she said as she sat on the bank and pulled off her sock and shoe from her real foot and rolled up both pant legs, exposing the shiny metal tube on the left side.
The water was cold, really cold, and the shock of it startled her. The stream was deeper than it looked, even though she’d found a place where it seemed shallow. It came up to the middle of her calf instead of just above her ankle as she thought it would. Red slogged across, mindful of rocks that could trip and mud that could trap and any other thing that might go wrong.
When she reached the other side she felt much more awake because that little bit of cold water on her bare skin made her shiver all over. She hurriedly dried her foot and leg with a small towel from her pack, noting that the sun was almost exactly overhead now.
There hadn’t been any sight or sound of people or animals since she’d encountered that man the night before, but she hurried away from the stream, grateful for the thicker cover of the woods on this side.
Red did not want to camp so close to the water. She continued on for another half hour or so, keeping a close eye on the shadows around her and listening for the sound of anybody else hiding in the trees.
Then it just appeared before her, almost like a hallucination summoned by her exhausted brain. A cabin. A cabin all by its lonesome, in a clearing in the woods.
For one brief moment she thought she’d somehow gotten to her grandmother’s house already, that she’d walked farther than she realized in the night. Then she shook her head and recognized that this building was about a quarter of the size of her grandmother’s—Grandma had a two-story with four rooms on the ground floor and a loft bedroom above, built with love and care by Red’s grandfather, who always went by Papa.
This was more like a hunting shack, a one-room affair with rough-hewn logs and a small metal chimney. There were beige-colored curtains over the one window she could see, but there didn’t appear to be any signs of life.
That doesn’t mean anything. Someone could be asleep inside, someone with a shotgun next to his bed who’ll blow your stupid head off if you knock on the door. And anyway in the movies people always get stuck in some cabin in the middle of nowhere and it seems like there’s nobody around but actually there is a serial killer lurking nearby who can just fade into the trees and wait for someone to walk into his trap.
(Red, don’t go thinking stupid thoughts. If there was ever a serial killer here he’s probably dead from the Cough just like everyone else.)
That last bit sounded like her mama’s voice, her very practical mama.
But there might be someone in there, there really might.
She found her feet moving toward the cabin anyway, even though her brain was saying, No no no too risky. Her legs had mutinied, taken the rest of her hostage, because her heart had seen that little cabin—rough and no doubt filthy it would be—and longed for it. She longed to sleep somewhere inside, under a roof instead of the open air or the thin nylon of her tiny tent.
She longed for the security of a boundary on all sides, of feeling tucked in and cozy and knowing that nobody could sneak up on her if the door was shut and locked. That was something she’d taken for granted before, before Everything Happened—the feeling of being indoors, of being safe.
Red couldn’t let go of her caution, though—couldn’t just walk right up to the door and act like she belonged there (because there might be a guy there with a shotgun, there really might, or a killer with a machete). She crept toward the one window as quietly as she could, which was not very quietly because there were dry dead leaves all around the clearing that seemed as loud as firecrackers in the still air.
She peered into the interior through the little crack in the curtains but couldn’t see anything except the handle of an old-fashioned metal percolator sitting on a table under the window. The rest of the cabin was too dark. So she looked closer at that percolator handle, because it was the only clue she had.
The dust was thick on the top curve of the handle, too thick to have been used by anyone recently. Which meant there probably wasn’t anyone inside. Probably.
She walked all around the cabin, looking for footprints
(like you’re some kind of tracker, ha, what do you even think you’re looking for?)
because even if she wasn’t some kind of tracker she could recognize a fresh print in the dirt if she saw one and she didn’t see any around the cabin or by the door.
Having done the only safety check she could do, Red approached the front door and tried the handle.
It was locked.
She laughed out loud then, and the laugh sounded a little crazy because she was exhausted and hungry and she’d been so concerned about a maniac with a gun that she hadn’t thought of the possibility of the owner locking the door when he left his cabin at the end of last season.
And then she cried a little too, and when she heard herself doing that loony laugh-cry thing she knew she was getting hysterical and she said, “Enough.”
Work the problem, Red.
That was her dad’s voice, not hers—it was the thing he always said when she was stuck and frustrated. For a long time it annoyed her until she realized that he was telling her to take a breath, to step back, to consider all the options one by one. It was a marvel of brevity, actually, to say all of that with just four words.
The window was far too small to climb through, even if she could break the glass—and she didn’t want to, for if she managed to get inside she wanted the window closed.