Chapter 1 Riley #4
Oliver walks slowly. He’s already tired. Riley breaks off pieces of a Powerbar and feeds him in fragments as they go. Earlier this evening, she broke the lock off the pantry and the storage cupboard and raided them.
She has made it final. They can never come back to Cousin’s house.
They catch the bus on the corner of Front Street, blinking in the neon glare.
The driver has a kind, pouched face like an old orangutan.
Riley feels Oliver wanting to talk to him.
He doesn’t get much company. She draws him gently to the back of the empty bus.
‘If the demon is looking for us,’ Riley says, ‘we should try not to attract attention.’
It’s a twenty-minute ride to the edge of the Rocky Mountain National Park.
Riley feels the driver’s eyes on them in the rear-view mirror.
She knows that she and Oliver are too young to be out alone at this time of night.
As the bus pulls up to the dark gates he looks at her and says, ‘Someone meeting you?’
‘Our mom’s just started as a maid over there,’ Riley says brightly, clutching Oliver’s hand tight.
She points at the blocky stack of a motel.
Behind it, the Rocky Mountains rear. ‘Her shift finishes now and she’s got the car.
Got to give the keys back to my aunt Mimi, she doesn’t drive no more ’cause she don’t know her left from right, never did since the boom hit her head, on that TV show she did catering for back in—’
‘All right, all right,’ the bus driver says hastily. Riley does have this talent – has it for days. She can lie.
Riley bends and pretends to tie her shoe until the red eyes of the bus are closed by dark distance. ‘Ok,’ she says. ‘Time to go!’ Oliver trots happily beside her. He doesn’t seem to mind about the demon anymore. Real life is always half made-up for kids, anyway.
They go quickly past the empty ticket booths, the ranger station. Oliver doesn’t even need to duck to walk under the traffic barrier.
Inside the park everything is different. Quiet but breathing – like it’s been waiting for them. A bird calls in the night. There won’t be mountain lions this close to the gate, Riley reminds herself. Or bears. There won’t.
She reaches into her pack and pulls it out. Oliver gasps. He’s shocked but also thrilled. ‘We don’t touch Cousin’s gun,’ he recites.
‘I do. You a hundred per cent don’t.’ Riley has watched Cousin enter the code to the gun safe through her eyelashes, over and over. She knew she might need it.
She makes sure the safety is on and slips it into her jacket pocket.
It’s only a .22 but it could help. In the dark?
Against a 700-pound bear? Shut up, brain.
There were other guns in the safe, gleaming ranks of sheeny metal.
Riley took this old one with its chipped wooden grip and its pitch to the left.
She knows a little about how guns behave.
Her mother always said, they’re always looking for something to bite and they don’t much care what.
So Riley didn’t take a really powerful one with big jaws.
‘Is it for the demon?’ Oliver asks.
‘Yup. I’ll shoot it dead if it follows us.’
He nods, satisfied. Riley puts on the flashlight and it throws a wide beam up the narrow trail that leads away from the road. Uphill all the way, to above the treeline, to the ridge. Out of the forest they’ll be silhouetted against the moon but they’ll be able to see anyone coming too.
She takes the directions carefully from her pocket. Noon wrote them on paper already soft with wear. Riley touches it with care.
DAY ONE
WEST GATE – TURN RIGHT
CLIMB UP THE MOONLIT RIDGE
FOLLOW MARKED TRAIL
TRAPPER CABIN
DAY TWO
14 MILES
STRIKE WEST OFF MAIN TRAIL. LILAC IS THE DOOR
DEER TRAIL
PASS THE CLEARING BENEATH TREE LIKE A SHIP
DAY THREE
DEER TRAIL
OVER THE MOUNTAIN PASS WHERE PEAKS HAVE EARS LIKE CATS
CLIFF PATH
WEST, SUMMER FOREST
THE CLIFF, THE END
NOW FLY
NOWHERE
We’ll never find it, Riley thinks. Never. And there’s no way to interpret the last instruction. But there’s also nowhere else to go.
You think you’re such a clever clogs. Cousin’s voice is in her ear, clear as anything.
Riley has known for a while that she does have a demon, really. It’s Cousin, in her head. ‘Shut up, you turd,’ she mutters. That cheers her up a little.
‘Lost my manners,’ she says aloud, mimicking Cousin’s voice. ‘Were you born in a barn? Raised by wolves?’
‘Cheerio,’ Oliver says, joining in. ‘Mustn’t grumble.’
Sometimes making fun of people is the only power you have.
The climb is difficult for Oliver. He labours, breathing hard.
The rocky slope crumbles like dry toast and more than once they slide, hands scraped bloody, scrabbling for a hold on the loose scree.
‘You’re doing such a good job,’ Riley tells Oliver over and over, which is true.
And ‘This is the hardest part,’ which is a lie.
Eventually they stumble out of the pine-scented dark onto the ridge. The moon lights the land grey, puddles of dark in the hollows. It’s like being on the moon itself. Riley holds Oliver’s hand tight. They’re the only breathing things for miles around. Or that’s how it feels.
‘Where are we going?’ Oliver asks.
‘Up and over.’ She points. ‘We’ll be there in no time.’ The wind runs its cold fingers through her damp hair, stealing all her heat. She shivers.
‘Eat this and come on.’ Riley throws the Powerbar wrapper aside.
‘Plastic takes up to five hundred years to biodegrade,’ Oliver says, kicking a rock hard up the path ahead. It skitters, the sound echoing off the rock walls around them.
‘Don’t do that.’
‘How much further, Riley?’ They’re still on the main trail. Dawn is still a few hours away.
‘I don’t know.’
‘But how much—’
‘Quiet, Oliver.’ She can hear how mean and stretched she sounds. She had hoped they would make faster progress but Oliver is so weak.
‘I’m tired.’
‘I said be quiet.’ She’s scared that she has brought them into the wild to die – there are so many ways to die, out here.
Oliver starts to cry and Riley stops and takes him in her arms. He pushes at her with small fists.
‘Oliver Olive,’ she says, but he shakes his head. It always feels like a missing limb when Oliver is angry with her.
‘You’re a demon, Riley.’
She catches her breath and takes a moment before she speaks. ‘You need to go to the bathroom, clean your teeth, ok?’
‘I don’t want to!’ He points at her. ‘Demon!’
‘Would a demon make you clean your teeth?’
She remembered to bring toilet paper. She digs a pit for them beneath a stand of briar and fills it in after. After she’s disinfected Oliver’s hands and given him water and another Powerbar. They eat as they walk. The moon turns their walking shadows into spindly giants.
‘You still not talking to me?’ They are climbing again and their breath shows white on the air. Oliver shakes his head, but maybe he’s just breathless. Anyway, he will forgive her in the end. He must. They only have each other.
When Riley looks upwards she sees it sharply like a shock: the sleek form moving dark against the night.
The mountain lion slinks along the ridge, keeping pace with them as they make their slow way along the trail.
A single small pebble clatters from the heights above onto the path ahead, echoing through the canyon.
Riley’s insides are liquid now; she can almost see it, gold eyes glassy in the moonlight, coat slivered, barred with light and dark.
Jaws licked by a long tongue. She catches that distinct scent of dried grass and bitterness.
She caught it occasionally on hikes with Mom, back in the day – the trace of savagery on the air.
She swallows and it makes a clicking sound. ‘Oliver. Stay close to me.’ He mumbles something defiant but she grabs his arm hard and drags him in close. She takes the gun out slowly, trains it on the ridge. The skyline is bare. Nothing stirs.
‘We have to hurry,’ she says. She hopes she’s right – that they’re near the old trapper cabin in the directions.
Cousin whispers in her ear, ‘You nitwit. You’re both going to die in blood and jaws and bone and—’
Shut up.
‘Riley?’
‘It’s ok, Oliver Olive, talking to myself.’
Walk, don’t run. She read that somewhere: running triggers the predator instinct. She pulls Oliver behind her at a brisk walk. She can feel the lion out there, she and the lion are focused on each other so tight that they seem to blaze like beacons in the night.
‘Riley, don’t go so fast,’ Oliver says. ‘My legs hurt.’
‘Keep up.’
‘Riley …’
‘One foot in front of the other,’ Riley tells him. ‘Breathe slow.’
Something gleams ahead on the trail. Riley thinks, eyes? But it’s moonlight on glass. The trapper’s cabin comes into view around the bend, night sky gleaming in the windows.
Something stirs in the boulders above, a squat shape detaches from the rocks. It moves with a tiny disturbance of air, a tail lashing.
Riley runs with her heart in her throat, half carrying, half dragging Oliver.
The hut has timbered uppers above granite walls, shingle roof, windows showing wooden shutters on the inside. Be open, she thinks, that’s all I ask. Let the door be open and I’ll never wish for anything else again. The latch doesn’t budge when she tries and she screams, rattling it.
The door gives abruptly and they fall into the hut. Riley slams the door shut. Oliver is crying and she takes a second to hug him tight. He hugs her back this time. ‘Are they here?’ he whispers through his tears. ‘The demons?’
‘They can’t get in,’ she tells him. Riley drags a heavy steamer trunk from the corner of the room and rests it front of the door. She can hear her pulse in her ears.
They wait, listening. There is only the wind outside. Slowly Riley’s heart settles. Maybe it wasn’t even a mountain lion. Maybe it was a curious deer. Maybe it was nothing at all, just pictures in her mind, on the dark.