Chapter 9 Chris
CHRIS
I was having a good time. I was glad Larissa hadn’t left when the others bailed. I don’t think I would have stayed if I had to walk alone, especially because she would have taken the dog.
It had warmed up as the day went on and the sun was baking us.
Her face was pink, and her shoulders were getting red.
Sometimes the trail would cut through a wooded area, but for the most part we had no coverage from the sun.
She’d taken her hoodie off an hour ago and shoved it into her backpack.
She had on a white tank top and some shorts.
Her hair was in a ponytail pulled through a black hat with the logo from Mike’s gym.
It looked a lot better on her than it did on Mike.
“We should put sunblock on,” I said.
“Do you have some?” she asked.
I unzipped my satchel and pulled out a tube.
“Thanks,” she said, taking it. “I put some on before I left the house, but I think I’m sweating it off. I didn’t think we’d be out here this long. How many miles have we gone?”
I looked at my watch. “Four.”
“He said an hour and a half, so we’re probably almost done,” she said, squirting some lotion into her hand before giving the bottle back to me.
I was getting hungry. I wanted to ask if she wanted to go get something to eat after but immediately shot the idea down.
It was one thing to be on this walk that we hadn’t intended to do without anyone else.
It was something different to make plans with her afterward.
Alone, just the two of us—no. If it were Becca, it wouldn’t have mattered.
But with Larissa it just did. I couldn’t explain why.
I started putting on sunblock while she pulled out her water bottle and crouched to offer some to Woofarine, but he didn’t want it again.
“He hasn’t had anything to drink,” she said, standing. “Should we be concerned about it?”
“We’re almost done,” I said, slapping lotion on the back of my neck. “He’s probably okay.”
She looked down at our dog, worried. He didn’t look worried. He looked ready to continue the charge. I don’t know where all the energy came from, he’d dragged us for the last four miles.
She watched him while she tipped her water into her mouth. Then she gagged.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“So bad.” She spit it out. “Sooooo bad.”
“What do you mean it’s bad?”
“It tastes like blood.” She grimaced.
I put the sunblock away and pulled out my water and tried it. I had to spit it out too. “Rusty pipes,” I said, wiping my chin.
“Is it dangerous?”
I shook my head. “No, it just tastes like shit. No wonder he won’t drink it.”
“Gross.” She blanched.
I dumped my water into the grass. “When I was in grade school, the water in the drinking fountain tasted like that. If you got thirsty enough to drink it, the kids would make fun of you and call you Vampire Boy for the rest of the day.”
She laughed, putting her water bottle back into her bag.
I nodded at it. “You’re not gonna dump it?”
“No, I’m gonna keep it in case I need to wash my hands. You never know what rotten thing Woofie might get ahold of.”
She wasn’t wrong about that.
We started walking again. Woofarine was still pulling on the leash.
“This would be a nice first date,” I said, looking at some wildflowers.
“No. You cannot take someone on a hike for a first date,” she said.
“Why not?”
She gave me a look. “Are you serious? Hi, I know I’ve never met you before but would you like to join me alone in the woods?”
“It’s pretty,” I said, gesturing at the flowers. “You wouldn’t like this kind of date?”
“I would, yeah. But not for the first one. What if you murder me?”
“Okay, assuming you know me well enough to know I’m not going to murder you, why not?”
“Let’s see. I’d want to be able to look at you, for one.
That’s hard when you’re walking next to someone.
If I want to leave, I can’t unless the guy walks me out, and that’s awkward.
Also, what if it’s hot? Or cold? Nobody wants to sweat or shiver on a first date.
And then there’s an incline and I’m gasping for breath, fighting for my life, trying not to let him see how out of shape I am. ”
“Ha. You’re not out of shape though.”
Then I realized how that sounded, like I’d been checking her out. “I… I just mean you seem fine on this walk.”
“I walk a lot at work. I’m used to it. Not sure how I’d do if there were hills though.”
A warm breeze blew and her perfume danced across my nose. I turned away from it and pretended to be looking at the tree line.
When I glanced at my watch again, we were almost at mile six.
“How long have we been out here?” she asked, noticing me check.
“Over two hours now.” I wrinkled my forehead. “Maybe we should look at a map. Do you think we took a wrong turn?”
“There haven’t been any turns.”
She was right. The path had been clear, no forks.
We moved under a tree for shade and I pulled out my phone.
“Okay, let’s see.” I tapped Google Maps.
The area we were in was solid green. Nothing but forest. I zoomed out. More green. I zoomed out again. Still green. I shook my head. “Where the hell are we?”
“Let me see.” She leaned over to look at my phone. It only took her a second to register what I’d already realized. “We’re in the middle of nowhere!” She looked up at me. “Why would Mike send us out here?”
“I don’t know. I’m calling him.”
He didn’t answer until the sixth ring. “What?”
He was drunk. I knew it immediately.
“Uh, hey,” I said, trying not to let Larissa see it on my face. “We’re on this walk and we’ve been out here over two hours. The map says we’re in the middle of the park reserve. Are we on the right trail?”
“How should I know?”
I glanced at Larissa.
“You said it was an hour and a half,” I said.
“It is. I just did it the other day.”
I paused. “Were you running?”
“Yeah? Why?”
I squeezed my eyes shut. Then I moved the phone from my mouth. “It’s an hour and a half, running,” I told her.
I watched the realization move across her face.
Mike was an athlete. He could sprint ten miles on his lunch break without even breaking a sweat.
“Mike, you have us out here in the middle of nowhere.”
“Just walk out. It’s not hard. You just… walk.” He sounded like he was falling asleep.
I put my back to Larissa and lowered my voice. “Hey, are you okay? You sound a little—”
“I’m fine. Hey, I gotta go,” he slurred. Then he hung up. I watched the phone screen go black in my hand.
“Is he okay?” she asked from behind me.
I turned and nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, he’s fine. I just think he’s a little out of it. From the migraine,” I added.
I didn’t think he was out of it from the migraine. I didn’t think he had a migraine at all. This was twice now. Something was up with him.
I wanted to ask Larissa how Mike had been doing. He had a history of anxiety and back in high school he drank to deal with it, but I couldn’t be sure whether he’d told her, and it wasn’t my place to let that slip if he hadn’t.
I’d have to talk to him about what the heck was going on, but for now I had to get us out of the woods.
“Okay,” I said. “We need to figure out where we’re at and how much farther we have to go.”
She nodded. “All right. Let’s sit and get our bearings.”
We found a shady spot just off the trail and sat on a log.
“We’re in the middle,” I said, looking at the map. “We’re almost as far in as we are out. A little less if we backtrack.”
“I don’t want to backtrack,” she said.
“We’ll get out faster.”
“Yeah, but we’ve already seen that. I don’t want to see it again. I want to see what I haven’t seen.”
“We have no water.”
“I have water. It’s gross, but it’s water. I have enough for both of us. Woofarine can drink from the next stream we pass. We’re not gonna die.”
I looked over at her. “You really want to keep going?”
She shrugged. “Yeah. Why not. What if what’s coming is better than what we’ve already done?”
I laughed a little.
The tenacity again.
The woman had a hundred jobs, she never took a day off. She quite literally didn’t slow down. She was like Woofarine, only without the urge to massacre.
I liked it.
“Okay,” I said. “We’ll keep going.”
“Let’s take an inventory of what we have,” she said. “Take a little break, have a snack.”
“You have snacks?”
“I always have snacks.”
She started rummaging through her backpack. She pulled out a chocolate-chip granola bar, an apple, and a couple of the individually wrapped breadsticks that Donna used as a side for the soups at work. She handed me one.
“I love these,” I said, unwrapping it.
“Me too. Better than crackers because they don’t get smooshed. I only take the ones the customers don’t open. Donna tosses them. I’m not stealing breadsticks.”
“I would never suggest such a thing,” I said, taking a bite.
“So what’s in your satchel?” she said with a smirk, nodding at it. “Anything useful?”
I unclipped it and handed it to her.
She set it in her lap and dug through it. “Benadryl, Band-Aids, hand sanitizer, cortisone—this looks exactly like a fanny pack packed by a pharmacist. Oh! This could be good.” She held up a packet of grape-flavored electrolyte powder. “Might make the water taste better. Can I use it?”
“Go ahead.”
She put her water bottle between her knees and unscrewed the cap, tore the corner off with her teeth, and poured it in.
When she tasted it, she gagged.
“Still bad?” I asked, watching her make a face.
“Now it’s grape blood.”
“We probably should drink it no matter how terrible it is. We have a couple more hours of walking,” I said.
“Be my guest.” She handed it to me.
It was the absolute worst thing I’d ever tasted in my entire life. It was all I could do to swallow it.
Fucking Mike.
I took a few more swigs, then handed the bottle back to her. She took another swallow, shivered, and put the cap back on.
When she was putting the water into her bag, she nodded at my leg. “I think you have a tick on you.”
I jumped up and swatted it off, doing a little dance.
“Don’t like bugs?” she asked.