Chapter 1 Out and Away #3
He started the engine and drove to the edge of the lot, just to mitigate the threat of Alf coming out to talk to him. He parked and entered the address for Candle-Fly into the GPS.
“Proceed to the highlighted route,” said a reasonable voice from the dashboard.
He hesitated.
Here in the dark woods, his plan to live somewhere wild and remote felt more like self-harm than it had while shopping for camping gear under bright store lights.
He brought out the scales of his reason and loaded his current plan on one balance and the life he left behind on the other.
The result was the same as it had been for weeks.
Along with fear, the acorn brought a suspicious clarity.
He had been checking off all his “supposed to” boxes for many years and they had brought him neither purpose nor satisfaction.
His life had been on the defensive, not so much taking actions to build something he wanted as constantly fending off imagined threats and criticism.
Something changed on the day he arrived home, drunk on survival, and sat the acorn on his kitchen counter.
The bizarre yet incontrovertible fact of its presence created a space outside his plans, his reasonable decisions, a space where he could stand and judge his life’s path in a new way.
All his careful choices still landed him beneath that bus, so how reasonable could they be?
Hadn’t he been compromising in the name of safety?
If safety wasn’t really on the table, then… what?
Death crowded out all the voices that had been prodding him along.
In that quiet aftermath, he listened to a new and perfect internal silence, waiting for the small voice that was his actual desire, divorced from practicality and social expectation.
When that voice finally came, soft and distant, raspy with disuse, it spoke of childhood memories of the woods and the wild things that called it home.
Green heard that faint voice, amplified by the acorn, and did the unthinkable. He listened to it.
“Proceed to the highlighted route,” the GPS repeated.
This time, he went.
The dark woods rose up around him and the gas station lights were swallowed by a bend in the road.
Don’t think. Just drive.
After five minutes of winding up the wooded slope, he noticed that the image of his car on the GPS console screen was now off the road, hovering in the green space to the right.
A blocky blue question mark blinked above the vehicle icon.
Either the satellite connection was weak or the maps were out of date.
“Turn left on Lost Creek Road,” the GPS said.
There was no road.
The thin line near his displaced car on the GPS was called 32, but zooming out on the digital map didn’t show any other roads nearby, just an endless expanse of green.
He eased off the gas and looked around, scolding himself.
“What exactly are you going to see?”
The road was the same narrow slash through dark trees, sloping up into another blind curve. He felt his heart begin to pound in his ears. There was nowhere to stop. Nowhere to regroup. Not even a place to turn around.
It hit him how alone he really was. What if he had a tire blowout or hit a deer? Would his phone work? Even if it did, could he describe where he was? Back in the city, there was a constant unspoken safety net of goods and services a button press away.
“It’s just a road. It’s just a road. Quit overthinking this.”
Around the next bend, he saw a pickup truck parked along the narrow berm.
A man with a floppy hat and a red beard was loading fishing tackle into the back. The truck’s taillights made his shadow a dark giant on the nearby ruddy tree line. A rod leaned against the tailgate.
Green slowed and lowered his window. He clicked on his hazard lights.
This feels like a great way to get shot.
“Excuse me.”
The man stepped toward the Prius and hunched down, his hands on his knees.
“Yeah. What’s up?”
“I’m trying to find Candle-Fly Camp? Uh, it’s on Lost Creek Road, I think.”
“I don’t know the camp, but I’ve seen the road. You’re almost there. Around the next bend. Tiny little gravel turnoff to the right. Go slow and you’ll see the sign.”
“Thank you. I was starting to feel really lost out here.”
The man shook his head.
“Not from around here?”
“No. Just arrived.”
“Well, bud, you can’t get too lost out here. Not on the roads. A lot of these roads are loops. When in doubt, keep going. If you get dumped out in a logging camp or the way turns into somebody’s gravel driveway, turn around. Don’t run out of gas and don’t take the curves too fast. You’ll be fine.”
“Thanks again.”
“Not a problem. Drive safe.”
Green drove on and the man, Kyle Cartwright, watched him go.
Kyle had driven an hour to spend the day at an old fishing spot his father showed him thirty years earlier.
He didn’t reach into holes in the bank to try and coax a catfish bite anymore.
He didn’t peel up flat stones to catch crayfish in fast-food cups anymore.
He couldn’t convince his daughter to take a break from the computer and keep her dad company anymore.
But he came anyway. The fish weren’t biting this trip, but that wasn’t the point.
He loaded his rods into the truck bed along with his cooler and camp chair.
Something glinted in the trees.
Kyle stopped to look.
Cellphone camera?
The lost man’s headlights had trashed his night vision. He couldn’t see anything up the slope. He closed his eyes and listened. Not hikers. Hikers wouldn’t be that quiet unless they were standing still just to watch him. That was horseshit. There was nobody out there.
He needed to piss, but his truck cab was suddenly very inviting.
Kyle wrinkled his nose at the idea. Had suburban life softened him so much? He hadn’t been afraid of these woods as a nine-year-old. He wasn’t going to start today.
He pulled out a compact flashlight, hard and heavy as a roll of quarters. Its beam lit up the woods, dropping a circle of noon into the trees. There was nothing.
Maybe it was a leftover from the stranger’s high beams. Maybe it was fox fire. Maybe it was aging eyes.
He pocketed the light and stepped up to a honeysuckle bush, unzipping his fly.
When his chest started to hurt, he assumed it was the fear running its course.
He coughed and it felt like it knocked over some furniture inside his rib cage.
His lungs caught fire and his vision wavered. He spun for his truck. His phone was in the cup holder, where it had been all afternoon. No phones while fishing. Calling 911 was a crapshoot out there, but if it was his heart…
Gravity did something and the roadside rushed him.
Gravel and twigs pressed against his lips like they wanted in. He turned his cheek and puffed out a plume like white smoke. He wanted to follow that pale vapor up and out, into the warm glow of his brake lights, but something took hold of his thoughts and shook them like a hound with a rabbit.
The world shattered into fractals against a cream-colored backdrop of pain and panic.
The thing that had robbed Kyle’s fourteen-year-old daughter of her father was already moving away. It was unchanged, there and gone like a moon shadow blotted out by a passing cloud.
Kyle Cartwright never saw what killed him.
Green would see it. Green would see it before daybreak.