Page 43 of Beacon

Nodding, Mack makes a five-point turn to redirect our vehicle on the trail. But before he starts driving again, he says in a gruff mutter, “We’ll do this, but we’re playing it safe. We’re not running headlong into danger. We’ll get info and report back. Nothing else. Okay?”

“Okay.” I know perfectly well he’s still traumatized from physical violence. Our helping out Maria and the others even briefly a few weeks ago was incredibly difficult for him, and I’m not going to make it worse by thrusting him right back into conflict when he’s still trying to heal.

Besides, I don’t want to risk either his life or my own if there’s any other choice.

“All right then. We’ll have to stay quiet.”

He drives even more slowly than he was before as we once again traverse the switchback in the trail. Neither one of us speaks, but we don’t need to. The two grooves in the trail from the pair of motorcycles are starkly evident. Following them will be no trouble at all.

It’s not. We continue following without incident orconfusion. Unfortunately their path continues all afternoon.

I’ve never been this deep into The Wild before. On the eastern fringe where Chloe’s grandpa’s cabin and the market are, inhabitants are scarce but present. But not here.

We don’t see a living soul for hours as we go. At one point, I’m worried enough to murmur, “Are we going to be okay on gas?”

“We still got three-fourths of a tank. If we get down to half, we’ll have to turn back.”

“Agreed.”

And that’s the extent of our conversation for the afternoon.

It gets dark early in The Wild—particularly in late autumn as we are. And eventually the filtered sunlight through the thick trees starts to fade. I shift on the seat, my thighs and ass sore from riding for so long. “What should we do?”

“We can’t travel like this at night no matter what. I’m not gonna do it.”

“Surely they’re going to stop soon too. Even bad guys don’t keep going in the dark.”

“Yeah. Hopefully so. Either way, we’ve got to find a place to camp until morning.”

“All right. Maybe we can find some sort of shelter that’s not too far off the trail.”

We keep an eye out for the next half hour and eventuallycome upon a grouping of large rocks on the side of a hill that provides a degree of protection from both the elements and any aggressors. Mack parks the ATV out of sight of the trail, and then we clear out some dead foliage to make a place for us to settle in a shallow alcove.

We’ve got plenty of food because of the provisions Mack traded for this morning. I make us ham and cheese sandwiches—dry and slightly messy because all I have to work with is my small hunting knife—while Mack collects some branches to block the view of our shelter.

We’ve still got water in our canteens, so we should be okay on that through tomorrow. When Mack is done, he lowers his big body to the ground, leaning against the largest rock. I sit beside him—very close by necessity and because I need the comfort—as we eat our sandwiches in silence.

We’ve camped together numerous times. After Fort Knox fell, we traveled together for weeks. Occasionally we could find abandoned houses to stay in, but quite often we couldn’t. We had no choice but to spend the nights outside.

“Remember that night next to the waterfall,” I say after we’ve finished eating and are just sitting together.

He wraps an arm around me and pulls me closer. “Of course I remember.”

We’d heard some coyotes howling in the dark, and I was scared. I huddled against him as he sang songs to distract me. That was the first night we ever kissed. WhenI was feeling better, I tilted my head up to smile and thank him for comforting me. He told me he liked making me feel better. And I was so touched I stretched up and planted a soft kiss right on his mouth.

Before that, there had been nothing romantic between us. Nothing but friendly comradery and caretaking (on his side). But he responded to the kiss that night. His lips had been briefly hesitant—like he was taken by surprise—but then he got into it. We kept going for a couple of minutes until he smiled against my mouth.

“That’s what I call a damn good kiss,” he drawled.

It made me giggle and took all the nerves and uncertainty out of the change in our relationship. Two nights later, in an empty farmhouse we stumbled across, we had sex the first time.

It’s only been six years, but it feels like eons ago.

“That was a different guy,” Mack says softly. “The guy who kissed you back then.”

He might have been reading my mind.

“Yeah. It feels like I was a different girl too. But it hasn’t really been that long.”

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