Page 48 of Wild Child
Ellie drew in a deep breath, her shoulders expanding. She sent me a look that I couldn't interpret, but thought meantthis isn't going to be pretty.Dirt and baked grasses crunched under our feet as we picked our way over, leaving Steve behind. Kimball pointed down, exultant.
"See?"
Indeed, a dilapidated building waited at the bottom of the canyon, near a dried-out creek that clearly hadn't seen much water this year. The roof had caved in on one side, and primitive logs crossed each other at the corners in ninety-degree angles. One end slumped to the right. For a moment, I swore I saw a flicker of movement inside, but figured it was a bird when it didn't repeat. Late afternoon shadows slanted over it, casting it in darkness.
"Wow." Ellie's eyebrows lifted. "You're right, Kimball. The weird, haunted cabin of your dreams does exist."
Kimball beamed.
"Now, how do we get down there?"
* * *
"It'll take a while to safely work our way down that slope," Ellie said with a ring of authority that took me back to our childhood, "but wecanmake it down. We'll have to be very careful. If we hike as a group, we can make sure that rocks don't dislodge and fall down the slope onto someone else. No one can twist an ankle, though, because going down this scree field with an injury is a recipe for disaster. Got it?"
She stood at the top of a shale field of rocks that looked daunting enough to me. The three of us stood back a few paces in a half-circle that faced her. After locating the cabin, she scoured a bit further and found this scree field to take down. With every word Ellie said, Kimball nodded eagerly, hands rubbing together with eagerness to crash down the volley of rocks ready to bruise our bodies. The cabin waited at the bottom.
We were at least forty-five minutes away, at best. The ridge hovered so high over the canyon below it already started blocking out daylight. Shadows crept up in the crevices. Steve's pale expression meant he wasn't too excited about our foray down the rocks either. With all that brawn, he'd fall hard.
Ellie readjusted her backpack and nodded. "Then, let's go. Everyone with me."
She started down the slide, nice and cautious, and nobody spoke. Each of us kept close to her tail and focused on where to step next. Not even Kimball had a word to say. All our attention focused on a path to boulder down, stop for rocks, hold our breaths, and eventually crawl toward the weird cabin. Any attempt to keep track of our surroundings was nearly lost. I stopped a few times to keep an eye out overhead, but someone would inevitably slip and draw my attention back. Whether it was Kimball's strange excitement, or Steve's even greater withdrawal and apprehension at every step, something wasn't right.
That cabin wasn'tjusta cabin.
But I couldn't stop our descent now, nor could I rule out massive paranoia after my deployment. In my mind, enemies waited at every shadow. Ever since I stepped off Afghani soil and back onto the terra firma of the US, I wasn't sure what part of my instinct was real. I'd honed my instincts to the sandbox of Afghanistan, but now I had to figure them out again in real life.
Ellie kept pressing toward the cabin and I could always trust her. Last night, the affection and the warmth in her tonehadbeen real. No denying that. Ellie never falsely represented herself.
We inched our way down the scree field with quiet, painstaking care. The occasional call of birds rang through the air, followed by the shudder of rocks as they skittered by. Even I felt the eerie silence all the way to my chest.
Finally, an hour later, the four of us fanned out in a line. We slowed to a stop on dirt ground again. A great sigh of relief slipped out of Ellie as she glanced around. The black ends of hair swept her shoulders as she regarded me.
"We good?" she asked.
I nodded. Kimball didn't respond. His gaze had turned nearly feral with excitement and fixed beyond the cabin. He issued a high-pitched whistle. The hair on the back of my neck stood up when the quaking aspen trees behind the dilapidated structure started to rustle.Onlythose trees. No movement near the neighboring pines. Nothing else even gave a sigh. A shot of color caught my eye. To the right of the cabin, where a small, circular clearing had been made, lay a shiny, foil wrapper.
A candy bar wrapper.
Next to it lay a small, folding camp chair that almost blended into the bush where it had been hastily shoved. The lines in the dirt beneath meant it had recentlybeen pushed there. A few things clicked together in my mind at that very moment.
Kimball's incessant chatter up the side of the ridge, like he wanted to make noise all the time.
His loud whoop once we arrived.
His obsession to get here.
Movement in the cabin.
Signs of people here now.
This had all been set up, and something was about to get really ugly. Just as I made a move to close the distance between me and Ellie, Steve tensed. Ellie's eyes grew wide, then panicked. A second before I heard her shout, a rustle came just behind me. I turned a second before something slammed into the side of my head.
Everything went black.
13
Ellie
