William Rabkin - The Call of the Mild

There was a pain in Gus’ left foot. At least that’s where it started every time he took a step. A dull, throbbing ache pounding across his sole, it pulsed a few times, then traveled up through his ankle to his calf on its way to his knee, where it knocked around for a bit before traveling up through his thigh. It stopped only when Gus lifted his foot. That’s when it started on the other side.

How long had they been hiking? Gus had no idea. They had set out before eight in the morning, and the sun was well past midpoint in the sky by now. He could have checked his watch to see what time it was, but he’d misstepped while maneuvering through a stony patch of trail, and a rock had gone out from under him. He’d managed to keep his head from slamming into the ground, but only by using his watch to check his fall. At the time it had seemed like a fair trade-off, to smash the watch’s face in order to protect his own, but about now a spell of unconsciousness-even a permanent one-was sounding pretty appealing.

Gus was once again taking up the rear position in the line of hikers. He’d volunteered for the job at first because he liked the idea of being able to see what everyone was doing. It was much harder for any of them to sneak up on him that way.

But after all these hours, strategy didn’t have anything to do with his positioning. He just wasn’t keeping up, not even with Balowsky, who had started off limping and complaining about rocks in his shoes, but who had picked up his pace as the trail steepened. He had no idea how long it had been since he’d seen Gwendolyn. Maybe she’d managed to cut six days off the hike and was already down at the bottom. Or maybe she had run up ahead to dig pits and cover them with brush, so that the rest of the hikers would all fall to their deaths impaled on sharpened stakes. About now, even that sounded preferable to walking for most of another week.

For what felt like hours, Gus had been hiking behind Savage and Jade, who whispered and giggled together like the newest couple on the junior high school campus. Gus had had to slow his pace in order to get out of earshot after he accidentally overheard them giving legal-jargon-based nicknames for the parts of each other’s bodies.

Then something had gone wrong between the two of them. Savage said something, and Jade stiffened angrily. He tried to apologize, but she slapped him hard across the face and accelerated away from him. He marched along sullenly for a moment or two, then broke into a jog to go after her. They disappeared around a switchback, and Gus hadn’t seen them again.

At first Gus hadn’t minded being alone. Under the blazing sun it was easier to let his mind focus on nothing but making sure that each foot hit solid ground at every step.

But after a couple of hours the trail took that familiar turn, and scrub brush started appearing along the wayside. Within minutes Gus was entering the pine forest.

That shouldn’t have been a problem, he kept telling himself. He’d been here already, and there had been no feelings of panic, no flashbacks to his familiar nightmare, no hallucinations.

At the time, though, Gus had had plenty of more pressing issues to worry about. There was something about the prospect of imminent murder at the hands of insane terrorists to keep you from thinking about being lost in the forest. Now that threat was gone, and as much as he tried to convince himself he needed to stay wary in case the Triton Players were actually a front for a real terrorist band, and they had just been pretending to be innocent actors to throw off suspicion until they could make their move, he couldn’t help feeling that the trees were pressing in on him.

Part of the problem was that they were. As the trail moved farther into the woods, it was growing narrower. Now it was just a slender track, sometimes completely obscured by heaps of brown pine needles. If he took his eyes off it for more than a second, if he lost his concentration and drifted off the path, would he ever find it again? Or would he be hopelessly lost, like he was in the dream, lost and chased by some hideous unseen monster?

Gus fought to keep these thoughts out of his mind, but it was getting harder and harder. The pain in his feet and legs was keeping him anchored to reality, but he could feel the ropes starting to fray.

He followed the trail around an enormous tree, only to find Shawn sitting against the other side of it nibbling at a granola bar.

“Can you believe people actually fight to protect this kind of wilderness?” Shawn said, getting to his feet. “Go ahead, try to tell me it wouldn’t be better without a Burger King every couple of miles.”

Gus stopped. “How far ahead are the others?”

“They’re spread out over a mile or two,” Shawn said. “If it makes you feel any better, even Gwendolyn was looking like she really needed a sylvan pool to splash in.”

“It doesn’t,” Gus said. He took a step forward and felt the pain run up his leg.

“It should,” Shawn said. “We need these people to be at least as exhausted as we are.”

“Small chance of that,” Gus said. “Why?”

“Because it’s our only chance of survival,” Shawn said. “We need the killer to be tired so that he or she starts to make mistakes.”

For the first time in hours Gus didn’t feel the ache in his legs. He didn’t think about the horrors of being lost in the wilderness.

“Mathis was the threat to the killer, and Mathis is dead,” Gus said. “Why kill again?”

“Because as long as any of us is alive, Mathis is still a threat,” Shawn said. “If the world knows he was murdered, they’ll also know it had to be one of us. And once they start investigating, they’ll figure it out. It may take a while. If it’s Lassiter on the case, it may take decades. But they will figure it out.”

“But if we all disappear in the wilderness, no one will ever know what happened.” It was so obvious that Gus couldn’t believe he hadn’t realized it before. “The killer is presumed dead along with the rest of us. The only difference is we’re all rotting out in the woods, while he or she is smuggling that chip out of the country.”

“I’m going to follow Gwendolyn’s lead here,” Shawn said. “Let’s just call the killer ‘he’ from now on, and remember we don’t know the real gender. Because if we have only hours left to live, I don’t want to spend precious seconds of my life saying ‘he or she.’ ”

“Fine,” Gus said. “He’s going to kill us all. He’ll have to kill all the actors, too.”

“He’s got time,” Shawn said. “Even if Rushton isn’t playing games, no one’s going to know anything’s wrong for at least four more days. It will take another forty-eight hours before they send out the search parties. And they’re not going to find anything, if the killer is smart.”

“So what do we do?” Gus said.

“As I see it, we’ve got a couple of options,” Shawn said. “First, we could kill all the lawyers before they can get to us.”

“I’m going to pass on that one.”

“Just as well,” Shawn said. “I don’t really have enough energy for a mass killing. It looks so easy when you see it in the movies, but when you start figuring all the logistics, all the luring the victim into a secluded location, then hiding the body, and then getting ready to start all over again with the next one, it gets to be a lot of work.”

“Why wouldn’t you just drop behind them on the trail and shoot them all at once?” Gus said.

“You mean like you?”

“Yes, Shawn,” Gus said wearily. “That’s the real reason I’ve been taking up the rear. Because I am actually the killer, and I plan to eliminate all the lawyers. On the off chance I ever catch up with them, of course.”