Mindy Mejia - Leave No Trace

‘This isn’t your car.’

‘No.’ I answered shakily, fighting against the black edges of the pain. ‘Butch, my dad’s first mate, lent it to me. He won’t find that out until they get back.’

‘No one’ – the road started to fade in the headlights – ‘will ­report it’ – my view of the road slipped lower and lower as I slumped against the driver’s side door – ‘missing.’

The last thing I remembered before the darkness swallowed me was the jolt of the car hitting the ditch and my body slamming into the steering wheel.

IDRIFTED IN a world where clouds descended over tree covered cliffs, spreading their mist in pockets that roiled with dank threat. Clutching the agate, blood ran up my hands and into my eyes, coloring the forest red. Something stalked me from within the mist, something that was both Derek and not-Derek, dead and not-dead. It closed in behind me, readying for the kill. Running over moss covered boulders and rotting logs, I stumbled and fell at the water’s edge, losing the agate in the waves. I jerked around, sightless and terrified, trying to find the teeth that had clamped into my side, slicing my flesh apart.

‘Get off! Get off me!’ I woke up screaming in the backseat of the car, clawing at the pain and finding only soft, wet cloth and a smooth line of tape fastening it to my stomach.

‘Maya!’ Lucas’s voice came from the front seat. Slowly I began to register things. The staccato of broken pavement bumping under­neath the car’s tires. The scratch of upholstery against my cheek. The chill of freezing air leaking in from the doors.

I looked down and saw a white square of bandage under my rib cage, peeking out from a twisted belt of red-splattered fabric that I recognized as my shirt. The contents of the first aid kit I’d brought were spilled over the floor like a gale had caught it in a fury. I tried to sit up, failed, then took a deep breath and forced myself vertical, bracing my feet and shoulders between the front seat and backseat of the car.

‘Don’t get up. You’re still bleeding.’

Lucas’s hand reached backward and the car swerved as he tried to force me down to the seats. I leaned out of the way.

‘Where are we?’ I huffed. The road was a dark, two-lane stretch of asphalt lined with trees clawing in at the edges of the headlights.

‘Lie down.’

‘All the supplies you need are in the trunk. Clothes. Tent. Food.’ I spoke slowly, needing to get the words out clearly and before I lost consciousness again. ‘See the compass on the dash? Keep heading north.’

‘Lie down, Maya! We need help. Medicine.’

‘All roads lead to Ely.’

‘Fuck Ely!’

Even through the pain I had to smile, proud to hear his first contextually appropriate curse. I was his speech therapist, after all. Had to celebrate the victories.

‘We just passed a town called Aurora. Is there a hospital near here? A doctor?’

Aurora? I started shaking uncontrollably, my skin and brain both suddenly freezing. How did we cover so much distance already? I remembered passing the reservoir when…

‘The crash. Are you okay?’

He laughed once, not turning around. ‘You’re asking me if I’m okay?’

‘We hit the ditch. I don’t remember after that.’

Lucas explained pulling me out of the car and how he thought I was dead when he saw the blood soaking my clothes. Then, finding the laceration on my torso, he bandaged me and cinched the shirt over the wound to staunch the bleeding like his father had taught him. Knowing we had to keep moving or at least get out of sight, he laid me in the backseat and pushed the car out of the ditch. He’d never driven before, but with a mechanic for a father he was familiar with the basic principles and he’d watched me enough during our field trips to memorize the motions. The car started without a problem and after a few experiments with the gear shift and pedals, he figured out how to get us back on the road.

Now he held the wheel awkwardly, constantly correcting the car as the headlights roamed between the edges of the lane. ‘I know we can’t go back to the city, but we’re getting help somewhere. Tell me where to go before you pass out again.’

The shivers wracked my body and I started to slide down, losing the strength to keep myself wedged between the seats.

‘We’re coming into the Iron Range. Ely’s right beyond—’

‘Maya!’ he bellowed, rivaling my dad for volume and irritation.

Shaking, I pulled the burner I’d bought out of my jacket pocket and punched in an address, then heaved the phone forward with the last of my energy. The chills knocked me down to a fetal position on the seat and it was all I could do not to vomit on the floor. My voice sounded like a child as I gave him the name. ‘Harry. Harry McKinley.’

The next time I woke up I was being carried into a cabin with a sagging roof that loomed like a ghost from my past. Fat snowflakes poured from the sky, mingling with the scent of wood smoke and pipe tobacco. Somewhere in the distance a truck engine roared then faded into the night. Lucas had found, whether he knew it or not, the border between our worlds.

Lucas laid me down on a couch and a squat man with a graying beard ambled over until his head eclipsed the lamp shining weakly in the corner of the room, the same man who’d spotted me from his vintage Chevy in Ely. One side of his mouth tilted up a few degrees.

‘I thought that was you in town the other day. Took me by surprise.’

Nodding, I blinked him into focus. Until I’d encountered the Blackthorns, Harry McKinley had been the closest thing I’d known to a hermit. I hadn’t expected to see him in town, either. The only places I’d ever seen him were puttering around outside this cabin or tucked into a fishing hole somewhere on the water.

‘You like to bleed on this couch, girl.’

I let my chest rise and fall a few times, gathering the strength to reply.

‘It wasn’t my blood last time.’

‘Damn snickity, it wasn’t.’ I felt rough fingers lift my arm away from Lucas’s makeshift tourniquet. ‘You leave any bodies behind this time?’

I didn’t have any more words in me, so I just shook my head weakly.

‘Are you a doctor?’ Lucas’s voice came from somewhere above my head.

‘Nope. Rebuilt a few trolling motors over the years, but I doubt she works like a Minn Kota.’ He laughed at his own joke and then I heard feet shuffling away. ‘You wait here, eh?’

After a minute I could hear a door open then slam shut. I tried to concentrate on something – the faded cross-stitch sampler hanging on the wall, the cracks running through the ceiling – anything that would help me stay conscious and aware. Then Lucas was there, smoothing the hair away from my face, and I didn’t need any help finding a focal point.

He had deep, black hollows under his eyes and he was sickly pale, but the worry in his expression was lucid and his pupils were dilating correctly. The chemical cocktail Nurse Valerie had been feeding him was already leaving his system. We stared at each other for a while, not speaking, and gradually his worry shifted into something else, a kind of desperate happiness.

‘You came for me.’ He breathed it more than said it, stroking down the side of my face and reaching for my hand. I gripped it hard as another stab of pain shot through me.

‘I told you I would.’ I managed a shaky but genuine smile.

‘You saved me. I couldn’t escape, couldn’t get free. I didn’t even know where I was trying to go, except I had to go somewhere and they weren’t letting me. It was a nightmare and I couldn’t wake up. Every time I almost surfaced, they would feed me another dose, push me back down. I was lost until I saw you. I think I saw you.’ Confusion flickered over his face as he tried to remember. ‘You were walking away from me and I was screaming for you to come back, but you wouldn’t turn around and I couldn’t reach you. I kept calling for you. I was afraid if I stopped saying your name I would forget again. I would forget you… and if I forgot you, then I would forget me.’