Mindy Mejia - Leave No Trace

Bracing myself on the gunwales, I nodded, hoping he could see me through the whiteout. I didn’t notice I was crying until the tears had frozen on my cheeks.

I didn’t know how much time passed. There might have been a shooting star. There might have been a whole cascade of comets blasting through the storm, or it could have just been my eyes on fire. I stopped being able to separate the flaming, dizzying flashes in my body from what was happening around me. It wasn’t until the canoe grounded, scraping bottom on an ice-covered rock ledge, that I registered the outcropping of giant boulders we had wedged ourselves in between. I blinked and looked back to see Lucas hunched close to my face. His hand felt like an ice pack on my forehead.

‘Welcome to my home.’

The boulders gave way to woods where Lucas dragged the canoe and hid it under the drooping limbs of a listing pine. I shouldered my pack before he could take it and followed him into the dense trees. There was no trail, no campsites here where the forest seemed impenetrable. I concentrated on Lucas’s back, which squeezed through gaps and disappeared in between giant snow-laden branches like magic or a hallucination. He was there and then he wasn’t. Heat radiated through my body in waves, adding to the illusion; I could no longer tell what was real. As the pain medicine kicked in, I became clumsier. Needles scraped my clothes and face, combed my matted hair and showered it with flakes. The forest thinned as we moved into an old growth area where the lower branches, deprived of light, had lost all their needles and clawed at us even as the canopy above kept the snow away. Then we descended into a frozen marsh and struggled through quick-sand drifts of dead summer grass buried in white. I wanted to give up, to lay down in the marsh beds and let the cold sink into me, but Lucas pulled me forward. The farther we went, the more excited he became. He pointed out landmarks in a language only he could read. A trio of birch – the three sisters. A branchless trunk rising into the sky – the eagle’s nest. And finally, a dead pine partially uprooted and sagging into the wide branches of another – the hugging trees.

We ducked underneath the hugging trees into a shadowed place, old growth on rock bed, and Lucas stopped as his breath made short, quick puffs in the dark.

‘There,’ he whispered.

At first I didn’t see it. A rise of rock covered in dead moss and decaying needles blocked the way in front of us, but as Lucas moved forward and I followed him, the perspective suddenly shifted. What appeared to be part of the hill was actually a moss-covered wall, camouflaged so well I wanted to run my hands over it until I found the edges. It arched at least seven feet off the ground, sloping in gradually to a peak where I spotted a glint of metal hiding in the needles – a chimney. A few rocks were scattered around the base and one seemed planted directly into the side of the wall, all overgrown with winter lichen and giving off the impression that this was exactly where the glaciers tossed them ten thousand years ago.

Two boulders flanked the narrow entrance, covered by a flattened piece of bark. Lucas dropped his pack and lifted up the wood to reveal a zipper underneath, a tent inside the hill. He unzipped it and ducked inside. I stumbled forward, squeezing through the rocks with my pack and lowered my head into the void.

‘Shut the door.’ Lucas said from somewhere nearby, and I did, leaving only darkness and strange noises: a rustle of fabric, a scrape of metal, someone fumbling with mechanical objects, and underneath all that, another sound – the unsteady whistle of ragged lungs.

I huddled near the door, waiting, until a flare of light illuminated the tent. Lucas crouched near the chimney in the middle, adjusting the brightness of the lantern. Supplies were stacked along the front wall near me – canisters of beans and dried vegetables, bags of rice, and a hanging rack of tools. I stared at the tip of an ice pick, inches from my face, until a noise from the far side of the room drew my attention. Lucas was bent over a cot, blocking the person lying on it. He unzipped the sleeping bag, unleashing a putrid smell that fell somewhere between unwashed flesh and decaying meat. Gagging, I covered my face with an arm as Lucas whipped away, also fighting for control. His eyes flooded as he coughed. A hand lifted behind him, the fingers bare and skeletal, and grasped Lucas’s knee. That was the last thing I saw before my stomach heaved.

Unzipping the tent, I scrambled out from the boulders and as far away as I could before vomiting into the snow and leaves. The pack cracked against my skull and my skin burned hotter than ever as each contraction ripped at the stitches in my side, turning every retch into a sob. When it was finally over I covered the mess with an armful of needles and crawled a safe distance away.

Lucas came out a few minutes later, his face wet with tears.

‘Are you okay?’

I’d unhooked the pack and was clutching it like a buoy, panting and still haunted by that deathly hand rising from the shadows. ‘He’s alive.’

He nodded and fell to his knees in front of me, covering my hands that were gripping the pack. ‘He’s so much worse. He’d lost weight over the summer, but now he doesn’t even look like my father.’

Maybe he’s not, I wanted to say. Maybe he was never the man you thought him to be. Instead I pulled a hand out from under his and lifted it to his face. He jerked in surprise. ‘You’re burning up.’

‘Is he lucid?’ I pressed. ‘Does he recognize you?’

Lucas nodded.

‘Good. He needs a bath.’

I instructed Lucas to go fetch some fresh water while I stayed with his father and started preparing food. Then, together, we could assess his condition and figure out which medicine to try first. He hesitated, not wanting to leave, but finally agreed and said it wouldn’t take him long to get to the marsh and back. Inside the tent, the fresh air had cleared the worst of the odor and Lucas tugged me forward to his father’s bedside.

Josiah Blackthorn lay on his back. His face was sunken, with the only visible skin stretched pale and gaunt, sandwiched between a dirty hat and beard. The hand that had reached for Lucas earlier dangled off the cot, as if unconnected to any living thing. There was no life in him except for his eyes, which were the same impossible, ghostly blue he’d given to his son and they followed Lucas now, gorging on the sight of him.

‘Dad, this is Maya. She’s—’ He didn’t know how to continue.

‘I’ll stay with you while Lucas gets water.’ I nodded at both of them and settled myself on the ground.

When the sound of Lucas’s footsteps faded away, I turned to the living corpse on the cot. Every trace of the gorgeous, brooding man who’d escaped into the Boundary Waters ten years ago was gone. This was a flesh-covered skeleton, except for two unnatural growths that bulged out of his neck.

‘The snow’s tapering off and it’s not too cold. Would you like some fresh air?’

The blue eyes stared at me. Without waiting for an answer, I pulled the sleeping bag off him and propped him up, threading my arms under his and trying not to breathe through my nose. Dragging him off the cot and out of the tent, I squeezed him through the boulders and in the opposite direction from the marsh. The hugging trees receded into the background of the forest as I jerked his legs over rocks and down inclines. He weighed almost nothing. I could feel the crush of his bones through his jacket and shuddered when, instead of fighting me, his fingers slowly closed over my forearms. On the last drop, I stumbled and fell. Josiah tumbled against a log and I landed a few feet away on a massive boulder, popping at least one of the stitches and crying out in pain.