August Ansel - Shadow Road

“Point made,” said Russell mildly, and Alex visibly relaxed. “We’re agreed, then, that their probable trajectory is north. We weren’t far behind to begin with. The push we’ve made, with or without direct sign, has closed ground between us. So I say again: we’re close. What is our next best move?”

“Angle back to the highway,” said Gilch immediately.

“Show me,” said Russell.

Gilch squatted. He cleared a spot in the dirt and snapped a piece of Doyle’s kindling to make a sharp point. “Coast is here,” he said, drawing a curved vertical line on the left side of his crude palette. “We’re out here.” Off to the right, he scratched out several gritty tree shapes. “They went from the stump house,” he continued, “to the big place on the hill where they rested up.” He traced a thin, meandering trail that ended at a large X in his imagined forest. “When they left that house, we know they were still pushing into the woods, looking to disappear on us.” He squinted up at Russell. “It’s one thing to go to ground and hide out awhile. But for the long haul, with hardly any provisions? No way. Twenty-five, thirty-odd days out here now, living rough. They’re not finding enough to keep them going. Guaranteed.”

“Not much to scavenge,” said Garrett.

“Out here you could barely keep in beer and Doritos even before the fucking world ended,” said Alex, cutting his eyes around at Doyle. When no one clouted him, he perked up, grinning at his own remark. “Trust me, by week two I’d cruised every little country-road market I could think of until I ran out of gas.”

“So you think they’ll double back toward the coast,” said Russell to Gilch.

Gilch drew a second vertical line, roughly parallel to the coast. “The 101.” Then he etched four more Xs along its length, naming each one as he did. “Eureka,” he said, “Arcata, Hayesville, Trinidad.” He looked around at them, a truculent fireplug of a man. “Stores, restaurants, houses. They need provisions, and that’s where the provisions are—on the road.”

Russell stepped forward and took the stick from Gilch. “Then let’s be there when they arrive.” With one stroke, he made a crude horizontal gash across the map. “This,” he said in his soft, blurred voice, “is us. Their deadline.”

THEY LEFT THE CAVE the next morning. It wasn’t a hard decision. Wet, weary, and usually hungry, they were traveling a ragged edge. As promised, Arie cooked up a breakfast of the birdseed. The millet made a decent meal—bland as paste, but hot. The mush filled their bellies, and they ate until they couldn’t manage another bite.

Curran and Talus led the way, pushing deeper into the woods than Arie had expected. The grade was moderate but relentless, tending up and up. In their state of general depletion, with all their belongings in tow, the climb was exhausting. The undergrowth was heavier, too, slowing them down and earning them a great many shallow scratches on the exposed skin of hands and necks. Within thirty minutes, Talus’s coat was loaded with thorns, small leaves, and strands of spider web. Her colors provided excellent camouflage, and her fur now sported so much organic matter she began to resemble a four-legged shrub.

Sometime past mid-day, after grinding up a particularly steep rise, they reached a place where the ground leveled out and the woods thinned considerably. They stopped to catch their breath. A breeze was blowing through, faint but welcome after their dogged climb. Though the sky threatened more rain, so far it had held off.

“Almost there,” Curran whispered.

Arie nodded. The spot where they stood was weirdly chaotic. An old-growth redwood had toppled—recently, by the look of it—and taken out a phalanx of smaller trees in its wake. The gargantuan redwood was otherwise intact, its enormous root end towering ten feet above their heads. Great clots of earth and small vegetation clung to the underside.

“Damn,” Handy breathed, scanning the damage. The massive tree’s top was far out of sight, hundreds of feet away. The shattered madrones, maples, and alders in its path looked dynamited. Spires and shards of raw wood lay in jagged profusion, bright pink and yellow in the dismal day, bleeding trails of sap.

“What a sound it must have made,” said Arie, imagining the concussion: a million pounds of tree striking the earth at once.

“Only if someone was here,” said Renna, “to hear.”

Arie and Handy looked at her with bland expressions so identical they seemed rehearsed.

“Oh, come on ,” Renna muttered. “That was funny.”

Talus scrambled into the mangled divot left by the redwood’s upending. The area was nearly dry, sheltered as it was by the colossal snarl of roots. She snuffled and dug in the soft, disrupted earth, then suddenly snapped at something, feet and jaws working in tandem. The tiny bones of a burrowing critter, mouse or gopher, crunched between her teeth. The dog glanced around, chewing happily, a few miniature beads of blood on her whiskers.

“Good job,” Arie told her. Talus sprang out of the depression, gave herself a hard shake. She licked her chops and fell in beside Curran, who was working his way to a high spot. He hoisted himself onto one of the newly created stumps. After scanning a moment, he snapped his fingers and pointed.

At first, Arie saw only woods and more woods, hung with shadows and festering with muck. But then, beyond the storm-tossed patch, she realized what he was pointing at. In the distance was a place among the trees where things appeared to open out. It wasn’t much, just a subtle thinning in the undergrowth that would have been invisible if the surrounding trees had still been standing.

Curran lowered himself off the stump, careful with his handholds on the viciously splintered wood. Talus sat patiently, watching his progress. He made a tiny gesture with his chin. “That way.”

It took nearly twenty minutes to get through the deadfall. They clambered over, ducked around, and once had to drop onto their bellies in the sopping duff to crawl under the tangle. Arie eased through, careful to shield her burn-scarred shoulder. Talus found her own trail, often doubling back to check their progress.

Once they were past the blow-down, the open spot in the tree line was plainly visible several yards ahead. Dismal afternoon light fell toward them as if through the broken slat of a picket fence. Drawing closer, Arie saw what she hadn’t noticed before: two inconspicuous buildings. The nearer one, smaller, was built right at the edge of the woods—it was the shed. She couldn’t make sense of the other structure, which had to be the cabin. It was prosaically house-shaped, but somehow threw off glints of color as she moved her head, trying to have a better look.

They moved to within ten feet of the squat building and halted, mostly concealed behind the girth of a hoary old Douglas fir. Talus stood at Curran’s flank as always, but instead of her usual silent attention, she was antsy. Her ears were relaxed and several times she looked from their faces to the clearing, all doggy interest. Arie wondered if Talus’s impromptu meal had gone to her head. Curran frowned and flicked a finger. The dog sat and yawned widely. Meanwhile, a great deal of quiet nothing happened in the space between buildings.

Curran put his lips to Arie’s ear. “I’ll look,” he whispered.

She dipped her chin. While the rest of them waited, he crept to the back of the shed, stepping with care around anything dead and dry.

The simple slanted roof of the shed hung over a rear wall no taller than Curran’s forehead. The unpainted wood siding sported a load of moss and lichen, and a trio of young sawtooth ferns sprouted from one deep crevice between shingles. By inches, he peered around the corner. After a moment, he motioned with two fingers, and they moved forward to join him.