Gravediggers (7 page)

We sit in silence, waiting for the watched canteen to boil, and the gravity of our situation begins washing over me in terrible waves. My hand rests on the lump in my pocket, and I know the way out, the one thing that will keep me from slipping into complete despair.

Both Ian and Kendra jump when the camera beeps, and stare dumbfounded at me as I lift it up to my eyes. Suddenly, the whole scene is on my screen—Ian and Kendra around a campfire—and the cold strain in my head and chest begins to wear off.

“It's day forty-six of our hike,” I say. “Ian Buckley, our perpetual protagonist, is joined by Kendra Wright, our new contender. Ian, what's going on?”

Kendra raises a shoulder and turns away from the camera. “Can you not . . . do that right now?” I'm feeling significantly better, but the anger is coming off them in waves.

“Things are looking pretty grim here, folks,” I say. “We've just come upon a hidden store of food left here by the ancient Indian tribe the Kuppa Noodels.”

“PJ.” Pan over to Ian, his eyes looking tired and hard in the glowing square of my viewfinder. “Cut it out, man. Put the camera away.”

“What's the point of getting lost in the woods if we can't document it?” I tell him.

“We're not in the mood for this,” he says. “Another time.”

“Wow, ladies and gentlemen, Ian is feeling a little antsy.”

“Stop it, PJ,” says Ian through gritted teeth. “Last warning.”

We go silent again. The whole forest feels angry at me. The trees bear down on us; the blanket of brown leaves underneath me makes me want to scream. The only thing that's not pitted against me right now is the square screen on my camera.

“Tempers wear thin, viewers. What happens next, only time can tell—”

One minute, Ian's sitting cross-legged by the fire, the next he's on top of me, hand clenched around my camera, eyes wild behind his creased brow, teeth bared. He tries to yank the handheld away from me, but I pull back. The plastic creaks.

“Let go!” I scream. “You're going to break it!”

“Put down the camera!” he yells. “You're such a little creep!”

I put a foot on his shoulder and try to push him away from me. His big clammy hand slaps on my face and shoves me back.

“Shut up!” shouts Kendra.

“
You
shut up!” yells Ian back at her, and then he lets go of my face and my camera. I'm about to scream my head off at him and kick him in the shin when I notice Kendra's on her feet, crouched, eyes flickering from one direction to the other.

“I think I heard something,” she whispers. “Listen.” We go silent, and then I hear it—rustling leaves, one or two twigs cracking, and then a sound, sort of like a chirp, but not a bird's sound. Something weird.

Before I can utter my famous last words—
It was probably nothing—
an animal, some kind of big cat, slinks into view a few yards away. Its fur shoots out from its face in wild spikes, all of it covered in gray-brown stripes. It has a stumpy little torso and long legs. Its whole body moves like liquid. It spots us, freezes, and its big yellow eyes narrow. My hand immediately checks my camera to make sure Ian hasn't destroyed it in our scuffle. This could be great footage.

“That's a Canada lynx,” whispers Kendra. “They usually only come out at night. Unless . . .” She blinks hard. “Unless they're hungry.”

The animal lowers itself to the ground, front legs stretched out, and the low rumbling noise that comes out of its throat translates perfectly:
Look. Meat.

Thirty seconds later, I realize that I'm running. Actually, all three of us are. Trees fly past us, firing sharp shafts of thick yellow sunset light between them, blinding us all the while. Kendra and Ian pant loudly next to me but never slow down; Kendra's backpack is open, and all of her stuff, her granola bars and field guide and map, come tumbling out onto the forest floor. There's no sound of the lynx, but with how swift and fearsome that thing looked, you probably don't even know it's there until there's a paw on your chest and the smell of blood in your face—

My foot hooks on something, and my whole body tenses and twists, defying gravity. My vision blurs, then explodes white, as my head thumps hard onto something cold and wet. My mouth opens, and a shriek comes bursting out.

“PJ!” yells Ian's voice from somewhere. Footsteps approach, and two sets of hands turn me over and shake me. My eyes open again, and I see Ian's and Kendra's faces peering down at me, outlined by the canopy of treetops.

“You okay, man?” asks Ian. His face is bright red. He wipes at watery eyes.

“I don't know,” I moan. “What happened?”

“You caught your ankle on a root—” Kendra reaches her hand down, and my foot flares with pain. Looking down at the rest of me, I see my left ankle, swollen and red, a scratch on it. At first, it's small and angry but not that bad, and then a single bead of dark red forms on it and dribbles down to my heel.

My stomach whirls. My face feels damp and cold. Slowly, my head falls back into the leaf-covered grass. I groan, unable to calm down, stuck in a rush of panic.

“What do we do?” asks Ian.

“We need to go back,” sighs Kendra. “We have to put out the fire.”

“Are you out of your mind? There's a giant ferocious mountain lion back there!”

“There could be a forest fire. And it was a
lynx.
”

“Our friend is hurt and you're worried about a forest fire?” he yells. “Is this Smokey the Bear's Happy Fun Time? What about us? What are we going to do? If we stick with your plan, we'll end up like the Pine City Dancers out here—”

“Stop talking about the Pine City—”

That's when the tears finally come. Since we realized we were lost, I've done my best to force down the stone in my windpipe and the lava in my eyes, but now I just let it out, let my whole face curl up and gush, because between the red rage coming off my friends, the red pain radiating off of my ankle, and the biting red light of the setting sun, everything is irritated, angry, full of frustration. I know that there's no way we're getting home tonight, that Kyra's going to sleep without a bedtime story, and that we might be stuck out here forever and there's nothing we can do about it. Kendra's feelings were right—this place is horrible, full of terror, and tonight, it's having us for dinner. We're not wolves or poodles or little fish, we're insects, rabbits,
prey
.

We're dead meat.

 

 

 

Chapter Seven
Ian

K
endra wigs out on me. She won't let up on this forest fire routine, just keeps saying, “We have to put it out,” over and over again. If you ask me, wild animals trump fires, and honestly, we barely had a flame back there, but she's crazy about it, “We
have
to
put it out,” emphasizing the
have to,
like it's not an option, which it totally is, but her weird superbrain is so wired with rules that it won't let her body keep moving until we put the fire out, so whenever I say anything, she comes back with, “You're just thinking about
yourself
. We
have
to put it out.”

Finally, I just snap and yell, “Fine. I'll go.”

“No,” she says, “I should go. You might not suffocate it completely.”

Like I can't put out a fire? “Look, someone needs to stay with PJ.” Normally, PJ would try and be brave, say he's fine on his own, but he's useless right now, on the ground squeezing the scratch on his leg and making this little squeaking noise between his teeth. Total mess. “You stay here. I'll go take care of it.”

For once, Kendra doesn't fight me, just nods and says, “If you're not back in five minutes, I'll come looking for you.”

“I'll be back in five minutes.”

“Try to grab any of the stuff we dropped,” she says.

“Yeah, I'll try.”

As I crunch back to our makeshift campsite, a prickle of excitement runs down my skin, 'cause yeah, maybe I ran from this weird lynx thing with the rest of 'em, but that was only because it surprised me. Now's my chance to see a wild animal close up, and not just any animal, either—a big one, a predator. Chipmunks and big bucks are all fun and games, but this is serious nature I'm up against. And wait, are lynxes, what are they called, scavengers? Maybe it could lead me to the Pine City Dancers. Here's hoping.

I hear a sound like a cough a few yards away, on the other side of the tree. Slowly, I peek my head out, and sure enough, there sits our campsite, lynx and all.

The lynx pads around the fire, pawing at bits of ramen that have spilled out of the plastic cup, and man, it is
funny
looking. A black spike of hair shoots off each ear like bug antennae. Its long legs move its stubby little body in a clumsy, swaying way, and when it sits, its shoulders seemed hunched over its fur-spiked face. All that plus the tiny eraser of a tail make it one of the dumbest-looking animals I've ever seen, something like a house cat, a lion, a monkey, and a rabbit mixed together. But even though it's not much higher than my thigh, and I could totally probably outrun it if I needed to, some part of me mixes enough fear with my excitement to hold me back. It's not that big, but this thing could use those big hindquarters to spring into the air and hit me pretty hard.

Then out of nowhere, this sharp knocking noise, kind of a
TOK TOK TOK
, rings out of the woods, and the lynx freezes, puts its head to the sky. Then it turns and bounds off into the woods, vanishing entirely after a few seconds.

I wait a little bit to make sure the coast is clear—also to keep my heart from exploding. When nothing else happens, I tiptoe toward our campsite, doing my best the whole time to ignore my shaking hands and dry, sandy mouth. I've never heard of bears or cougars or bigfoots making a noise like that knocking sound, but seeing as it scared away that lynx, my mind is coming up with craziness like you wouldn't believe, all sorts of monsters pouncing on me at once out of nowhere. It feels lame, thinking like this. Who am I, PJ?

Just like I said, the fire isn't even really going, barely smoking ashes, but it's still red enough in the center to burn a falling branch, so I kick dirt on it until it's dead, and then I kick some more dirt on it just because it feels good to trade in that cold fear for some hot anger. The canteen has been knocked to one side, but it's still full. On the way back to Kendra and PJ, I pick up the other things—the compass, the specimen jars, the granola bars—until I get to the creek, and I see something in the water, something mushy and flat—our map.

When I pick it up, the map crumbles into soaked pieces that slowly drift down the creek, leaving me with nothing but a sour taste in my mouth and a sick feeling in my gut.

Stupid Kendra, thinks she knows everything. Stupid PJ, gets in my face with his camera and then starts crying the minute he gets a boo-boo. They both act like I'm some jerk who can't do anything but run fast and yell. When things get crazy, though,
I'm
the guy who has to go
deal
with it. They think I'm so dumb, I'm not scared—
of course
I'm scared. That's what being tough is—being scared but doing something anyway.

When I get back, PJ's leg has stopped bleeding, and he's gone from sobbing to sniffling. Kendra is staring at something in her notebook, her eyes bugging out of her skull. When I'm only a few feet away, her head snaps up suddenly.

“What'd you find?”

“The specimen jars, the canteen, and the compass,” I say, handing them off to her. “Oh, and the granola bars. Did anything stay in your bag?”

“Nothing, really.” She kneels and pours some water from the canteen onto PJ's ankle, washing the blood away. He hisses, then dries the scratch with the hem of his sock. From his backpack, he pulls out a Band-Aid and applies it carefully to the tiny scratch, like it'll gush blood at any moment.

Of course, PJ brought Band-Aids. His parents probably stuffed them in his bag, afraid he'd get mauled by a sparrow.

“What about the map?” asks Kendra.

“It fell in the creek,” I say. “It's in pieces. I couldn't save any of it.”

PJ groans and shakes his head, but Kendra just shrugs. “Wasn't doing us much good anyway,” she says.

“Did you guys hear that noise?” I ask. “The lynx was back there, and the sound scared him off.”

“I guess,” says Kendra. “It was probably a woodpecker.”

“Are you sure? It didn't sound like the wood-peckers I've heard, and I figure if it scared that lynx, it has to be pretty big—”

“Ian,” says Kendra, in her hoity-toity please-shut-up tone, as if I don't understand that what I'm saying might upset PJ, who I've known my whole life
.
We're stuck out here together, people. Let's talk about what's going on.

“Well, sorry if I wanted to keep you informed,” I say. “Did you hear when I said the lynx was still there? I risked my neck to prevent forest fires, and all I get is ‘
Ian
.'”

Kendra closes her eyes and drops her hands to her sides. “Thank you, Ian, for going back and putting the fire out.”

“Thanks, Ian,” says PJ, all raspy. At least he sounds honest about it.

“Whatever.” Great, now I feel like a jerk for asking them to thank me. There's no winning here. “PJ, can you walk? Nothing broken, right?”

“Yeah,” he says. Slowly, he climbs to his feet with Kendra at his side spotting him. He winces a little and sort of half hops on his twisted ankle (which, if you ask me, is all a big dramatic production; I've seen guys walk off sprains and twists
way
worse than that), but he gets up and does his best to smile through his limping.

“Okay, if you can walk, then we'll need to keep going.”

“Wait,” says Kendra. “Let's think about this.”

“We don't have time to think,” I bark, and she cringes back from me. “All of your thinking has done absolutely squat for us so far. There is a lynx in the woods. We don't know where we are. The sun is five minutes from setting. We need to
do
something.”

“Fine,” she snaps, jumping to her feet. “Fine, let's go. We're going.” She powers off ahead of us, leaving me to walk with PJ, who does his best not to hobble too much.

“What's her problem?” I ask him. “She needs to get with the program. You
both
do.”

PJ laughs like it's not funny. “Now I have to ask—are you feeling all right?”

“I'm
fine
. Why?”

“Because you're being really mean. Even for you.”

He—I—wow. It takes me a good ten seconds of deep breathing to calm down enough not to snatch him by the collar and shake him. PJ's right, I'm beyond angry; I'm furious. This isn't how a wolf behaves; wolves are cunning and quick and careful, not raging about every little thing. What's wrong with me?

“I dunno,” I finally say to him. “Something's got me feeling really . . . crazy.” PJ nods and then mumbles something I can't hear. “What was that?”

“I think it's the woods,” he says softly, glancing around like the trees might be listening to him. “They're messing with us. I don't trust this place.”

We walk about twenty yards behind Kendra for a while, until she reaches a cleared area, lit red-orange, and she stops and stares west. When we reach her, we follow her gaze into the sunset, which, yeah, is just gorgeous. A blanket of misty white clouds hangs around the mountaintops in the distance, and the sun is a burning red wedge that sits in the middle of a million and one different shades of purple and pink sky, disappearing more and more every second until it's a tiny fiery dot, and then even that gets eaten up, swallowed by the clouds and the mountains. For the first time since we got here, I feel cold. While it was going on, the sunset was beautiful, but now it seems intense, like the mountain around us just ate all the light. And man, if these woods have been wild by day, wait until it gets dark. . . .

“I don't like those clouds,” says Kendra, ruining the moment.

“Why?” I ask. “That sunset was beautiful. Are they not fluffy enough for you?”

She glares at me over her shoulder. “No,” she says, “because they look like rain.”

“But they're all misty and flat,” says PJ, “not big or dark like storm clouds.”

“Cumulonimbus, the big dark ones, they mean thunderstorms. But these flat cottony ones, nimbostratus clouds, can mean a prolonged rainstorm. More than that, they create a blanket of—”

“You're being paranoid,” I say. “Relax. We'll see what happens.”

Kendra spins and glares at me with this outraged face. “You're such a
jerk
, Ian Buckley,” she yells, her voice going all high and echoing off the mountains. “One minute, you think I'm not getting upset enough; the next, I'm getting too upset. . . . It's like, like anything I do, you have to one-up me!”

“Maybe if you weren't always acting like a teacher, we wouldn't be panicking so much. It's all,
Think this out, these clouds look dangerous
,
they're nimbo-whatever,
blah blah blah. We're on a hike. If you hike in the rain, you get wet.”

“Guys, really,” says PJ, “this is getting us nowhere.”

Kendra's cheeks go dark brown and she looks like she might explode, but then she closes her eyes, takes a deep breath, and says, “At least I can start a fire. It sounds like
my
dad taught me better than yours.”

Ouch. My face feels really hot, and the air feels cold. I'm trying to stay cool, but I don't feel cool, just angry and hungry and embarrassed in front of my friend by a
girl
, a girl who almost broke my face in half once. “Well, if you could
read a map
, we wouldn't be in this mess.”

“No, Ian, if your ADD-plagued jock brain hadn't sent you running off to try and tackle some deer, we wouldn't be in this mess,” she shouts, throwing her arms wide. “Maybe I'm paranoid, or I'm freaking out, but that's because I'm a little busy trying to clean up after some
puerile dolt
who can't hold still for five seconds.”

“Guys,” says PJ, before I can tell Kendra to shut her stupid brainy mouth. “It's getting dark. How does this help us, in any way? Less yakking, more hiking.”

He's right—the light from the sunset is already fading from pink to purple to navy blue, and the blanket of clouds is coming at us in a wave of soggy gray, and just like Kendra said, in the distance there's rain, a smear of shadow trailing down and behind the clouds like the tentacles of some big gross jellyfish. The woods up ahead don't look cool or inviting; they look dark, gnarled, and spooky, and they're getting spookier by the second. I keep telling myself that it's an adventure, that I'm still having fun, but it's getting harder to believe. It's like the mountain is enjoying this, like it won't let up on us.

Maybe PJ's right. Maybe it's this place.

Kendra snorts. “Fair enough. Maybe we can find a cave or something to spend the night in.” PJ swallows hard at the idea of sleeping in a cave but nods along.

Then there's that noise again—
TOK TOK TOK
—and PJ and Kendra stop and raise their heads to the sky. It's louder now, and I can tell by the look on Kendra's face that it's no woodpecker, but she doesn't say anything, just tightens her mouth and moves forward.

PJ slowly pulls his camera out of his pocket, but then he looks up at me, squeaks “Sorry,” and puts it away.

“It's okay, dude,” I say, “you can film this if you want.” But he just shakes his head and shrugs. Poor guy. Guess I did attack him earlier.

Soon, everything is dark blue, and it's harder and harder to see the shafts of light between the trees. Every branch throws a weird, jagged shadow across my face, and every noise seems to come out of nowhere, like the darkness itself is moving around, following right behind us.

Then we hear it—the first slaps of water on the ground. An ice-cold drop hits me square in the forehead, and in a quick second, it's drizzling, then raining, then pouring, the darkening sky spitting waves of freezing water over us. There's a rumbling in the distance, and bolts of lightning cut across the sky, illuminating everything—PJ's panicked face, Kendra's soggy hair, the endless mountain around us—before plunging us back into even blacker shadows.