The Hike (2 page)

T
he signposts were gone now, but the path remained fairly consistent. Ben walked along parallel tracks of pressed-down leaves as the woods spread out behind him. The trail descended and he had to walk in a zigzag to keep his footing on the loose, unsettled rocks. Going back up the mountain would be a real pain in the ass, but again, he had time. Maybe the path went in a circle. Maybe there was a more gradual, friendly slope back up the mountain so he wouldn't have to double back. He could keep moving forward but still end up home.

He kept expecting to see another walker come crossing by, or a jogger, or a hotel attendant on break time, but there was no one. He was alone, for the first time in a very long time. There was that little itch to check his phone, but he quashed it the best he could and tried to enjoy the moment like a responsible adult . . . to take in the majesty of the forest. Oh, the majesty! The leaves flittering and the sound of distant tractors from across the mountain and the royal blue sky above. Yes yes, this was all worth soaking in for the sake of personal betterment.

And then he came to a fork. The ATV tracks split in two here. To
the right, he could see them bend down toward a main road. Through the dwindling leaves, Ben caught the occasional glint of a passing car. If he went that way, he would eventually hit that road and have to turn around because there were no sidewalks to be had. That was a country road. You were either driving on it, or you were the dead deer lying next to it.

So he followed the tracks to the left and stayed perched along a ridge, walking along as the country road option disappeared behind him. He would remember the split if he had to go back. It was unmistakable. There was no other spot where the path turned vertical like it did right there, so he walked on with a great deal of confidence. He saw the country McMansions below come back into view and now he was moving back closer toward the inn, if not exactly on the same level. He was good. This was all fine. The path split again and this time, he took out his phone and opened up the Notes app and jotted down the markings so he wouldn't forget them: “Two trees with split trunks at junction.” He thought about calling home a second time to talk to the kids (on the phone, they were adorably unintelligible), but he saw the top left corner of the screen offer nothing but “Searching . . .” The only way to bring the phone back to life was to move on.

Soon, he could see a gate in the distance: one of those old iron-bar gates that you have to get out of your car to unchain. It was hanging open now, with a big
NO TRESPASSING
sign posted next to it, and past that was an old white pickup in front of a two-story aluminum shed.

Then Ben heard a whirring sound, like the motor of a leaf blower or a hedge trimmer . . . the kind of motor you can make squeal just by squeezing a trigger. It got louder and louder as he approached, but he couldn't see any people and he couldn't tell where the noise was coming from. Suddenly, he felt more vulnerable than he had five seconds earlier.

As he got closer to the gate, Ben slowed down, without even realizing it at first. One moment he was walking briskly, the next he was stepping around quietly, like a drunken teenager trying not to wake his parents up.
Maybe I should turn back around.
Seemed like a good idea. This was probably the end of the trail anyway. He could go back up the mountain and get back to the hotel and shower and get dressed and maybe lie there for a moment before his meeting. The hotel didn't seem so bad anymore. It probably had hot water. Ben wasn't exactly a marathoner. Every step forward was now going to be an extra step back, and it was wearing on him and his corroded knee joint. There was nothing more out here for him to see.

And then he saw the man: a big, hulking man wearing a denim shirt and cheap jeans, dragging a body out of the shed. The corpse was small and clad in a little cupcake nightgown. Her feet were gone. Her hair was bloody and tangled. Her hands were limp and Ben could see the chipped blue nail polish on her fingernails. The legs were just a couple of stumps dragging along the ground. He saw the red, like the butchered deer parts on the side of the road.
Saw it.
Then the man turned to him and their eyes met and
fuck.

The man's face wasn't visible. It was covered by the skinned-off face of a black Rottweiler, ears included.

Before Ben could process anything, he was running. He couldn't feel his body moving at all. Sight and sound took over his brain: the sight of the path cutting through the forest, the sound of the killer dropping the corpse to the ground, and his footsteps kicking into high gear: first lumbering, and then jogging, and now booming behind Ben in big thumps, like a giant stepping across acres of grassland at a time. Soon, he could hear the killer panting, and laughing in a low demonic register. He was closing in.

Don't slow down. Don't slow down even for a second.

Ben cried “HELP!” again and again but all he could hear was the growing laughter of the man behind him. His face grew deep red. He felt like he was about to start bleeding out of his eyes. He considered taking out his phone but that would only slow his progress, and his goal at the moment was to not get caught. The path stretched out ahead, but he could barely see it now because his mind was presenting him with a slideshow of terrors: the dog-faced murderer closing in, the future sight of his own mangled body, his wife getting the call and screaming out in horror and dropping her phone to the ground in shock. He had to look back. He couldn't resist it any longer.

The killer was twenty yards away, a healthy distance and yet not comforting to Ben at all. The man was twice Ben's size and had a big butcher knife in his hands. Even from this distance Ben could see that the edge of the blade looked cleaner and newer than the rest of the knife, ground down by a fresh sharpening, now gleaming and ready to hack through bone and skin and tendons and whatever else got in its way. The man would catch him, and then Ben would see the man's sickly green eyes and feel his awful dog breath and watch the knife plunge into his body and that final moment would linger into his afterlife and well beyond.

Now Ben wasn't bothering to form the word “HELP” when he screamed. He was screaming purely . . . all random, soft, extended vowels spewing out like vomit. He had no control over it. He could hear the maniac still laughing behind him. And then he heard him say what sounded like. . . .

“I've been waiting for this since the day you were born.”

He spotted bizarrely arranged piles of sticks off to the side as he blitzed down the path, structures he had never seen before. Maybe this killer, this
dogface
, had been waiting for Ben the whole time. Trapped him. Maybe he would be gutted and lashed to those sticks
and left for a faceless dog to chew on. Ben turned to look again. The distance between them had grown to thirty yards and he was praying he would be able to get back to his signpost and turn up the mountain and leave that man in the dust for good, then make it to the hotel and call the cops and get in his car and go home and never ever ever come back here.
Thanks for everything, Pennsylvania, but fuck you eternally.

Just when Ben was getting his hopes up about escaping, another man leapt into the trail ten yards in front of him. Also in a dog mask. He had a knife, too. Through the holes in the dog's skinned-off mouth, Ben could make out the second man's lips and teeth. He was also laughing and smiling and clearly deranged. Ben screamed again in holy fright. He was throwing his screams, as if they were a last-ditch weapon for him to hurl at the madmen.

Run right at him.
That was Ben's first thought. Ben played football when he was a kid. Fullback. Not a great player, but not an embarrassing one either. Whenever they were facing a team that had a really good defensive lineman, his coach always used the same strategy:
Run right at the guy. Don't let him chase you. Don't try to fool him. Just bowl the fucker over and take him by surprise.
There was a killer in front of and behind Ben now, with the treacherous mountain slopes on either side of the path, waiting to trip him up and render him easy prey. There was only one real option: the football option.

So he kept running. He imagined having a football in the crook of his arm and then he barreled forward, screaming for war.

The second dogface didn't expect that. By the time he was rearing back with the knife, Ben was already knocking him down. Stiff-armed him flush on the chin and dropped him like it was nothing, like he'd been waiting all these years to play one final, perfect down. If he had diagrammed it and practiced it for a week, he couldn't have executed it better.

He was running so fast now that his muscles felt like they were exploding, sending random bits of stray tissue to other parts of his body where those bits didn't belong. He looked back and the first dogface was hunched over the second dogface thirty yards away, then forty, then fifty, and then out of view entirely. Soon, he didn't hear them at all. He was extending his lead. He was gonna make it back to the hotel. He was gonna live.

But when he scoured for the two split-trunk trees marking his way up the mountain, he couldn't find them. The trail bent to the right instead of the left, as he had originally anticipated, and now he was seeing bigger maple trees and other things he hadn't recognized on the way in: odd rock formations, uneven slopes, patches of thick mud. A family of deer began sprinting alongside him, their bodies melting into the trees and then reappearing again. He looked down the mountain and saw no signs of a road, or of any McMansions at all. They were all gone. Everything . . . everyone . . . was gone.

B
en took his phone out in midsprint for the time (4:02
P
.
M
.
) and a clear signal, but there were no bars. It was still “Searching . . .” The longer it searched, the more quickly the battery would drain. He became frantic—all hard breaths and shaking limbs—running faster down the trail, searching for another glimpse of road or chrome or man-made structures, but nothing materialized . . . nothing he could recognize from the previous hour. Keeping one eye on the path, he opened the Maps app on the off chance that the phone would finally pick up a tower signal, but it only showed a single blue, pulsing dot, with the world waiting to be filled in around it.

“HELP! ANYONE?! HELP!”

Nothing. He fumbled the phone to the ground, he was shaking so hard.

“Shit.”

He picked the phone up and kept running. The adrenaline had worn off a bit since he had eluded the two dogfaces, and now the terror was sinking in well after the fact, taking up full residence in his mind. He didn't feel as if he had outrun them at all. They still felt present—part
of the atmosphere—along with the dead girl and her mutilated legs, the exposed bits of her veins and bones and flesh coloring the leaves below like a pair of paintbrushes.
That poor girl's mother.
The images and sounds became clearer to him and hardened into firm memories as he continued to run.
I've been waiting for this since the day you were born.
In his mind, he could see their hideous Rottweiler faces mouthing the words. God, how he
hated
Rottweilers. He scanned the mountain above for any tiered birdhouses or log benches, but nothing came into view. The path shot forward with no discernible end in sight.

But how far could he really be from the hotel? He wasn't some crazy distance runner, and he hadn't been out
that
long. If he went to the top of the mountain and doubled back, he'd happen upon the hotel again, right? It would be back in the same direction of the dogfaces, but surely he would discover something eventually (although that would be true if he continued in
any
direction, since he was just seventy-five miles outside of New York City). He looked down at the phone and still the blue dot pulsed, and pulsed. He tried his wife again, but the call cut out.

This is a dream. This is not a physically possible situation, which means all I have to do is wake up.
If he just gave his brain a light tap within the dream, he would stir, and eventually float back up to the surface of his consciousness. He woke up from nightmares like this on occasion. So he screamed out, “AHHHHHH!!!” as loud as he could. Seemed like a real scream. Seemed like it was really him doing the screaming. Here. In real life. Not a dream. Shit.

At a loss, Ben spied a narrow tributary of the path that branched off up the mountain. Maybe the killers would rush by it without noticing. He turned and began to climb hastily, desperate to maintain separation between himself and the dogfaces. It was not a graceful climb—lots of slipping on leaves and awkwardly jumping around fat
branches and thorny weeds—but still he managed. He came to a lull between two peaks, mountains rising up on either side, the path turning to the right. He could make out a small peak behind him where the hotel
should
have been. But there was no esker anymore. The topography was completely different. Now he was both terrified
and
pissed off.

Back home, he liked watching survival shows, and now he remembered one of the key tips: If you're lost, search out the highest point possible, so you can get a layout of the ground below. Made perfect sense. He followed the path to the right and up toward the small peak, pushing through the choked corridor of tangled sticks and mossy rocks and low-hanging conifers that refused to offer him soft needles to brush against. It was much harder labor than he was accustomed to, and he was rapidly succumbing to fatigue. His knee was throbbing now, and he was getting a nasty case of Museum Feet. There were little burrs all over his pants. Flecks of mud peppered his shoes and ankles until he had one smooth layer of filth covering everything below his knees. But he kept going because he knew that if he stopped moving, the dogfaces would find him and cut him up.

The sun was going down as he reached the top. This mountain was still well below the tree line, with spruces and lichen-coated pines blocking his view in every direction, all impossible to climb. He tried to get a decent view down below, but the light was fading and he couldn't make out any houses or hotels. No roads. No lights. No smoke rising up from chimneys. He took out the phone and it was still “Searching . . .” The battery was now in the red. It would die within an hour if he kept it on, but he couldn't fathom turning it off just when he needed it the most, when he needed the fucking thing to
work.
He tried his wife again and there was nothing on the other end.

“Come on. . . .
Come on,
you fucker.”

He kept expecting to hear the laughter of the dogfaces return, but
for now, he couldn't hear a thing: not a bird or a squirrel or a tree swaying in the wind. There was only him and his dying tether to the rest of the world.

There was a compass in the Utilities folder of the phone's operating system, one of the few things that didn't require a stupid signal to function. Facing back down the hill, toward the murder scene, was west. West was bad. East seemed better. He would head east until he found something. There was a rock nearby to rest on, so he opened up the Notes app and jotted down “craggy rock” for a signpost. Then he pressed hard on the power-down button on top of the phone, swiped across the screen to turn it all the way off, and watched as the screen gave way to a spinning white wheel in the center of a black void, spinning into nowhere until it finally died, too.

Ben put the phone back into his pocket, sat down on the rock for a moment, and cried into his T-shirt.