Authors: Mark Wheaton
“It looks worse than it is. I was under a fallen tree and they got a claw into me, but Kenji distracted it.”
Christy looked down at the voicing of the name, and Jess knew he’d A) been her boyfriend and B) was likely dead.
Not wanting to embarrass her, Jess turned to Alex, only to see that his eyes were fixed on the German shepherd standing at attention nearby, peering inquisitively at the newcomers.
“Is your dog cool with this?”
“Not my dog.” Jess shrugged. “But he’s calmer than he was, so that’s a positive.”
“Holy shit,” Christy suddenly said, kneeling beside Jess. “They got you, too.”
“Not quite. Car crash trying to get away. But I sure know what you’re talking about. First aid kit has bandages and hydrogen peroxide.”
“Thanks,” Christy replied, walking over to it. She stopped at Bones, offered her hand to sniff, and then stroked him between the ears. “Hey, boy. It’s okay. We’re friends.”
She reached into Alex’s backpack and extracted a stick of beef jerky. She held it out to Bones, who slurped it up in one bite.
“That’s a good boy!” Christy said, petting him some more.
Traitor
, Jess thought, then realized she was jealous of the attentions of a pretty girl to a dog she barely knew.
You really need to get back to civilization
before you lose that other half of your mind, too.
“He loves that stuff,” Jess offered.
“Thought you said he wasn’t your dog,” Alex retorted.
Jess pointed to the empty wrappers next to the food locker. Alex nodded in understanding, but Jess had already decided he was a prick.
“How’d you find the tower in the dark?” Jess asked.
“We passed it while hiking,” Alex explained. “Spent most of the day backtracking and looking for it, as we didn’t think we’d get out of here until dark.”
“But as we wanted to keep off the main trails, it took a while to orient ourselves,” Christy added.
Staying off the trails would’ve been smart
, Jess thought.
Somewhere my dad is shaking his head at his dumb daughter
.
“What’s your story?” Alex asked.
“I was with three friends. We’d arrived maybe two hours before, set up camp, were just eating, and then the...”
“Sasquatches,” Alex interjected.
“Sure. The
sasquatches
erupted from the woods and tore everybody apart. I was lucky enough to be near the car when it happened, but it went down so quickly. My friends were dead before I could even get over to them, so I got behind the wheel and raced off. They chased after me, but I guess I got just far enough away that they gave up. Then, like an idiot, I hit a fallen tree and got thrown from the car.”
In the dim light, she searched Alex and Christy’s faces for any sign of disbelief, praying her story passed muster. Alex nodded appreciatively.
“We saw a couple of fire roads on the way where they’d dropped trees, obviously to keep people from escaping. You were probably lucky to get as far as you did.”
Jess fell silent. It was morbidly vindicating to think Patrick’s death was probably orchestrated by the sasquatches.
Christy poured what little hydrogen peroxide was left over her wound and went to work bandaging it up. She fed Bones two more sticks of jerky, which he gratefully accepted. Alex, meanwhile, used his shoulder lamp to investigate every corner of the tower in search of an electrical outlet. Jess didn’t remember seeing one when she arrived, but admitted that she hadn’t been looking for one regardless.
“There are antennae on the roof, so they may have been connected to something, possibly near the ceiling.”
“Doubtful,” Alex countered. “Any radio they had probably ran on batteries. If there’s a wire running up the post, the outlet should be near the floor.”
Jess was just mentally reasserting her opinion that Alex was a prick when the young man let out a victory whoop.
“Here it is!” he announced, pointing to a spot on the wall mere inches up from the floor. “Throw me the pack.”
Christy tossed the backpack over to him, and he shook out the contents. From the ensuing pile, he extracted a cell phone and a cord, which he quickly plugged in. Immediately, a green light burned to life on the phone as it charged.
“You have a phone?!” Jess exclaimed.
“Don’t get your hopes up,” Christy said. “We haven’t had reception the entire time.”
“But it’s better than nothing!” Alex added. “And we’re up high now. A whole different story if we’re above the tree canopy. Now we see how long it takes to charge.”
It turned out that Alex and Christy were brother and sister and American Indian, not Hispanic, as Jess had initially surmised. The late Kenji, in fact, had been Christy’s boyfriend, a young Japanese foreign student that she’d met at Princeton, where she was an undergrad in molecular biology. Alex was on academic probation from Michigan State, something Jess was surprised he was so open about.
“It’s fine,” Alex said, shaking off Jess’s attempt at a pitying look. “The professors ganged up on me. I’m part of a number of different actions, particularly ones that work against the logging in the U.P., and those are the guys who buy and sell every public institution in the state. So, a few protests, a few arrests, and a few court dates later, my profs aren’t letting me take make-up tests or hand in late assignments. I drop below a 2.0, and they send me a letter saying I’m on probation. If I don’t improve, then I’m out.”
“So you came to Pennsylvania?” Jess asked, perplexed.
Alex nodded to his sister.
“He was two days from leading some new protest,” Christy said, looking tired and drawn, hardly as interested in this line of conversation as her brother. “We, Kenji and I, suggested he come camping with us.”
“An intervention,” Alex added.
Jess idly wondered if, in his last moments, Kenji had regretted reaching out a helping hand to his ne’er-do-well, possibly future brother-in-law.
“Are you a big camper?” Alex asked, the question sounding surprisingly like a come-on.
“My dad used to take me all the time. He died a few years back….”
“Sorry,” muttered Alex.
“No, it’s okay,” Jess said, meaning it. “He was a lawyer, so he’d been fighting all his life. When he got sick, I could see it in his eyes. Fight it, and maybe you’ll make it a year or a little more, but it’ll be nothing but misery. Take nothing but pain medication, and you’re looking at maybe two months and a really painful last week. He chose the latter. It ended up being four good months and three painful weeks, but I didn’t leave his side the whole time. We hadn’t been that close since I was a little girl. We went to D.C., we went to New York. I delayed the start of my senior year, but the school was cool about it.”
Alex scoffed. Jess wondered if his anti-logging campaigns were strictly about the environment or hinted at class rage as well.
“What about your mom?” Christy asked, trying to cover up her brother’s response.
“She and my dad split when I was six. I didn’t know at the time it was unusual for a father to get full custody. Even if he was a lawyer. I found out later that my mom was just a black-out drunk and really abusive. My dad started wondering why I had all these little red marks on me and realized that my mother used to slap me in ways that wouldn’t leave a
big
mark, but she’d still get out of her system whatever was bottled up in there.”
“Wait, like how?”
“Instead of one big hit, she’d slap me on both sides of my face over and over and over again, but these light slaps that just made me cry and cry and cry.”
Jess suddenly fell silent. She didn’t understand why she was telling all this to total strangers. This was something she’d barely talked to her father about and only mentioned to Scott the night she learned her mother, then a born-again Christian, was pregnant with another daughter. She’d cried a lot that night. She wondered if being so close to death was just bringing everything back now.
“Sorry,” she sighed. “I don’t know why I’m talking about all this.”
“It’s okay,” Christy said. “I don’t think any of us know how to react to all this.”
Jess nodded and ran her fingers through Bones’s fur for comfort. The dog had been mostly quiet since he’d slipped down the stairs to relieve himself, an action Alex was against at first even as the shepherd pawed and whined at the trapdoor. The fear was that he would attract the sasquatches, but Jess assured the two others that, given his familiarity with the tower, he’d probably been in the woods for some time, ignoring and being ignored by the creatures. While Jess secretly worried he wouldn’t return, he was gone only ten minutes before they heard his claws clinking back up the ladder.
“Maybe it’s good to have his scent down there,” Alex admitted. “If the sasquatches think he’s on his own, maybe it’ll cover us up.”
Doubtful
, Jess thought, but had nothing to base her doubts on.
She was just massaging the base of the dog’s neck when his ears suddenly perked up and he raised his head.
“Does he smell something?” Alex asked, heading to the window.
“No, he sees your phone,” Christy replied.
Sure enough, Bones was staring right at Alex’s cell phone. The red light indicating the dead battery was now green.
“Holy shit!” Alex cried, grabbing the phone. “Time to get out of here.”
But as soon as he held it up, he was reminded of the earlier issue.
“No bars. Dammit.”
“What about the roof?” Jess suggested.
“Oh, yeah!”
Alex sprinted over to the ladder and rolled down the coiled-up rescue ladder. He climbed it gracelessly, the lightweight frame pitching and twisting under his weight. But a second later, he pushed up the trapdoor on the ceiling and disappeared onto the roof, his heavy footfalls echoing down into the room below.
“Still nothing!” he moaned, moving from one edge of the roof to the other.
“Be careful!” Christy admonished him. “Don’t slip!”
Not wanting to miss the excitement, Bones leaped to his feet and raced to the ladder. Jess thought this one would give the dog more trouble, but the shepherd ascended it with ease and joined Alex.
“I wonder if he’s some kind of military or police dog,” Christy offered. “I’ve never seen a dog do that before.”
“Me, neither,” Jess admitted.
“Wait, I think I’ve got something!” Alex called down. “Holy…yeah! Two bars! Calling 911 now. Have to put it on speaker so I can hold it as high as possible.”
The phone beeped three times as Alex punched in the number, then waited.
“Holy shit. Busy signal. Holy
shit
.
And
, I just lost reception again.”
Bones’s footfalls were excited, as if happy to be out in nature again, if only through his nose, as he inhaled the various smells of the night.
“Try the ranger station!” Jess suggested.
“You have the number?”
Jess wheeled over to the supply chest and opened it. On the inside of the lid were several phone numbers, the ranger station being up top. She read it out to Alex, who punched it in immediately.
“Ranger station. Is this an emergency?” came a sleepy male voice through heavy distortion.
“Yes,” Alex intoned, his voice turning grave. “There have been several injuries and deaths in the park.”
“Wait, where are you calling from?” the ranger said, suddenly not so sleepy.
“A fire tower. I’m on the roof.”
“Is there a number on the roof?”
There was a pause.
“Yeah, a big black seven.”
“What’s your name, son?”
“Alex Hazares. I’m with my sister, Christy, and another camper.”
“What are the nature of the…you said
deaths
?”
“Yes, injuries and deaths.”
“I’ll give you one warning. If this is a prank, that’s the kind of thing that goes straight to the State Police. We don’t fuck around.”
“No prank,” Alex said, maintaining the strictness in his voice. “There’s been an attack. Bears, big cats,
something
. It killed a member of my party and attacked and injured members of the other camper’s party.”
Good
, Jess thought.
Don’t say “sasquatch.”Anything but that
.
“Well, I wonder if that explains why Chuck and Laura weren’t on post when I came on for my shift tonight,” the ranger drawled.
Jess suddenly recognized his voice.
“Alex! Tell him the other camper is the girl he let in for five bucks the other night. We were in a white Mazda.”
Alex related this, and the ranger’s tone changed again.
“Ah, yes. The blonde or the brunette?”
Yep, that’s him
, Jess thought.
“The blonde,” Alex replied, flabbergasted as to the turn in the conversation.
“Okay. You guys sit tight, and I’ll be out as quick as possible. If there is a bear or some kind of cat or, more likely, a pack of wolves coming over the bridge from Sault Ste. Marie, we need to get Fish & Game out here
pronto
. You’re in a safe place?”
“For now,” Alex replied.
“All right. Look for me in about thirty minutes. You’re
way
the hell out there.”
The call ended. Alex came back down the ladder, followed by Bones, and plugged the phone back in.
“It’s already dead again,” he explained.
Jess nodded as Bones returned to her side. She knew the next half hour would be the longest of her life.
N
o one spoke much as the trio of humans and the one German shepherd awaited the arrival of the park ranger. At one point, Christy started crying, a memory of Kenji floating to the surface before she could sink it back down. Alex sat next to her, putting his arm around her shoulders. Jess wished for the umpteenth time that night that Scott was there to do the same for her.
Forty minutes in, everyone got nervous, and the stories flowed again. Alex and Christy talked about growing up as “Yoopies,” slang for the denizens of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
“But you actually hear two things – ‘yoopies’ and ‘yoopers,’” Christy explained. “Down state, Lower Peninsula, call us both, but I’ve never really heard anyone from the U.P. call themselves anything but yoopies. So, I’m a yoopie.”