Out of Place (5 page)

Chapter 7

Emily got out of the car and looked around. The small log cabin was very isolated.
It had an A-frame style roof with large windows at the peak. There was a wide porch, which spanned the entire length of the front.

Thick
pines and tall oaks crowded the house, giving it almost no yard at all. A gravel sidewalk led up to the steps away from the dirt driveway and wrapped around the house on both sides. She could see some space behind the house where the sun splashed on the sloping yard that led up to a hill.

Harry walked around to the back of the car and removed a couple bags
from the trunk. “This place has no electricity, but there’s a propane generator and stove.”

“Where are we?”

“We’re in Virginia, near the Appalachian trail system.”

Emily hugged herself
. This place had a creepy feeling to it. “What makes you so sure they can’t find us here?”

“If they do, I’m ready!” He held up an assault rifle.

They entered the cabin. It had tall ceilings and dark wood throughout. It was only one room and a bathroom. A small kitchenette sat to the left, with a tiny table. A bed was pushed up against the wall on the right and there were two fabric covered chairs, one of which was folded down into a sleeper.

Emily stepped lightly on the
creaking floor. “Whose place is this?”

Harry dropped the bags
on the floor. “It’s my friend Calvin’s. He told me no one would ever find us out here in the middle of the woods. He comes here only about twice a year in spring and fall. We’re a good fifty miles from anything, so we should be safe.” He stepped into the kitchen area. “This place has a pump well and a hydraulic pressure basin, so we have to pump it up every day to get fresh running water. The pump is down that trail a few hundred yards away, towards the lake. I have enough food for several days. There’s a stove with two containers of propane so that will last us a long time.”

He walked up to her and placed his hands on her shoulders. “
Hey, I know you’re scared right now, but we’ll get through this. We just need to stick together and be smart.”

Emily
studied his face. “Are you okay? That looks painful.”

Harry wiped his nose and looked at the back of his hand. “Eh, he got a couple lucky shots in
, but the guy was a punk. I used to eat his type for breakfast in my youth. He’s lucky I’m a little out of shape or he would’ve never gotten any upper hand.”

She sighed. “Thanks, Harry. I don’t know how to thank you.” She gave him a hug and he patted her on the back.

“Hey, what are neighbors for?” He stepped back and smiled. “I’m going to gather some firewood just in case the temps drop tonight. Maybe you want to get some rest. You can take the bed, I’ll take the sleeper.” He turned and went back outside and down the wide wooden steps, angling towards a trail that led left and into the woods.

She stepped outside onto the porch and listened to the wilderness. This was probably the mo
st remote place she’d ever been in her life. Being outdoors was something she loved, but in general, she loved the beach and well-populated lakes or trails that were maintained by parks officials. This was not her type of getaway. The woods scared her a little bit. She’d never been camping for real and never wanted to. Sometimes, when they were young, she and Renner would camp out in their yards. But it was never scary unless they spooked themselves with ghost stories or urban tales about a man with a hook-hand who roamed the railroad tracks looking for his severed limb.

Going d
own the steps, she looked up to see the sky in the spaces between the tall trees. It was crystal-clear, that perfect deep blue that she always wished her eyes were, like her mother. But she got stuck with her dad’s sort of hazel, gray, green mixed colored mess. Some days they looked gray, some days they looked brown, but they never really looked like anything cool. Ren had nice eyes. They were a cool green. The thought that she’d never see them again made her want to cry, but that same something inside wouldn’t allow it. Maybe it was that intrinsic human fight or flight instinct keeping her focused and on edge.

Something drew her attention to the woods. It felt like eyes were upon her. She swallowed hard and took a deep breath.
Walking around the side of the house, she saw a small backyard with nothing much to speak of other than a tree-stand. She didn’t know much about hunting, but she knew that hunters used those to watch for deer.

Something stirred behind her
. Turning quickly, she saw Harry coming out of the woods with a pile of logs wrapped in a nylon carrier. He strode up quickly, struggling with the weight of the load. “There’s lots of wood around here. That will save us the propane so we don’t have to waste it. We need to conserve where we can.”

She frowned.
“How long are we supposed to be here?”

He
climbed the stairs and dropped the pile of wood next to the door. “No way to know. It might be a few days, a week, longer.”

“A week?” Emily screeched it louder than she wanted to. “There’s no way! I have to leave for school
and I have so much to do.”

“Why so early?”

“Because I have to take my physical for tryouts, hockey starts, and I have pre-credits to earn. I told you I’m graduating in three years so I don’t have any time to waste.”

Harry
shook his head. “I’m telling you—don’t be in such a hurry. Why such a hurry to grow up? Life happens fast, whether you plan it or not. You should enjoy it.”

She shrugged. “I will enjoy it. I don’t want to hurry, but I don’t want to waste time and money
, either. Yale is very expensive. The longer I stay the more it costs.”

“You’ve got money. You
r dad has told me how much you’ve saved.”

“That money has to sustain me
for life. It’s a safety net for the just-in-case. I’m not going to have time for a job while I’m in school. And my parents can’t afford to give me any. Adam is going to need money for school and he isn’t getting any scholarships. He doesn’t have a big fat bank account, either.”

“Your dad makes more than you think.”

“I know exactly what he makes. He makes ninety thousand dollars a year. My mom makes thirty-six. Between their mortgage and cars, and what they’re saving for Adam, there’s not a lot left over.”

Harry
sat on the steps. “Sometimes I forget how smart you are. You’ve always had it so together. I still think of you as a kid, but you haven’t been a kid in a long time. In my mind it seems like you just turned sixteen last year.”

“I’
ll be nineteen in three months.”

“
I always forget you have one of those birthdays where you’re too young to be in the class behind you but too old for the class ahead of you. You’re only four years younger than Cheryl, and she missed an entire year.”

Emily nodded. “I always wanted to know
: why did she miss a year?”

He shook hi
s head. “It’s a long story. But after the fire, she needed some therapy.”

“The fire?”

“Yeah, at our old house.”

“I didn’t know about any fire.”

“Your dad never told you?”

“No.”

He turned his palms up and then clasped his hands. “Well, Cheryl went through a bit of a pyromaniac phase. We grounded her and tried to get her to stop, but she kept playing around. One day she was playing with some matches; it started a fire that got out of control. It ruined the house almost completely. We all got out okay, but unfortunately, our dog didn’t make it. Cheryl took that pretty hard.”

“I didn’t know.”

“It was a hard time for everyone.”

“How’s she doing?”

He sighed. “Cheryl is what she is. My daughter hates me, always has. She’s struggling all the time with on and off depression, but she’s smart and she’s done with school, so we hoped she’d come back to Jersey. She’s my baby and I’ll always love her. I just wish she’d understand that instead of always thinking I’m disappointed in her.” He shook his head slowly. “I wish you two had been better friends. She needed a good influence like you. You’re smart and level.” He waved his hand. “Ah, it’s a mess with everything going on.”

“Can I ask you what happened with
Arlene?”

Harry
looked up to the sky. “What can I say? It’s a long story, but I guess she fell out of love with me.”

Emily
softly kicked some gravel. “I’m sorry.”

“Me too. But it’s been coming for a while. The last few years haven’t been good. She blames me for
Cheryl being so screwed up, she blames me for the business not doing what it should be.”

“It must be hard.”

“It is.” He stood. “But I’m here helping my friends, and that’s what’s most important. My problems are not the issue right now. This is life and death and I will keep you safe.”

Emily nodded.

He opened the door. “Let’s get some food.”

They went inside.

Chapter 8

Zack nearly lost his footing on the rutted trail, but managed to hold his balance after a few stutter-steps.

“Whoa there!”
Rick joked. “What’re you drunk? You been sipping the whiskey behind our backs?”

Zack
smirked. “No, I slipped on a rock.”

Javier finally caught up to the others. “Damn, you guys walk too fast. This trail is nasty.”

“Ha!” Rick looked at Javier. “It’s not nasty, it’s just your Cuban ass can’t handle the outdoors.”

“Bullshit,
leprechaun, I can hang.”

“Guys
,” Zack said, stopping them before they ended up in one of their usual racially motivated insult games. It was all in good fun and never turned into anything but laughs and eventually shots of tequila or Irish whisky, depending on who won. “We’re almost at the end here, which way are we going?”

They all looked to
Donovan Young, a blond-haired, six-foot-three-inch beanpole who constantly had flushed cheeks flanking his long nose. He took out his phone and studied the screen. “Well, if this trail app is still accurate, five miles past nowhereville. We need to stay left.”

“Left is good.” Zack nodded.

“What’s to the right?” Javier asked and then took a swig of water from a large blue bottle.

Donovan
pushed his razor lips up toward his nose. “Looks like about five miles to a small lake.”

Rick
O’Reilly, short, muscular, with black hair and dark eyes, had been Zack’s best friend since day one at Princeton. He came from a huge Irish family that operated a farm in upstate New York. He looked at Zack and asked, “Why aren’t we going to the lake?”

Zack
stretched his arms above his head. “Maybe that’s not a bad idea. We can camp there tonight.” He adjusted his backpack. “I don’t know about you guys, but I wanna set up camp before dark tonight. Last night was ridiculous.”

“Yeah,” Rick agree
d. “That’s what I’m saying.”

Donovan
shrugged. “The lake is totally off our path, though. It’s not north at all. But Lenape Point is another few hours away, that won’t give us time to set up camp.”

“Then it’s settled
,” Zack said. “We’ll go to the lake tonight.”

Rick nodded. “Is that an executive decision?”

Zack pursed his lips and nodded. “Damn straight.”

They headed down the trail.
They always looked to Zack to be the decision maker since in general he made the right ones. He decided he’d pull up the rear for this leg of the hike. They’d been hiking for three days up the Appalachian Trail. They weren’t covering the entire trail, but they were doing a pretty solid third of it. And they were taking the alternate route, not the popular marked trails that most people chose, but the true old trail that no one used anymore because of its remoteness and roughness.

Zack
and Rick wanted to hike the trail. Donovan wanted to do whatever Javier wanted to do, and Javier wanted to go down to Florida and party at Miami Beach. They tossed a coin and fate decided this was the way to go. Sure, chasing girls on the beach had its benefits, but they’d done that every year on spring break since they got into college.

Zack
wanted to do something different. Since this was probably the last time the four of them as a group were going to spend together, he wanted to do something where they could just hang out and create a few more memories. If you put girls and a beach into the equation, there was a good chance they wouldn’t be spending any time together at all. It was just the foursome—the same four friends that met up freshman year at Princeton while sharing a suite. They’d been through a lot together and now they were all going their separate ways.

Javier was off to law school
, angling to join his father’s big Manhattan firm. Donovan took a job in San Francisco with a small upstart software company, and Rick was going back home to Newberg, New York to work on his family farm. He’d gotten a degree in agricultural science and was going to take the dying family farm into a new realm. He’d connected with an organics company and they were about to sink about ten million dollars into the operation to turn the farm into an organics trendsetter with the largest greenhouse in the country for year-round growing.

Zack
still wasn’t sure what he was going to do. He might just stay in New Jersey and find a job. Or he might take Rick up on his offer to work with him at the farm. Zack certainly wasn’t a farmer by any stretch. His degree was in marketing and communications, but that’s exactly why Rick wanted him. A new organic farm was going to need all sorts of marketing and media strategies and Zack could already envision a lot of good ideas. Not to mention, two Princeton graduates could attract a ton of investors and a good amount of attention.

It was a big decision. He didn’t want to go in with Rick
, hate it, and leave him hanging. He’d visited Newberg with Rick a couple times and it wasn’t really his type of place. It was a small upstate New York town, surrounded by smaller towns, which were surrounded by forests and farms.

Zack
also had a standing offer to work with his Uncle Jack if he wanted. Jack Byrne owned Byrne Golf Equipment, a medium sized company that provided high end equipment. Zack didn’t really like golf that much, but it was a good company and his father wanted him to come work for Uncle Jack like pretty much everyone in the family did.

The sad part is that these offers were better than anything he had thought up on his own.
The problem was he really had no idea what he wanted to do. He wasn’t really good enough at anything he liked doing to choose it for a career. Sometimes he wished he’d stayed a psych major, because he liked working with people. But the idea of sitting behind a desk and asking people how they really felt didn’t excite him.

Either way he didn’t have to make a choice right now. The whole point of this trip was to unplug
, unwind, and shut down his overactive brain. He focused back on the trail as the rocky path wound down and around a sharp turn. As they came out over the side of a steep drop, a pristine, crystal green lake appeared to their left in the near distance.

“Wow,” Rick said. “That’s some beautiful shit right there.”

“Yeah, it is,” Zack replied. “Looks like a liquid emerald.”

Donovan
lifted his small field binoculars to his face and pointed to a clearing on the opposite side. “I see potential camping right there.”

Zack
took out his phone and snapped a picture. “Agreed, that looks like the sweet spot.”

They h
eaded down the path towards the lake.

***

After setting up their tents, Zack and Rick headed out to gather some wood for a fire. They found a large gather of broken trees and started snapping off some limbs.

“So,
” Rick asked, “did you give any thought to my proposal?”

Zack
sighed. “I thought we weren’t going to talk about it this week.”

“Did I say that?” Rick smiled.
“And you believed me?”

“Yeah, I should know better.”
Zack was good friends with a lot of people, but Rick was definitely his best friend. They’d only known each other for four years but they’d been practically glued together since their first day at Princeton. They had a lot in common right off the bat, as they were both huge motocross fans growing up, and rode dirt bikes all their lives. That’s a small community in general. Most people will bond over something obscure that they share, and when Rick got tickets for the Motocross Nationals at Unadilla that first summer, they were buds ever since. The O’Reilly family farm was only five miles from the racetrack, so Rick had been going every year since he was old enough to walk.

“D
id you see that trail a while back off to the left? That hill?” Rick asked.

Zack
broke off a huge limb. “I know. I was drooling; that would be a nice ride. Wish we had our bikes.”

“
No doubt bro. I wish we’d’ve gone out to Glamis and hit the dunes instead.”

Zack
picked up a large log and tossed it. “I hear ya, but those guys don’t ride. I’m pretty sure Javy is afraid of dirt bikes.”

“I’m pretty sure Javy is afraid of dirt.”

Zack laughed a little. “Yeah, he won’t admit it, but he’s hatin’ this.”

“He hates anything that doesn’t include a cocktail glass with sugar on the rim
, served to him by a blonde with huge fake boobs.”

“
As long as those huge boobs are offset by a huge fake booty.”

“And the hair has to be really fake
-looking with black roots.”

Zack
nodded. “And she needs to have those huge spider-leg eye lashes.”

They laughed and
Zack asked, “How many fake parts can a girl have before she’s officially a cyborg?”

“I’d say more than five.”

Zack tossed another log. “No, gotta be more than that. You got boobs, hair, lashes, nails, butts—”

“Calfs, lips, noses—”

“Contacts, eyebrows…” Zack thought for a second. “We need to change our criteria. I’m going to go with a power button on the nipples or touchpad on the abs.”

Rick blew out a long breath and wiped a bit of sweat from his brow. “So we’re not there yet
, technologically speaking.”

Zack
wiped his hands on his jeans. “No quite.”

They carried as much wood as they could pile onto their arms and headed back to camp. As they arrived
, Javier and Donovan were just completing the circle of rocks that would be the fire pit.

Zack
’s pile was getting very heavy. His arms were whipped and he dropped the pile with a groan. Rick didn’t have as much trouble. He was built much thicker—not that Zack was a weakling by any stretch. In fact, he spent a good amount of time in the gym working out, lifting weights, and he’d played hockey all his life. But Rick was a freak of nature, built like a tank out of the womb.

Zack
took out his foldout axe and started chopping off some splinters for kindling. Night would be falling soon and they needed a good fire. He hacked away at a large arm-sized log until he had a nice pile of splinters and twigs and he started arranging them around the center of the fire pit.

In his pack
, he had some dirty paper towels he saved in a zipper bag to keep them dry. Zack had taken a one-week survival course in school, and rule one is that you never throw anything away because there is a recycle use for everything. Old paper towels were perfect for starting a fire.

He clicked his
compact camping lighter and got a towel burning. Touching it to the tiny curled pieces of shaved wood, it didn’t take long for those to ignite, and before long a small fire was cooking. “We have ignition.”

Rick came over and placed four
small logs on top in a pyramid shape. “And we have liftoff.”

Zack
looked towards Donovan, who just finished setting up his tent. “You two make a wood run.”

“Why us?”

“Because we just did.” Zack pointed down the trail. “Go down there about two hundred yards, there’s a nice pile on the left side.”

Donovan tapped Javier
, who sat on a log. “C’mon, Javy, we’re up.” He turned back to Zack. “Then you two can go find your own seats.”

***

They sat around the fire. It wasn’t completely dark beyond the glow of their campsite. “Good call, Dono, on the camp,” Zack said to Donovan. “We would’ve never made it to Lenape before dark.”

Donovan
leaned back on his log and said in an old English accent, “Why thank you, Ma’Lord, ‘tis my honor to navigate and relay critical logistics.”

Zack
laughed. “You’re such a freak.”

“Yeah,” Rick added. “You need to stop that Larping shit o
r you’re never going to get laid.”

“Are you
actually still doing that stuff?” Zack asked Donovan.

“
Indeed I am,” Donovan replied. “You guys don’t know what you’re missing.”

“
Sorry, Dono,” Zack said. “We know exactly what we’re missing.”

“I’m not so sure
, guys,” Javier entered the conversation. “I could see it being fun. It’s just like acting. I was in the drama club in high school and I played a knight once. It was cool.”

“
Except Larping is lame,” Rick offered. “At least there’re chicks in the drama club, so there’s some hope. I don’t see any chicks Larping.”

“Oh
, yeah, there are,” Donovan added.

Rick raised his hand.
“Sorry, let me rephrase that. I don’t see any hot chicks Larping.”