AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Ever see one of those reality shows,” asked Boone, “where they drop people off naked in the middle of nowhere?”
“We’re
not naked,” Shane countered.
“Not usually,” Jeremy pointed out. “But I have to say, a good amount of the time we’ve been—”
“Shut up.”
“Okay…”
Boone cleared his throat before continuing. “The point is, whenever you watch these shows? These people are exhausted by day three without food. By days five and six, they’re just lying around sleeping all day. After a week, they’re comatose.”
“So?”
“So if we’re going to chance it,” Boone said, “we need to do it now, while we’re still strong. We just finished off the last of the food. We should expend that energy, while we still have a shot.”
They stopped for a moment, maybe letting the gravity of his statement sink in. Jeremy eventually broke the silence.
“When the hell were there peaches?”
I wanted to laugh, but it wasn’t funny. Reaching someone on the radio probably wasn’t going to happen from here. Not at the base of the mountain. All the way tucked in the back.
“How close do you think we got,” asked Shane, “the first time we went out?”
“Dunno,” said Jeremy. “We were trying to walk around, remember? Not up.”
“Yeah but…”
“If only we’d climbed that tower, we could’ve gotten an idea of how far away we were. But the visibility was already gone, and—”
“Tower?” I asked abruptly. “What tower?”
They all turned at once as I came over. They had no clue I was even listening.
“You didn’t say anything about finding a tower.”
“That’s because we didn’t stay long,” said Shane. “It was some old cellphone tower we stumbled across, right before we turned around. Jeremy wanted to climb it but I stopped him.”
“Would’ve been nice if any of us had saved some battery life,” added Jeremy. “Instead of using our phones as flashlights, we could’ve—”
“Are you sure it was a cellphone tower?”
They looked back at me strangely. Like I was making a big deal about nothing.
“There weren’t any power lines,” said Shane. “If that’s what you were thinking.”
“Was it smooth and round?” I asked. “Like an aluminum mast? A bunch of little things sticking out on top and—”
“No, no,” said Shane. “Not like that at all. It was big and steel. Old.”
“How old?” Boone cut in. “Older than cellular phones?”
“Yeah, definitely…” Shane’s brow crossed, as he realized what he’d just said. “Oh shit! I guess it couldn’t be a cell tower then. Could it?”
I grabbed Jeremy by the shoulders, almost like I was interrogating him. “Was it latticed?”
“Latticed?”
