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If she’d spotted it through a car window, she’d have gazed in wonder and awe. Seeing it standing a few feet from her—while she’s flat on her back—is nothing short of terrifying. It might not be a grizzly, but one wrong move, one moment of fear and panic, and those massive hooves will trample her to a pulp.
Penny slides backward as she rises. The moose only watches. She keeps backing up. When it snorts and shakes its antlers, she turns and runs. Runs blindly, even as an inner voice screams that she’s overreacting, it’s a moose for god’s sake. A giantdeer.
She doesn’t care. She runs until she is certain it’s not charging after her. Then she stops to catch her breath, looks around, and realizes she’s left the path far behind.
Penny squares her shoulders and heads back the way she came. Back toward the path. But after a few strides, she hits a solid wall of trees. This isn’t the way she came.
She’s lost. She’s completely—
Calm down. Look around. Get your bearings.
The moon has slid free of its cloud cover. Use that as her guide. Where was the moon before? Uh, overhead?
Wait, there’s moss on the trees. That only grows on the south side, right? Or is it the north? Is that even true? She vaguely recalls some online trivia saying it wasn’t.
Breathe deeply. Gather her thoughts. There has to be something she remembers seeing. Mountains. Of course. There are mountains to the west of the town, which makes the sun set earlier than it usually does, but leaves spectacular sunsets that had her itching for her camera.
She looks up ... and sees trees. Pines rocket into the night sky and block any mountains she might see behind them.
All right, but she can see the mountains from the jobsite, which means she needs to get to a clearing. Pick a direction and start walking.
She does that, and twenty minutes later, she’s blind again, the moon disappearing. She’s walking with her hands in front of her face while she tells herself everything’s fine. It’s getting too dark for predators, right? And while it’s hardly the warm spring evening she’d be enjoying at home, Alaska in May isn’t nearly as cold as she expected. She’s warm enough in her jacket and boots and gloves. Worst case, she’ll need to hunker down until morning and then find her way back.
When she hears a noise to her left, she veers right and starts to jog, hands out in front of her face. Then she stops. It sounds like water. The burble of a stream.
Where there’s a stream, there could be a clearing, right? Also, where there’s a stream, there is eventually a lake, and there’s one right beside the town, which means she could follow the stream back.
She picks her way in that direction. It’s slow going as the trees get thicker. Then she stops as she catches an odd metallic sound. A faint tinkling, as if the water is running over something metal. That’s a definite sign of civilization.
She moves faster as the clouds thin, allowing a filtering of moonlight. Too fast, too confident, and when her foot hits a taut wire, she pitches onto her hands and knees. A trap. She’s been snared in a trap.
She flips over fast, and there’s a crack and a snap, and a billowing sheet drops onto her. Penny flails, struggling to get out from under the sheet that dropped over her. Her hands touch clammy fabric. She yanks it off and finds herself looking down at a canvas tent. She tripped over a guyline and brought the whole tent down.
She goes still, listening. If there is a tent here, there is a person here. Every story about serial killers in the Alaskan wilderness slams back. She carefully extricates her feet from the guyline. Then she rises, peering around. The clouds have passed enough for her to see that she’s in the middle of a campsite.
A hidden campsite.
As soon as she thinks that, she wants to dismiss it as fear and paranoia. But as she looks around, she realizes it’s more than that. She just left a town that’s being specially constructed to disappear into the landscape. Someone has also tried to hide this camp. That’s why she didn’t see it until she literally tripped over it.
The tent is dull brown with splotches of green for camouflage. There’s a box that must hold supplies, and it’s painted the same colors.
She peers around again and then makes her way to the box. It’s locked, but someone has forgotten to fasten the lock. She bends and twists it open, and the squeak of the metal almost—but not quite—drowns out the crackle of dead leaves behind her.
Penny spins, arms going up to protect herself. When she sees who it is, she lowers her hands.
“You,” she says. “What the hell are you—?”
A burst of pain, exploding through her skull. And then ... nothing.
1
I’m pressedagainst the glass of an airplane window, looking for a dream come true, and I’m absolutely terrified. I don’t have dreams. Ambitions, yes. Plans, certainly. Get a degree. Go to police college. Become a detective. Get on the homicide squad. Very practical aspirations, devoid of people or places. Get a dog? Have a circle of good friends? Fall in love? Move into the countryside? Nope. I excised all that from my life plans at eighteen, when I took a gun to confront a guy who put me in the hospital, and I pulled the trigger, and I spent the rest of my life waiting to be caught for it. I didn’t dare live a life where others might get hurt. WhereImight get hurt, when the inevitable end came. I couldn’t afford dreams.
Now I have one. I have so damnmuchthese days that it scares the shit out of me. Good friends. A husband. A life focus. Even a dog. All of that swirls together around the nexus of a place that has been born from my idea, shaped by our shared dream, now taking form in the Yukon wilderness. Taking form somewhere below me.
Haven’s Rock.
I shouldn’t be able to see it from here. If I can, then it’s not hidden, and we’ve paid a lot of money for nothing. That doesn’t keep me from peering into the endless forest, straining for a glimpse of a roof, a glitter of metal, something that doesn’t quite fit in this vast forest.
