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The lodgepole pines stood like majestic sentinels, their branches whispering secrets to the wind as the sun painted dappled patterns on the forest floor. The fragrant scent of pine needles, sap, and spring wildflowers wafted through the air. Her anger at the cities threatened to explode from every pore. She wanted to scream in frustration. Instead, she ran faster, more recklessly.
Anything to burn the frustrations out of her blood. Up here, Erin could let her wildness run free, and there were no security patrols to tell her to slow down.
Her breath sawed in and out. Sweat ran down her back, soaking her t-shirt.
On Friday, Maria, her boss, had scowled and asked her to rebind proposals to change the font color header on page forty-three from cerulean to sea green. All two hundred of them. The job paid just enough for her to afford a studio apartment in Class D housing, just a step up from the de facto slums.
Erin’s arms pumped, her thighs burned, her eyes watered.
Sometimes Erin was convinced she was simply born in the wrong fucking century. Hell, perhaps the wrong planet. Not that she knew the right time or place she’d fit in, but this certainly wasn’t it.
The trail dipped down and around a formation of boulders three times as tall as Erin, and she rounded them with ease, using her momentum to propel her up the slope on the other side.
She was going so fast, Erin had to throw a foot out in front of herself when she saw the brown bear lumbering down the hill. The sound of her feet skidding to a stop was painfully loud in her ears. Erin immediately crouched, making herself small and non-threatening. The bear wasn’t even looking in her direction.
Erin had read up on wildlife in the Rocky Mountains, but she’d never seen a bear before. According to the textbooks, they were extinct. Beasts of history and lore. This one was now less than four hundred feet from her. It was smaller than she’d thought it would be, perhaps about five feet long and just over three feet high, but by the shimmer of its fur with every lumbering step, Erin could tell its bulky form was packed with muscle.
It was beautiful and Erin cherished the moment, even while she anxiously waited for the animal to continue on its merry little way. Just then, the wind picked up and the bear’s snout sniffed the breeze and its gaze swept unerringly toward Erin. She’d seen a dog’s hackles rise before, but watching the bear react to her was another thing entirely. It dropped and swayed its head from side to side, a low rumble issuing from somewhere deep within the bear’s belly.
Erin scanned the area, and behind her, next to the boulders, the ground rose steeply and crested a ridge. She couldn’t see what lay beyond, but it was uphill, and she knew from reading up on bears they moved slower uphill. Erin was a fast runner. Was she fast enough?
It might give her a minor advantage if she had to run for it. Erin heard the bear make a huffing noise and focused back on the beast. Its snout was raised, and it let out a loud growl. Erin held her ground and kept low, refusing to look at it directly, attempting to appear cowed. She certainly felt intimidated. Couldn’t the bear tell it had won the pissing match?
The bear charged, and Erin sprung into action, racing up the hill. She heard thundering footsteps pounding behind her as the bear crashed through the underbrush, hot on her tracks. Its roars spurred her on, forcing more adrenaline through her veins as she dodged rocks and leaped over fallen trees. Soon, she reached the crest of the hill, and to her horror, discovered it wasn’t simply another hill.
It was a cliff, with a drop of easily over a hundred feet, down into a ravine below. The sight gave her immediate vertigo.
Panicked, Erin spared a glance behind her at the enraged bear, which was now only about a hundred paces away, and then down into the ravine. Without thinking, she got down on her belly and shimmied down the rock face, desperately seeking footholds and gratefully, against the odds, finding them.
She had no experience rock climbing, but looking up at the bear only fifty feet away, it now looked like the time to learn.
Erin’s moves were quick and, in hindsight, extremely lucky. She got a few feet down the cliff wall before the bear arrived. She was far enough away that she had escaped the creature’s reach, if not its powerful roar. The bear, clearly the more intelligent of the duo, chose not to climb the cliff. Instead, it snarled and snapped at the crest of the hill for a while before trudging away. Erin did not know how far it had gone.
With her luck today, definitely not far enough. Going back up would be the shorter and, it was likely, an easier route, but she did not know if the bear remained nearby. Thus, not entirely safer.
Going down would be hard, but Erin was strong.
Erin steeled herself and started down the wall, taking her time now. This differed from any other exercise she’d done before; it required strength in her fingertips and forearms that she hadn’t trained for. Her arms quivered with each new grip and foothold.
She made the mistake of looking down. She’d only made it less than halfway down, and the bottom was littered with sharp rocks and bushes. With her luck, the bushes sported inch-long thorns.
Erin pushed onward, determination her ever-present partner. Unfortunately, her stamina continued to fade, and there was nowhere on this nearly sheer pockmarked surface to rest. Every movement was a struggle, plus her fingers were raw from gripping the coarse and sun-warmed rock.
Erin fought back tears as she found the next hold, the sharp angles of the rock cutting into her hand as she squatted into position, but she needed the hold, and there wasn’t another option. Erin found a more comfortable one for her left hand and then began seeking footholds blindly. Her feet found two different spaces, widely spaced, but they were there. Erin let out a long breath, and let her weight settle onto the new footholds.
When both feet gave way at once, Erin’s body stretched out against the rock, her hands slipping in their grips as her feet flailed for footing and found none. The rock bit into her right hand painfully, and Erin looked up to see blood dripping down the rock. Her bruised fingers slipped from the hold on the left, and then the flash of pain in her right hand was simply too great, and Erin let go reflexively when she felt the joints in her fingers begin to tear.
The free fall lasted only a heartbeat before Erin hit and scraped against the rock wall, banging her forehead painfully against the stone. It tossed her backward and her downward glide continued unimpeded until Erin hit bottom with a sickening crunch as she crumpled to the ground, landing mostly on her back. She tried to stay awake, her vision blurring and darkening at the edges. She fought the encroaching darkness, terrified of what might happen if she succumbed to it. As her consciousness slipped away, she held onto one final thought: she had to survive this, bear and all, to prove that she was truly alive and free.
CHAPTER3
ERIN
The pounding in her head roused Erin, followed by the awareness of throbbing pain all over her body, with a screaming, shooting pain flaring from both her left ankle and her right hand.
If only this was just a nightmare. If only she could wake up from it now. The city guards were probably right; the wilderness can be a treacherous place for a lone woman like her. Yet here she was, lying in agony, with no one else but herself to blame.
Erin didn’t want to open her eyes. Heat seared her flesh. Her throat was parched. Her twisted back screamed for attention, and for a moment, Erin remembered the bear, her scrambling descent down the cliff, and then her complete loss of control.
