Actual, Real Danger

Rich’s sweat dried with a sour smell. Any animal would smell it and know he was afraid.

Sally Yan struggled to pull herself out of his unending misery, wondering if she had ever been like that, not wanting to know what happened to him next. For a moment she thought she pulled herself to her feet, but she was wearing a pack, cinched at the waist so it hurt her hips.

With a dead feeling of terminal illness, Rich Poore hurried on up the trail. He did not go back to that ruin and on back to the village. He went deeper into the woods and the trees now seemed eager to let him do it.

Every few minutes he turned his head and strained to see around the side of his pack without actually stopping.

The fear faded into a leaden lump once the immediate cause was gone. He knew vampires couldn’t really exist, so he built a wall around that clearing and shut it out.

The woods pressed in and the time dragged on. But just as the light started to fade, he came to a small clearing open to the evening sky and stopped immediately. The place was slightly less creepy than the woods and his heart leaped toward the far off deep purple blue.

The clearing was choked with bushes but there were a couple of bare spots. He unrolled his ensolite pad, pulled his sleeping bag from its green stuff sack and set up a bed in the bigger of the bare spots.

If he’d had a tent he would have crawled inside and not come out until morning. How he wished for walls around him! But Colin Fletcher the backpacking guru didn’t carry a tent unless the weather was bad and so Rich didn’t either. (Instead he carried a hardcover copy of The Complete Walker

which probably weighed as much as a tent would have.) The purple deepened and shadow-clogged trees leaned in on all sides.

A stealthy noise! He peered into the gloom, skin crawling, but saw only shadows and shapes everywhere. There it came again, a shuffle and bump!

It must be an animal; things always sounded bigger and louder outdoors!

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He dug his Durabeam flashlight from one of the pack’s side pockets. But should he turn it on and call attention to himself?

Stop it. There are no vampires. There is no sadistic God torturing me for my own good. I’ll just start my evening routine.

He looked half-heartedly for usable pieces of firewood.

There were only a few scraps in the clearing. Nervously he wandered into the deeper shadow of the trees, found two big rotted branches, nice and dry.

And then he heard, from far off, a sound which froze his heart. A low, hollow boom drifted up the trail, the sound a heavy marble lid might make when it was dropped carelessly back onto a cold marble coffin.

The branches slithered from his lifeless hands, a splinter jabbing itself painfully into his finger. Weeping with terror he fought his way over uneven ground back to the clearing. I’m in more danger now than I’ve ever been in my life.

He sank against a tree, just to have something at his back. I’m in danger

, he said with accusing disbelief to the empty sky. I’m in actual, real danger.

What could he do?

Should he go ahead and make a fire? Warmth and heat would be protection, right? But that was what to do if there were wild animals

around. Wouldn’t a fire just draw the vampire right to him? Maybe if he cowered quiet as a mouse all night long, it wouldn’t come this way.

He pictured a hiding place. A hollow tree, a cave, even a rickety A-frame tent.

But he also pictured footsteps coming closer to his hiding place, and the horror of seeing a pair of dark boots stop just outside.

If only that old man, that asshole

, hadn’t given him that horror movie warning. Or if he hadn’t seen the coffin in the ruin. The boom he’d just heard would have meant nothing to him. He’d be cooking his spaghetti dinner and drinking his tea like Colin Fletcher.

He wasn’t going to build a fire. He was afraid to even light his butane stove. His fingers, still throbbing from the splinter, fumbled at the little spring toggle, slid open the pack’s main flap and found a dried fruit bar and some salami. He ate them in quick, tearing lumps which left him bloated and still hungry.

It started to get cold. He wrestled his Sierra Designs jacket out, cringing at the noise it made.

As long minutes passed into what might have been an hour and nothing happened, he felt safer. Enough time had passed that if there was a vampire out there –

And then he did see something.

Out in the blackness: the faintest suggestion of movement, a darker shadow against the darkness. He gasped and stared. Did

that shadow have a human shape?

His flashlight was in his jacket pocket now. He could pull it out, turn it on. He imagined the thin beam dancing across thick trunks and suddenly illuminating … a face.

He stared without light, wondering if something watched with cold amusement as he squinted. Dreadful minutes slid by.