Hot, thirsty, and exhausted from hours of walking, Miriam finally acknowledged a small wrinkle in the BIG PLAN.
Tracing her father’s hiking map with her finger, she couldn’t help but scratch her head.
What had gone wrong?
She’d followed the train tracks to the fork. Found the footpath through the bramble. Hiked on for at least another hour. But where was the service road? And why hadn’t she begun to hear the sound of the creek?
“Did we miss it somehow, Beatrix?” she said aloud.
Beatrix noted that the scrub was a bit overgrown. And there had been a number of deer paths that looked like trails but disappeared after a hundred paces.
This, Miriam decided, was how treasure hunters must feel when they went searching for pirate gold. Not lost, not hopeless, just frustrated at their inability to follow a stupid map to a stupid X that’s supposed to mark the stupid spot. Except in her mind she used a word much worse than stupid.
The clearing into which Miriam stumbled, however, seemed a reasonable alternative to her expected campsite. There was an open section of ground covered in soft pine needles, fallen branches for firewood, rocks on which to perch, and no signs of black bear or even fire ants.
“I’m sorry, Beatrix,” she said, placing the doll on a rock to keep watch, “this might have to do for tonight. We’ll make it to the proper campsite tomorrow.”
Darkness closed in like a pack of wolves.
Miriam gathered wood, arranged a ring of stones, and after several tries got a fire blazing with help from her trusty lighter. As she put up her tent in flickering reflections of orange and red, she whistled a nursery rhyme, reciting the words in her mind.
Rock-a-bye baby, in the treetop
When the wind blows, the cradle will rock
When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall
And down will come baby, cradle and all.
And then it was time for supper.
The BIG PLAN called for regular meals, all of which consisted of Wonder Bread (which contained no actual wonder) and hot dogs (which contained no actual dogs). Miriam shaved a palmetto stem with her little ax, skewered a hot dog, and thrust it into the roaring fire.
A sudden pang of shame overcame the girl.
“Don’t look at me like that,” she said to Beatrix. “The storeman said I could take the food I needed.”
Really? asked Beatrix. I never heard him say that.
“Well, he didn’t stop me.”
Flames licked the hot dog as it sweated and swelled, turning deep brown then crisping into ashen black–just the way Miriam liked it. The roasting process reminded her of creepy stories her dad used to read to her from a tattered book–grim fantasies of people being cooked alive by monsters in the woods.
But that was back before Sunny Shores. Back when her mom was there. Back when things were… better.
Miriam clutched Beatrix closer and pretended she didn’t miss her old life.
After dinner, the girl crawled into her tent, tucked Beatrix back into her hoodie, and fell sound asleep.
Or at least she tried to.
Almost as soon as she zipped the tent shut, a still heat crept into the woods.
She kicked away her sleeping bag. But something beneath the tent–roots that had not been there before–seemed to poke at her no matter how she tossed or turned.
And then the buzzing began.
Miriam expected a few lingering mosquitoes ahead of the first cold snap of the Fall, but this was a chorus–no, a symphony of the thirsty bloodsuckers.
“Don’t worry,” she reassured Beatrix. “They’re outside and there’s no way they’ll find that little hole in the window flap.”
For once, she was right. The mosquitoes did not find the gap.
But something else did, something bigger.
It must have been attracted to the smell of hot dog grease. The sound of a paw or maybe a claw clicked against a tent pole, then went scritching along the canvas.
Miriam clutched her doll defensively. “Go away,” she whispered. “Shoo!”
But the only response was a ripping noise, like an old leaf being pulled apart at the stem.
Heart pounding, the girl shot straight up, fumbling in the dark for her electric light. She flashed it toward the sound–where a jagged hole had appeared in the side of the tent.
Miriam stifled a shriek, scooching as far away from the tear as she could, back against the canvas, her light fixed on the breach.
The canvas on either side of the hole trembled.
She held her breath.
A claw reached into the tent.
Followed by a thin, hairy arm.
This time, Miriam’s scream split the night like a banshee’s wail.