Page 6 of The Code

He is sitting down on a rocky outcropping.

His groggy head tips into his hands.

He is alive. Jack is not dead.

He is overcome with emotion, everything rushing him all at once. He feels it pressing through the back of his face, constricting his throat, loosening his sinuses.

He yells. A deep-chested bellow of grief and pain and fear that rolls out across the valley and comes back to him. The echo is the loneliest sound he’s ever heard.

One primal scream is all he will allow himself.

Energy is low and night is coming. He has to get to work.

He is down to a long-sleeved T-shirt and cammy pants and nothing else. He stuffs his shirt with moss for warmth and then finds a stream in which to wash his toe. It looks angry but not yet infected. The chill stream shocks him alert. The freezing water is exceedingly painful but he holds the foot under until the toe goes numb. Always clean your gear even when the gear is just body parts. The thought of fourteen hours of hiking on a bum foot elicits in him utter dread, but he pushes the sentiment down.

As he pulls his socks back on, he is struck by a lightning bolt of hope. The twenty-dollar bill. It takes a few tries to peel up the right boot’s insole, but there it is.

Bob & Co. clearly missed it when they dumped him out here.

He realizes he is laughing out loud like a crazy person.

Twenty bucks is not much. But it’s not nothing. Twenty bucks opens up his options.

Nightfall is coming on. To avoid freezing, he needs to get moving. The first stars are blinking into visibility, and his training tells him to orient himself and go. Hiking will work up body heat and that will keep him alive.

And yet.

With a twenty-dollar bill there might be another way. Does he risk waiting to find out?

The path up the mountain is steep and rocky. It looks to be no more than a few kilometers, but already dusk is crowding in, messing with his depth perception. He doesn’t have a lot of energy to waste, let alone time spent shivering in the cold.

But he takes the risk, scrambling upslope.

He gets near the peak, a clear patch with a panoramic view.

Then he waits.

Darkness bleeds slowly into what’s left of dusk. He studies the horizon.

The stars come clearer.

There is still nothing in sight but endless trees and slopes and valleys.

He is just beginning to think that he bet wrong when he sees it to the east—a distant glow of electricity at the edge of a valley. It is a mirage? He waits for the last glow to leach from the sky, turning up the volume on those man-made lights.

A town.

He gauges it at ten klicks.

Ten klicks beats seventy every time.

He starts off.

The going is rough. Between hiking intervals, he starts fires to coax frostbite out of his fingers, but never pauses for long. The sky is pregnant and he has to beat the rain. Beneath a rotting log, he finds a stand of browning cattails to eat. He takes the last third of the distance in a single go, his feet rubbed raw in his boots.

When he finally stumbles out of the woods, bedraggled like a mountain man, he can scarcely breathe because his teeth are chattering so badly. He is at the edge of a small town and there are lights and movement all around, so much sudden humanity that his head swims. He stares at what he is looking at, trying to make it make sense.

A traveling fair.