“Well, sure it does. But I mean, let’s just wait here. They’ll be gone soon.” She was eating her snack crackers. Brynn looked at them. Michelle, reluctantly, it seemed, offered her some. She ate a handful hungrily.

“We can’t stop. We have to keep going.”

“Where?”

“North.”

“What does ‘north’ mean? Is there a cabin that way or something, or a phone?”

“We’re getting as far away from them as we can. Into the park.”

Michelle slowed. “Look at this place. It’s all a mess, it’s tangled and…well, a mess. There aren’t any paths. It’s freezing.”

And you in that two-thousand-dollar coat…complaining, Brynn reflected.

“There’s a ranger station maybe four, five miles from here.”

“Five miles!”

“Shhh.”

“That’s bullshit. We can’t walk five miles through this.”

“You’re in good shape. You run, right?”

“On a treadmill at my health club. Not in places like this. And which way do we go? I’m already lost.”

“I know the general direction.”

“The woods? I can’t!”

“We don’t have any choice.”

“You don’t understand… I’m afraid of snakes.”

“They’re more afraid of you, believe me.”

Michelle displayed the crackers. “This isn’t going to be enough food. Do you know about hypoglycemia? Everyone thinks it’s nothing. But I could faint.”

Brynn said firmly, “Michelle, there are men out there who want to kill us. Snakes and your blood sugar really come pretty low on the scale of problems here.”

“I can’t do it.” The woman reminded Brynn of Joey’s first day at elementary school: he’d planted his feet and refused to go. It took two days for her to persuade him to attend. In fact, Brynn now recognized similar signs of hysteria in Michelle’s face. The young woman stopped walking altogether. Her eyes were wide and she gestured broadly with twitchy hands. “I shop at Whole Foods. I buy coffee at Starbucks. This isn’t me, this isn’t my world. I can’t do it!”

“Michelle,” Brynn said gently, “it’ll be okay. It’s only a state park. Thousands of people come through here every summer.”

“On the paths, the trails.”

“And we’re going to find one.”

“But people get lost. I saw this thing on TV. This couple got lost and they froze to death and the animals ate their bodies.”

“Michelle-”

“No, I don’t want to go! Let’s hide here. We’ll find a place. Please.” She looked as if she was going to cry.

Brynn remembered that the poor woman had seen her friends shot down-and had nearly been killed herself. She tried to be patient. “No. That one man, at least, Hart, he’ll come after us as soon as he finds we tricked ’em with the boat. He won’t know for sure we came this way but he might guess.”

Michelle looked back, her eyes zipping around in panic, her breath fast.

“Okay?”

Michelle ate another handful of crackers, not offering any to Brynn, and then shoved them back into her pocket. She gave a disgusted grimace. “All right. You win.”

With one more glance back, the women started their trek, moving as fast as they could, picking their way around the tangles, many of which would be impossible to get through even with machetes. There were plenty of conifer woods, though, and it was possible to find flat routes unobstructed by steel-wool underbrush.

They continued on, away from the houses, Michelle doing a fair job of keeping up the pace despite the limp. Brynn gripped her spear firmly, feeling both confident and ridiculous because of the weapon.

Soon they’d covered another quarter mile, then a half.

Brynn started and spun around. She’d heard a voice.

But it was only Michelle, muttering to herself, her face ghostly in the blue moonlight. Brynn too had the habit of self-dialog. She’d lost her father to disease and a dear friend in the department to a drunk driver. And she’d lost a husband too. She had talked to herself during those times of sorrow, praying for strength or just plain rambling. For some reason, she’d found, words made pain less painful. She’d done the same just that afternoon, with Joey in the X-ray unit at the hospital. She couldn’t remember what she’d said then.

They skirted scummy ponds choked with bog bean and cranberry. She was surprised to see a swath of moonlight illuminate a cluster of pitcher plants-a carnivore Brynn had learned about when helping Joey with a report for school. Frogs screeched urgently and birds gave mournful calls. It was too early in the season for mosquitoes, thank the Lord. Brynn was a magnet and in the summer wore citronella like perfume.

Reassuring herself now as much as Michelle, Brynn whispered, “I’ve been to the park on two search-and-rescues here.” She’d volunteered for the assignments to put to use some of the expertise she’d picked up at the State Police tactical training seminars, which included an optional-and extremely exhausting and painful-mini-survival course.

One of the two search-and-rescues here had actually become a very unpleasant body-recovery operation. But Brynn didn’t mention that.

“I don’t know the place real well but I have a rough idea of the layout. The Joliet Trail’s near here someplace, no more than a mile or two. You know it?”

Michelle shook her head, eyes on the bed of pine needles in front of her feet. She wiped her nose on her sleeve.

“The trail’ll take us to that ranger station. It’ll be closed now but we could find a phone or a gun there.”

The station was Brynn’s first choice. But, she went on to explain, if they missed the building or couldn’t break into it they could continue on the Joliet, which angled northeast till it crossed the Snake River. “We can follow the river east to Point of Rocks. That’s a good-sized town on the other side of the park. They’ll have stores-for a phone-and a public safety office of some kind. Probably part-time but we can wake ’ em up. It ’s a ways, six or seven miles, but we can follow the river and it’s pretty flat walking. The other option when we hit the Snake is to turn west. And climb the rocks along the Snake River Gorge. That’ll take us to the interstate by the bridge. There’s traffic all the time there. A trucker or somebody’ll stop for us.”

“Climb the rocks,” Michelle muttered. “I’m afraid of heights.”

So was Brynn (though that hadn’t stopped her rappelling down a sheer cliff face to a waiting keg of Old Milwaukee-the traditional graduation exercise in the State Police course). And the climb at the gorge would be steep and dangerous. The bridge was nearly one hundred feet above the river and the rocks were often nearly vertical faces. It was in that part of the park where the body the law officers had been searching for had been recovered. A young man had lost his footing. The fall was only twenty feet but he’d been impaled on a sharp tree limb. The coroner said it probably took him twenty minutes to die.

To this day Brynn McKenzie was haunted by the image.

As they moved from the pine into ancient forest-denser and slathered in darkness-Brynn tried to pick out the route that would be easiest on Michelle’s ankle. But the way was often impacted with rooty brush, tangles of saplings and vines, forcing them around. Some they just had to fight their way through.

And some routes were so dim they avoided them completely for fear of missing a steep drop-off or deep bog.

And always, reminders that they weren’t really alone. Bats zipped by, owls hooted. Brynn gasped when she trod on the end of a deer rib rack, which swung up and clapped her in the knee. She danced away from the bleached, chewed bone. The scarred skull of the animal was nearby.

Michelle stared at the skeletal remains, eyes wide, without response.

“Let’s go. It’s just bones.”

They pushed through the tangled wilderness for another hundred yards. Suddenly Michelle stumbled, grabbed a branch to support herself and winced.

“What’s the matter?”