“Mmm?” “Are we going to be okay?” “Sure.” Alex hugged the girl closer, not out of affection but expediency. The less space between them, the warmer they’d be. Beneath them, their nest of leaves and debris crackled with a sound like dry cellophane. The debris shelter was warm, almost toasty from their body heat—captured as it was in a thick, three-foot mound of leaf litter. “We’ll be fine. Couple more days and we’ll be at the rangers. They’ll know what to do.” They’d run as the sky fired with a startling, blood-red sunset, one that made Alex think of that really famous painting where the guy was standing on a bridge and screaming. They’d kept on running as that weird light faded, and then they’d run some more, stumbling on by flashlight until the only scents Alex picked up were of the forest and themselves. By then, with the moon not yet risen, the woods were black, and the going too treacherous for them to continue. Ellie hadn’t wanted to eat. Really, Alex didn’t much blame her; she was pretty queasy, too—almost chemo-queasy—and wrung-out from the accumulated horrors of this terrible day.
