The Middle of Somewhere(16)

By seven o’clock, she’d organized her gear and stashed the bear can outside the door. If a bear wanted to play with the can in the rain, he could come over here and get it. Other than what falling water had accomplished, she hadn’t washed or bothered to brush her teeth. Her limbs were leaden. She wanted only to lie inside her sleeping bag, close her eyes and wake to a sunny morning.

In her dream, she stood alone aboard a tall ship on a high sea. Tattered sails whipped around her. The ship groaned and pitched, and the mast snapped in half with a deafening crack that startled her awake.

Her heart was racing as she sat up. It was pitch black. Rain pelted the fly and wind shouted through the trees. Her mouth went dry as she realized the breaking mast in her dream had been thunder. Her fingers searched along the inside surface of the tent until she found the mesh pocket and pulled out the flashlight.

A low boom sounded in the distance. She froze. A loud burst of thunder, like wood splintering against rock. She dropped the flashlight. As her hands scrambled to find it, the thunder growled twice more, louder each time, as if it were coming for her. She grasped the flashlight and turned it on. It didn’t provide the comfort she’d hoped for. The shadows in the tent, combined with the undulating movement of the wind against the fly, brought only another dimension to her fear. She turned the flashlight off, but kept it in her hand.

Liz closed her eyes and pulled her hat over her ears to muffle the sound of the storm. She wriggled deeper into the sleeping bag as her mind struggled to rein in her emotion.

I’m not in the open.

I’m not the tallest thing around. (Thank you, trees.)

I’m not at the top of a pass holding a forty-foot metal stick in the air.

I don’t have to go anywhere.

She realized it had been raining long and hard enough that water might be streaming under the tent. Her mattress was waterproof but the rest of her gear remained vulnerable. She cursed herself for not digging a trench around the tent to divert the flow. A couple of inches deep would have done it. She sat up again and shone the light across the tent floor. A two-foot section in the corner was dark with moisture. If it kept raining, the whole tent would be soaked.

Shit. Time to put on your big-girl panties.

Liz’s hands trembled as she crouched in the tent opening and put on her rain suit and boots. The zipper on the fly jammed. She took a deep breath, backed the zipper up and tried again. Success. Not wanting to see more than she had to, she kept the flashlight focused on the ground. She circled the tent, stepping over the guy lines, and found where a rivulet flowed toward it. Using her bootheel, she scraped a shallow trench. The water flowed into it obediently.

She had almost completed the trench when a rolling boom made her stomach clench. She slammed her heel harder into the earth, determined to finish the job and seek refuge. An explosive crack startled her. Her foot skidded on the slick mud. She threw her arms out to regain her balance, and the flashlight sailed out of her hand, landing ten feet away, pointed uselessly at a boulder.

Liz moved to retrieve it. A flash of lightning lit the sky. The silhouettes of the trees and boulders appeared for an instant. Ten yards away, a shape, the head and torso of a man, was framed between tree trunks. She screamed. She darted for the flashlight, her boots slipping with each step. As she picked up the light, she fell onto one knee, pushed off the ground and wheeled around. She held the flashlight in both hands and shone the beam where the figure had been. It was gone. Her breath came in gasps as she jerked the light from place to place, searching. A peal of thunder rumbled up her legs and into her gut. She ducked into the vestibule of the tent, crouching like a rabbit under a bush, and turned off the light.

When she was once again in her bag, she told herself nothing would happen to her that night. She told herself the person she saw standing in a thunderstorm at two in the morning was probably a hiker camped nearby who’d gone out to pee, or to solve a problem with his tent as she had. This area wasn’t particularly remote and would attract backpackers doing shorter trips, not just JMT through-hikers. (She pushed aside the competing thought that someone hiking for the weekend surely would have seen the forecast and changed their plans.) She made the argument that it could have been the older man hiking with his wife, since Liz’s pace matched theirs, or even Brensen the actor. He had been behind her, but could have churned his anger into speed and caught up.

Liz told herself all these things, and many more, as she lay awake, shivering and hoping for dawn. But neither the logic nor the repetition of these lectures could alter her feeling that the man she had seen was Payton Root, and that whatever business he had outside in the middle of a thunderstorm had everything to do with her.