The Call of the Mild

Chapter Fifty-One

The others hadn’t been gone long. Gus reached over and touched Shawn’s sleeping bag. It was still warm. And the fire was blazing in the ring, a pot nestled among the embers heating water for instant coffee and freeze-dried eggs.

Gus looked back at the sun. It had climbed in the sky and it pounded him with its heat. But it still didn’t seem to give off any light. The only illumination in the campground came from the flickering fire. Shadows jumped, danced, laughed at the edges of the camp.

“Shawn?” Gus whispered. Beyond the reach of the firelight something rustled in the underbrush. Gus tried to peer into the darkness, but he couldn’t see anything. “Shawn?” he whispered again, but there was no answer.

Where had Shawn gone? Where had they all gone? And why had they left him here alone? He bent down to check one of the sleeping bags and his hand came back sticky and feathered. There was a gash in the bag, and as Gus stood up, the feathers flew out of the tear and swirled around his face. He shook his hand to get the feathers off, but they wouldn’t fall. He slapped at them, and his hand came back red with blood.

The gash in the sleeping bag was bleeding.

This wasn’t possible. Even as his rational mind was being consumed with terror, Gus knew that a nylon shell filled with duck feathers couldn’t bleed. And that meant this couldn’t be real. He had to be dreaming. He had to be dreaming that dream. All he had to do was wake up.

Gus squeezed his fist until his fingernails were digging into his palm. Then he looked down at the sleeping bag. It was still oozing blood. He looked up at the sun.

The sun was oozing blood, too.

There was another rustling in the bushes behind him. Gus turned to see who was coming after him. What was coming after him. A branch tore off a tree and fell to the ground and a hand reached through the opening in the tree trunk. Except it wasn’t a hand, it was more like a-

Gus woke up. His eyes flashed open. The sun was coming up over the mountains, and it was actually shining light down on the campsite.

Shawn was sitting by the fire mixing something in a metal Sierra Cup with a plastic spoon.

“I keep stirring and stirring,” Shawn said when he noticed Gus was awake. “But this still doesn’t look like eggs Benedict.” He tilted the steel cup so Gus could see the yellow-and-white soup floating inside.

Shawn was here, but the lawyers were all gone. As he crawled out of his sleeping bag, Gus searched the camp for any trace of them. “Where is everybody?”

“Bathroom break,” Shawn said. “They worked out some system where the three of them go into the woods together so no one actually has to look at anyone else. Or something.” He took a sip of his eggs and grimaced. “If I ever come up with a brilliant moneymaking scheme that revolves around eggs Benedict you can drink with a straw, talk me out of it.”

Gus wanted to grab Shawn by the shoulders until his head fell off, grew spider legs, and ran away. How could he be thinking about anything so trivial right now?

There was a rustling from the bushes. Before Gus had time to formulate the image of the creature in his head, the three lawyers stepped out into the camp. Savage and Balowsky stayed a step behind as Gwendolyn walked up to Shawn and reached for his pack.

“We’ve taken a vote,” she said. “We’ve decided to share control of the map.”

Shawn nudged the pack out of her reach with his foot. “I voted that if Quaker Oats was going to release a new flavor of Life cereal they should go for chocolate instead of maple-and-brown-sugar,” he said. “They seemed to think that my vote didn’t count, especially since they never had an election.”

If Shawn had hoped to distract Gwendolyn into a discussion of the Quaker Oats company’s unfair decision-making process, he was disappointed. “We don’t trust you and your little sidekick.”

Gus should let that go, he knew. There were monsters in the woods. They couldn’t start fighting among themselves. But he found himself taking a step forward, his hands clenching into fists. In the last few days he’d been held hostage first by a mime, then by a group of actors. He’d been stranded in the mountains and forced to hike a bazillion miles to save his life. He spent half his energy fighting to stay alive and the other half struggling against blind, irrational panic. Through it all he’d remained pleasant and polite. And what was his reward? To be insulted by a lawyer-a lawyer! Worse-a lawyer with a thirty-four percent chance of being a mass killer. He wasn’t going to take it anymore. “I am no man’s sidekick,” he said.

“I didn’t say you were a man’s sidekick,” Gwendolyn said. “I said you were his.”

“That’s it,” Gus said. “The last straw.”

Somehow Shawn didn’t seem to share his anger, even though the barb had been aimed primarily at him. “I guess that makes you the camel’s back,” Shawn said. “That could come in handy on the rest of the hike. Which is what we should really be saving our energy for.”

“I’m ready to hike as soon as I can see the map,” Gwendolyn said.

“You want that map?” Gus said. “You can come through me to get it.”

“Because that would be a long and exciting fight,” Shawn said casually. “After all, she’s only the Master of Sinanju looking for an excuse to scoop your brains out through your nose with her pinky finger. And you never came in lower than second when we played Rock’Em Sock’Em Robots.”

“We’ve got to have this out now,” Gus said.

“That’s a good idea,” Shawn said. “I mean, it’s not like they came up to us and deliberately tried to get us mad so that we’d start a fight, giving them an opportunity to kick our asses and take the map from our cold, dead hands. And when I say it’s not like that, I mean it’s exactly like that.”

The blood pounding in Gus’ ears was almost enough to drown out Shawn’s logic. Almost, but not quite. He dropped his hands and felt the blood surging back into his fingers as they unclenched. “So by not fighting, we win,” Gus said. “It’s like a Zen thing.”

“Wax on, wax off,” Shawn agreed.

“That is the lamest excuse for wussing out on a fight I’ve ever heard,” Balowsky said.

“Almost as lame as letting the girl do your fighting for you while you hide behind her?” Shawn said.

“Even lamer,” Gwendolyn said. “They know who their strongest warrior is.”

“I know I do,” Shawn agreed. “If there’s one of the three of you who’s tough enough to toss Jade off a cliff, I’d vote for you.”

“And yet the other two want to give her the only map out of here,” Gus said

“Nice try,” Savage said. “But we can work that out between ourselves once we’ve got the map. Now hand it over.”

Shawn picked up his pack and slipped it over his shoulders. “Tell you what,” he said. “We’ll be the ones going in the right direction. You get moving, and we’ll call out the turns.”

He headed out of the camp between two tall trees. Gus shouldered his pack and followed. There was a moment’s whispered discussion among the lawyers, and then Gwendolyn led the others quickly through another stand of trees and around so that they were positioned in front of Shawn and Gus.

“You’re going to give us the map,” Gwendolyn said.

“You couldn’t trick us into a fight; you’re not going to outsmart us,” Shawn said. “There’s no way we’re going to give it to you.”

“Except that there are only two of you,” Savage said. “And there are three of us.”

Savage took one menacing step forward. But as his foot hit the ground, something snaked through the litter of dried pine needles and seized him around the ankle. Before anyone could move, the snare tightened on his foot and flung the lawyer upside down high among the top branches of the trees. Gus heard a meaty thump as Savage’s head collided with the trunk. Gus peered up. Way above them, he could see the tiny, broken figure of the lawyer dangling limply from the rope.

“I guess that makes us even again,” Shawn said. “Shall we start walking?”