I climb back in the truck and pull the door shut. The dog immediately leaps onto the passenger seat, tongue hanging out, tail wagging, and I lean over and pop the glove compartment to pull out a bag of beef jerky.
“You want a treat, buddy?”
He pushes up on all four paws, practically bouncing in place.
“That’s what I thought.”
I open the bag and tear off a piece, letting him nibble it from my fingers excitedly. He nudges the bag for more, and I laugh as I pull it out and let him take it. “I guess I won’t be going home alone tonight.”
LUCKY
Panic seizes my chest, squeezing so tightly that it’s all I can feel. The ache in my feet barely registers anymore as I rush down the shoulder of the narrow, winding mountain road before the sun even fully rises.
Where is he?
“Gizmo?”
My voice carries out across the pavement and disappears into the endless trees, swallowed up by the ominous mist hovering over everything.
It’s eerie.
Yet, the way it clings to the ground and rolls up the trees, covering the mountain, gives it an almost ethereal quality—like I’ve stepped off Earth and arrived in some alternate realm.
But this isn’t any realm I want to be in.
Not one where Gizmo is gone.
Despite how loudly I yell for him, I don’t hear his scurrying paws or bark of response. Only chirping birds waking to a new, bright morning in North Carolina greet me.
I try to breathe through the anxiety threatening to drown me.
You’ll find him, Lucky.
You. Will. Find. Him.
That’s what I have to keep telling myself because from the moment I woke and found him gone, it has felt like my entire world had fallen apart—what was left of it in the first place. And in the last forty-five minutes since I realized he was missing and started my walk into town, it has only gotten worse as I near what passes as civilization out here.
It can’t be much farther now.
At least, I hope not…
The straps of my backpack bite into my shoulders, weighed down with all the items I’ve dragged with me on this trek, and every part of my body screams for a break from hiking the desolate road under my feet, but I can’t stop.
I can’t.
Not until I find him.
He has to be okay…
I won’t let myself consider what could have happened to him out in those woods in the dark.
I can’t.
If I actually thought about it, I would lose my ability to think clearly, and that’s when things go to shit—a lesson I’ve learned far too many times in too many painful ways.
The sign bearing the words Welcome to McBride Mountain looms on the side of the mountain in the distance, but rather than being welcoming, I tense up even more than I already was.
Towns are bad.
