TWENTY-SIX
CARA
Same shit. Different day.
—@TayCamp
The ever-present wood smoke had to be tickling Fisk’s throat, too, because he grumbled intermittently aboutthe damn firesandman-made disasters sure to end us all.He was otherwise silent as they hiked higher and further into the backcountry. Cara thought he might not speak to her at all until they stopped briefly at a stream. As he knelt by the edge and filtered water into a plastic bladder, she reached for a pretty sprig of Queen Anne’s lace growing beside the water.
“Don’t touch that!” he said so brusquely that she jumped and Maybelline brayed loudly.
Cara instinctively dropped her hand to her side. “It’s Queen?—”
“It’s water hemlock, the most lethal plant growing in the United States.”
“Are you sure? I learned about it back in Girl Scouts when I earned my nature badge.”
“Hemlock has small purple spots and a smooth stem. Queen Anne’s lace doesn’t have purple spots and it’s hairy.”
She deflated. “I could have?—”
“Yup.” Fisk motioned for her water bottle. “It’s dangerous out here.”
And yet she’d somehow survived.
“I stayed alive my first night outside by burrowing into a pile of leaves,” she said, glad to be having any kind of conversation.
“You’re lucky the temperature didn’t drop too much that night.”
She watched Fisk pumping filtered water into their bottles, wondering why she felt the need to prove she wasn’t totally helpless in the wilderness.
“I also figured out that water is safer to drink in the middle of a rushing stream.”
“Unless it isn’t.”
“I survived rapids the sheriff said would kill me!”
“When he told me that part, I knew you wouldn’t last another day on your own.”
Was that the moment he decided to up the stakes and take her along with him?
“What else did they say to you?” she asked.
Fisk screwed the tops back on the water bottles and put his filtration kit away. When he handed her bottle back, he was smiling. “They told me you weren’t armed but to consider you dangerous.”
He obviously didn’t. But he might well consider her valuable, worthy of a reward if he turned her in. If Fisk was smart—and he increasingly seemed to be—could he be taking her somewhere, not to maim and torture her, but to wait it out and watch the pot grow?
As he whistled at the animals to get them moving again, she asked, “Are you going to tell me where we’re headed?”
“Not until we get there.”
“What are your plans for me?”
“Good question,” he answered.
TWENTY-SEVEN
JORDAN
