The last of Paul the Perv's money runs out just before Lila and I enter the Nebraska National Forest.
It is five days after the library, and I haven't been able to hitch another ride. I've only allowed myself one meal per day, and still the money disappears. I buy myself a pair of mittens and a fur-lined hat with ear flaps and a thick scarf at a thrift store. With my last few dollars I buy a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter.
All that's left now is a fistful of coins.
It's just as well, since Lila has led me deep into the forest where there aren't any stores. It's not like the forests in Montana. The ground is flat between the clumps of trees, which are sparse enough that I don't get that claustrophobic feeling. Still, the shade of the pines blocks out any warmth from the sun. On our first night sleeping in the forest, I wake up covered in a light layer of snow.
Lila leads me along a lonely path, and I follow, as I'd prefer not to run into the forest rangers or campers. I can smell their traces, a whiff of exhaust from the rangers' four-wheel drive vehicles or the smoky stench of a campfire that burned out many nights before. I'm most nervous when I hear the sounds of reckless youths riding ATVs through the wilderness trails, or when I smell that faint predatory scent I caught that night of the wild dogs.
I feel like we are running away from something.
My dreams are getting stranger. Kayla appears almost every night. "Only you can save us, Daniel," she tells me.
"Save you from what?" I ask.
I never get an answer. Winds blow up and wrap that awful dangerous scent around us and then I'm running, we're running. Or she starts to tell me but then I can't hear her. She gets angry and screams at me. "It's a part of you! It's who you are!" That I hear, but I can never figure out what she means. Some part of what she's said has been lost.
I often think about the hitchhiker inside of my head, that Other who steals my consciousness from me and uses me to kill. Does he know about me? Or am I an annoyance to him, making him come awake in random situations, hungry and angry and sometimes handcuffed to a bed with a predator looming over me?
The three of us hike through the forest. At night I collapse wherever Lila has found us a shelter. We walk until I have no more food left. And then, at night, after I fall asleep wishing for something to fill my stomach, curled up and shivering, I run.
The dreams of running are more than dreams. I wake up tired, in different places, having slept until the sun is high overhead. Yet in those running dreams I'm not running away. It's freedom, flying faster than any human could go. Sometimes Kayla runs beside me; sometimes it's Lila.
There comes a night when we run out of the forest. The moon overhead watches as we fly over roads and across vast fields covered in snow. I wake up in an abandoned car buried in bushes. I am so cold that my breath is not even a cloud in the frigid winter air. I am so hungry I am numb to it. Euphoria has me wondering whether I am awake now or asleep.
Lila licks at my face. Her tongue is warm but once it's gone I feel her saliva turn to an icy crust on my skin. I don't want to move. The ripped vinyl seats, their smell of decades of rot and mouse droppings, are the most comfortable bed I've had in more than a week. My limbs feel too heavy to lift.
My eyes slip closed.
Some time later, I'm not sure how long
(seconds, minutes, hours? days?)
Lila becomes more insistent. Aggressive. How did the car's rusted door open? I didn't hear it. Did I do that? I stare at it vacantly until I realize that Lila's teeth are digging into my arm. She's pulling me. Without the strength to pull away, I fall out of the car and onto the hard, frozen earth.
The movement has woken something in me and I begin to shiver.
It's too much it's too cold
She's still tugging, yanking with her teeth. In the flashes that follow sometimes her teeth and sometimes human hands haul me to my feet. When I am finally upright it is just my mutt Lila beside me. No one else.
so hungry
All around me is dead, dead grass, dead leaves swirling in the dead wind, dead earth. The wind is too cold for my nose to smell anything.
Blindly I follow Lila.
Time slips in and out. I hold myself, pressing against the emptiness inside of me.
And then it comes: a wisp of scent, delicious meat smell, tender and young and fresh
and I am lost