Wildland by Rebecca Hodge

Author:Rebecca Hodge
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: CROOKED LANE BOOKS

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

THURSDAY, 9:00 AM

Kat and the children walked in silence, Lily still in the lead, picking their path through a tangle of brambles. Kat focused on the small square footage of ground that lay between her feet and Lily’s.

Her feet. Ten more steps, she promised herself, and she counted them off. There. That proved endurable. Now ten more.

The pain was insistent. She tried to distract herself by thinking of happier times—picnics, parties, vacations, holidays—but reality kept intruding. If only she could talk one more time with Sara, apologize for their disagreement, let her know how amazing she was. She set such an example to the world with her dedication to her animals. If only Kat could let her know one last time that she was loved. Her eyes filled with tears, and they weren’t due to her feet. She had so much to say, now that she had no chance to say it.

She had counted dozens of sets of ten when Lily stopped and whirled to look behind them. She threw her head back and checked the sky, her body tensed and focused. “What’s that noise?”

The forest still embraced its eerie silence. It took a moment for Kat to hear what Lily meant. An engine. Up high. An airplane, or maybe a helicopter.

Nirav pointed back the way they had come. Kat squinted, searching for anything that moved. The smoke cloud didn’t hug the ground here, but it hovered close to the treetops, cloaking the sky, thick and impenetrable. Trying to find an airplane in its shifting mass was like trying to glimpse a straight-pin in a wad of gray-black cotton.

Lily waved her arms over her head. “Over here! We’re here!” Even as she shouted, the engine noise faded and disappeared. Lily’s arms dropped and her shoulders shrank. “They didn’t see us. We have to go back. We need to signal them.”

Kat seized Lily’s arm. “We can’t go back.”

“How will they know we’re down here?”

“We can’t signal unless we can see them.”

Lily glared.

Kat shifted her weight uncomfortably. “We need to keep going, Lily.”

Nirav looked back and forth between them and then pointed in the direction they were headed. “We are walking now.” He waved Lily forward with both hands.

Outnumbered, Lily spun on her heels and stomped ahead, her back unyielding.

Kat started counting steps again. Maybe there really was someone out there, looking, but if she and the children couldn’t spot the airplane from the ground, they were equally invisible to anyone searching. Assuming anyone even realized they were out here. Assuming Scott or Malcolm had escaped the flames, hadn’t been trapped, too. If they were alive, they must be frantic, but believing in a sensational rescue from the sky was as hopeless as believing in a miracle cure for her cancer.

Lily checked the sky at frequent intervals, but none of them heard any more engine noise.

They kept walking. Trees. Shrubs. Vines. Tangles of dead branches. An occasional scramble over a rotting log. A rabbit, munching greenery, froze as they passed. A lone squirrel scolded from a tree.

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