Edge Walker by Chris Hampton

Author:Chris Hampton [Hampton, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Compel Publishing, LLC
Published: 2020-05-24T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 40 - Walker

For four days, the boy and Ghost trek northward. They camp along the same creek each night and travel on higher ground during the day. As they move, the terrain transforms. The high desert scrub and brush gives way to greener vegetation. Even the nighttime temperature drops some, indicating a gain in altitude.

Six-to-eight-foot junipers and pinyon pines dot the landscape. As they trudge through this new greenery, a two-track dirt road keeps crisscrossing their path. Unlike the lower mesa, seeing long distance is now difficult with the thick forest cover. This makes the boy nervous. Tire tracks are visible in the ruts, but he can't determine how old they are or if anyone is still using this road.

The boy has come to trust Ghost. He watches his movements, and relies on him to alert him of any danger. This road seems forgotten, deserted. And Ghost hasn't shown nervousness or caution. But a dirt road makes for easy movement by a vehicle. This worries the boy.

He shifts his thinking. Where are these mysterious Red Cliffs Grandfather told him to find? He never talked much about them while alive, yet made the boy promise to find them. It must be an important place. The old man's words were so forceful. But he can only guess at how to find them. The only clue he has is to go north, to avoid people, to trust no one.

The presence of humans, which Grandfather called two-leggeds, means sickness and death. To be sick in the wild means death. To be in the cities now means death, since the release of the killer virus. Two-leggeds are deadly in more ways than just sickness, as he found out with the Death Camp and desert war by the cottonwood trees. Yet, Grandfather also told the boy to trust his gut feeling, his heart. These two instructions confuse him.

“How do I know when to trust or not trust humans?” The boy speaks these words out loud in frustration.

Ghost, following the boy, blows through its nostrils, startled at the sudden talk. The boy keeps walking and remembers how his gut signaled him when to disappear in the alley yard that night, just before the shark came hunting. And, again, how his gut told him when to leave the cottonwood tree on the quad after the desert war.

With both incidents, the humans never saw him. What's going to happen when he's face-to-face with another person or a group of people? How will he act then?

His mind keeps going back to the Red Cliffs. What are they? The journal doesn't give any clues. Are they a place all by themselves? Maybe they are in a canyon, like the Anasazi cliff dwellings. Until he knows more, all he can do is walk north in hopes he'll find answers about them.

He looks back at Ghost. The boy trusts the horse, with his life. And Ghost apparently likes him. The horse doesn’t need the boy to survive, that’s for sure. Maybe it wants companionship, even if that companion has only two legs.

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