VI leaned against the live oak as Andrew stepped into the lodge. She watched the black creek, lined with marsh grass, meandering west between the pines. Had the night been clear, she’d have seen where it widened to join the distant sound.
On the periphery of vision something moved.
She saw a black shape emerge from the woods and move quickly toward the lodge.
At first she thought it was a deer, bounding. Then her blood iced as though she’d glimpsed a demon, watching in silent terror as it reached the steps.
She screamed, “Andrew!”
The thing with long black hair slammed the door to the lodge and padlocked it as Andrew shouted her name.
Then it looked right at her.
Vi reached instinctively for the. 45, felt her bony hip.
Before she could even stand, the shadow had descended the steps and was running toward her.
Vi shrieked, sprang to her feet, and bolted into the woods, tree trunks screaming by, her animal panting drowning even the sound of her predator’s footsteps.
She ran and ran and did not look back, expecting at any moment to feel a hand come down on her shoulder and drive her into the ground.
The grove of live oaks turned back into thicket.
She tripped on a dead vine.
Fell.
Chest heaving now against the ground.
In the distance she heard her pursuer flailing about in the thicket.
It stopped.
She held her breath.
Silence.
Her ears adjusting.
Now she could clearly hear the sound of its panting. Much closer than she thought.
She prayed the woods were as dark to him as they were to her.
When her heart quieted she could hear her eyes blinking and nothing else.
A moment passed, then came the rustling, like footfalls on brittle leaves.
Craning her neck, she looked back, saw the shadow stepping gingerly through the thicket.
It stopped fifteen feet away, just a spindly bush between them.
Vi wondered if it were enough to hide her.
The thing walked toward the bush, so close now she imagined she could smell it. The brush shifted beneath her, made a crackling she thought was deafening.
The monster twitched, pushed its hair behind its shoulders.
It stood motionless for what seemed hours.
Listening.
Then abruptly it turned and started back toward the lodge.
Vi couldn’t bring herself to move even when the sounds of its thrashing had grown indiscernible from the snaps and creaks of the island’s other nighttime murmurs.
She didn’t want to budge. Ever.
If I move, he’ll hear me, come back, find me, kill me. But I have to get off this island.
She lay in the thicket for another hour, praying for the will to stand and push on.
Vi had been making her way through the woods for thirty minutes when she stopped and sat down in the tangle of undergrowth. Closing her eyes, she pinched the bridge of her nose, trying to faze out the adrenaline and the panic. She wanted to boil the moment down to the facts and proceed from there. That’s what a strong cop would do.
She took several deep breaths, then stood up again and continued on, flinging the possibility from her mind that she had miles and miles of this thicket still ahead of her.
In keeping with the trend of her day, things degenerated. The undergrowth became so dense she was spending thirty seconds on each step, untangling the vines from around her ankles, whacking the labyrinth of limbs out of her way.
When she failed to unwind one persistent vine she found herself lying facedown in mud.
She did not get up.
She lay there and cried, then filled with anger at the tears, and resisted allowing the totality of this “fucking bad fucking day” to envelop her. You can’t think about it. It’s too much. Just get up and do your job, Viking. It could be worse. A lot worse. You could be dead. Now. Get. Up.
She struggled to her feet. Waded on. Mad. Weak. Right on the verge.
Ten steps later she broke out of the thicket. From claustrophobic vegetation to the sprawling spaciousness of a tidal flat, the wind spilling over the distant dunes, carrying the briny reek of the sea. Eerie black plants rose out of the alkaline soil-salt-sculpted formations, otherworldly and demonic, like the remnants of some nuclear apocalypse.
The flat extended north to south as far as she could see and she tore across it, her boots sinking in the mud, the wind chilling her down, arms pumping, swallowing great mouthfuls of air.
She ran and ran.
The moon, only a sliver of it, materialized behind a ragged gauze of cloud.
God, it was cold in the clearing night. A star appeared here and there, and still she ran, straight ahead toward the small rise of dunes, though she didn’t know they were dunes. She didn’t know the sea lay just beyond them or that she was crossing a tidal flat. A strict mainlander, her knowledge of sea level began and ended with the Grand Strand of Myrtle Beach:
Wings.
All-You-Can-Eat seafood buffets.
Slushy lemonade vendors.
Biplanes pulling advertisement banners across the faded denim sky.
Laying out with the flabby masses and drinking limey Coronas under a $25/day umbrella.
Walking up and down the beach at night with Max, the hazy glow of hotels and resorts marking the concave curvature of the South Carolina coast. The essence of summer. Every last week of July. That was the beach.
This was the wild. You could not walk back into a motel from this tidal flat and watch HBO.
The dunes were close now. Beach grass, cottonwood, and wormwood stabilized the mounds of white sand, glowing strangely in the moonlight.
She clawed her way to the top and there lay the sea, gleaming and foaming and drawing back into low tide. Even in the face of all she’d been through in the last eight hours, the winter beauty of this wide forsaken beach was devastating.
She scrambled down the dune onto sand that had been smoothed and hardened by the tide. Shells of mollusks and horseshoe crabs and kelp and broken sand dollars and pieces of gray driftwood lay strewn across the beach, battlefield casualties of the nor’easter.
The wind whipped out of the north, blowing white sand across dark sand and between her legs like a rushing vapor. The static whisper of sand skimming sand even beat out the crush of the sea.
Vi glimpsed a light in the north.
At this distance she couldn’t be sure but it seemed to originate from the beach.
Dead dog tired, she started walking toward the light, then jogging, then running, the shells crunching under her boots, grit watering her eyes. She doubted if she could run much farther. If that light never got closer, if it proved to be the Ocracoke Light, several miles north across the inlet, she’d find a place at the foot of the dunes to curl up and sleep through the night. Things would look better in daylight. Less surreal.
The light she’d been running toward vanished but she saw its source.
A short ways up the beach in the soft sand beyond the reach of high tide, a white canvas tent flapped in the wind.