Everything turned a brilliant shade of white. He felt a vague sensation of sliding several feet, the uneven floor sandpapering his ass, his shoulders, the back of his head. The inside of his mouth prickled. His face stuck with a thousand pins. His body was immobilized save for the scorching pain still twitching the nerves of his arm. Somewhere he registered sounds of retreat, the bedroom door slamming shut.

Lying there on his back gave him an excellent view of the gas hissing through the ceiling vent above, wavering the air like a heat mirage.

13. Last Glance Back

13

Last Glance Back

For Evan’s seventeenth birthday, a former Army Ranger exposes him to a brutal week of sleep deprivation and caloric reduction, then drives him to a desolate stretch of the snowy Allegheny Mountains, gives him a set of coordinates, and leaves him shivering in a T-shirt and jeans. As the four-wheeler pulls away with a cheery toot of the horn, Evan recalls Jack’s Third Commandment: Master your surroundings. Looking around, he wonders how this is possible.

He has weathered SERE training, which focuses on the four basics of operational up-the-creek-ness—survival, evasion, resistance, and escape. He’s been taught woodcraft and wilderness skills, counterinterrogation and camouflage techniques. He can make a fire, build a shelter, and distinguish mushrooms he can eat from mushrooms that will Cuisinart his kidneys or send him on a psychedelic trip on the magic bus, but now, as he faces the reality of the damp earth and empty pockets, it seems like all that knowledge is for shit.

Forty-eight hours later, near hypothermic and bedraggled beneath a paste of mud and leaves, he stumbles upon a long-deserted cabin. The roof is partially torn off, the walls rotted, critters nesting in the walls. In a fallen cabinet, he finds an ancient energy bar still in the wrapper and devours it.

Mistake.

Too late he notes the bitter aftertaste at the back of his tongue. A gentle poison or emetic, probably hydrogen peroxide or syrup of ipecac. Curled up on the dusty floorboards, he vomits the scant contents of his stomach. It seems that the heaving will never end. In hour two he hears an engine approach over the rugged terrain. The door opens, and a shadow falls over him.

“Why the hell would there be an energy bar in a deserted cabin?” Jack asks.

“The First Commandment,” Evan croaks.

“That’s right.” Jack crouches, sets down a bottle of water by Evan’s face. “See you at home.”

Four days later, having staggered out of the woods, cleaned up in a gas-station bathroom, stolen clothes from a church coatroom, and hitchhiked dogleggedly back to northern Virginia, Evan passes through the twin stone pillars and begins the painful climb up the dirt slope to the two-story farmhouse. Strider meets him at the porch, nuzzling his palm, wagging his tail so hard his rear end swivels.