I didn’t have time to be impressed with the damage. A number of Hosts still remained down below, picking themselves up, regrouping. I stared hard through the darkness, but there was no sign of Nick. He’d been carried off already. Some of the injured Hosts staggered toward the barricade again. A woman with a caved-in cheek and a missing lower jaw. A man with his collarbone spiking through his uniform shirt.

We couldn’t wait around.

When I turned, I saw Patrick and Alex looking up at me. I was still holding Nick’s Stark Peak Monarchs hoodie. I reached over the top of the barricade and let it go. It fluttered down out of sight.

Then I started hopping down the back side of the barricade. At the bottom we circled up. Cassius stuck his wet nose in my palm, and I stroked his soft head.

“I should’ve left him to hide in the car,” Patrick said, and walked away.

Alex shot me a frustrated look and then followed. The road up was empty. No abandoned cars we could take. We made the choice to stick to the woods beside the pass, hiding under cover as we started up. Sure enough, the few Hosts we saw came stumbling down the middle of the road. They were smart to do so; the terrain was brutal. We went from mud to boulders to brambles to granite faces that we had to help one another scale. Treetops blotted out the moonlight, making the climb even harder.

Through the trees we kept an eye on the road for vehicles but spotted nothing except a Subaru upended in a roadside gully. We hiked until I felt like my hamstrings might snap, until my hands were raw and my calves on fire. At last we broke free of the pines, standing in an open patch near the top of the pass. Looking back across the valley, we saw only darkness. Crisp air usually meant that from high on the pass we could spot the flare of lights marking Creek’s Cause, but not today. Not anymore.

We topped a cracked hump of stone, pulled ourselves to level ground, and lay panting on the cold dirt. Above us rose a solemn ring of Douglas firs. A stone’s throw away, the highway forked into two dirt roads, one winding up to dead-end at Lawrenceville, the other rising to a plateau on the north before starting its corkscrew descent into Stark Peak. At either side crevices fell away treacherously, sheer drops without bottom.

“Let’s rest here a bit,” Patrick said.

I about collapsed with relief. He and Alex started clearing pine needles to make a space to lie down. Taking the hint, I got Cassius, moved a brief ways off toward the road, and cleared my own makeshift camp.

Patrick with Alex.

Me with my dog.