She wiped sweat from her eyes and shaded them, looking for about a minute with her back hunched over. Then she pointed. “Yeah, that’s the depot where they took me,” she said. “It’s got rooms underground. The cabin where we stayed is just past it. We’re here.”

We stood and stared for a long while, searching for some activity. From this place on the road it looked like nothing more than some old mountain town that had been deserted and left to rot decades ago. Clever, Mister O.

Sweat dripped from my chin and my shirt was drenched. Our combined stench could have offended a skunk. I used the branch to clear a pathway through a vine of thorns and it was the first and only thing it was good for. Regardless, I still got sliced a number of times hiking through the thorny undergrowth.

“Isn’t there a show where people do this shit naked?” I said.

“Hush,” Cassie said from behind me.

“We’ve all lost our minds,” I said.

We stopped about twenty feet from the first cabin, sat on our haunches and conducted our final survey. When I was growing up, there used to be woods in every neighborhood. My friends and I would take our bikes out into these woods and pretend we were secret commandos in some wide-scale war. Pre-teen Rambos. Using nothing more than our imagination, we would create these elaborate missions where we’d have to infiltrate a base and release hostages or assassinate an army commander. And it would feel so authentic, out in the quiet woods, that we’d manufacture real fear and adrenaline. The celebration after successful missions was genuine. But the stakes were not. Here, I had the same feeling I did as a kid preparing an assault on some imaginary fortress, but now my courage, or lack thereof, would truly be tested, and the outcome mattered. Fail, and I couldn’t just return home to my mother’s meatloaf and a warm bath and an hour of sitcoms before bedtime. Fail, and I might lose my son, the family I’ve fought to keep, and my sanity, if not my life. My bravado wanted to say, ‘Failure is not an option.’ But the voice in my head, the one that says, ‘Just one drink won’t kill you’, told me it not only was an option, it was the most likely one.

We’ll see about that. My bravado and insecurity are always at war.

“It looks empty,” I said.

“Sure does.”

“So, where did everybody go?”

“I’m guessing underground.”

“Great.” I stood and led us through the brush and out onto the rutted dirt road. I hesitated at the tree line, then turned and tossed my weapon-slash-walking stick back into the woods. “You’re right. That’s just likely to get us hurt.”