Free Mountain Madness by Daniel Pyle Page A

and taken advantage of many times in the last few months. The tracks in the mud consisted mostly of deer prints. At points, the path narrowed to almost nothing, but it never completely disappeared. Even if it had, Dave would have managed to pick it up again. He wasn’t an expert tracker, probably couldn’t have followed a chipmunk from California to Maine on a two week delay, but he could sure as hell keep his eye on a deer-wide rut. To a woodsman (and Dave considered himself one), this path might as well have been a newly paved interstate.
    Dave walked behind the boy, nudged him in the back when he slowed or seemed to get confused about which way he was supposed to go, wiped occasionally at his eye. The sneakers on the kid’s feet were well tied (of course) but otherwise cheap and worn; one of the soles flapped and smacked against the shoe’s upper with every step the boy took. Dave hadn’t noticed the damage before, so it must have happened only recently, perhaps during the kid’s unsuccessful rush in the tree fort. The shoes showed no brand name, only an icon he didn’t recognize. He’d have to get Georgie some decent hiking boots.
    They continued to move, and Dave wondered if he should have spent a little more time inside the house, gotten some of the kid’s clothes and maybe some food. Might have made the transition a little easier, both on Georgie and on himself. It wasn’t too late to go back—he doubted anyone had heard the woman scream, and there wasn’t a husband to come home early—but the house was the kid’s territory. He might know of another hiding place back there, or of a weapon to use against Dave. Dave didn’t want to chance anything like that, not when he could just as easily pick up some boots off a back stoop or a porch somewhere along the way. Or he might find something back at Mr. Boots’s house, something left over from his own boyhood. He had a few outfits at least and maybe some toys (or toy-like objects anyway). It was his job to provide now. And he would.
    They crossed a narrow stream, Georgie slipping once but catching himself in that acrobatic way of his, Dave never missing a single step. Once he’d reached the other side successfully, the boy said, “My mom—”
    But Dave cut him off. “Don’t worry, we’ll find her,” he said. The boy meant his old mother, of course, and Dave knew it, but he didn’t want to risk a conversation about her. Not now or ever.
    “Why are you doing this?”
    Dave nudged him again. “No more questions,” he said, still keeping his voice perfectly cool and level. “Georgie never asked so many stupid questions.”
    “I don’t know who Georgie is,” he said. “My name is Zach.”
    Dave smiled and nudged him forward. “Used to be. You used to be Zach, I used to be Davy, everybody used to be somebody.”
    The boy didn’t respond to this. He pushed on, warding off a low-hanging tree branch with one arm and letting it swing back when he’d moved out of its way. He didn’t look back to see if it had hit Dave (which it had not), and Dave was glad. He didn’t want to think Georgie had tried to hurt him on purpose, although at worst it would have thwacked him in the chest and maybe given him a little welt.
    The trees thinned ahead. Not far from where they walked, sunlight cut through the canopy in wide swaths. The road beyond was really more of a gravel walkway that had once been wide enough to allow a vehicle passage to a pair of cabins in the mountains above. The cabins had burned a long time ago, and nature had crept in to reclaim what had been leveled, but Dave had managed to get his truck most of the way up the forgotten road and knew he could get it all the way back down. He’d done it before.
    The underbrush grew less dense here, and the trail widened until it became almost indistinguishable from the rest of the forest floor, though Dave could still see it clearly where it hit the road and make out the spot on the other side where it