Ray pointed past Marcus’s shoulder at the dog.
Ranger had stopped thirty yards away, just at the edge of the shadows. The dog was looking back over his shoulder.
Waiting for them.
Marcus saw it. He let go of Ray’s arm, wiping sweat from his forehead.
“You think he wants us to follow him?”
Ray's fingers closed around the shape of the pocket watch through his leather vest.
“I think somebody wants me to.”
They crossed the tracks only after the red warning signals finally stopped flashing and the bells went dead, leaving the valley in profound quiet.
Ray instructed the other riders to remain near the motorcycles on the highway. If they weren't back in an hour, they were to call the local sheriff. Marcus, refusing to be left behind, followed Ray into the thick brush. Ranger moved slowly, favoring his injured leg, but his nose stayed low to the ground and he never hesitated at forks in the overgrown path.
The dense forest canopy swallowed the sunlight and the distant highway noise within minutes.
Ray's heavy boots pressed into damp, decaying leaves. The air grew significantly cooler up the slope. Sunlight filtered through the sprawling branches of ancient oaks in dusty golden shafts, illuminating dancing clouds of gnats. Somewhere downhill, out of sight, water moved rapidly over stone.
Marcus kept his hand resting near the heavy hunting knife on his belt, his head swiveling constantly.
“This is how every bad decision in a horror movie starts, you know that right?” Marcus grumbled, ducking under a low-hanging branch.
Ray didn’t look back. “Following an injured dog through an abandoned mountain trail?”
“No,” Marcus shot back. “Following an injured dog carrying encrypted messages from a dead man through an abandoned mountain trail. There’s a distinction.”
“He isn't dead.”
Marcus stopped walking. The crunching of leaves ceased.
Ray took three more steps before he realized what he had just said with absolute, unthinking certainty. He stopped and turned around.
Neither man moved for a long moment. The silence of the woods pressed in on them.
Marcus lowered his voice, his tone devoid of its usual sarcasm. “Ray. You don't know that. Someone could have found his gear. Someone could be using his memory to lure you out here. You made enemies over there. We both know you did.”
Ray looked ahead at Ranger, who was sitting patiently by a rotting stump, waiting.
“I know,” Ray said softly.
But it was a lie. Hope, bright and violent and terrifying, had already smashed through the heavy steel doors of his grief. It had entered the space where resignation had lived for twenty years, and Ray hated how incredibly powerful it felt.
Hope was dangerous. Hope could get a man killed.
Grief, on the other hand, eventually became familiar. It was a cold roommate, but a predictable one. A man could build entire routines around absence. He could learn which photo albums to leave in the attic, which songs to turn off on the radio, which questions not to ask himself at three in the morning. He could build walls.
Hope destroyed those walls in seconds.
As they climbed higher, Ray’s mind drifted involuntarily to the last argument he had ever had with Thomas.
It hadn't been a dramatic, cinematic blowout. That was what bothered him most. It was mundane.
They had been sitting on the tailgate of a rusted transport truck under a sky thick with stars and tension, discussing what came after their service ended. Ray had been restless, tracing lines in the dust with a screwdriver, talking about buying a bike and traveling the highways until the map ran out. Thomas, nursing a warm beer, had wanted stability. He wanted a garage with a roof that didn't leak, a dog, and a quiet town where the loudest noise was the Sunday church bell.
Thomas had joked, a half-smile on his dirt-streaked face, that Ray would spend his whole life moving because standing still frightened him more than enemy fire ever had.
Ray, young, proud, and defensive, had taken offense. He had snapped at Thomas, calling him a settler.
Thomas had just laughed, clapping Ray on the shoulder.
*“I'm serious, Hammer. One day you're going to have to stop running long enough to let people find you.”*
Those were not Thomas's final words to him. There had been tactical briefings, radio checks, and terse commands later that night before the ambush.
But they were the words Ray remembered. The words that haunted his quiet moments.
Now, twenty years later, he was following Thomas's dog deeper into the Appalachian mountains, letting himself be found.
The trail narrowed, choking with briars and thick ferns, until it was barely a deer path.