Keep Watch

Chapter Nine

When Chloe's eyes shot open to a loud bang, she could have sworn one of them had been shot — what she didn't expect, however, was to have to duck from flying shards of rock as the stones around the campfire exploded.

"What the fuck?" Chloe grumbled. "Why has the world decided to attack us? I can't keep waking up like this, I swear to God." Somewhere in her complaints, she was searching for an explanation.

"Fuck, I was scared that would happen," Aava admitted. The three of them looked toward him, and he gave them a sheepish smile. "There are little air and water bubbles in those river rocks, and when they get heated up, they expand. So when we put them beside the fire..."

Ah. Chloe understood it now. Aava had plotted to murder them with his fiery explosives, and had waited until they'd been asleep to launch his attack. Very classy.

Just before she could muster any sort of semi-witty response, Chloe smelt it: The smoke.

It started small. The whiff she got dissipated alongside the dew coating her sore body, but after a few moments, it came back with a vengeance. She looked around, at first attributing it to the still-smoldering campfire, but her eyes widened when she noticed the little tendrils billowing from the roots of several of the trees around them.

"Um, guys?" she started. "I think we might have... done a bit of an oopsie-poopsie."

Amused by her childish language, the group didn't immediately give credit to her words. When they noticed the way her eyes had widened and her gaze flickered from tree to tree, however, they seemed to give her more of their attention.

"What do you see?" Aava asked.

"I think we lit the trees on fire."

Before the words were out, Chloe had been ambivalent to the idea. Now that she'd said it, however, she realized how messed up it would be if the forest — the one they were inside — were to light on fire.

"I sure hope we're not in B.C.," she said. "That place lights up like a candle."

Time was a limited resource for the four of them. They collected their belongings, packing the leftovers from the salmon into leaf wraps and then Jeremy's pockets, but at this point, they had no idea in which direction they should be headed.

The smoke had worsened in the few minutes they'd been inactive. Now, Chloe could feel it tingle in her nostrils — when she ran her hand through her greasy hair, it came back with the stain of a few ashes that had fallen on her.

"Okay, okay." Aava gestured them into a circle, and explained the plan: "Let's get the fuck out of here."

They didn't have a river to follow anymore, considering they had found the end of it. Instead, they continued up the length of the wire, though this time they skipped the step of tugging it up from the dirt. It seemed to be in a relatively straight line, so they kept on a path that they assumed to be parallel to it, checking for it with their toes whenever they remembered to do so.

The trees had begun thinning out long before, but their branches still sparsely hovered over the group, casting long shadows as they blocked some of the light from sunrise. It was cold, and a few times, Chloe was able to catch sight of her breath clouding in the air; she kept her arms flush against her body as she walked, hands balled into fists to retain their warmth.

"God, am I ever glad I wasn't wearing sandals," she snorted. "Some of them had open-toed shoes. Shit sucks."

It seemed their resettling calmness was falsely returned to them as they fell into the same habit as the day before, forming a silent line of wraith-looking bodies as they padded through the forest.