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As they moved forward, Mary had grown heavier as she sank into her stupor. Halo had trapped her arms under his front-facing backpack and laced his fingers under her bottom to keep her up on his hips, her head lolling on his shoulder.
Each step pressed his bog shoes deep into the moss. In his mind, he pictured Miriam fishing out the hiker. It sounded straightforward in the telling of the story. Having just tried to get out of a pool—without clothes, shoes, or another person attached to him—Halo now understood how heroic Miriam had been. How frightened. How brave.
Halo wasn’t sure if the ground truly gave way beneath them either would survive. If he was going down, he planned to tip Mary backward, shove her away from him, and hope that Max could figure something out.
It was a harrowing thought.
But as the strategy came clearly to mind, he looked down at Max. And Max seemed to get the picture and understand his duty. Guard Mary.
Halo was following the pulses of his shirt. He had to veer this way and that to stay on the driest, highest ground. And he was glad that he had tested the navigation system before it became crucial, but also that the grandfather evergreen was up ahead, guiding him in.
His nostrils filled with the smell of ozone again.
And then the sky was slashed with the crackle of lightning.
“Holy hell. Come on now!” he called up to the sky.
Marilin said that this was a desperate circumstance, that if they were on the bog when they saw lightning, they were to get to the tree line as fast as they could.
He was already doing that.
The idea that he’d lose his line of sight, that the water would rise—all the ramifications of the situation sizzled along his nerves.
The air shuddered with the boom of thunder.
Stopping as briefly as possible, Halo wrangled each of them into the rain ponchos he’d yanked from the side pockets of his field pack as he yelled, “Go, Max! Go! Find the car! Go, Max! Fast track! Go!”
Halo couldn’t divide his attention. He had to trust that, before the rain flushed away their scent trail, with the command to move at full speed, Max would be waiting for Halo at the vehicle. Safe.
So far, Max’s training sessions had translated beautifully into real-world missions.
As the words left Halo’s mouth, Max dashed in the correct direction. His light frame leaped across the expanse of bog, and he disappeared into the tree line.
The next crack of lightning split the clouds open, and the rain fell in a torrent.
Halo sent up a thank you to the engineers who had figured out this shirt because, just like on the Virginia mountainside, Halo could only see three feet ahead of him.
The tree line was gone.
The bog water was rising alarmingly fast.
Mary hung limp over his back. Flailing would make this impossible. “Just a little further, love, almost there,” he called to her. And though his staggering movements kicked her bog shoes into his knees, he didn’t want to take them off lest he need to set her down for some reason. Without the shoes, she’d sink out of sight, lost to the bog.
Keeping his focus on the three feet around him, the only space he could control, Halo made his way forward. When his foot landed on solid ground, it felt like a bleeding miracle.
Three more steps and the trunk of a tree let him know they’d made it out of the bog and into the forest.
The bog shoes came off and were left behind.
Marilin had said that the winds would be high enough that they could topple trees, but Halo had not imagined the sheer power that engulfed them.
The lightning intensified, giving him brief moments of clarity.
The tree limbs only somewhat softened the onslaught of rain.
But around him, Halo heard the crack of severed limbs and the thud of falling trees.
There was no safety in the woods.