Legionnaire

Mike pulled his pack off the bed of his truck and put it on his back for the twenty-second time since Wade went missing.

He knew the number because he had started counting after the official search ended.

Three weeks.

That was how long they had looked before the county called it. Three weeks of search teams, dogs, drones, volunteers, weather delays, bad ground, false hope, and men with calm voices explaining that sometimes the mountains did not give people back.

Six months later, the paperwork had done what paperwork did.

Missing.

Presumed dead.

Mike still hated the words.

They sounded too clean for what they meant.

He shut the tailgate harder than he needed to and looked toward the trees. The same trees. The same mountains. The same hard blue sky that had been in half the pictures he had shown Wade when he convinced him Blackpine Basin was worth the trip.

His fault.

The thought came every time.

Not all the way true, maybe. He knew that. On good days, he knew it. Wade was grown. Wade had chosen to go. Wade had ignored the weather warning. Wade had made whatever decision put him somewhere the search teams never found.

But Mike had given him the route.

Mike had given him the gear.

Mike had given him the fucking Garmin inReach.

He had sat on his porch, beer in hand, and told Wade the woods might give him enough quiet to hear himself think.

Now Wade was gone.

And Mike still did not know where.

He walked around to the passenger side of the truck and pulled the folded map from the seat. It was not the clean one anymore. That one was at home in a drawer because he could not stand looking at it.

This one was scarred with red boxes.

Grid squares. Search areas. Notes in the margins. Dates. Weather. Places already covered by official teams. Places Mike had gone back over himself because official did not mean perfect and called off did not mean finished.

He spread the map across the hood and held it down against the wind.

Today’s square sat near the cliff face northwest of Wade’s planned route.

Too far off.

That was what the deputy had said when Mike brought it up months ago.

Too far from the marked path. Too far from the last likely camp. Too rough. Too much dead ground. No reason for him to be there unless he had gotten badly turned around.

Mike had almost laughed in the man’s face.

Badly turned around sounded exactly like Wade.

He traced the red box with one finger.

“Alright, dumbass,” he muttered. “Let’s try one more.”

He folded the map, tucked it into the chest pocket of his jacket, and started up the trail.

The first hour was easy enough.

Easy by mountain standards, anyway. His knees hurt. His shoulders warmed under the pack. The air thinned as the ground climbed. Pines crowded the trail, and patches of old snow still clung in the shadowed cuts where the sun did not reach long enough to finish the job.

Mike moved slower than he used to.

He hated that too.

Every now and then, he stopped and looked back the way he had come, trying to imagine Wade doing the same thing. Tired. Pissed off. Breathing hard. Making some smartass comment to nobody because that was what Wade did when things started sucking.

At the split, Mike left the route.

The trees thickened almost immediately. The ground pitched sideways, uneven and slick beneath old needles and loose stone. Twice he had to grab branches to keep from sliding. Once he stopped and checked the map again, then the compass, then the GPS unit clipped to his shoulder strap.

He was on the edge of the grid.

Good.

Or stupid.

Probably both.

By midday, the cliff face rose ahead through the trees.

Dark stone. Broken ledges. A shallow cut running along the base where rainwater had carved mud and gravel into uneven lines. It looked like a hundred other pieces of mountain he had already searched.

Mike stood there breathing hard, one hand braced against a pine.

“Come on,” he said quietly. “Give me something.”

The mountain did not answer.

He worked the base of the cliff slowly.

Not like a hiker. Like a man looking for a body.

Under brush. Behind rocks. Down every little wash where water might have carried something. He checked cracks, shadowed hollows, places where an injured man might have crawled to get out of weather.

He found animal tracks.

Old cans from some other idiot years before.

A torn strip of blue tarp that made his heart slam into his throat until he realized it was sun-bleached and brittle.

Nothing.

He kept going.

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An hour later, he found the overhang.

It was not much. A dark mouth in the stone, shallow and low, barely enough for one man to crawl under and get out of the rain. From the trail, it would have been invisible. From the wrong angle in a storm, with lightning flashing and panic riding your back, it would have looked like shelter.

Mike stopped.

His hand went to the map without thinking.

He did not need to look.

He knew.

This was the kind of place Wade would have gone.

The ground below it dropped harder than it looked. Not a cliff, exactly. More like a broken shelf hidden under brush, steep enough to punish a bad step. At the bottom, loose stone collected in a narrow wash before disappearing into thicker trees.

Mike swallowed.

“Wade?”

His voice came back small.

He climbed down slow, using roots and rock and every bit of caution Wade apparently had not. At the bottom, he searched the wash.

Ten minutes later, he found the first piece.

A strap.

Black nylon, half-buried under wet leaves and grit, the buckle cracked but still attached. Mike crouched and pulled it free.

He knew that strap.

His own pack had the same one.

For a second, he could not breathe.

Then he moved faster.

Too fast.

He nearly slipped twice before he found the pack wedged beneath a deadfall, half-hidden where spring runoff had shoved branches and dirt around it. The rain cover was gone. One side was torn open. Mud had dried into the seams and been washed out again so many times the fabric had gone stiff and pale.

Mike dropped to his knees.

“No,” he whispered.

He pulled the pack loose and dragged it into the open.

Wade’s pack.

His pack.

Mike knew every pocket. Every strap. Every piece of gear inside because he had packed half of it himself while giving Wade shit about land nav and weather and not dying like an asshole.

His hands shook as he opened it.

Wet rot smell came out first.

Ruined clothes. A crushed protein bar. Torn rain gear. First-aid kit still sealed. Bear spray gone. The little stove dented but there.

Then his fingers closed around orange plastic.

The Garmin.

For a second, Mike just held it.

The screen was cracked. The casing was scraped to hell. Mud sat in the buttons. The SOS cover was still closed.

Still closed.

Mike stared at it until his vision blurred.

“You didn’t hit it,” he said.

The words broke in his throat.

“You stupid son of a bitch, you didn’t hit it.”

He sat back in the leaves, the dead Garmin in both hands, and pressed his forehead against it.

There should have been a body.

That was the thought that came next.

With the pack here, with the fall here, with the shelter right there, there should have been blood. Clothes. Bones. Something the search teams had missed but animals had not. A boot. A knife. Anything.

Mike forced himself up.

He searched until the light started to fail.

He found the pocketknife sheath, empty.

He found one torn piece of fabric caught under a rock.

He found drag marks that might have been water, animals, or his own desperate imagination.

He did not find Wade.

At dusk, Mike stood under the overhang and looked at the stone wall behind it.

It was just rock.

Cold. Dark. Wet in places.

Nothing magic. Nothing glowing. No doorway. No answer.

He put one hand against it anyway.

“Where the hell did you go, man?”

The wind moved through the trees.

The Garmin sat dead in his jacket pocket.

Mike closed his eyes.

For the first time in months, the thought that came was not Wade is dead.

It was worse.

Wade was here.

And then he wasn’t.

Mike opened his eyes and looked back toward the lowering sun.

He should have hiked out before dark.

He knew that.

He also knew he was not leaving the pack behind.

He bent, lifted it carefully, and strapped it to the outside of his own.

Then he looked once more at the overhang.

“I found where you were,” he said.

His voice was rough and quiet.

“I’m not done.”

Then Mike turned away from the cliff face and started the long walk back.

Getting back up was worse.

Going down had been slow and ugly, but at least gravity had helped. Climbing out with Wade’s ruined pack strapped to his own was something else entirely.

The extra weight threw everything off.

Wade’s pack bounced against the back of Mike’s, pulling him backward with every step, catching on branches, shifting whenever the ground turned uneven. Twice, gravel broke loose under his boots and rattled down into the wash below.

The second time scared him enough to stop.

Mike pressed one hand flat against the cliff wall and eased his weight onto a narrow shelf barely a few feet wide. It was not a trail. Not really. Just a broken ledge cut into the rock, half-hidden by brush and hanging roots.

He shifted Wade’s pack higher, trying to cinch the straps tighter across his own.

The dead Garmin dug into his chest pocket.

The weight of it felt worse than the weight on his back.

“Easy,” he muttered. “Don’t join him being an idiot.”

He pulled one strap.

Then another.

Something scraped under his boot.

Mike froze.

Slowly, he looked down.

A pocketknife lay wedged between two pieces of stone on the shelf.

Closed.

Mud-stained.

Half-hidden under pine needles and grit.

Mike stared at it for a long second before bending down.

His hand shook when he picked it up.

He knew that knife.

Not because it was special. It wasn’t. Just a cheap folding knife Wade had carried for years because he liked things that worked and didn’t give a shit if they looked pretty.

Mike turned it over in his palm.

“Wade…”

The name came out barely above a breath.

Then he saw the cloth.

A torn strip of dark fabric hung from a dead branch jutting out of the rock wall a few yards ahead. Not a branch growing from soil. This thing had wedged itself sideways into a crack, dry and gray and hard as bone.

The cloth moved in the wind.

Mike shoved the knife into his pocket and moved toward it carefully.

The shelf narrowed near the branch. He had to turn sideways, one hand pressed against the stone, boots scraping for purchase. Wade’s pack shifted behind him, and for one ugly second he thought the weight was going to pull him off the ledge.

He stopped.

Breathed.

Tightened his jaw.

Then kept going.

The cloth was not old.

Weathered, yes. Dirty. Frayed. But not ancient. Not something that had been hanging there for years.

Mike pinched it between two fingers.

Rain gear.

Or pants.

Something synthetic.

Something Wade could have been wearing.

He looked past the branch.

At first, he saw only shadow.

Then the wind moved a curtain of dead grass and roots hanging down the rock face.

Behind it was a hole.

Small.

Low.

Almost invisible unless someone stood in exactly the wrong place at exactly the right angle.

Mike’s mouth went dry.

The opening was maybe two feet across, tucked behind the branch and hanging roots. Not a cave like people imagined. Not some big black mouth in the mountain. Just a narrow break in the stone, half-hidden by brush and shadow.

He crouched as much as the packs would let him.

Cold air breathed from the hole.

Not mountain cold.

Something else.

Mike reached into his jacket and pulled out his flashlight. It clicked on with a hard white beam.

The light showed stone for the first few feet.

Then darkness.

Deep darkness.

Too deep for a hole that small.

There should have been a back wall. Roots. Dirt. Rock. Some dead animal den.

There was none of that.

Just a narrow passage sloping into black.

The beam caught something near the entrance.

A smear.

Old mud, maybe.

Or dried blood.

Mike swallowed.

“You went in there,” he whispered.

The wind pushed across the ledge and tugged at the torn cloth still caught on the branch.

He knew what he should do.

Mark the location. Take pictures. Get the GPS point. Climb out before dark. Come back with ropes, lights, and someone else who could tell him not to be a fucking idiot.

He knew all that.

He had given Wade that same speech six months ago.

Mike looked at the pocketknife in his hand.

Then back into the hole.

“God damn it, Wade.”

The darkness waited.

Mike clicked the flashlight off.

Then on again.

Still there.

Still impossible.

Still waiting.

He made it three whole seconds before he lied to himself.

Just a better look.

That was all.

Maybe the passage turned ten feet in. Maybe Wade had crawled inside and gotten stuck. Maybe there was a body around the bend, hidden from the search teams by one bad angle and six months of weather.

Maybe knowing would be worse.

Mike got down on his hands and knees.

The extra pack scraped against the stone above him, so he shrugged it loose and dragged it after him by one strap. His own pack followed. Wade’s pack caught on the entrance, then jerked free.

The hole was tighter than it looked.

Cold stone pressed against his shoulders. Dirt broke loose under his gloves. His flashlight beam bounced over rock, roots, and black space ahead.

“Wade?” he called.

His voice did not echo right.

It went forward and disappeared.

Mike crawled another foot.

Then another.

The passage dipped.

He shifted his knee forward, looking for purchase.

There was none.

The floor vanished beneath his hand.

For one stupid second, Mike hung there with his chest wedged against stone and both packs dragging behind him.

Then the rock under his left elbow broke loose.

“Oh, fu—”

The word tore away as he dropped.

The flashlight spun from his hand.

The beam flashed over stone.

Roots.

Darkness.

Something impossibly wide below him.

Then Mike was falling into the black.