The Tent: A Novella Read Online Free

it, leave me alone,” he mutters under his breath , then curses when his foot comes down in on a patch of ground that’s not ground at all, but a water-filled hollow. Cold water seeps into his boot up to the laces. The burst blister on his heel catches fire.
    Lightning flares, turning the tree trunks to stone and sending thick spears of shadow into the cobalt spaces between them, but they reveal nothing to Mike but more felled trees, scrub, and waterlogged forest floor.
    As they march back the way they came, pausing every few seconds in the lulls between flares of lightning to lance with their flashlight beams the boil of the steaming dark, Mike knows it’s time to give up, not on the boy, no, never that, but himself. All that matters now is finding Cody and getting them all out of here. And once he does—what then? Divorce, probably. He’s tired, just as worn out as Emma, and just as sick of trying so hard for little reward. He may be naïve in certain ways, but he’s far from stupid. And a man would have to be some kind of dumb not to be able to read the signals his wife has been sending him for the past eight months. She’s done, and if he had any sense at all, he’d be done too. All this trying to make her change her mind about him, about them , has done nothing but make him appear sad and desperate, which he is, and it’s exhausting, and it makes him hate himself.
    Sometimes, it even makes him angry, though he’s never quite sure at whom that anger is directed.
    Right now, she’s making it a little easier to for him to focus that anger.
    He stops to wait as she clamps her flashlight between her knees, raises her hands to cup her mouth, and cries out the boy’s name . He has already told her Cody won’t hear her over the storm, but she’s a mother, and mothers don’t listen to anything but their own hearts when it comes to their children.
    As he sweeps his light across the boles, fear twists his guts. They will find the boy—he knows this, has to believe they will— but this interim, the waiting until they do, is terrifying. Their attention was only away from the boy for a few minutes, so he truly believed what he had told Emma: The boy could not have gone far. Probably just snuck behind a tree to take a whizz, in which case moving further away from where they’d been was probably an even worse idea.
    “Emma,” he sa ys, when she pauses to take a breath to power another cry for the boy.
    She looks at him, eyes dark with anger, electric with fear. “What?”
    “We shouldn’t go any further.”
    “We have to find him. We have to find where he is.”
    “I know.” A wild gust of wind strong enough to make him stagger drowns out his words, and he waits for it to abate. We’re doing everything wrong . Pulling his hood tight against his face to protect himself from the needling of the icy rain, he tries again. “I know, but I figure he just went to find some privacy so he could take a leak, maybe.” Please let that be it.
    Hope reduces some of the darkness in her eyes as the idea takes hold. “So what do we do?”
    “We go back to where we were and wait there. If he comes back and we’re not where he left us, we’ll lose him for sure.”
    She nods. “Okay, but let’s hurry.”
    He does, and together they retrace their steps for a second time. At least this time, they know where they’re going. Along the way, in a stroke of luck Mike is almost afraid to acknowledge lest it reverse itself out of spite, the rain begins to ease off, the wind to lessen to a bluster, like an belligerent drunk losing steam. And by the time they reach the spot where they last saw Cody, the area memorable only because of a half-buried sandstone boulder protruding from the mud and deadfall like the shoulder-bone of a felled giant, the rain stops completely. Mike yanks down his hood and takes a deep breath, as if they have spent the past few hours not in a storm, but underwater, and leans back against the boulder,