Page 12 of The Spirit of Love
Angry new rivers swirl around us, carving the earth with violent force. Sam pauses, grunts, lunges forward—until we’re all the way up to the top of the trail. I’m almost disappointed when he sets me down near the cliff’s edge, the same place where my taxi driver dropped me off this afternoon. Water courses over the tops my rain boots, flowing inside and freezing my ankles.
The island feels oddly empty, except for the two of us and the storm. The legion of deer is nowhere to be found. I wonderwhere they go in apocalyptic moments like these. I wonder why I was the only camper on that beach. I wonder what the flare was that Sam thought he saw. The light that sent him down to me.
He pulls a ring of keys from the pocket of his jeans and presses the Unlock button for his Jeep. I don’t see the car, but I swipe my soaking hair out of my eyes and try to smooth it down, suddenly aware that in a moment we’ll climb into his Jeep, straight into an overhead lighting situation—and something tells me Sam will be looking like tennis legend Taylor Fritz crossed with Charles Melton and Tom Bateman…whereas I will look like something from theStar Warscantina scene.
Having written dozens of erotically charged apocalyptic episodes ofZombie Hospital, I’m happy to discover that, despite what that crankyVarietyTV critic wrote in his review, I’ve actually been onto something: The end of the worldcanbe a turn-on.
“Sorry about this,” Sam says, turning in a slow circle. “I must have parked a little farther off the road…”
I follow as he strides inland, away from the cliff, still holding out his keys, still pressing the Unlock button. A sudden blast of wind blows me sideways. My feet slip in the mud, and when I stagger to catch my balance, my foot finds only air.
“Sam!” I cry out.
His arm is quickly around my waist, pulling me against him, where it’s warm and far more solid than the ground. For the second time in five minutes, he saves me.
“You okay?” He studies me. The longer we stare at each other, the more brightly his eyes exude thiswarmth, likesomeone backstage is turning up a light inside of him. It makes it impossible to break his gaze. Something inside me says,Keep looking until you can put this into words. What I’m feeling in my chest is almost playful, strangely happy—entirely at odds with everything else about this situation. My entire night, and possibly my entire weekend, has been upended.
“I…I think so?” I am, because of him.
“What happened?” Sam asks.
“There’s a drop. I didn’t see it.”
“There’s no drop here. I know this route like the back of my skull.”
“Wait. What?”
“Oh wow,” Sam says, halting as if he’s just run into an imaginary door. “Ohcrap.” He turns his head to me, then back in the direction he’d been facing. “Look.”
He bangs on his helmet, and a weak stream of light flickers long enough to illuminate a deep ravine below. At the bottom, a hundred feet beneath us, I see the dented, upside-down reflection of a word:
JEEP
For a moment, we just stand in the pouring rain and stare. The miner’s light goes black again.
Sam finally says, “I guess there is a drop.”
“Yeah, maybe you should check in on the back of your skull.”
“Let’s get out of this storm.”
“How?” I ask, shivering. “Your Jeep is totaled. And isn’t it six miles to Two Harbors?”
“I know something closer.”
We trudge solong in darkness, up and then down and then up steep and muddy slopes, that eventually I lose track of time. When finally the downpour dwindles, so does the temperature. My teeth chatter. The chill penetrates my bones. The only part of me that’s warm is my left hand, in Sam’s, which he uses now to gesture up ahead.
At a cabin that stands at the end of a path cut through tall grass and wildflowers. It looks like something out of a fairy tale.
It’s modest and charming, built of rough-hewn logs. There’s a porch, a tin roof, two large windows downstairs, and a tiny window up top—near the chimney, from which curls an undulating arm of smoke.
“Who lives here?” I ask as we approach the cabin. “The Seven Dwarves and Jason Voorhees?”
“I do,” Sam says, eyeing the place with a look of pride. “It belongs to the Conservancy—they handle the land trust of the entire island—but I get to hang my helmet here while I complete my training.”
I clear my throat. “Training?”
“All right, you got me. You’re my first rescue,” Sam says, like it’s a huge compliment.
