“What do we do?” I asked. “Should we call the police?”

“No,” Michael said. “They’ll only get in the way and make matters worse. We’ll handle this ourselves.”

“And what exactly is it that we’re handling?” Adam asked.

Michael looked down at the ground again as we took a different and shorter path home.

“The mysterious and sudden disappearance of our friend,” Michael answered.

Deranged

1

It wasn’t like Rob to just disappear without telling anyone where he was going.

His car was still in the drive, and too much time had passed for it to have been a walk in the woods. Plus, who goes for a walk in the woods with only one shoe? Michael, Adam, and I searched all around the cabin; calling for Rob and spreading out enough to look a sizable distance from the cabin before checking back in with each other.

“He’s not here,” Adam said.

“That’s impossible,” I said. “He has to be here. Where would he have gone?”

Adam and Michael stood there silent, unable to answer me because they didn’t have a clue where Rob might have been.

“Something has happened to him,” I said on the verge of tears.

“We don’t know that,” Michael said. “We can’t assume the worst until we know something for sure.”

“Yeah, because things never end up proving to be the worst case scenario for us, right?” I said sarcastically. “Things always work out great for us and never get weird.”

“Okay, she definitely has a point,” Adam said, backing me up.

“We have to go out into the woods and look for him,” I said.

“Agreed,” Michael nodded his head. “But we can’t go out there without supplies. It’s winter, getting dark out, and if we don’t act smartly about this then we’ll end up being lost or dead in the woods ourselves.”

I gasped at his comment.

“You think that Rob is dead?” I said with my mouth hanging open.

“No, that’s not what I meant,” Michael said as he tried to backpedal his comment.

“Try not to panic,” Adam said, switching sides to back up Michael now. “Worrying isn’t productive. If we’re going to track down Rob, we need to be smart about this. Michael is right; let’s go inside and pack a few backpacks with supplies and head out to look for him.”

I didn’t want to waste a single moment. It would start getting dark in a few hours and who knows how far into the woods we would have to go.

“Hang on,” Michael said.

He was looking out toward the shed where I kept the pots and tools for the garden. We had already looked all around there, so I wasn’t sure what could have caught his eye, or his train of thought. Michael left Adam and I standing there and walked toward the shed. We followed behind him to see what he was doing. When he got to the shed, he stopped and looked down at the ground where the late afternoon sun was reflecting off a small puddle. The light must have caught his eye from where we had been standing.

“Look at that,” he said as he pointed at the irregularly shaped ditch in the snow. “What does that look like to you?”

I glanced down at the puddle and looked. Michael took a few steps forward to where there was another small puddle in the melting snow, while Adam and I both stared at the one in front of us. Then it dawned on me what I was looking at. The edges of the melting shape in the snow were beginning to blur into the mush of the wet ground around it, but I could still make out the shape—a shoe.

“This is a footprint,” Adam said when he came to the realization at the same time that I did.

“There’s another one here,” Michael called.

We both hurried over to where he stood.

“Look,” Michael said as he pointed toward the path of small puddles that trailed off into the woods. It’s a path of footprints.

“How come we didn’t see these before?” Adam asked.

Michael walked slowly ahead, bending down to look at each one in turn.

“It looks like someone tried to cover them up, but when the snow started to melt and the light started to hit them, they became more visible. It’s definitely footprints, and since there’s no one else here and none of us walked this way into the woods; I’m assuming that they must belong to Rob.”

“Let’s go,” I said as I started to run along the trail of prints.

Michael grabbed my arm and gently pulled me back.

“Hang on,” he said. “We still can’t go wandering off aimlessly and unprepared into the woods. We want to find him as bad as you do, so let’s go inside and get what we need and then we’ll head out.”

“Okay,” I nodded as the three of us went back into the cabin.

Thoughts of what could have possibly happened to Rob, and who would have covered up his footprints, raced through my head. There was only one set of footprints, so unless whoever it was had carried him, then it looked like Rob was alone which didn’t make any sense. He wouldn’t have wandered off to disappear in the woods all on his own, and he certainly wouldn’t have covered up his own footprints. I only hoped that he was okay and that we found him before anything bad happened.

Michael grabbed three backpacks down from the top of the closet and tossed them onto the bed, one for each of us.

“Don’t make them too heavy,” he said as he started rooting through drawers to find what we needed. “We don’t know how far or how long we’ll have to be out there. The mountainous terrain can be difficult to navigate even with no pack. Keep it light and only pack the essentials; change of clothes, water canteen, some food. I’ll pack a tent, matches, and first aid. You guys just pack what you’ll need.”

“How long are we expecting to be out there for?” Adam said. “Like a general guess at least?”

“Maybe a day?” Michael said with a heavy dose of uncertainty in his voice. “Maybe two?”

Michael packed his backpack the heaviest, putting the communal things that we would all share inside his. I grabbed a pair of jeans, T-shirt, sweater, and a pair of underwear. I couldn’t really think straight on the spot about what I would need out in the woods. It wasn’t like I had ever done something like this before or had any survival training. Adam handed me a metal flask filled with water, and a few packs of beef jerky. Then, he folded up a blanket as tightly as he could and stuffed it into his pack. When all three backpacks were ready, I changed my shoes into a more durable pair of combat boots and grabbed a thicker jacket from the closet to push my arms through. The jacket had a fur-lined hood that reminded me of the fur blankets that Michael and I laid under by the bonfire. After everyone was ready, Michael locked up the cabin, and we headed out.

The footprints were already starting to fade, and a fresh dusting of snow was also starting to fall. It wouldn’t be long before we lost the track entirely and were searching blind.

“We need to use what light we have to search as far as we can,” Michael said.

For hours we trekked deeper and deeper into the mountains. We searched for the rest of the day until we exhausted all of the daylight and the dim light of dusk, then we used as much of the moonlight as we could to continue looking, until eventually we lost sight of the footprints and there were no more clues to go on. Now, we just had to canvas the wilderness until we either found more clues to follow, found Rob, or ran out of supplies and needed to turn back.

“It’s too dark to keep searching for tonight,” Adam said. “We need to stop and pitch the tent before we end up just wandering around in circles or falling off the edge of the mountain.”