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way he’d come.
    For a moment she just looked around her surroundings, slightly amazed that even though she’d scouted this location out herself, that had been two years ago. Her life hadn’t changed much, to be fair, but still, turning over that hump between the don’t-give-a-shit twenties, and the ugh-where-is-my-life-going thirties was quite a feat.
    To the north, the direction of her camp, there was nothing but a dense, green wall of forest that looked imposing as all hell, even in the early morning. She’d been down this road a hundred times, going out deep into the woods, frequently by herself, and always ended up fine.
    But never this long. And never this far away from humanity.
    She did have that radio, though. She smiled and laughed a little to herself, thinking back to Fred trying to sell her on this absolutely stupid-crazy idea. “Always with the radio.”
    Still, she didn’t much like it. And this time, Stanton was supposed to be with her. Something about his abrupt departure from the project – or at least the first few months of it – still didn’t sit right with her. Yeah, sure, he was pushing seventy, but he’d never had any health problems before. And more than that, he was far too annoyingly specific to ever just say things like “oh the numbers are off” and leave it at that.
    Jill shook her head, tied her brunette curls into a doubled-up ponytail and shouldered the enormous backpack.
    She’d be taking deliveries every week or so, depending on the weather, so taking the hike slowly and marking the path would be a very good idea, especially since the weather that day was perfect.
    Overhead, light, wispy cirrus clouds mixed with exhaust from a couple of jets.
    As she walked, those two creeps – Eckert and Marley – came into her mind. Their accusations that she was chasing what amounted to dragons in the sky. Anecdotes, true, were all she had to go on, but she knew, somehow, she’d find them.
    How did they survive this long without ever being seen? She wondered. Then again, I guess I am in a place so remote that Bigfoot would feel solidly safe, so there’s that .
    The nearest town was about eighty miles away by flight, far more if a hiker had to weave through the endless, tangled woods.
    She swallowed hard as reality set in deep.
    There was no backing out. The disappearing helicopter was the end of the humanity she’d see until that very same helicopter came back. There was always the remote possibility of a hunter, a poacher, or some other adventurer passing by, but way out here? Not much of one.
    As she buckled her backpack into place and tightened the harness down to keep it from flopping against her back, she let the beauty of the place overwhelm her. She turned in a circle, taking in the ring of trees all around. She was in a different world, and nothing could be more apparent.
    Jill’s regular day-to-day of cinderblock office walls, the eternal, but somehow lovable asshole Albertson Craven making dirty jokes, that was all gone, and in its place was a massive forest with undergrowth so thick she could hardly see to keep on the path through the plants.
    No more Albertson, no more office, no more... anything.
    A mixture of earth, pine, fir and rain either coming or just passed filled her nose as she inhaled deeply, filling her lungs with life.
    Every inch of her body prickled with a mixture of fear, possibility and inescapable excitement.
    And with that, she took her first step.
    One step turned to two, turned to a thousand. She couldn’t see the sun anymore, thanks to the canopy, by the time she stopped to eat some of her hardtack and granola, but she knew it had to be around noon just from the heat.
    Sweat ran down the sides of her face, and cooled slightly each time a breeze blew through the woods. Breezes didn’t come as often as she liked, but she pressed on anyhow, dripping wet, soaked through all the way to her skin.
    As the woods got deeper, and slightly darker, all kinds of