The Last Adventure

Bobby Mars heard it first.

He couldn't have said what woke him. Only that one moment he was deep in dreamless sleep, and the next he was sitting upright in the dark, his Boonie hat still on his head from the night before, his heart doing something strange in his chest. Not fast. Not slow. Just different. Like it had decided to keep time with something outside itself.

He lay back and stared at the ceiling and listened.

A screaming sound, high-pitched and desperate, carried on the wind from somewhere far away. Faint, almost swallowed by the distance, but unmistakably real. Not a coyote. Bobby had heard plenty of those. Not an owl or an elk or any other creature he knew. This was different. This was wrong somehow. The kind of sound that makes the hair on your neck stand up straight.

Bobby threw off his covers and launched himself out of bed so fast he nearly tripped over his own feet. The wooden floorboards were cold against his bare skin as he rushed to the window. He shoved his head out into the warm night air, the wind immediately tousling his already messy brown hair. He gripped the windowsill so hard his knuckles turned white.

Then he heard it again. That eerie, bone-chilling scream, like something caught between terror and rage, echoing across the valley.

Bobby's eyes locked onto the western horizon where the jagged silhouette of the high mountain loomed against the star-scattered sky, its peak still capped with snow that glowed ghostly white in the moonlight. He heard it for the third time. The sound was definitely coming from up there, from somewhere high on that mountain where no one ever went, where the trails ended and the wilderness began.

His fingers reached up to touch the brim of his Boonie hat, which hung on the bedpost beside the window, drawing courage from his father's gift.

Morning came quickly. Bobby rolled out of bed with one thought blazing through his mind: he had to tell Jeffery.

He grabbed yesterday's clothes, the same jeans and T-shirt he'd been wearing for two days, yanked them on so fast he nearly fell over. With one shoe on and the other clutched in his hand, he hopped toward his bedroom door like a one-legged grasshopper. He raced down the wooden staircase three steps at a time. THUMP. THUMP. THUMP.

He didn't notice his mother standing in the kitchen doorway, spatula in hand, pancakes and scrambled eggs waiting on the table.

"Bobby, breakfast is" she called out, but her words were cut off by the sharp SLAM of the front door as her son burst through it like he was being chased by a bear.