text: [Themes: modern, thriller]
  
  It is a relief just to be in a room by yourself. The lean-to structure that constitutes this extra room has a metal roof, and Bob's heavy rain is pounding furiously away at it above you in a loud staccato. Still, it is a more soothing sound than what has become the infuriating and vaguely menacing voices of Charlei and Gordy.
  
  With the door to the kitchenette firmly shut, you grope in the dark for another light switch on the wall. When you find it, the light comes on with a flicker — a sign that the generator, wherever it is, is adjusting to the need to put out more power. You look for a way to lock the door, but there isn't any such device on this side. Nor can you block it shut, since the door opens into the cabin. The best you could do, maybe, is pull one of these metal shelves in the way, but that would take too much time, create too much noise, and do too little to stop anyone from getting through.
  
  So, the gun cabinet. The last time you were here was for a Fourth of July cookout two summers ago, and on that day Ray Cooper was proudly showing his little arsenal off to the male neighbors in attendance, and in particular the collection of shells he was hoarding — which, as he put it, was enough to make "Andrew Cuomo and his effing SAFE Act blush." Ray fancies (fancied, past tense?) himself as a hunter, but he is (was?) really more into the guns for their own sake. Most of them were kept in a tall plastic cabinet here in this room, between the door leading in from the kitchenette and a second door leading out to the camp's backyard.
  
  And there it is, just as you remember it... but with the unfortunate development that it is locked tight with a padlock. You'd need to find Ray's key to get in, and so far you've seen no sign of him.
  
  Damn you, Ray! This is really throwing your plans for a loop. You'll have to think fast to come up with an alternative idea, assuming the Goodcheer-Fellows are only going to give you just so much time to "look for jumper cables." You could try busting in to the gun cabinet, but again that would take too much time and cause too much commotion. And at any rate, the best tool for that job would be an axe — which is the one tool in this entire collection of tools that seems to be conveniently missing. Should you arm yourself with a shovel? A sledgehammer? Pruning shears? If push comes to shove, you might have to. But first, it seems like there are other, better options you should be exploring first.
  
  Like, maybe, just getting the hell out of here. The most beautiful thing about this utility room is its second door, providing a route of escape out of the cabin that doesn't involve Gordy and Charlei. You won't need to defend yourself against them if you can just get free of this place.
  
  The door isn't locked, but you can't get it to open more than a few inches. Something is blocking it on the other side. A fallen branch, perhaps? Whatever it is, the object does not feel hard, and it seems to have a little bit of give. Throwing your entire body into the effort, the door begrudgingly opens another six inches.
  
  You are about to squeeze your way through this slender gap when you are stopped cold by a grisly sight: someone's arm lying in the mud just outside the door, motionless.
  
  Recoiling in horror, you suppress an urge to just curl up in a corner of the room and hope this entire night comes to an abrupt end. But what good would that do? Instead, you flip on the outside light, which of course is going to cause all of the other lights in the A-frame to flicker as the generator revs up to accommodate the new load. But the light fixture above the door shows you what you want to know: it's Mindy Cooper's body blocking your way, with a bloody hole in the back of her pink-and-purple flannel shirt.
  
  This confirms all of your fears about the Goodcheer-Fellows: it wasn't just paranoia, or some generational misunderstanding, that has been causing you to fear and dislike them so much. They truly and genuinely are dangerous killers.
  
  This is all the more reason not to be stuck in the same house with them. Trying your best not to look down at the body beneath you, you squeeze your way out the gap. It's possible that you might've stepped on Mindy's hand accidentally in the process, but you remind yourself that would be the least of anyone's worries right now. When your chest is through the door, you step gingerly past her until you are protected from the rain by only the sheet of corrugated metal propped up above their stack of firewood.
  
  That's when you see what must be Ray's body, maybe fifty feet beyond the door: facedown on the ground, the missing axe embedded in his back, its handle pointing upward into the night.
  
  For certain, you are in a precarious position. The Goodcheer-Fellows could've killed you at any time tonight, but have apparently kept you around only for sport — thus Charlei's coded directive to Gordy a few minutes ago, that she wanted to make this a more challenging "game" by allowing you to search the back room.
  
  But here you are, in no better position to defend yourself than you were ten minutes ago, assuming that this bloody, hellish "game" of theirs is about to resume at any moment. A few ideas come to mind, but there is no way to tell which would be the best. You could search Ray's corpse to see if his keys are still on him, and maybe unlock that gun cabinet after all. Or you could cut the generator off, and level the playing field by putting everyone in the dark. It's doubtful your "companions" will give you time enough to do both.
  
  > turn off the generator.
  Charlei said she wanted this "game" to be more challenging, and what better way to give her what she wants than to throw the entire camp into darkness? That can be accomplished literally with the push of a button: the off switch on Ray Cooper's generator.
  
  The biggest question is, where is it? Normally a gas-powered generator wouldn't be that hard to find — just follow the sound of the running motor. But tonight Bob is the louder force, making the generator more of an inferred power source than a known one: instead of listening to its droning purr outside the cabin all night long, you can only make assumptions about its presence based on the observation that the A-frame's lights are on.
  
  But to turn it off, and thus throw the Goodcheer-Fellows into a world of confusion, you first need to find the thing. A generator would be placed outside, of course, out of view but easy to access. You are in the camp's backyard, so you would expect to find it nearby, away from the more decorative front half of the camp. Around the woodpile, maybe?
  
  Pulling your jacket up above your shoulders to shield your face, you dash out from under the cover of the corrugated sheet metal and begin the search. There is irony in this situation: you must search the darkness to create darkness. Still, it is better than rifling through the pockets of a murder victim, right? At the far end of the wood pile, and butted up against the stone foundation just below one of the low-reaching eaves, is a wood box lurking in the shadows. Between the rain pounding on the giant metal roof and the wind continuously flushing the air clean, you could trip over a generator tonight and never expect to hear the motor or smell its exhaust. But you put your hand on this wooden cube and feel the steady vibration of a running engine. This is it.
  
  You fumble with the door to the enclosure in the dark, but then the wind catches it and flings it open for you. There is no light here, but you know enough how a generator works. You feel around for a control switch, and then grasp a knob rotated to a 45° setting. This must be it! You try a clockwise rotation, but the knob refuses to move in that direction. Rotating it counterclockwise instead, you feel the generator shudder and go motionless. The light on the other side of the wood pile, over the door to the utility room, goes out, leaving nothing but the wildness of the storm.
  
  Well, it's not entirely dark: one light source remains on the far side of the cabin, and it takes you a second to realize it's coming from the headlights of the F150.
  
  Now you have an understanding of why moths do what they do: with all but one light extinguished in your universe, you are immediately drawn to the one that remains. You decide to take the long way to get there, going around the far side of the A-frame, well away from both doors. With your right hand in contact with the bottom of the great roof, you feel your way around the side of the structure, stopping just before you reach the front corner.
  
  There you stop, still hiding in the shadows. You can see the driveway plainly: the shadowy Dodge Ram, your red F150 pulled up at an angle to it preparing for that jump that never occurred, the motor still running and the lights still on. The rain is pounding furiously at the gravel surface, faster than it can be soaked up by the ground; the excess water on the surface is roiled up, as if the contents of the storm were pouring into an open swimming pool, not onto solid ground.
  
  When the three of you exited the Ford a few minutes ago, someone didn't close their door all the way. The dome light is still on, revealing an empty crew cab. Your truck is just standing there, ready to make a quick getaway!
  
  > It's your truck -- go for it!
  You are not a violent person; despite what you've seen tonight, you give yourself low odds against a pair of people who are apparently capable of killing without motivation. Al Flansburgh has no hope of outlasting such cold-bloodedness, nor is there anyone for miles around who is going to come to your rescue. All you really want is what you began the night with: some cold beer, a steady fire, and nothing but the forces of nature outside a sturdy wall.
  
  Granted, you don't expect Charlei and Gordy to let you get away that easily, but the sight of your truck just sitting there is more than you can resist. Without hesitation, you sprint as fast as your somewhat-out-of-shape body will go, motivated as it is by the preservation of life, limb, and property. Your shoes are already so wet that they feel like jugs of water, your toes swishing in the contents. The baseball cap, which you've managed to hold onto during this entire ordeal, finally blows away into the night, plucked away by Bob's insatiable winds.
  
  Ray Cooper's Ram stands along the most direct path to your Ford. When you make it that far without any indication you've been spotted, you take cover behind it to assess the situation one last time. The A-frame remains dark, the F150 remains empty, idling away in the storm. It is now so close you could poke it with any one of the fallen sticks lying in the inch-deep water — but you are on the wrong side of it. The driver's side door is all the way on the opposite side. Normally that wouldn't even be a consideration, but now it might as well be a mile.
  
  The headlights are shining right up to the house, illuminating that door inset into the side of the steeply-pitched roof. There is still no movement. So, continuing to abide by your previous motivation, you begin the next leg of your grand getaway scheme by circling behind the idling F150 and coming at the driver's side door from the rear, well away from the betraying beams of the headlights.
  
  The door opens, you climb in, the door closes behind you. The dome light remains on, now displaying your presence to anyone with a direct line of sight. Crap. It's one of the two passenger side doors that's not closed all the way, keeping the light on. You reach over to where Charlei had been sitting, opening the door and closing it again with your fingertips, but still the light stays on. It must be Gordy's door in the rear that's not shut all the way.
  
  When you sit back up, you see Charlei running down the walkway toward the truck. Crap! Reflexively you pull down on the shifter, putting the transmission into reverse. There is no time to be delicate about this — you just need to get out of here. Shifting back into drive, you make a sharp turn and take it on faith that you have found the narrow driveway leading down to the road.
  
  Expecting shots to be fired, you are instead surprised to see a second set of headlights illuminating the storm-soaked woods. It's the Ram roaring to life, the same vehicle you had come here to jump, and you can only assume it's Charlei behind the wheel. The Dodge was already pointing toward the road, therefore she has no need to make a turn. Instead, she just steers the truck in the direction of your taillights and hits the gas pedal. She speeds forward, ramming you in the tailgate.
  
  You lurch forward, the seatbelt catching you across the chest. The gap in the trees ahead of you must be the course of the driveway; if not, it's where you're going anyway. You press down on your own gas pedal, hoping for the best, and also hoping that you can still recognize the road when you reach it. The V6 seems happy to be useful, powering the truck over fallen limbs and small trees, bouncing you around in your seat. A single red reflector catches the light, and this is your best guess that you have reached the road.
  
  Charlei is still right on your tail, having lost only a little bit of time bouncing over the fallen limbs. This is not quite the getaway you had in mind, but it fits the rest of the way your night as proceeded so far. You've escaped the A-frame, but now you need to figure out a way to lose the Ram. On an eight-mile-long dead-end road with only half a dozen unoccupied camps, the options are limited. Heading right, toward the trailhead at the end of the road, would be tantamount to seeking refuge in a dead-end alley, sort of like a bad ending to a B movie — especially if you weren't able to permanently lose your tail along the way.
  
  This leaves only one other direction: left, toward Griffin.
  
  > Next page.
  The road is slightly more obvious than the Coopers' driveway, but not by much. Before, when you were taking the Goodcheer-Fellows in the opposite direction, you drove slowly because even then you could barely see the road. Now, at least half an hour later, the storm has done even more to hide the way under a litter of fallen leaves and broken branches. Nevertheless, you don't have the luxury of making this a leisurely drive.
  
  On the other hand, Charlei seems to lagging behind a bit. She doesn't know the road as well as you do, and perhaps is less confident in her ability to barrel down it. You can track her progress by the twin headlights snaking their way through the trees in your mirrors: fast, but not as fast as you.
  
  Obviously, the two-dimensional solution to this puzzle is to simply keep doing what you're doing, and put as much distance as you can between you and the Ram. You have problems with that idea, though: First, these really are poor conditions, and your confidence in your ability to keep yourself on the road has its limits. Second, as you've already reasoned, there is a high likelihood of severe road washouts between here and Griffin. So, yes, you could get away in the short-term, only to be stopped altogether by impassible roadblocks.
  
  An alternative solution arrives like an inspiration: make Charlei go blind by putting out her headlights, so that she is unable to find the road at any speed.
  
  Admittedly, this is going to be tough to explain to the insurance agent at State Farm next week, but you can't see a better way out of this predicament. Just as you complete a sharp bend half a mile past the Bear's Den, you cut your own headlights and bring the truck to a stop in the middle of the road. Charlei is just a matter of seconds behind you. Hurriedly, you reach over the seats to close the rear passenger door that Gordy couldn't close himself. Then you wait, lights off, transmission in park, foot hovering over the gas pedal, hand on the shifter.
  
  As the Ram comes around the bend, you shift into reverse. The truck lights up in two directions, hopefully taking Charlei by surprise. The Ram doesn't stop in time, but you hit the accelerator, your already-dented tailgate speeding backwards into her headlights. Both vehicles rear up at the collision, and the point of impact gets dimmer as her left headlight goes out.
  
  You shift into drive again, keeping the headlights off and relying instead on the less-bright daytime running lights. Arguably, you can see better this way anyway, and you aren't showing any red taillights for Charlei to follow.
  
  There is no longer any sign of her in your mirror, not even that one remaining headlight you weren't able to bust. Conceivably, the collision caused more damage than just a broken light. You're not about to begin taking it easy, though; there have been enough surprises for one night. The question remains, though: can you get all the way out to town?
  
  As roads go, this one is ancient, built a decade before the Civil War and only nominally improved for use by motor vehicles. Except for the six private camps and the old cemetery, the state owns the rest of the surrounding land as a forest preserve, protected by nothing less than a 120-year-old amendment to the New York State constitution, thus eliminating all prospect the road might someday be widened beyond its historic footprint. Rough weather typically does a number on the hills, because there is no place for the town to dig out proper drainage ditches. Water runs down the road, often washing out little gullies.
  
  And that's during a normal storm. When you reach the top of a long hill that is notorious for washing out like this, you stop the truck, get out, and take a closer look. This slope leads down to the road's nearest approach to the Honnedaga River, and you can tell already the route has been obliterated by erosion. In fact, it looks like a smaller version of the river itself, with small logs and other debris piling up on an exposed rock halfway down. Maybe with care you could coax the F150 into negotiating the rocks and the rubble, but it wouldn't be fun, nor would there be any guarantee of improved conditions once you got close to the swollen river.
  
  No, tonight belongs to wild nature, and humans should be content with whatever high ground they can find. To that end, you have one more idea. The state land frontage along this little old road is popular among hunters in the fall, who come with beat-up old campers (and sometimes repurposed old school buses) to set up primitive campsites at one of a handful of small turnouts. Having a camp of your own, you've never needed to use one of these sites before, but if you recall correctly one is located very close by.
  
  You get back in the truck, throw the transmission into reverse, and look for the telltale yellow state land marker. Bingo. It's a short driveway leading into a small clearing, raised just slightly above the level of the road. Seeing no sign of anyone else coming down the road behind you, you back the truck into the campsite and turn off the engine. Finally, you have found the peace and quiet you've been looking for. Finally, you have outsmarted your tormentors, and they are no longer pursuing you.
  
  Or are they?
  
  > Next page.
  Compared to everything else you've experienced tonight, the ravages of Bob no longer seem that bad. At least not here at the campsite, located on the lee side of Honnedaga Mountain where the storm's winds seem much less severe.
  
  This may be a wilderness campsite now, but the presence of a fifteen-foot chimney tells of a different history, one in which yet another homesteader once cleared a small farm at this site. The old man died, or went bankrupt, and this time the state took over the land instead of some engineer from General Electric who wanted to rusticate in the woods a few weekends a year. You hope the old farmer lived comfortably enough during his day, because time has undone all of his work: someone must have bulldozed in the cellar hole to make this campsite, and planted all of his cleared land with thousands of red pines to restore it to forest conditions.
  
  The pines are not swaying nearly as much as the hardwoods back on the other side of the mountain, but they are a hell of lot noisier, with the long, stiff needles functioning like reeds in a wind instrument to amplify the sound of moving air. You wait inside the truck, all lights off, certain that Charlei will eventually find her way here. The storm persists for hours on end, its wind and rain relentless, even if the wind is less fierce here. The constant patter of water droplets hitting the roof and hood of the truck, and the steady sighing of the pine trees, are enough to put one to sleep.
  
  You are startled awake by a light — a solitary headlight down on the road. A truck, tentatively seeing how far it can travel.
  
  What time is it? You have no way of telling, but it must be hours later. It is still dark, and Bob is still dropping rain on the mountains. But the rain is now less torrential, more steady, like an ordinary summer shower that simply refuses to stop.
  
  Your F150 is parked at a right angle to the road, and about forty feet back. There is a possibility that even with all of your lights off you might still cast a reflection in the other truck's headlight, and if so you can expect the repercussions to begin any moment now. But it rolls past the campsite, heading toward the top of the washed-out grade. All you can see of it in the dark are the lights in the front and rear, as well as a slight instrument glow in the cab.
  
  The old fear and anxiety return. Of course this must be one or both of the Goodcheer-Fellows, and even if they don't know you're here any proximity is too much to bear.
  
  But when nothing else happens after about five minutes, curiosity overcomes you.
  
  Gently opening the door, and gently shutting it once your shoes have touched the ground, you listen. The wind has now died down considerably, and sure enough you can hear two familiar voices.
  
  Not well enough to make out the words, though, so you creep over to the corner of the campsite closest to the washout, where a small boulder stands at the edge of the woods.
  
  "You're going to need to push harder than that!"
  
  "Push harder? Gordy, you know I only weigh 140 pounds, right?"
  
  "Just do it!"
  
  "I am! What are you expecting, Wonder Woman?"
  
  Above this are the unmistakable twin sounds of a revving engine and spinning tires. There is no way they can hear you while engaged in these antics, so you creep a little closer through the pines to get a better look. All you can see are the lights of the truck, skewed at an unhealthy angle relative to the road.
  
  "Oh, Christ!"
  
  "What now?"
  
  "I just slipped into some deep water! It's up to my waist right here!"
  
  "Well just stand on something higher, then!"
  
  "I can't! My foot's wedged under something hard."
  
  "Oh frig, the truck's slipping! I think the mud's moving, going to take us with it if we don't get out of here."
  
  "Gordy, can you reach me?"
  
  "Not right now, just hold tight, Hun!"
  
  "Yes, now!"
  
  "I can't! The mud's coming in through the window!"
  
  Indeed, the movement of the Ram's lights tell you they are drifting sideways down the slope. Clearly you are no longer their primary concern, so you emerge from the woods to stand on the road. The one remaining headlight beam paints a harrowing picture: the earthen bank above the washed-out section of road slipping away, ninety-year-old pine trees being pulled downward along with the mass of mud, a battered Dodge Ram swept into a slow-moving current from which no amount of torque or horsepower can save it.
  
  Could you save them, if you were so motivated? Now let's just assume for a minute that their reaction would be one of common human gratitude, free of aggression toward you or guilt for the two murders they committed — just one person coming to the aid of two others in distress. How does one go about extracting two people from a mud-slide-in-progress? It's not like you could just wade in yourself and drag them to safety, or like you have a rope long enough to throw to them. Maybe you could head back to the Bear's Den, grab your phone, climb the nearest hill, and see if you can place a 911 call — but that just seems more and more absurd with each step you tack on to the process.
  
  On the other hand, isn't it morally incorrect to simply stand by and watch as two people are slowly consumed by nature — either doomed to be smothered and crushed by the mass of mud and pine oozing down the hill, or drowned by the raging river that awaits them at the bottom? That's a trickier question, especially when the nature of the two victims is added to the equation, as well as the horrific deeds they have recently performed. You might need to think about that one.
  
  For a while.
  
  Here, at the top of the hill.