The Hike by Drew Magary Read Free Book Online Page A

along the row of neighboring units. On the other side of that road was the sea. There was no land to be found past the expanse. He was on a massive sandbar. There were no telephone poles outside the house. No visible power lines. No cars. No bikes. No wagons. No vehicles of any kind. And no people. He was getting used to disappointment. He went up the loose plank stairs to the front door of the blue house (which faced away from the first expanse of ocean he had encountered) and began rapping furiously on the door.
    No one answered. He dared to turn the knob and the door came open with ease. Inside was a spartan summer home designed to be lived in for only ten weeks a year. There was a little kitchen with ancient appliances, but no cookware of any kind. The kitchen opened to a living room with a pair of cute old lounge chairs and a cracked pleather sofa. Ben scoured the walls for outlets and phone jacks but saw nothing. Upstairs, he found three bedrooms with empty drawers and bare mattresses. He ran into a bathroom and turned on the faucet but no water came out.
    â€œHello?”
    The closets were empty. Pacing from window to window, he could see that the neighboring houses didn’t seem to be harboring any traces of life either. He booted up his phone on the off chance that it would power up for just a moment and give him a signal. If you left the phone off for a while, sometimes the battery was resurrected just long enough for you to get angry at it again. But this time, it couldn’t even make it past the greeting logo. He pocketed it once more. His whole life was just taking his phone out and putting it back in again.
    Up and down the sand spit, each house offered him the same kind of nothing: no people, no communications equipment, no food in the fridge, no water. It was a ghost resort. A trap, like the yellow light in the forest. Every sign of life was just a piece of bait to draw him away from the path.
    And now the sea began to swell up. The whitecaps rippled and churned and, from the front porch of a three-story red Victorian, he saw a massive wall of water forming on the horizon: a wave higher than any building he had ever set foot inside of. Seagulls flew away from the wave with supreme urgency, but the water enveloped them as it drew closer to the coastline, their caws snuffed out by the coming catastrophe.
    He ran down the porch steps through the bristling dune grass until he came to the parallel lines in the sand that had probably been drawn for him by some cruel God. The tsunami was arriving, ready to claim the sandbar. Ben reached into the seed pouch and took out the final hard nut. He threw it at the wet sand just as the wave was gathering up the front of the ocean and preparing to throw it all back on top of him.
    The fire immediately blazed up and down the coastline, reaching past the cloud sheet and into the stratosphere: a wall of fire with no limit to its height or width. Ben got down and the hot sand began baking him like a buried clam. He could hear the fire snuffing out the wave, steam loudly hissing all above him.
    And then the wall died down and the ocean returned to its resting state, gently lapping at the edge of the beach. Wisps of steam rose up and broke apart in the air—ghosts of the tsunami—as thin and frail as the little clouds above him. That was his final warning. No more seeds to save him. No more leaving the path. He sat up in the sand and wrapped his arms around his knees and started to cry again. Thehysteria had ebbed and flowed, and now it was walloping him again. He began saying
I miss you
over and over, in his hushed and croaky voice, hoping all the
I miss you
s
would be carried like a signal through the atmosphere back home.
    â€œI miss you all so much. Someone . . . someone please help me.”
    But there was no response. Then Ben rose to his feet and shouted up at the sky.
    â€œWHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?! WHAT IS THIS SHIT?”
    That was all he could