Faith itself was inexplicable, for there was no possible way to explain a belief in something, someone, or an entity that couldn’t be perceived by human senses. Faith was about choice, conscious choice, similarly to confidence and conviction. To know oneself capable of something, one just had to know. A choice had to be made that decided it so.
Lauren couldn’t see God, but she believed in Him. She’d never been devoutly religious, but her faith in a higher power had endured since the day her grandmother had first taken her to church and had spoken to her at length about her own beliefs during the ride home. Lauren had been much younger then and hadn’t understood what it all truly meant, but as she’d grown older and her love for the outdoors and the intricacies of nature blossomed, she couldn’t fathom any other way for things to have come about as they had. Air, water, fire, earth, life and death, sadness and joy, a smile, even love—those things were simple, but hadn’t simply evolved from matter and spontaneous energy. She’d surmised that it all had instead been created by some means, and though she couldn’t process how, she’d chosen to believe it as so. And that was faith.
After visiting with Lee and paying her respects the previous day, Lauren had walked back to the Perrys’ barefoot, having forsaken her shoes in the woods. She hadn’t bothered returning for them, their value in that time having become insignificant in the grand scheme of things. The cuts and scrapes inflicted on her soles by sharp objects on which she’d strode had felt good in a way. Jabs of jagged gravel, pricks of thistles and stabs of shredded twigs had brought with them a minute agony that had dampened so well the war of anguish lopping away at her soul. It had become clear to her then why cutters inflicted self-harm, slicing at their skin with knives, scissors and the like. The external pain and the body’s subsequent reaction provided pause, a temporary reprieve from internal suffering. Self-injury wasn’t meted out to numb one’s feelings or for one to feel numb, it was done to feel alive.
Lauren could not remember ever having felt worse than she had on that day. She’d spent a good while studying the damage, the scorched earth, the absolute annihilation that supplanted what had once been a home, a thriving business, and three human lives. She’d noticed the Honda four-wheeler she had deserted there in days prior, and had stared at it for a long while, wondering why it hadn’t yet been retrieved by anyone. The family had two others just like it; the whereabouts of the third evidently hadn’t been a main concern. But the longer she’d considered it, the more it had called to her, and a blueprint for what she would do next came to fruition.
Lauren had taken the quad on something of a joyride, having driven it at perilous speeds all the way north to the abandoned town of Wardensville, with no regard for the valley’s borders or her own safety. The speed-driven winds had whipped through her hair and batted around the dress she’d been wearing like the gale forces of a churning tempest. The experience was galvanizing and cathartic, and she’d embraced it eagerly after such a brutal series of days. At the road’s end, she had reversed direction and returned to the cabin, having decided then to pack a bag and take her leave for a while, though not before making a few stops to further supplement her loadout.
An integrally suppressed carbine she’d appropriated on one of those stops poised in her lap, Lauren sat cross-legged atop the resplendent sandstone outcropping making up Big Schloss. She looked intently below into the rolling valleys of trees, recalling what she had done successive to that, smirking at the absurdity of it all. Absurd as it might’ve been, it had unmistakably been the freest she had ever felt in her life, both before and after the day commemorating the collapse of society.
With her backpack and a pair of tactically acquired gear duffels secured to the Rancher’s rear rack, she had driven south on Trout Run Road, up the mountain to Wolf Gap, where the D9T bulldozer had been returned to act as a formidable roadblock. There, she’d spent some time searching for an off-road detour and eventually had crossed over to the Virginia side of the mountain, while recalling a hike to a remote waterfall on which her father had taken her sometime in her early teens.
Retracing the route from memory, Lauren had navigated to and along forest road 252 to the trailhead after having bypassed several defunct forest service tube gates. She’d concealed the Rancher in a thick patch of blackberry, donned her pack, and followed the trail’s sheerness to an unmarked side trail perceptible only by a duo of cairns, one on either side. The side trail jutted left and up, flattened for a stint, and led downward into a deep, narrow gully. After a steep descent, it opened into a dark, humid cove, green with ferns, the air hued white by rising mist, enclosed on all sides but one by an altar-like formation of rock. Roots of moss-covered shrubs and evergreens ran along and above sizable pillars of limestone and granite. The expanse was like a lost city, unspoiled by man, so exceptional and enriched in natural splendor that Lauren couldn’t find words to describe it.
She remembered the cold, the utter frigidness entombed within. The microclimate’s chill clung to the air, assailing anyone daring to trespass. The only sounds she recalled were the incredibly harsh smacks of water crashing onto a pile of fractured stones at the base of the falls, some waterworn, others jagged and razor sharp.
Lauren had scaled her way down into the detached obscurity of the cove and had hung her pack from a low-hanging branch of a lone pine jutting from a boulder. And while shedding a few
