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In keeping with the trend of her day, things degenerated. The undergrowth became so dense she was spending thirty seconds on each step, untangling the vines from around her ankles, whacking the labyrinth of limbs out of her way.

When she failed to unwind one persistent vine she found herself lying facedown in mud.

She did not get up.

She lay there and cried, then filled with anger at the tears, and resisted allowing the totality of this "fucking bad fucking day" to envelop her. You can’t think about it. It’s too much. Just get up and do your job, Viking. It could be worse. A lot worse. You could be dead. Now. Get. Up.

She struggled to her feet. Waded on. Mad. Weak. Right on the verge.

Ten steps later she broke out of the thicket. From claustrophobic vegetation to the sprawling spaciousness of a tidal flat, the wind spilling over the distant dunes, carrying the briny reek of the sea. Eerie black plants rose out of the alkaline soil—salt-sculpted formations, otherworldly and demonic, like the remnants of some nuclear apocalypse.

The flat extended north to south as far as she could see and she tore across it, her boots sinking in the mud, the wind chilling her down, arms pumping, swallowing great mouthfuls of air.

She ran and ran.

The moon, only a sliver of it, materialized behind a ragged gauze of cloud.

God, it was cold in the clearing night. A star appeared here and there, and still she ran, straight ahead toward the small rise of dunes, though she didn’t know they were dunes. She didn’t know the sea lay just beyond them or that she was crossing a tidal flat. A strict mainlander, her knowledge of sea level began and ended with the Grand Strand of Myrtle Beach:

Wings.

All-You-Can-Eat seafood buffets.

Slushy lemonade vendors.

Biplanes pulling advertisement banners across the faded denim sky.

Laying out with the flabby masses and drinking limey Coronas under a $25/day umbrella.

Walking up and down the beach at night with Max, the hazy glow of hotels and resorts marking the concave curvature of the South Carolina coast. The essence of summer. Every last week of July. That was the beach.

This was the wild. You could not walk back into a motel from this tidal flat and watch HBO.

The dunes were close now. Beach grass, cottonwood, and wormwood stabilized the mounds of white sand, glowing strangely in the moonlight.

She clawed her way to the top and there lay the sea, gleaming and foaming and drawing back into low tide. Even in the face of all she’d been through in the last eight hours, the winter beauty of this wide forsaken beach was devastating.

She scrambled down the dune onto sand that had been smoothed and hardened by the tide. Shells of mollusks and horseshoe crabs and kelp and broken sand dollars and pieces of gray driftwood lay strewn across the beach, battlefield casualties of the nor’easter.

The wind whipped out of the north, blowing white sand across dark sand and between her legs like a rushing vapor. The static whisper of sand skimming sand even beat out the crush of the sea.

Vi glimpsed a light in the north.

At this distance she couldn’t be sure but it seemed to originate from the beach.

Dead dog tired, she started walking toward the light, then jogging, then running, the shells crunching under her boots, grit watering her eyes. She doubted if she could run much farther. If that light never got closer, if it proved to be the Ocracoke Light, several miles north across the inlet, she’d find a place at the foot of the dunes to curl up and sleep through the night. Things would look better in daylight. Less surreal.

The light she’d been running toward vanished but she saw its source.

A short ways up the beach in the soft sand beyond the reach of high tide, a white canvas tent flapped in the wind.

47

AS Vi approached she heard voices. A Boston Whaler equipped with a small outboard motor had been dragged up onto the beach. Fifty yards offshore, just beyond the breakers, a yacht floated in the calming sea.

She stopped outside the door of the tent and listened. A sleeping