Excerpt: Moonwalks and Unknowns

I sat there stunned, watching our car lights glare through rippling liquid, then gave our surroundings a quick perusal. Thin veils of wispy fog circulated lazily from one bank of gloomy forest to the other, absorbing the smoky blues of dawns pre-light. Then, my feet were wet. I looked down at them. Water was rising fast. My fifteen-year-old brother shoved hard against the driver’s door and slid out. My door was harder to open, as I was directly broadside to the current. He tried to shut his door. I shouted, “Leave the doors open so the water will run through and not fill it up!”
We stood, shocked, on opposite sides of my dear, sweet Saab. I used the open passenger door as a crutch in an effort to support my weight because of the ankle I’d broken on a trail seven hours earlier. Both of us were thigh deep in the freezing waters of some unnamed creek in the middle of nowhere. The nearest town was an hour and a half away, providing you were driving, and the closest main logging road a good mile or more behind us. David lifted his arms and looked to heaven. His gut-wrenching yell thundered through the valley, “Oh God, what have I done to my sisters car!”
An eerie silence followed as dawn changed its blues to light gray. Then a demonic cackle pierced through the silence from within the blackened forest behind us. We jumped. Then another wicked vocal joined it from the woods on the opposite shore, and another, and another. Multitudes of banshee’s from both sides of the creek joined the evil chorus. We were helpless, surrounded by a large, curious, invisible, and possibly very hungry pack of coyotes. David hollered, “Where’s your keys?”
I didn’t know. I was having a heck of a time keeping my balance in the creeks current and this water was cold. Please, oh please Lord, don’t let him have dropped them into the water. My teeth chattered. I gritted them in an effort to gain some control, “They are either still in the ignition, or you’d better be holding them!”
He glanced at his clenched fist and opened it. “Oh, Here they are.”
Thank you, Lord!
He sloshed to the half submerged trunk, opened it, dug around our drowned camping supplies, and grabbed my wee hatchet from the water, then spun around to face the nearest wail, coming out of the thicket of shaded salal, wielding the weapon in an arc, ready for the pounce of fur and fang.