A single sharp bark up ahead told them that Nip had circled back to her usual place, taking point. Tuck barked from farther away, on the right, invisible somewhere in the dwarf pine forest.

The world seemed enormous up here, under the great vault of blue above, on a sunny day without a cloud in the sky. The dwarf pine forest stretched away on all sides like some bizarre field of crops. Angie and Rory were hiking along the central and highest part of the ridge, on ground where the meagre soil lay atop the unyielding mass of the ancient semi-metamorphised conglomerate, a rock so hard that the early settlers of the valley prized it as "Millstone" and cut circular blocks of the stuff, five feet across to grind wheat in watermills. The forest reflected the difficulty of survival in this harsh environment. While the trees survived, they were tiny, none more than eight feet tall and most no more than five or six, even though they were a hundred years old.

The trails ran through this surreal landscape, with occasional glimpses to the west of the Catskill Mountains, a series of great distant masses, each green with tree cover. Angie was swept up in a spiral of happiness. She'd given in to something unexpected in this fling with young Rory, and he'd returned her ardor two fold. She'd almost forgotten what it was like to be infatuated like this, buoyed up on a tide of hormones, given pleasure just by the sight of a man's smile, or the gleam of desire in his eyes.

Tuck barked again, this time much closer. A moment later a long legged Jackrabbit bounced out of the dwarf pines on one side of the trail, and disappeared into the pines on the other side. A little bit later Tuck charged out of the pines just ahead of them.

Rory whistled. Tuck stood still for a moment, looking at them, panting, tongue lolling on one side.

"Never gonna catch that rabbit," said Rory with satisfaction as Tuck went on into the pine trees.

"I bet that rabbit is good at the game. I hear coyotes all the time."

"Got that right, and Tuck? Let's just say he's conflicted."

"Yeah?"

"Part of him wants to herd the rabbit, get it and a dozen others into a nice tight group and keep an eye on them."

She laughed. "That's what they're bred for, right?"

They took each other's hands, swinging along here, where the trail was wide enough.

"Who keeps this trail clear?" he said after a while. Evidence that a machine had been run along the trail to cut back brush was visible here and there.

"Must be Jim and his boys. They seem to be everywhere up here."

Rory grinned at that thought. "Very interesting fellow, Jim. Been a good friend to us."

"Me too. Kind of amazing, considering he's not exactly a local product."

"Criminal mastermind, I'd say. When you think about it, he avoids areas where there might be conflict. He doesn't get into my business for instance, not at all. He provides favors for people, like, for everyone. You need something, you go to Jim. And when he needs something he asks you in return. "

"But where does he make money? He never seems short of it."

"He's always buying and selling stuff. Cars, guns, equipment, you name it. He makes a little bit on every transaction. Those kids of his are all gonna be great used car dealers, you should hear them get the spiel goin'."

"So, basically a used car operation, with other stuff on the side?"

"Think so."

They stopped for a moment, having reached an elevated spot on the trail, beside an enormous glacial erratic, a boulder the size of a house. Rory leaned back against the rock, Angie leaned against Rory and enjoyed the comfort of having a man of her own, a man in love with her, lean, hard, young and dependable.

"This is nice," she whispered.

"Mmmm." He kissed the back of her neck.

After a few minutes Nip appeared, trotting back along the trail curious about what was holding them up. Seeing them standing there together, she sat down on her haunches and took a rest.

"That's probably the first time she's stopped since she got out of the truck."

"Are we her herd today?"

"You got it. She's always on the job."

"What about Tuck?"

"He'll be along soon. If not, she'll call him."

Angie had been enjoying the view, the Catskills seemed to float in the sky, above the tops of the dwarf pines, below the vault of blue, without any connection to the ground beneath them. The day was so clear, there were sharp edged shadows on the mountains' facets. That was unusual in New York, where the summer humidity normally gave the atmosphere a haze that softened such edges.

Angie was happy on this seemingly perfect day.

"I like this," she whispered, letting control slip another degree.

"Yeah, me too," he said quickly, and she knew that he meant it.

Something welled up inside her, out of the blue. Almost like a tsunami striking some placid tropical beach, and tears ran down her cheeks while she struggled not to sob, and then found it impossible and gave way to the urgency of grief.

"It's okay," Rory murmured, folding her into his strong young arms.

She shivered, and she wept. Was it okay? Was it really?

Years, decades of fear, of the endless terror of being sought by powerful, faceless foes who wanted nothing but your death, were unleashed in those tears. And woven into them too, was the memory of the Sangacha murder, of hiding in that vanity cabinet while the killers stalked around the duplex looking for her. The blood, buckets of it, on the floor in the hall, and Sangacha himself, still covered in the welts she'd given him, lying dead on the floor.

"It's okay," she managed to say after a while. "Just memories..."

"Sure." He seemed to know there was no need for him to say anything. And after a minute or two the storm passed, the tears drying up, the heaviness in her chest ebbing away. But in the process something had changed. She had grown so used to never showing vulnerability that it had become a given, a reality tacitly accepted by her innermost self. It wasn't armor anymore, but part of the mechanism of her life. And now she'd just let herself cry, and accept a young man's assurances that it would be alright, because, well, because she was wrapped in his strong arms.

He said,"okay," but did he have any idea what he was saying? Of how dangerous to himself, her presence in his life could be? Probably not, and if they found her, and they sent the death squad after her, then it would be anything but okay, and young Rory would probably wind up with a bullet in the head just like her.

And still, for the first time in decades she had this feeling, that there might be someone else here with whom to share her life. Parts of her that had been suppressed so long they'd been just about forgotten had surfaced. It was strange to have these feelings, and uncomfortable too, when she'd grown used to having a void there, a blank, an emptiness. She'd told herself for decades that she could only depend on herself, that that was the only way to survive. Could that be changing? Did she dare allow that?

Was there any way she could manage a relationship with this sweet, handsome young man that wouldn't result in a catastrophe for both of them?

Thoughts still in a whirl, hesitant smile on her lips, eyes guarded, she broke away from him for a moment, then turned back and took his hand. He was definitely a little puzzled. She'd let him file it all under "women," the mysterious sex. They went on down the trail. Nip got up with a short bark and trotted off ahead. A moment later, Tuck came running up behind them, passed them, tongue lolling from the side of his mouth, and hurried ahead.

After another mile, during which they said nothing, they found Nip and Tuck obsessively working over the scene of an old kill. Scattered bones and tufts of grey hair were all that was left of the deer.

"Coyotes," Rory pointed to tracks in the soft ground and the mud at the edge of the trail.

Nip turned over what was left of the skull, partially gnawed. The teeth were large and yellowish. The sight chilled Angie. She felt the deer's death, pulled down by coyotes, who probably started eating it before it was dead. Nature was so horrible in those ways.

"Poor thing," she murmured.

"Yeah," he agreed. "For deer it comes down to either starving to death or getting eaten." He looked away for a moment. "Or hit by a car. Those are the lucky ones, I think, sometimes, 'cos they die quick. Usually, that is."

"Over now, though." She nudged the skull to shift the empty open eye sockets out of view.

"Yeah, let's go."

They moved uphill for another mile and quite suddenly came out of the dwarf forest onto another surreal landscape. Here the conglomerate had been scraped clean of soil, and wind and rain had prevented any from building up since. The rock was bare, except for lichen that mottled it grey and green in places. Here and there, where the rock had cracked, there were clumps of tiny, ancient pine trees, bonsaied by their location and its harsh climate.

A hawk screamed above them, and was answered by its mate. They stopped to watch the two raptors circle one another in the sky for a minute or so, before they turned and soared off to the east.

"Amazing, all this," she gestured to the flat stretch of rock, which was tilted east to west, "so strange."

"Yeah, beautiful, but, you know, harsh."

They went on, crossing the bare rock, stopping now and then to admire a clump of tiny trees, some no more than two feet high and six inches thick.

They came to a stream, it ran along a crack in the conglomerate, dead straight, from the east, down to the west. They jumped across and continued on, until they came to a ten foot high cliff that marked a fault line. The rock massif to the north had shifted ten feet higher than the main mass to the south. The cliff was sheer, the conglomerate's hardness ensuring a very low erosion rate.

"Been here once," said Rory. "Turned back. It started to rain."

"Were you hunting?"

"Yeah, with my friend Rob. We didn't even see a deer that day. I think we learned that they don't stay up here too much when it turns cold."

"Well, I wouldn't, I guess. If I was a deer."

He laughed at that thought. Turned to her with a smile. "I don't see you as a deer."

"Yeah?"

"Try, uh, mountain lion. Lioness."

She grinned. "Is that your fantasy side talking?"

"Maybe. Maybe I'm a wannabe lion tamer?"

"Grrrr."

And she let him pull her close and kiss her and kissed him back, hard.

"Not here," she said a moment later as kisses started to turn into something else.

"Why not?"

She laughed. "Because I want something soft under my ass, not this rock."

"You can be on top."

"And damage my knees?"

"Okay, okay." His expression made her laugh, and her laughter got him laughing and then they laughed like mad things, holding onto each other and the rock to keep their feet. Every time they almost stopped, something would set them off again.

Hearing their screeching, Nip came back to check on them, settling down on her belly about twenty feet away with a slightly anxious look in her eyes.

The sight of her, sent both of them off again.

Soon Tuck arrived and joined Nip. The dogs licked each other nervously, a little uncomfortable with the madness that had possessed the people.

Eventually, after several minutes of giggling, they calmed down.

"Oooh, that was so good it hurts," she managed to say at last. And it was true, her cheeks ached a little, and so did her chest.

"The best medicine, right?" he was bent over, hands on his knees.

"C'mon. Help me climb this thing."

They found a place where the cliff face was more like a layer cake, with ledges between different layers of the conglomerate. It was quite easy to climb and a few minutes later they were at the top of the cliff.

Nip and Tuck had already found another way up and were waiting for them. Tuck gave a single bark, and headed away, west, down the gentle, trending slope. The forest of dwarf trees resumed down there, perhaps a quarter mile away, and ahead, the ground changed, becoming broken, and tree covered too.

"Never been this far," she said, shading her eyes from the sun as she looked north.

"Yeah. We must be somewhere west of Awosting, the big lake."

"That was, like a state park once, I think."

"Right, until the proscription came down. Took it out of state jurisdiction."

Angie nodded. In the emergency the Federal Government became all powerful. Anyone, even State Governors, who got in the way just disappeared. The media didn't report things like that, there were just rumors, like the one about the big gun battle that raged for two days in Columbus, Ohio when the Feds went in to arrest the leaders of the Ohio state government. That was how it had been back then, rumors, always rumors and counter-rumors and no one ever really knew the truth.

"This rock, how'd it get so hard?" She tapped it with the toe of her boot.

"It's, uh, what they call, semi-metamorphized. It was buried pretty deep by younger rocks? And heated up, but it didn't, uh, cook all the way, or it'd be like marble, nowhere near as hard."

"Where'd you learn that?"

"Website, somewhere."

There were more fractures in the rock now, foot wide fissures that went down deep into cool, mysterioius darkness.

They jumped these and continued north, and soon found more big cracks, some of them huge, ten or twenty feet wide, that they had to detour east or west for some distance to get around. With the broken ground there were more dwarf trees. The surreal flat table top landscape of the high ground was replaced by a jumbled world of erratics, pits, patches of bare rock and thick clumps of tiny trees. Their progress slowed. Nip appeared now and then to give them a bark from the top of some nearby boulder. Tuck appeared less often, and usually barked once from farther away.

"What time is it?" she said as they paused for a break.

"Getting on to two."

"Almost four hours then. We'll have to head back soon. Great hike."

He'd seen something up ahead. They stepped around a house sized erratic boulder, found a narrow deer trail through a clump of pines and came out on an area where everything had been clear cut forty years before. Weeds and young trees had grown back, but the zone of clear cutting was still visible, and so was the reason for it.

"Wow," she said, gazing along the length of the fence. It was nine feet high, with twenty strands of barbed wire stretched on ten foot spacing between the steel posts, which were set in concrete footings.

"Somebody put in a lot of work on this," she murmured as they stepped up to the fence.

Indeed, the concrete footing had been dug out of the conglomerate itself.

"Bet they wore out a few jackhammer picks doing this," murmured Rory.

There was a sign, a hundred feet to the west, made of white metal, rusted on the edges, with a black skull and crossbones prominently displayed and underneath in red.

NO ADMITTANCE
PROSCRIBED ZONE
TRESPASSERS WILL BE SHOT ON SIGHT

"Kinda blunt, that," Rory seemed a bit surprised.

"Shot on sight, yeah, no kidding."

Nip appeared out of the dwarf woods and sat down about ten feet away, watching them with careful eyes.

"Think they still do that? Shoot people who go in there?"

"Doubt it. I think this is just left over from those times."

"Well, we have to go back anyway. I don't see any easy way through this."

He agreed. "You know I heard about this, it's like a legend or something."

"Yeah? Why did they put it up. I mean, what's over there?" she waved a hand towards the forest on the other side of the fence.

"You hear all sorts of stories. Mainly, I think. a place where they, well, they tortured and killed people."

And there it was, a cold little draught from the past, from that dark place where skeletons were hidden and things that could snap off your face lurked, along with the men who would pump bullets into your brain, because they'd been told to, by other men, or even women, who were concerned about keeping secrets under lock and key, secrets that pertained to this, whatever it was, which was just another place like thousands of its kind, scattered across the country like fearsome tombstones for an era where something great had died. A great nation perhaps, a country that had lost its way, or its head, or maybe its heart, she didn't know and nobody talked about it now, anyway.

"Time to go back, anyway," she said, feeling chilled.

"Yeah. Good hike."

Tuck emerged from a deep crack, almost a crevasse in the rock and trotted over to sit beside Nip, who gave him a sniff and then looked back to Rory. Angie marvelled at that dog's ability to get around in this difficult terrain. She didn't think she could've climbed out of that crevasse and she had opposable thumbs.

"What's for dinner?" said Rory.

She laughed. "Whatever we can find in the house, I guess."

"That sounds great." He pulled her close and kissed her and she enjoyed it and kissed him back, hard.

"Come on, let's go," she said a few seconds later.

They turned back from the fence with its brutal signage and headed south, back along the great ridge, across the fault line, over the bare rock plateau, back to her house and the relative sanity it offered. A place of refuge, at least for now.