Twenty - The End

There was no cell phone reception way up in the Mogollon Rim. There was just darkness punctuated with dancing beam of Dave’s flashlight. He voiced his anguish at the loss of his stash with savage howling and curses. Billy could be heard too. He taunted Dave by imitating Gollum from The Hobbit.

“My precious! My precious! Give it up, Man! If you’re seriously jonesing, I’ll let you have some of my methodone.”

“We gotta go back! We gotta go BACK!” Dave came out of the woods aiming his flashlight beam right into Rich’s face.

“Get away from me asshole! Where’s that axe. If you try to hit me again I’ll split your skull open.”

“Did I do that?” Wow, I’m sorry… but you threw away my STASH, man. You had it coming.” The tone of Dave’s voice bounced around from wonder at the effectiveness of the punch he landed to Rich’s mouth to anger at the tossing of his stash to finally, outright pleading. “We gotta go back, Rich!” I can’t be out here without holding SOMETHING!”

“Yes, why don’t you all just go back.” Robert the ninja minstrel interrupted. “Why don’t you druggies just go back to where you came from and leave my wife and I in peace?”

“But what about the fire? What about the police?” Rich asked, surprised at the sudden change in the attitude of the ninja minstrel couple.

“We can’t get through to them and I sure as hell don’t want to spend the rest of the night seeing or hearing any of you. You’ve nearly killed yourselves and us once tonight. Just get the hell out of here. Just go.”

Rich grabbed the flashlight from Dave and began indiscriminately picking up the charred camping gear. “Come on Dave, come on Billy, let’s go.”

“Fuck yeah, let’s get out of here.” Dave was eager to help if it meant getting back to civilization and getting back on the nod. “I don’t even know why the hell we decided to do this in the first place.”

“Because I’m dying, asshole.” Billy answered. Billy offered no assistance to Rich and Dave. He walked over to the hood of the Jeep, braced himself and retched violently. “Too much to drink,” he gagged. “It’s not good for me in my current condition. We should probably get me to the doc.”

When they finished picking up what they could, they climbed inside the Cherokee and pulled out of the damaged campsite. Rich rolled down the window as they passed Rob and Andrea’s campsite and called out, “Thanks for your help. I really appreciate you just dropping the whole thing with the cops. You guys aren’t so bad after all.”

“No we're not,” said Andrea. “But you are. All of you are bad people.”

As they left the mile marker campground and made their way down the Forest Service roads back to Show Low, Billy got sick again. He rolled down the window and heaved. When he leaned back into the passenger seat he wiped his mouth and smiled, “You know what? I gotta say that was a hell of a lot of fun.”