Chapter 7: Tent Five

By dawn the whole camp had changed shape.

The storm had flattened seven of the Lake Camp tents, and the survivors were hauling their gear up the ridge in a long gray line.

Freja and I stood in the doorway of Tent Four and watched them come.

"We can't be seen," she said. "Not by him. He'll know my walk from a hundred yards."

"Then we get sick."

"Sick?"

I walked to the guide in the red hat and told him I had a stomach bug and had been up all night.

He took one look at my face, which hadn't slept in two days, and believed me.

He hung a sign on our tent pole.

It said QUARANTINE: STOMACH ILLNESS, and below it somebody had drawn a cheerful little skull.

"Don't share a cup with anyone," he told Freja. "I'll send soup to the flap."

"Thank you," she said in the soft voice she used for Holly Ames.

When he was gone she turned back to me.

"That works," she said. "Nobody wants your germs."

"I'm very contagious."

"You look it."

We crawled back inside and zipped the flap.

By noon the new tents were going up around us.

I knew exactly where Tent Five was because I heard the pole stakes going in eight feet from my head.

"Lovely spot," Dean said, loud and clear through the canvas. "Quiet. Away from the families."

"Away from the kid next door with the stomach bug," Lindsay said. "Did you see the sign?"

"I saw it."

Keep reading free with an account. Start The Other Man in My Wife's Tent from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.