The Wrong Choice

“Alex, slow down!” I shouted, swerving hard to the left to avoid a puddle the size of a manhole cover.

“You’re kicking up spray. You know grease and grit can damage chain links, right? They can cause tiny scratches in the metal!”

Alex didn’t slow down. He stood on his pedals, leaned forward over his handlebars, and aimed his front wheel straight through the deepest part of the puddle.

He let out a loud whoop that echoed through the pine trees lining the park trail.

“Micro-abrasions build character, Dan!” he yelled back over his shoulder.

His dark hair was already plastered to his forehead, and his crooked grin was in full effect.

“Besides, bikes are meant to get dirty. It’s part of the job. Look at that sky. You really think a little dirt is your biggest problem?”

I glanced up past the tops of the pines, and my stomach dropped.

To the west, the Rocky Mountains had disappeared behind a wall of dark clouds.

The wind had picked up in the last few minutes. It was freezing, too. A minute ago, we had been dealing with a faint, polite drizzle. Now the drops were getting fat and heavy.

I tapped the face of my digital watch.

“We need to turn around right now. If we push it, we can reach the paved park entrance in eight minutes and make it to my garage in fifteen.”

“Fifteen minutes uphill in this?”

Alex stopped and pointed at the clouds.

“We’re not making it.”

“Then we pedal faster,” I insisted, stopping a safe distance away from his muddy rear tire.

I looked down at my bike’s front fork and felt a genuine twinge of pain.

“My dad said summer storms in the foothills move fast, but they usually blow over if you get indoors. We have a plan. Stick to the route.”

“Plans change when nature decides to throw lightning bolts at you,” Alex replied.

A pale flash lit up the clouds.

Thunder rolled across the valley a second later, vibrating right through the soles of my sneakers.

Before I could argue that we would be safer if we simply followed the trail back to the road, the sky opened.

It didn’t ease into rain. It was like someone had dumped a bucket over the entire mountain.

A wall of water crashed down, instantly soaking through my light jacket and fogging up my glasses.

Within seconds, the hard dirt path turned into a slick trench of orange-brown mud that sucked at our tires.

“See?” Alex shouted, his voice barely audible over the roaring rain.

“Fifteen minutes is off the table! Follow me!”

“Follow you where?” I yelled back.

“The trail goes straight back to the road! There’s nothing out here but trees and park signs!”

“Not true!”

Alex spun his bike toward the thick brush on the uphill side of the path.

“There’s a cabin!”

I stopped dead in my tracks, my sneakers sinking into the mud.

“A what? Alex, we’re in a nature preserve. The signs clearly say you can’t go off-trail. There are no buildings out here. I studied the trail map on the park bulletin board!”

“The park bulletin board doesn’t know everything!” Alex yelled as he got off his bike and pulled it up the hill.

“I found it two weeks ago when I was looking for shortcut routes around the gulch. It’s totally hidden. Come on, unless you want your precious chain to rust into a solid brick of iron!”

Another flash of lightning lit up the forest in stark white, followed almost immediately by a crack of thunder so sharp that my teeth clicked together.

I knew we had to get out of the storm, so I grabbed my bike and followed Alex off the trail.

The ground was slippery, and the trees gave us a little cover from the rain. Twigs broke under my tires.

Alex was about ten yards ahead of me, climbing between two large rocks like he already knew the way.

“You scouted an undocumented cabin and didn’t tell me?” I demanded, panting as I pushed my heavy bike over a fallen log.

“What else are you hiding out here? A secret pirate cave?”

“I was saving it for a sunny day!” Alex called back.

“I thought we could turn it into a clubhouse or something. But emergency shelter works too!”

“It’s probably abandoned because it has structural rot,” I muttered, mostly to myself.

“Or wasps. Or bears.”

“No bears. I checked,” Alex said cheerfully.

We crested a small rise, and the trees opened up into a hidden hollow surrounded by a ring of ancient, towering pines.

In the center of the clearing sat the dark silhouette of a small cabin.

It didn’t look like any park building I had ever seen. The walls were made of old logs, and there were no power lines, modern locks, or signs saying it belonged to the park.

It looked very old, but the walls were still solid.

“Told you,” Alex said, turning around with water dripping from his chin.

“Solid roof, four walls, zero lightning.”

A strong wind swept through the clearing, and rain struck my back.

The cabin door was slightly open, moving slowly in the wind.

I looked at the cabin, then down at my ruined, mud-caked sneakers, and finally at the sky, which had turned an alarming greenish-black.

“Fine,” I conceded, shivering as I pushed my bike toward the porch.

“If there are raccoons in there, you deal with them.”

“Deal,” Alex said, grabbing his handlebars and racing me to the steps.