Author's Notes: Ahoy there! Well, I know it's been a while ducks flying tomatoes but here's an update - short, as chapters go, and probably not quite as much action as I'm sure y'all'd like to see - but hopefully it'll tide you over until I finish with Chapter 10. Postponed, but not forgotten. And to give credit where credit is due, my absolute thanks to my wonderful beta readers (even though one of them is quite stressed even though she'll do perfectly fine on what's stressing her our, and the other one will kick Chem tail by the end of the semester) - and I have to credit Trace Adkins' song "Ride" for the inspiration on how to kick this off again. If there ever was a Bo song, that's it. Enjoy!
Chapter 9: Lost and Alone
Bo was looking out at Hazzard exactly the way he liked it – flying at him fast through the bugs on the General's windshield. He grinned as a bump jarred the orange Charger and pressed the gas pedal another fraction of an inch to the floor, leaving Joe Dunn behind in his dust.
"Curve up ahead, Bo," Luke reported from the passenger seat. "This one's sharp, watch it."
Bo just grinned broader as he turned the General into the bend, skidding sideways slightly and throwing up another cloud of dust. Luke looked back, and saw the other six cars coming around the curve behind them – one upside down, a second now spun around facing the wrong direction, while the other four carefully avoided the wrecks and carried on to chase the lead car.
The elder cousin narrated to the younger, and Bo whooped in delight. He was about to say something, when his grin fell as the RPM's started to drop, and he felt something odd going on with the General.
"Oh no," Luke echoed Bo's thoughts aloud, leaning over to read the gauges.
"What do you think, Luke?" Bo asked. Slowly the temperature reading ticked higher, and his heart sank into his gut. Finish the race, and risk the General, or drop out, and lose both the winnings and their entry fee?
Luke looked back at the four remaining cars behind them, gauging the distance and speed of each, then looked forward towards the finish line two miles ahead, somewhere beyond the trees. "Uhhmm…"
The General answered for him in a sudden spray of steam and smoke as the radiator blew. Both Dukes boys were slammed against their harnesses with the sudden deceleration of the race car, skidding to a stop on the side of the road. Smoke and steam billowed, and Bo coughed, the race forgotten as he fumbled with the harness straps.
"Luke?.!" Bo called, his voice squeaking with fear. He couldn't see a thing. He reached out towards the passenger seat, groping through the thick fog that was becoming thicker by the moment. Instead of finding Luke, his hand met a trickle of cold water, and before he could fathom where the water was coming from, it became a roaring torrent coursing down over him, and he was falling off the General's secure, solid front seat into a nightmare of cold, choking, rushing water.
"LUKE!" he shouted above the roar, but he could see nothing through the thick fog.
"BO! HELP!" Luke cried out in the distance.
Frantically, Bo spun around, pushing through the water that swirled around him, but he couldn't get a fix on the direction of the voice. "LUKE!"
"BO! HELP ME!" his cousin cried out again, farther away, struggling.
"LUKE!" Bo's voice was cracked with tears, now, as he struggled to find his bearings. After the longest time, he found the shoreline, desperately clawing his way up onto the rocks. He turned around to look back at the water, and now the fog cleared, and he found Luke, except Luke wasn't moving. The eldest Duke cousin lay facedown in the shallows on the far shore, still as death, drowned in the heavy current.
"Oh God, no! LUKE!" Bo cried, falling to his knees. "No…no…" he sobbed into his hands. "I tried…Luke, I tried…"
Bo woke with a jump, and found himself shivering in the aftermath of his nightmare. He huddled against the roots of the great oak tree, but it was hardly comfort for the image burned into his mind – Luke, dead in the water of the Ridgewater River. Bo's breath choked in his throat in half a sob, and he allowed a few tears to trickle down, giving in to his misery for just a moment. Then, sniffing and wiping his eyes, he took a deep breath and buckled his emotions back under control, then looked around. He wasn't going to help anyone if he just sat here wallowing in self-pity.
A quick look around proved that he hadn't been asleep very long – no more than a couple hours. It was still pitch black beneath the trees, though as his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he could see trickles of moonlight streaming down through the treetops. Using the tree for support, Bo picked himself up off the ground, restraining a cry of pain as he discovered his injured leg had stiffened and cramped while he rested. He spent a few minutes limping around in circles, working out the worst of the pain. When it was manageable again, it only took Bo a minute to find the trail, and he continued on his way.
After leaving the river behind earlier, he'd followed the trail of heavy boots well into the night, straining in the darkness to see the footprints and disturbances in the soil and leaf cover. There were two sets of tracks, hiking boots by the look of it, and one set made a much deeper impression than the other – the man carrying Daisy. They did little to cover their trail, so either they weren't very good woodsmen, or they weren't afraid of pursuit. Either way, it worked to Bo's advantage. He tracked for hours, until dizziness and exhaustion forced him to sit for a few minutes, and before he knew it sitting turned into sleeping.
Now he picked up the trail again, searching the ground ahead of him for the heavy bootprints. It soon became more difficult – the trees began to grow in thicker, shutting out the white moonlight, and the ground was covered in several years' worth of fallen leaves, which took boot prints none too well. For the fifth time since his short rest, Bo stopped to search the ground closer, peering down as close as he could without aggravating his injured leg.
Heaving a frustrated sigh, Bo turned and looked behind him at his own barely discernable trail. He could only just make out the trail, and his prints were fresh and familiar – how well could he follow a faint hours-old trail in the dead of night?
No. He refused to even entertain the idea. He wasn't lost. Luke wasn't dead. And he was going to find Daisy.
Bending down, Bo readjusted the cloth wrapped around his calf, tying it a little tighter, then straightened himself and resolutely stumped on, following what he hoped were the tracks of his cousin's captors.
The forest was silent and still. All Bo could hear was the sound of his own breathing, and it was an unnerving feeling, as though all the creatures of the night were waiting and watching to see what he would do.
He was lost.
There, he admitted it.
After another hour of blindly stumbling through the trees, he was dead certain that he was no longer following Daisy's trail, nor any trail at all, save the one his imagination created before his feet. Making matters worse, his bandaged wound was bleeding again, and he was growing dizzy and lightheaded with every slow, hobbling step as more blood seeped away. He was tired and sore and not thinking very clearly, and he had lost all sense of time and direction in his wanderings. Plus, as his stomach was sharply reminding him, he hadn't eaten anything since the day before – before the rapids, before the dunking in the river, and before effectively losing both his cousins in a matter of hours.
In short, Bo was about as miserable as he could be, and now he stood there in the warm, dark, silent forest, running a muddled debate in his head over what to do.
In the end, his stomach won out first – not because of any real logic-based decision, but because a short breath of wind carried the scent of ripe raspberries to his nose, from a massive clumps of thorny raspberry bushes about ten feet away. He limped over and carefully lowered himself to the ground, resting and eating every berry in his reach while he thought about his dilemma. He didn't get very far. Instead, Bo found himself thinking about Luke, and a night not unlike this one, a very long time ago.
It was his first time camping alone with his older cousin, and it was scary, even though the farmhouse was only a half-mile away and he'd been camping with the whole family plenty of times before. Somehow the night seemed darker, the tree branches seemed creakier, the shadows seemed shadowier, as seven year-old Bo stared out from his sleeping bag with round blue eyes. The tent seemed so empty with just the two of them – he missed Uncle Jesse's comforting bulk between him and the tent wall that flapped with the breeze, and Daisy on his other side, the two younger children pressed between uncle and eldest cousin.
Then an owl glided past, briefly casting a winged shadow on the tent wall as it swooped down to the field in search of dinner. Little Bo let out a gasp of fright, ready to bolt for his nice, warm, safe bed in the house.
Half-asleep in his own sleeping bag, Luke blinked and yawned. "What is it, Bo?" he asked softly through the darkness.
"I don't like this, Luke," Bo whimpered, freezing up again as the wind brushed a tree branch against the tent wall.
"Scared?" the eleven year-old asked gently. To be honest, this was no piece of cake for him either – he'd only been camping alone with Cooter Davenport a few times, and he'd never been out alone and responsible for his little cousin before.
In the dark, Luke couldn't see the blond boy's affirmative nod, but he felt it when Bo wriggled his sleeping bag closer to him, huddling at his side.
"Bo, you've been camping before – you know it's just the trees out there, and the wind, and the animals we see all the time on the farm," he reasoned, saying aloud the same things he'd been telling himself a half-hour before.
But there was no reasoning with a seven year-old's mind. "But it's dark, Luke, and I don't like it."
"Do you want to go inside?" Luke offered. In the light of day, Bo had been eager to camp out deep in the woods near their favorite fishing hole, a long walk from the house, but Uncle Jesse wanted them close for just this reason.
Bo shook his head vigorously. No matter how scared he was, he wasn't giving in – he was a Duke, after all, and Dukes weren't chickens.
"Then try to go to sleep. It's okay, Bo – it'll be nice and bright and sunny out in the morning, and it won't be scary then. You'll see, there's nothing to be afraid of."
When Bo spoke, his cousin could hear the unhappy frown in his voice. "Okay, Luke."
He wriggled around in his sleeping bag some more, trying to get settled comfortably with Luke on one side and his teddy on the other, and then the tent was quiet for a few minutes. Luke was growing drowsy again when Bo's voice startled him awake a second time.
"Luke, how long is it 'til morning?"
The older boy couldn't help but laugh. "I don't know, Bo – maybe nine hours? It'll go by a lost faster if you go to sleep."
Bo pondered this for a moment, and then replied, "But it's still scary."
"I know, buddy. Everything looks scary at night when it's dark. It'll be better in the morning, I promise."
Finding that he'd run out of raspberries within arm's reach, Bo slowly worked his way around to the other side, where the raspberry bushes hedged right up to a tall pine tree. Leaning back against the tree trunk, he continued filling his stomach, and thinking.
Of course, Luke had been right, that night in the tent so long ago. Somehow he'd fallen asleep, clutching his teddy bear tight, and in the morning he was amazed to see they were camped underneath one of his favorite climbing trees, and the branch scraping the tent was the best one for hanging upside down by his legs. Even better, the owl had left a big feather on the ground beside the tent, which Bo delightedly collected and kept, and to this day it graced the top of his bureau. It was a great end to a difficult night, and there was, as Luke said, nothing to be afraid of.
Now, after running out of raspberries again, Bo slumped back against the tree and let his eyes drift shut, unable to come up with a better plan. A few stray tears escaped unnoticed down dirty cheeks. He didn't dare to hope that Luke's sage words might come true again, and things would actually be better in the morning.
P.S. This chapter is hereby dedicated to the raspberry bushes in the backyard of the house where I grew up - Rest In Peace - I know I'll never taste a raspberry as sweet and dangerous to access again (stupid new owners!).
