Chapter Forty Two
FORTY-TWO
“Case!” she yells.
A flash of pain and you’re back in the canoe.
Diana looks terrified, and you know you were spacing out again.
Your paddle is wet, so you must have been helping for a while.
But you weren’t present for much of it, and as usual you’re not sure how much time has passed.
All you know is that you’re not yet on fire and you still haven’t answered Diana’s question about why you never called her.
But she doesn’t seem as concerned about that now.
She grabs you by the collar and slaps your face. Hard.
“You can’t go to sleep!” she says. “Do you understand that?”
“Ow,” you say.
“I need to hear a yes,” she says.
“Okay! No sleep. Got it.”
She wipes a tear from her face.
“Nothing good happens if you go to sleep.”
The smoke is even thicker than before, and you pull your damp shirt up over your mouth again. The temperature, too, feels like it’s gone up a few degrees, but then again you might just have a fever.
“Is it…,” you say.
“Hotter?” says Diana. “Yes.”
“How far are we?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “Fran’s been quiet for a while.”
Diana cups her hands around her mouth.
“Fran!” she says. “Where are we, girl?!”
Fran turns around, soot-colored sweat running down her forehead. She’s about to speak when, instead, she looks over your heads and up toward the sky behind you. Her eyes widen, and she inches noticeably backward in her seat. Diana turns around next, and when you hear her gasp, you have to look too.
And there it is, just visible over a stand of spruce: a fire higher than the trees.
It’s bright orange with tendrils reaching like spectral fingers toward the dark clouds above it. An enormous plume of ink-black smoke pours off the top of the fire, making the dusky sky even darker.
“Oh my god,” says Troy, nearly falling out of his canoe. “That has to be a hundred feet high.”
Will doesn’t make a sound. But he starts paddling faster. Within seconds, he’s passing your boat in the narrow channel and pulling even with Troy and Fran.
“Hey, what are you doing?!” asks Diana.
“Faster,” he says. “We need to move faster.”
Before the others can even adjust to what he’s doing, Will tosses his pack into their canoe, right behind Troy.
“Will,” says Troy, “you almost tipped the boat. What are you…”
“Hold on!” says Will.
He stands up in his boat then and leaps out of his canoe, holding his paddle above his head.
It’s not pretty, and he lands waist-deep in the water.
Then, while Troy and Fran scream unintelligibly, Will manages to pull himself into the boat without tipping them over.
His old canoe floats listlessly away into the grass, knocking against a rock. Troy and Fran are in shock.
“What the hell, Will?” says Fran. “How about some warning next time!”
“Three paddles will move us quicker,” he says. “And we need to go quicker. So shut up and paddle.”
He immediately starts digging through the water with his oar, and when his shipmates join in, they are indeed moving faster.
“Go!” he yells. “Go! Go!”
“What about us?!” you say, as the three of them start to cut a slightly faster path through the creek.
“You two need to keep up!” he yells.
You tell yourself not to look back again, but you can’t help it.
Before you start moving your aching shoulders, you turn around and watch as the spindly pines light up like birthday candles, the fire moving ever closer to the banks of the river.
You close your eyes just for a second, then you breathe through your shirt and try to get in sync with Diana, putting your whole torso into the movement, the adrenaline powering you through.
Troy, Fran, and Will push ahead, but not by much.
Your two canoes are within a couple of feet of each other as you move around a tight corner to the east. And in the distance to the north, you finally see something that looks like moving water.
There hasn’t been much of that since those first rapids.
But you swear you can see a current taking shape.
“The Loop!” yells Fran. “That might be the Loop!”
The roar from the fire is noticeably louder, and she has to scream to be heard. After she speaks, she can’t stop coughing. You give yourself a second to look, but you can’t see the Loop as clearly as she can. You can only see patches of the white water throwing off mist and spray.
“OH GOD,” says Troy, “NO. NO. NO.”
But he does not stop paddling.
No one does. You can’t tell if it’s your imagination, but the heat seems to be rising at your back.
This time, you don’t look behind you. If the fire creeps up on you, you’re toast, and it doesn’t matter if you see it or not.
The wind blows from what you think is the south, and suddenly, there’s little oxygen to be found.
You all fall into a coughing fit as you move closer to the rapids.
“Get down low!” says Fran.
And you all duck down, paddling with your backs hunched, trying to get under the smoke for a bit of air.
Fortunately, the wind shifts again and clears out some of the smoke.
You all take in huge lungfuls of air and fight with everything you have to move forward in the shifting gales.
It sounds like a freight train is following you, and when you finally get close enough to see the beginning of the rapids, your body goes into a state of panicked shock. It’s not just a strong current.
It’s a waterfall.
Not the size of Niagara Falls or anything, but it’s not nothing.
Ten, maybe fifteen feet in the air. It seems to appear out of nowhere, cutting between two enormous black rocks and landing in more frothing rapids below.
And the current is moving fast beneath your boat.
These are not the relatively short rapids from the beginning of the trip.
These rapids are wild. They’re white and foaming, and any stick that gets drawn into their path is immediately sucked under.
Ahead of you, Fran is screaming. But the sound of the fire nearly drowns her out.
There’s not much time to think. If you keep going forward, you’re going to be pulled into the path of the falls.
If you jump out of your boat and swim to shore, it won’t be long before the fire is likely to catch you.
You can’t really call what you’re feeling a panic attack, because instead of going into alarm mode, your body seems to have shut down entirely.
Diana’s too. She’s just looking forward, completely still.
What you expect to see from the boat in front of you is Troy scrambling to get out.
What you see instead is Troy grabbing on to Will’s shoulders.
He’s already decided: He’s going to brave the falls.
Your mind jumps to the quarry only for a moment, watching Sean dive off that cliff.
He did it so effortlessly, flinging his body out into the summer air, completely ready for the plunge to come.
You could barely make yourself walk to the edge to look down.
How are you supposed to go over a waterfall?
There is still time for you to bail. You could try to outrun the fire on land.
Maybe if you stay on the rocky surface, it won’t catch you.
Fire can’t burn rock, right? You think about it, and your anxiety brain seems to already have made the choice to jump out, when an ache starts to build in your chest. You’re not entirely sure if it’s a pang—because you’re not entirely sure what a pang is—but that’s the best way you can think to describe it. It hurts, and soon enough you know why.
If you jump, you’ll be sending Diana over alone.
And this time, you don’t think you can do that.
You already abandoned her once, and you know in that moment that you are not prepared to do it again.
So you reach up and tap her on the shoulder.
She looks back at you, completely horror-struck.
But even in her bloodshot eyes and sunburnt skin, you see a flash of that person who climbed up a garage roof just to wish you happy birthday in what seems like another lifetime ago.
She is the same person. Your only real friend.
And whatever happens next, you have to face it together.
“HEY!” you scream over the din of fire and churning water.
“WHAT?!” she asks, her face tight with terror.
“HOLD MY HAND!”
She doesn’t hesitate. She reaches out and grabs your cold fingers and interlaces them with her own.
Then there are only a few seconds to brace yourselves for what’s coming before the current grabs you.
Behind you, you feel a wall of heat, like someone’s chasing you with a flamethrower.
The air goes dark as night. Then the raging water seizes you and the two of you go over the edge.