Chapter 7
Marlow
The second the man lunged forward, I snapped my hand out to grab at the back of his life jacket, hauling him away from the side of the raft before he had the bright idea to tip us all over.
The strap I had a hold of pulled taunt while he jerked forward again, a grunt tumbling past his lips while he tossed his paddle down onto the floor next to his wife’s unoccupied spot.
Clearly, he was too out of his mind with worry to be thinking straight, but it wouldn’t do any of us any good trying to save that poor woman if we were all too busy trying to keep ourselves from getting dragged under one of the rapids while trying to get back into the raft after being flipped.
“Ellen!” he shouted again.
I tightened my hand around the nylon strap while it dug uncomfortably into my skin.
For an old guy, he sure knew how to throw his body weight around.
As soon as I ripped him back with a sharp jerk, I steered him down toward the floor, practically tucking him between his bench and the one in front of him as gently as I could manage given the small and compacted space.
Talos was already in motion next to me, grabbing the discarded paddle and tossing it into the river to keep it from breaking the man’s fall and his back.
“Shit,” I heard Talos say, right before a shrill whistle blasted me in the eardrum, rattling my fucking brain in the process.
Two more whistles answered farther down the river from us.
Quite useless, seeing as how there was no way any of the other rafter parties were going to be rowing back up this way to help us.
Which meant one of two things, we fought the current ourselves to try and get to our fallen comrade or someone was going swimming.
Ellen’s figure went down under the water again, popping up a moment later as she sputtered and coughed, her hands desperately clinging to the front panels of her life vest that was coming up near her shoulders from how hard the water was tossing her around.
Even if that vest was strapped snug around her body as tight as it could go, it wouldn’t matter if she managed to wiggle out of it trying to fight from getting pulled under again.
“Keep focused,” Talos barked, his voice sharp. “Remember your training. We’re going to cut through the rapids and make our way over there.”
I had a feeling by the time we coordinated and got over to her, she’d be floating face down while the current took her to wherever it wanted.
We had no time to be fucking around here and letting Talos try and wrangle up the three remaining people able to keep rowing was a waste of that precious time.
So, instead of listening to him bark at me to grab my paddle and spin us around toward Ellen’s direction, I tossed it down onto the floor at my feet.
“Marlow—”
I didn’t bother waiting for the inevitable chiding before tossing myself right over the side of the raft and practically rolling down into the next set of rapids.
There was a distant “Fuck!” that I caught just as I speared my hand through the water, cutting into the force of the spray that kicked up as soon as my body faced west.
Swimming was the only hobby of mine I hadn’t yet grown bored of from childhood, making it second nature to fall back into those old and practiced strokes I knew all too well.
Call it the fish in me or blame it on the competitive nature of showing off to the academy boys while in boarding school gym class I’d yet to grow out of twenty years later.
The water was much colder than what had been kicked up inside of the raft while we’d been slowly making our way back over to the river’s channel, sending my adrenaline spiking through my system and propelling me forward.
Ellen’s eyes were wide while she floated aimlessly toward another rapid, her mouth moving while she said something I couldn’t quite catch over the swell. Our helmets were a bright yellow, stark against the murky browns of the water, making it easy to keep my eye on her while getting to her.
There was another sharp trill of Talos’s whistle, signaling to either the rest of the crew again or using it to belatedly scold me for doing something as stupid as jumping into a raging river with no plan outside of grabbing Ellen and swimming back.
Okay, so maybe this was one of my least smart impulsive choices.
“Hey!” I called out to her as soon as I was close enough to grab at her, “Hold still! I’m going to—”
Her hands seized my arm the moment we made contact, giving her enough leverage to practically crawl up the side of me and use me as a human buoy.
“Help!” she screamed. “Help!”
Naw, fuck.
The worst part about panicked drowning people is they’d always sacrifice you out of pure instinct to get one last meager breath before you both plunged under the water’s surface again.
Treading water, I shook her off me. “Jesus, woman. Hold still!”
Before she could reach around to grab at me again, I shoved my hand under the nylon strap wrapped around the back of her life jacket and dragged us both backward, side-stroking toward where I’d last heard Talos blow his whistle from.
The water was high and hard to navigate through with the use of only one of my arms free, and given the added weight of Ellen and us fighting against a very healthy current, my body was feeling the burn.
I was going to wake up jacked as shit tomorrow.
Three more sharp bursts of the whistle sounded out, a little bit to my left and slightly further down from where we were.
Like a guiding fairy light through a dark and decaying forest, I kept us pointed toward the sound. The bright yellow of the raft was hard to miss, much like our helmets, even through the rapids.
Talos had the younger couple working overtime dragging their paddles down and keeping the craft pointed our way while he had his own paddle outstretched in our direction, feverishly waving it.
The last few yards were the worst, with time slowing the moment I reached out to brush my hand along the edge of Talos’s paddle, just barely missing it before my hand plunged back into the water. My body ached, the adrenaline already wearing down now that we were so close.
“Grab it, I’ll pull you back!” Talos shouted as he waved the paddle again.
His words almost had me rolling my eyes.
Well, yeah. I sure as hell hoped you would.
Because the alternative was getting the cops to come fish our bodies out of the water. I highly doubted Blake was ready to deal with that kind of fiasco.
Once I actually managed to get a hold of it, the plastic of the paddle bit into my hand with how hard I gripped it. With a single heave, Talos dragged us back toward the side of the raft. My upper body slammed into it, though not hard enough to hurt.
Or maybe that was still the adrenaline talking.
“All right, Ellen,” I heaved her against the craft. “Up you go.”
Two sets of hands reached over the side to drag her out of the water, the entire thing tipping dangerously backward with the added force of grabbing her and settling new weight onto the vessel.
I kept my hand wrapped tight around one of the rope loops hanging off the side of it while we bobbed, allowing my body to float and recover in the meantime.
If this wasn’t a case of someone practically drowning, I would’ve thought being out here in the water practically freeballing it was lovely.
“Come on.” Talos’s voice came from above me right as his hands found the front of my life vest and hauled me up. “Blake will kill me if I let you die out here.”
My toes curled at the thought of him even giving a shit outside of a business perspective, let alone enough for Talos to say something.
There was the possibility of that being exactly what he meant—that letting a client perish on property would be cause for many-a-lawsuit and probably the last thing Austin Adventures was looking to garner publicity-wise.
I wasn’t by any means a public figure, however, I doubted Avery or Silas would let that shit go peacefully and without raising some kind of hell in order to find out what exactly had gone down at this camp that got my passport stamped with a one way ticket to the meat locker.
Avery alone had enough money to hire plenty of lawyers to bury this place into the ground if he so chose to.
My friends could be pains in my ass plenty, but they were also my ride-or-dies through and through. Thick and thin, I knew I could count on them.
I grunted the second Talos dropped me unceremoniously onto the floor of the raft, my body finally flagging as the last of my remaining adrenaline bled out of me.
To me, it was crazy how easily my strength had been zapped from my very bones with none of the work I’d spent years maintaining to show for it.
How the hell anyone survived a dip in the rapids was beyond me.
Distant crying caught my attention next, sending me turning my head toward the sound of it.
The older couple was huddled together, their arms wrapped around each other in a sweet way that normally would’ve had me smiling at the charming sight and almost forgetting about the near-death experience we’d all just shared.
As a silver lining, at least now they’d have an exciting story to tell the grandkids over Christmas dinner.
“River right,” Talos called, climbing over top of me and fishing his paddle off of the floor by my head. “Let’s park this thing.”