Chapter Thirty-Three #3
She didn’t have any reason to believe Not A Bear could understand her, but begging was all she had left. The creature’s gaze returned to her when she spoke, away from Imani’s hiding place. “If you understand me…” Tasha said. “I love my babies. Please don’t hurt my babies.”
Those eyes! The way those eyes stared at her with such sober expressiveness, as if the creature truly did understand.
Too late, Tasha realized she had not advocated for her own life. Or her unborn’s.
As her knee buckled, her strength stolen by the shock of consorting with impossibility, a deafening whoosh clapped her ears. She didn’t feel herself drop her phone.
The creature’s flaps whipped around her, swallowing her in the dark.
“Yes, it’s risky…” Daddy’s voice, hushed. Strangled and so robotic. “If I have to, I’ll carry her. But we need to get moving. I promised her.”
Imani opened her eyes and saw Daddy and Sharise framed in the gap, both standing outside.
They had taken a few steps away, maybe for privacy, but Imani heard them without trying to.
Daddy had his rifle raised, and Sharise clutched her snowboard under her arm.
Daddy was talking to Sharise, but his eyes were scanning around him for the Beast.
Sharise’s words sounded more like sobs. “Dad, look at her! You can’t carry her, and there’s no way she can come like this. She’s in shock. We’re all in shock!”
Gravel sank Daddy’s voice. “We need to move while it’s somewhere else.” While it’s with Mom, he meant. The gravel in his voice was from trying not to say the unthinkable out loud. The gravel rattled in Imani’s stomach and made her want to close her eyes again. But she didn’t.
“It’s too fast,” Sharise said, matching him truth for truth. “It’ll catch us.”
The snowfall had stopped. How much time had gone by since Mom’s terrible shrieking and begging? Imani’s face was a mask of cold tears. Somehow her skin felt hot. Her whole body felt hot, a sudden fever. She imagined steam rising from her cheeks.
“We don’t have time to argue,” Daddy said. “If we stay here, it’ll just wait us out. And you were right before: I can’t leave you here. We were guessing it was safe here. You heard her just like I did, Sharise—she made me promise to take you home. That was the last thing…”
He didn’t finish the terrible sentence, but he didn’t have to.
“But she wouldn’t want you dragging Imani out there to die either,” Sharise said.
Imani’s nose was clotted with snot from crying, so she huffed through her mouth as she sat up, orienting herself.
Mom’s shrieks from the tunnel that scalded her insides had stopped, but the silence was the greater horror.
The sudden silence had sent Imani into wild sobs while Sharise clamped her hand over her mouth to keep her from screaming their mother’s name.
Once Imani had surrendered to her sobs, she had hyperventilated and couldn’t stop gasping for air until she was curled on the ground with her knees pulled to her chest.
Maybe she had passed out. Maybe she had slept. The silence persisted from the tunnel, but it wasn’t suffocating her anymore. She could breathe, although breathing hurt the way blinking hurt against her puffy eyelids and acid tears. Being awake hurt.
But she stayed sitting upright in her pool of misery. They still had work to do.
Imani’s flashlight was still on, the beam crowded close to the wall of crisscrossing cracks in the dead wood.
She grabbed her light and circled the hollow, looking for her gear.
Her open backpack was behind her, so she stuffed it with the emergency blanket and first aid kit Daddy had discarded.
She shoved her firestarter deep in her back pocket.
Then she flung her backpack outside into the snow.
Daddy and Sharise stopped mid-argument as the backpack flew out.
Imani angled her legs to climb out behind her backpack, kicking past the lost fire’s last embers.
She reached in for her snowboard, pulling it behind her.
Sharise’s mourning receded long enough for Imani to see her sister’s lips give way to a relieved smile.
Imani strapped her backpack on. “She’s close,” she said in a thick whisper.
“Voices travel in caverns, so she could be two hundred yards away. But not more than that, I bet. So… that cliff is where we should go. If she’s not near the creek, she has to be there.
” Imani had seen a harrowing survival show about explorers lost in a cavern and how voices had fooled them, making them sound farther or closer than they were.
No one believed Mom could be alive anymore—maybe not even Imani. Not after what they had heard. The ache crushing her ribs was written on their faces as they looked at her, their eyes beet red.
“Imani…” Daddy said. “The last thing your mom made me promise—”
“I don’t care!” Imani said. “She needs us to go find her!”
Their unbelief glowed from their faces. Daddy’s face was clenched like his robot voice.
“You have twelve shots,” Imani went on. “No matter what… you have to kill it, Daddy! If something happened to Mom, it’s our fault! She was talking to us! To me!”
Daddy’s shoulders sagged; his body weighing him down. Sharise pursed her lips hard. They could all spend the rest of the day crying. Maybe they would. Crying and dying.
Daddy leaned down to hug Imani, although she noticed he never stopped watching for movement near them, his neck shifting right and left as he hugged her.
“Shhhh, muffin, no—it’s not your fault. We all got excited when we heard her, okay?
We had to try to find her because we thought we could help her. But we got to say goodbye.”
His words were shiny and hopeful, but he recited them all wrong. Sharise started crying again as soon as she heard the lie. She joined their hug, all of them trying not to drown alone. They were thinking the same thing, but no one could say it: We killed her.
Daddy pulled away, flicking a tear away from the corner of his eye. Like Imani, he had taken off his right glove and donated it to Sharise, who now wore a mismatched set.
“Listen to me…” Daddy said with a hand on each of their shoulders, briefly letting go of the rifle.
Imani felt his trembling, or maybe it was hers; unsteady joints from sorrow, not the cold.
“It’s too risky for me to take you to go looking for Mom.
It would be risky if there were six of us with rifles.
It moves too fast, it’s too big, and we’re not equipped to go climbing on rocks.
Our best bet is to get back to the lodge as fast as we can—”
“It won’t let us go back,” Imani said. “It’s tracking us too.”
“If it tries to stop us, then I’ll shoot it,” Daddy said.
“I promise you. And after we shoot it, I swear on my life I will go looking for Mom the minute I can. We can all go—I promise. But your mother—my…” He stopped, as if he had forgotten the language he needed to describe her, because wife wasn’t enough.
“… Tasha knew what she was up against… and I promised to get you back home, to keep you safe. And that’s what I have to do.
Hear me? I have to. It’s not a choice. It’s not a conversation. We’re heading back.”
Sharise nodded, convinced. Her only objection had been leaving before Imani was composed enough to take care of herself. Sharise never planned to look for Mom either. Even now—when they had proof she was closer than ever. When they had brought danger to her.
With more time, Imani might have convinced Sharise to take her side.
What difference did it make if the Beast attacked them in the snow or on the rocks?
Either way, they had to kill the Beast or it might kill them all.
But Dad would not be convinced—Imani saw it in his robot’s face.
They had all heard Mom’s request, her order, to take them away—she’d sounded mad, or at least frustrated—and Daddy would never defy it.
In the name of honoring his promise, he was turning his back on Mom when she needed him most. Imani knew she might spend the rest of her life trying to forgive him for this moment of weakness.
“Imani?” Dad said, checking as if her thoughts were blaring to him. “You hearing me?”
Reluctantly, Imani nodded. She was too hollowed out to argue. This was the first time she felt certain she knew better than her father, and it was terrible. Another piece of her world gone.
Daddy looked visibly relieved. He knew she didn’t give up easily when she felt strongly about something, and she had never felt more strongly about anything.
“One of you grab the ski pole,” Daddy said. “The other end is sharp.”
“Don’t you need that for balance?” Sharise asked.
“I’ll be fine,” he said. “I’ll find a stick if I need one.”
They almost sounded like a regular family, except they were preparing for the Beast.
The ski pole lay on the ground near the warm firepit, closest to Imani’s feet.
“I’ll take it,” she said, grabbing the pole.
She tested it, stabbing snow while she imagined spearing out the Beast’s eyes.
The fantasy of hurting it tightened her jaw.
She hoped it would come after them right away.
The sooner it chased them, the sooner they could kill it.
The sooner they could go back for Mom.
“Sharise, hold your snowboard defensively,” Daddy said. He sounded surer, convincing himself he was doing the right thing. “Just stick close behind me. We’ll head south. I remember some of the way, and maybe we’ll find tracks. Tracks show up more in the pine groves.”
Imani checked her cell phone’s compass app Sharise had told her about: The bearing wasn’t exact, but south was close enough.
Besides, she didn’t care about getting back to the lodge.
The new snowfall had ended, so they should be able to follow their tracks back to the tree.
Once they returned here, they could find the cavern where the Beast had taken Mom.