14
My limbs feel leaden as I peel off my damp clothing, change into my pajamas, brush my teeth, and unzip my sleeping bag.
My head pounds and my mouth feels gritty, like it’s lined with sand.
I can tell I’m still dehydrated from rationing my water half the day.
But trying to catch up now will mean having to pee outside in the darkness tonight, which doesn’t seem worth it.
“It’s a Nashville day,” I whisper to Parker.
I realize I’ve gotten more comfortable with talking to him out loud out here—almost like the rules of regular life don’t apply in the wilderness.
It’s only day two of the rafting trip, but the isolation, the physical labor, and the novelty of spending all day with strangers has made it feel like much longer.
“Send me a nice dream tonight, okay?” I murmur, shimmying farther into my sleeping bag and straining to pick out some stars through the tent mesh.
But between the campfire smoke and the moon, all I can make out is the bright dotted line of Orion’s belt.
I close my eyes and try to ignore the aching in my head.
“The least you could do is visit me like you promised,” I whisper, an image of a hawk soaring behind my eyelids.
The least you could do.
My chest abruptly tightens with resentment. I try to shove the feeling down, finding it more unbearable than grief. Sadness feels gentler, acceptable. But anger I can’t reckon with. When my therapist suggested we explore my anger over Parker’s death, I’d stopped scheduling sessions.
Because Parker doesn’t deserve anger.
He suffered so much. He didn’t mean to leave me. And besides, what good does anger do me? I have nowhere to direct it. Parker is gone.
When I finally sink into a fitful sleep, I dream that I’m sailing through another rapid.
When a big swell breaks over the raft, a fish pops out of the water and lands at my feet, wriggling against the slippery floor.
I reach down and try to grab the little brown trout, but another wave hits, jolting me backward.
I right myself and try to grab hold of the fish again, squeezing my hand around him. I have to get him back into the water. He can’t breathe. But his slimy scales are slippery, the rapids unrelenting, my hands shaky. The trout’s mouth gapes in a desperate O, begging for help.
I fling myself into the bottom of the raft, trying to catch him, trying to save him. But by the time I manage to clutch him in my fist, the gills have stopped beating. The unblinking eyes stare back at me.
He’s dead and gone.
Sick with despair, I wake in a cold sweat.
My stomach is so sour from dehydration that I worry I’ll vomit before I can get the tent flap open and stumble onto the sand.
Mercifully, the nausea recedes a little as I sit up.
I reach for my water bottle with shaking hands, taking tiny sips.
A glance at my phone tells me it’s 1:29 a.m.
With my insides calmer, I lie back down on my sweat-stained sleeping bag and half-deflated pad, trying to ground myself.
I search for Orion’s belt again, but my eyes still swim with tears.
The more I resist them the faster the tears fall, pain radiating and constricting my chest and stomach like a full-body muscle cramp.
There is no emergency, I tell myself, again and again, focusing on the drone of the river.
And then, all at once, the night shatters.
“No, no, no! Help me!” The frantic plea slices through the silence so suddenly, I sit bolt upright, forgetting all about the dream.
From somewhere down the line of tents comes the sounds of a struggle: rustling fabric, limbs flailing, hurried footsteps, a choking wheeze.
Then nothing.
A surge of adrenaline makes my head swim. I freeze, heart pounding hard, listening. The chorus of crickets has all but fallen silent.
Is Allie having another nightmare? Is this going to happen every night?
In the quiet, I hear the sounds of one, two, then three tents unzipping. Then voices and footsteps moving along the sand, just like the night before.
I take a few deep breaths. Then, gritting my teeth, I pull on a sweatshirt and my sneakers. At the last second, I grab my water bottle—might as well refill it while everybody is up and moving around.
“Allie, honey,” Pam’s voice calls over the sound of a zipper. I step onto the sand and turn my head just in time to see her poking her head inside one of the tents a few yards away, moonlight shining on her auburn hair. “You’re having another nightmare, Allie—”
Time seems to slow as I recognize that something is wrong about this scene. Pam isn’t near the guest tents. She’s leaning into one of the guides’ tents, which stand apart in their own row.
I almost jump straight into the air when Allie’s voice calls out from right behind me. “No, Pam! Pam, I’m right—”
But that’s as far as she gets. Because at that moment, Pam stumbles backward from the open tent, screaming.
“What? What is it?” I ask, rushing toward her.
“Oh my god, she’s dead!” Pam cries, clasping her chest as if holding her heart in place. “Gracie, it’s Gracie! Help, someone please help!”
Gracie is dead.
The words don’t make sense. They’re too horrible, too unbelievable. They can’t be true.
For half a second, I freeze. I can’t process anything. Even Allie doesn’t react immediately. We both stand still, immobilized, staring at Pam—who looks like a statue herself.
Finally, my eyes move from Pam to the open tent flap in front of her. The fabric is rippling gently in the breeze, faintly dappled by the moonlight.
Something dark is smeared across the nearest tent wall, much too solid and thick to be a shadow.
“It’s happening, oh god, it’s happening. We have to get out of—” Allie stammers and takes a clumsy step backward, just as a loud crash and more screams come from along the line of guest tents.
Pam, Allie, and I all turn in time to see one of the guest tents bow inward, collapsing like it’s been hit by a hurricane.
Another high-pitched, frantic scream erupts.
A sickening gurgling sound is followed by slick, wet thuds, so close I want to run as fast and far away as I possibly can.
It’s a sound I never, ever want to hear again for the rest of my life.
The sound of a knife stabbing flesh.
Reality closes in on me. Someone is being stabbed, mere feet away from us.
Just like Gracie was stabbed.
Just like I’m going to be stabbed if I don’t do something, fast.
Allie wheels toward shore, taking off at a sprint.
As I spring forward to follow her, Pam pushes past me in a panic—sending me hurtling onto a pitch of gravelly sand at the base of a car-sized boulder.
I scramble to stay upright, the debris grinding beneath my feet while screams ring out from all directions, swelling above the unrelenting roar of Anvil Falls.
It can’t have been more than a couple of seconds since Pam rushed past me, but it feels like an eternity when I realize that in my struggle to regain my balance, I’m the only one left by the tents. From the shore, someone is screaming, “Get into the rafts!”
I want nothing more than to run, to follow them. But a silent alarm in my head warns me not to make any sudden movements right now. Because in the last two seconds, something has changed.
The tent nearest me, where the stabbing sound came from, has stopped shaking.
Body fizzing with adrenaline, I start tiptoeing sideways along the boulder, trying not to make a sound as I pick my way across the minefield of small rocks and dead branches at my feet. If I don’t rush, don’t make too much noise, maybe I can skirt past without notice—then run like hell.
Keeping my eyes locked on the half-collapsed tent, I slink a few more steps toward the chaos on the beach. With each movement, I look down to find my footing, then back up at the tent, its billowing fabric sprayed dark with liquid.
Just then, a shadow shifts inside the tent, and I hold back a scream, forcing myself to keep inching past, praying whoever is in there can’t see my shadow.
I imagine launching into a run and turning my back on the shadow.
Then I imagine the blade of a knife slicing into my back.
As I step out of the uneven footing and onto the sand, I suddenly realize I can hear—between screams from the beach—snatches of heavy breathing coming from inside that tent.
The shadow shifts again. A zipper runs. The fabric walls shudder.
In what feels like slow motion, I watch as the shadow turns into a figure, bending as it exits the bloodied, collapsed tent. My brain can barely make sense of what I’m seeing.
I have to run, but I know he’ll catch me. He’s so close I can still hear his breathing over the sound of the falls. My feet feel glued to the sand.
“Hey!” shouts a male voice from behind me, back near Gracie’s tent. Between the screams onshore and the blood pulsing in my ears, I can’t tell if it’s Josh or Bryan. But it’s the sound of that voice that finally unfreezes me, and I bolt for shore.
Clutching my half-empty water bottle like a weapon, I race toward the frantic voices near the rafts, away from the figure rising up from the crumpled tent.
Whoever was in that tent is dead.
Just like Gracie is dead.
Clumsy with panic, I trip over a rock in my path, only this time I can’t catch myself. I land hard on my hip. Grit flies into my mouth and eyes as my jaw skids roughly along the cold sand.
I bite back a shriek, bracing myself for a knife’s blade to bear down on the stretch of exposed skin where my sweatshirt has ridden up.
I hear that same male voice from behind me again, but I can’t make out what he’s saying. Who the fuck is it? I struggle to my hands and knees, still clinging to the handle of my water bottle, and blink away the sand in my eyes. That’s the moment a Chaco-clad foot lands inches from mine.
There’s no escape now. I know that. But I lunge at the leg anyway, slamming my water bottle against the shin as hard as I can.
It makes a pathetic, plastic thwack.
And all I can think is, This is it. This is how I die.