18
For the second time tonight, time slows to a crawl even though we’re flying across the water.
More figures in the lead raft slam backward, in a strange, coordinated ripple.
I can’t make sense of what I’m seeing in front of me, even while Parker’s voice urges me to figure it out. “Remember what happened to Raymond in Virginia!” he says urgently.
The name and the place ping vaguely familiar as connected to one of Parker’s outdoor-enthusiast friends, but what happened? And why does that matter right now? I can hardly think straight.
Ahead of us, bodies are falling into the churn.
And as they do, dark liquid sprays in arcs, like buckets of ink being flung into the air.
Most of it disappears into the whitewater as the boat crests the last wave.
But some droplets fly far enough to splatter my hands, my life jacket, my hair.
Blood—it has to be blood—that nauseating, tangy, metallic smell cannot be river water.
“Head down!” Parker pleads in a fever pitch. “Remember!”
I try, racking my terrified brain to remember, but all I feel is dread and panic as we surge toward the big wave. The situation has gone from bad to worse somehow, but I can’t make sense of anything. Where is all that blood coming from? Why did the other women fall out of the raft like that?
Time seems to stop, freeze-framing the chaos in front of me. Distorted, choked screams rise above the river’s roar. Not of fear this time, but shock—and agony.
If I weren’t at the very front of our raft, I might have thought the other women hit a submerged boulder and fell backward into the water. But no. Their bodies jerked backward like they ran into something at high speed. Like a horrifying game of Red Rover.
My eyes land helplessly on the silhouette of the last woman, seated at the back of the boat.
As the ripple effect reaches her, she drops her paddle and holds her hands out in front of her before dropping sideways like she’s been knocked out.
Her head lolls over at a strange right angle as she tips into the frothing wave, blood trailing after her into the water. I taste copper on my lips again.
There’s something wrong with her neck. Like it’s been cut clean through. I can see the pale gleam of bone through the dark wound, peeking through the ebb of black liquid.
I recognize the shape of her stubby pigtails, but don’t know her name.
“Clotheslined,” comes the word, in Parker’s voice, just as the glint of something shiny catches my eye again, strung between the walls of the canyon maybe three feet above the surface of the water. There’s a clump of something clinging to it that I abruptly recognize as hair.
I finally realize what Parker is trying to tell me.
When we first got married, his friend Raymond went dirt biking with a friend in Virginia, following a trail that veered into private property.
The landowner had posted a NO TRESPASSING SIGN—and immediately beyond it, a tension wire strung across the trail between two trees.
A “wire trap,” the news article called it.
It’d been meant to throw the boys off their bikes, teach them a lesson for trespassing.
Instead, as the bikers roared down the hill and collided with the wire, it did fatal damage.
Raymond initially survived, but barely. His family had to take him off life support three months later.
The brother died on impact—decapitated.
I catch another glimpse of that glinting wire as our raft noses down the wave, preparing to pop up toward it.
Allie’s words thunder in my brain for the second time tonight. “A couple of the rafters were missing their hands. Two were missing their heads.”
Terror seizes my entire body.
Allie was right. It’s all happening again.
Bryan must have somehow strung razor wire across the river between the canyon walls. Those of us who escaped his stabbing spree have been sent downriver to die in a second trap.
Suddenly, I can feel Parker in the boat beside me. I can’t see him, but I know he’s here all the same. Calm, insistent, and absolutely real. “Head down, Kaia. Tell the others. Now.”
This is Third Man Syndrome, the uselessly rational part of my brain manages to interject. But I’m not listening to it, I’m listening to him. The words tear from my throat the instant before we buck through the wave. “Head down! There’s razor wire!”
“What?” Macy cries, her hoarse voice barely audible from her position at the rear. “No, keep rowing!” she insists, clearly not understanding.
“Get your fucking heads down!” I snarl in desperation, feeling the raft tip upward as the other women fling their paddles into the center of the boat and follow my lead.
I throw myself down into the pocket of space at the front of the raft alongside them, grabbing the straps of Allie’s life jacket and bringing her down with me just as the wave launches the boat up like a rocket toward that glinting wire at head level—now dripping with blood.
“No—” Macy cries, followed by a shrill scream that turns into a wet gasp.
Then she goes silent.
The raft shudders and bucks as Macy’s guide oars slam into the narrow canyon walls with a splintering set of cracks, then a muted splash.
“No, no, no,” Allie whimpers, crouching in the inches of water sloshing around us, surely tinged with blood. “Oh my god, no.”
My mind goes numb with horror. I want to vomit. There’s no way anybody survived that. The smell of copper wafts toward me again, raw and violent.
I stay next to Allie, face down in the center of the raft, until I feel the boat begin to bob more slowly. Then I ease myself up and blink into the night.
In a daze, I count the remaining women in our raft.
Four. Me, Allie, Deborah, and Pam. Macy is gone—and so are her guide oars. The clamps that kept them locked in place at the back of the raft are twisted and broken.
A wave of disbelief makes me feel so lightheaded I think I’m going to pass out, my hands shaking so badly I can hardly grip my paddle.
“What was that? What just happened?” Pam asks, voice high and shaky as she drags herself up onto the middle bench. She looks between me and Allie, eyes wild. “Where is Macy? What the hell just happened?”
“Beth!” Deborah screams frantically, rising up from where she’s been crouched beside Pam. “Beth? Oh god, where is everybody else, why aren’t they answering?” She whirls around to face me. “What the hell happened to Macy?”
Without waiting for a response, she grabs hold of a paddle, dipping it into the river to aim us toward the first passenger raft that is now floating maybe ten yards downriver in front of us, scraping slowly against the canyon wall in the meandering current.
I strain my eyes in the dark, but I can’t see a single person manning that raft. And it certainly no longer sags with the weight of twelve people. The faintly glowing orange rubber is no longer uniform in color. Dark splotches and streaks dribble into the water.
A full-body shiver tears through me. I’m terrified to imagine what’s left of the other women.
The river has gone eerily silent. No moans. No cries for help. Only the distant thunder of the falls behind us.
And—I realize with a jolt—there’s no sign of Bryan’s gear raft.
Why isn’t he on us yet? Where is he?
I’m terrified to learn the answers to those questions. All I know right now is that we have to get out of here. We have to keep rowing. But there’s no way we can move on without looking for survivors—if there are any.
“Shh. Listen! Can anybody hear anything?” I cry. We all go very still, looking out into the water surrounding us. There are still no cries for help. No splashing. No movement at all, except the rippling current.
After a minute, Deborah shouts, “Hello?”
In the silence, bile sloshes in my stomach, and my body begins to shake. I dry-heave over the side of the raft, my gut clenching around nothing. Deborah is paddling now, and I force myself to help as we row toward the first raft.
“Keep your eyes on the water for any sign of movement,” I choke. “A few of the women in that raft were wearing life jackets, right?”
“Yeah, I think some of them were …” Allie begins helplessly.
We all look down at the excess of life jackets scattered uselessly at the bottom of our raft.
“They all piled into that first raft so fast, trying to get away … there were too many of them … Nikki was on that raft … I was so glad she escaped …”
I nod numbly.
“Macy fell off the back,” Pam says, like she’s trying to make sense of what just happened.
“She didn’t duck in time, the wire … I think the wire got her.
I heard her scream when she fell out, then she went under, and I didn’t see her again.
Remember, she said there was a bad undertow at the bottom of the falls … ”
The shiver crawls up my back. The images in my mind are unfathomably horrific. I try not to remember what the woman with the pigtails looked like, with her neck hanging at the wrong angle, her head barely attached.
“Look! A life jacket!” Deborah cries, pointing ahead. We all row with purpose again, closing in on the shape bobbing in the water a few yards downriver, moonlight reflecting off its buckles.
As we come alongside the woman floating facedown in the water, I catch a glimpse of short red hair.
“Nikki?” Allie wails, leaning over the edge of the raft. She manages to grab hold of the life jacket. Water sloshes everywhere as Allie tries to reel her in and pleads, “Nikki, please, please.”
But there’s no response.
I force myself not to think, only move, as I hurry to the side of the boat to help Allie. When we roll Nikki over in the water, it takes everything in me not to recoil. That faint but unmistakable smell rises up—river water and the tang of blood. I can hardly breathe.
“Oh god, no, no, no.” Allie’s breath comes in fast, choppy spurts as she stares down at her friend.
Nikki stares back, unseeing, rivulets pooling like tears in her wide-open brown eyes. Her skin is unnaturally pale, waxy in the moonlight. The corners of her mouth are severed cleanly through, all the way back to her ears, in a gruesomely wide smile.
She was alive five minutes ago. Now she’s dead.