19
After the frenzy of the falls, the river is mercifully calm, the water like obsidian. It’s the only mercy, though.
Over the next few minutes, we find five more life jackets—each of them buoying up a lifeless body.
Seconds warp into an eternity as we row back and forth across the canyon in the dark, looking for any signs of life. It can’t have been more than half an hour since Gracie’s screams rang out at Camas Creek, but it feels like days. Nothing will ever be the same.
As we comb the water for the others, my heart pounds, knowing Bryan could shoot out of Anvil Falls at any second. And when he does, there will be maybe a hundred yards of river between us at best.
But we can’t bring ourselves to leave without looking for more survivors.
Each time someone cries, “I see something!” a tiny spark of hope flares back to life—only to be snuffed out when we discover it’s another body. One woman floats face up, staring up at the stars. I can’t stop my brain from cataloging every wound, every awful detail.
All of the dead have horrific injuries to the head and neck, sliced in an instant by the wire.
There’s no stopping the wails that rise up each time we witness another scene of catastrophic damage.
A scalp peeled back from the skull. Arms severed at the wrists, where one woman must have thrown up her hands in defense.
Another’s throat opened up beneath the chin.
Between us, we’re able to name the five women we find: Kerry, Sydney, Yvonne, Teia, and Beth.
Deborah’s sister, Beth, is the most devastating of all. We find her body floating on the other side of the abandoned raft, wedged against the canyon wall.
Like the woman with the pigtails, the wire has gone straight through her neck, just beneath her chin.
When Deborah turns her over in the water, her head hangs on by a strap of skin at the nape of her neck.
When it lolls back, I can see the tips of vertebrae, flashing white against the red water that sloshes in her open neck.
Deborah lets out an agonized sob and tries to pull her sister’s limp body into the raft by her life jacket’s lapels. “Beth, oh Beth,” she cries over and over again.
Pam rushes to wrap Deborah in a tight embrace, effectively holding her inside the raft as she tugs at her sister’s lifeless body. “No, honey, no,” Pam tells her. “We can’t bring her with us.”
“I can’t leave her here. I can’t,” Deborah cries. “I don’t want him to find her. We have to get her … we have to …” She trails off with an anguished moan.
At the mention of Bryan, Allie and I turn in unison toward the base of the falls.
Where the fuck is he?
We’ll find out the hard way if we don’t start moving.
And it’s pretty clear now: there are no survivors.
Every woman who was on that first raft—plus Macy—are either dead or gone. Floating lifelessly on the surface, or at the bottom of the river, beneath the crushing undertow at the mouth of Anvil Falls.
Just like Kellen Stroop’s victims.
“Beth has a life jacket on, Deborah,” Pam says, gently holding Deborah’s arms to keep her from pulling her sister aboard our raft.
“We can find her again. We can come back for Beth and the others. But right now, if we want to live, we can’t bring her with us.
We have to get down this river and get help, fast. We need to get out of here. ”
With a low cry, Deborah shakes Pam away, still holding onto her sister’s life vest. “I’m so sorry, Beth.” She turns to us. “I told her to get on that first raft before me, because I wanted her to be safe.”
A lump rises in my throat, but I force the words past it. “It’s not your fault, Deborah. I’m so sorry. But Pam is right. We can’t stay here any longer. We have to start moving.”
Deborah stays frozen where she is, murmuring something in her sister’s ear.
I can’t bear to watch.
Allie, Pam, and I stare helplessly at each other, the whites of our eyes bright against the deep-canyon darkness.
“What in the world are we going to do now?” Pam asks.
I shake my head and grip my paddle tighter.
Someone has to take charge and get us moving.
The only real option is to start moving downriver and leave the victims behind.
There isn’t even a spot where we could pull the bodies to shore to be recovered later.
There is no shoreline, and from what Macy said, there won’t be for another forty miles.
There will be no rescuers at all unless we make it seventy miles downriver to the takeout, through nonstop Class-Three and -Four whitewater, in the middle of the night, without a guide.
And that isn’t even the worst-case scenario here.
Worst-case scenario, we never make it to the takeout. Worst-case scenario, Bryan catches up to us. Or there’s more razor wire stretched along this canyon, taut and waiting.
Another realization hits me. There could be another group coming down Anvil Falls in the next few days—thrilled to have the permit to run this isolated stretch at all—completely unaware of the death trap ahead of them.
How did Bryan even think of this? Is this how the original Camas Creek victims died?
Kellen Stroop is long gone—and yet here we are in what feels like a sick re-enactment.
I want to know what Allie has to say, but there’s no time to ask. We have to get out of here.
My teeth begin to chatter so hard, I’m afraid my molars will chip. The cold feels like it’s seeped down to my bones, but it’s more than that. We’re going to die out here, just like the women floating in the water. “Deborah, I’m so sorry but we have to leave her, now,” I demand. “We have to—”
“Oh no, oh no, no, no,” Pam cries in a panic, gesturing behind us. “I see him. There he is! He’s right there.”
All of us, even Deborah, turn to look.
And there it is, a neon green gear boat speeding over the final wave of Anvil.
At first, the raft looks unmanned, still loaded with supplies. But then, beneath the roar of the falls, I hear it—faint at first, then clearer. Whistling, unmistakable and getting louder. That same nameless, meandering song he whistled at the put-in.
“Oh my god, we gotta hurry,” Allie whispers, but for another second, all of us stay frozen.
As soon as the boat noses over that final wave and onto the calmer water, a dark figure rises up from the back of the boat and stands, an oar in each hand.
Bryan.
He’s less than a hundred yards away, where the raging falls give way to the straightaway of calmer water where we’ve been searching for survivors.
He angles the oars and points his raft toward us.
Even at this distance, I can see the dark stains on his bright swim shirt. Gracie’s blood. Josh’s blood.
He keeps whistling, notes drifting over the water as he moves toward us, smooth and unhurried.
If we don’t start rowing right now, he’ll be on us in less than a minute.
“Deborah and Allie, row left!” I demand, taking charge. There isn’t time for discussion. We have to get out of here. “Me and Pam will stay right. Everybody, row together now!”
For a heartbeat, I’m not sure if Deborah is going to comply. But after one last anguished moan, she lets go of the lapels of Beth’s life jacket and grabs onto a paddle. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” she cries.
“All forward, dig hard, stay together,” I bark, parroting what I heard Macy and Josh say the day before. “Let’s catch that center current line, so we can really get moving.”
I don’t dare turn around. All that matters is staying ahead of Bryan.
We cruise forward, gaining speed, skirting past the ghost raft that carried twelve women only minutes before.
“Good, we’re doing good, just keep going.
” As I speak, I dart my eyes back and forth across the canyon.
It’s widened considerably since Anvil—there’s no way Bryan would’ve been able to string more razor wire here.
Then again, I can’t even begin to understand how he strung it over Anvil.
Even so, my head moves on a swivel, searching for any sign of glinting metal overhead.
The memory of what that wire did—the ripped flesh, the dismembered bodies, the blood—loops in my mind like a broken record.
I remember what Macy said—some of her final words, I realize—that there are five of us and one of him.
Four of us, now. He might be a better guide than he pretended—after all, he made it down Anvil just fine.
But we have the power—even if we are missing our guide oars.
If we can stay ahead of him, we might make it out of here somehow.
The raft picks up speed with the current, slapping across the surface of the choppy water.
I can already see the start of the next rapid ahead, maybe fifty yards downriver, its frothing-white threshold a stark contrast to the black current.
Fear and adrenaline make me row even harder toward it, despite the fact that it might very well capsize us.
That’s when I hear a sound that sends a fresh jolt of adrenaline surging through me.
Erratic splashing, coming from the other side of the river.
I whip my head right, searching. At first, I think it’s coming from an enormous tree trunk that juts out of the water, its branches waving like thick fingers as they quiver in the current.
Then I hear a voice. Faint, so quiet I almost miss it, but unmistakably clear. “Help.”
“There’s someone holding onto that branch,” Pam says with a sharp exhale. “Come on, we have to get to them.”
I wonder if we can even get close enough—if we even have time.
As I stare at the horizontal tree trunk, I make out the shape of a woman in the water, clinging to one of the partially submerged branches.
Every few seconds, the current fishtails her body under, then sideways, like it’s trying to flick her away.
Is she holding on, or is she trapped there, her clothing caught on the tree?
The current funnels us forcibly toward the next rapid.
It’ll be impossible to hold the raft in one place for very long.
“We can’t stop,” Allie says, her voice rising in panic. “There’s no time. He’ll kill all of us!”
“We have to try,” Deborah insists.
“What if the raft gets stuck on one of those branches?” Allie demands. “Then we’re all dead.”
We need a decision, and we need it now.
In that moment, I know I need Parker. Whether it’s neurons firing or a figment of my subconscious or traumatic stress, I don’t care. I need him. Help me, I beg.
But all it takes is thinking of my husband’s solemn face to find my answer.
We can’t leave her behind. We just can’t.
She’s somebody’s Parker.
“Come on, all left! We can get her in the boat in time,” I say with far more confidence than I feel.
“He’s right behind us, though,” Allie chokes, but she’s rowing left like I said, driving her paddle hard into the water.
I risk a glance behind me in a desperate attempt to calculate how many seconds we have to spare.
To my surprise, Bryan actually hasn’t closed the gap between us by that much. He isn’t really rushing. Isn’t bent over at the waist, digging into the water frantically like we are.
He’s whistling. While moving steadily toward us, unrelenting and unhurried like some kind of Michael Myers on the water.
Like he’s … enjoying this.
Like he knows we’re doomed, no matter what we do next. And all he has to do is keep us in sight.