22
We row until we gasp with the effort, until the darkness has all but swallowed the trailing gear boat.
With each stroke, I think again of Michael Myers. The way he walks, never runs—but always finds you. And unlike the town of Haddonfield, there’s nowhere to hide on this river. No exit, no cover.
None of us even bother suggesting that we abandon the raft to take our chances on shore.
For one thing, there is no shore—not really.
Not until we reach the next elusive beach, still miles downstream.
I have no doubt that Bryan is fully aware of exactly how long it will take us to reach that beach.
He knows this river better than us, and far better than he pretended.
Even if we did manage to pull the raft alongside the steep canyon and tie off the boat, then find footholds in the basalt, the rock walls soar above us like skyscrapers.
Only the mountain goats we saw the first day on the river stand a chance at survival up there.
The river is all we’ve got.
“Imani? Hey, are you still with us? Can you sit up?” Allie murmurs, momentarily breaking from rowing to crouch beside her where she’s huddled in the center of the raft. Pam, Deborah, and I keep rowing, trying to maintain the buffer of distance between our boat and Bryan’s.
Imani moans. “Yes … cold.”
“Stay with us,” I beg her. “Think about those boys you showed me on your phone. They need you to stay awake.”
“We need something to wrap that open wound at her elbow,” Pam begins, but Deborah is already unbuckling her life jacket and peeling off her tank top, wringing water from it.
Aside from her bra, it’s the only layer she has on, and I wince at the gooseflesh popping along the loose skin of her pale arms and back.
Above the hum of the current and the crickets calling down from the canyon ridges, I can hear teeth chattering.
I’m struck again by how woefully ill-prepared we are for the situation at hand.
The temperature is probably in the mid-fifties—warm enough for hypothermia to be slow, but cold enough that our soaked cotton pajamas are actively killing us.
On the water, miserably wet, in the dark—it feels like the dead of winter.
I take another shuddering breath and wonder how long we have until sunrise.
“What else can we do for Imani?” Allie asks.
“With the limited supplies we’ve got, there’s not much else we can do right now. She’s a rockstar, all things considered,” Pam reassures, but her steady voice is tinged with worry.
Imani smiles faintly but doesn’t open her eyes. I wince. How much blood has she already lost? It has to be a lot. The injury is catastrophic.
“Does anybody have anything dry at all?” I ask. Maybe we could at least warm her up.
“I think I might actually,” Allie says. She motions for Deborah to trade places with her.
Deborah digs in with her paddle while Allie leans over the back bench, rifling through the stack of life jackets and paddles.
“I wasn’t lying about not sleeping last night.
Nikki and I shared a tent, and we tried taking watches but we were fucking exhausted, and after a while …
” She makes an anguished moan. “We fell asleep. And yeah, I kept my dry bag packed … so I grabbed it as soon as the screams started.”
“I don’t get it.” Deborah smacks the paddle into the current. “So you really knew this was gonna happen, but you didn’t do anything to stop it?” she mutters, sounding like she’s on the verge of tears.
I glance back at Pam, who keeps her eyes lowered as she rips a strip off Deborah’s tank top and wraps it tight around Imani’s severed arm.
I bite the inside of my cheek hard. Deborah’s accusation seems overly harsh, but I don’t know what to say in response. None of us can turn back time now.
“I didn’t know this was gonna happen!” Allie finally whispers, her voice sharp.
“I was fucking terrified, because nobody would listen to me about the Camas Creek murders and all the weird shit going on. When I heard the screams, I had no idea what the hell was happening either. It was dark, and everybody was piling into that first raft, and then we weren’t sure whether it was Josh or Bryan—and everything went down so fast. I just tossed my bag back here and put my life jacket on and tried to get out of there.
” She’s crying hard now. “Here, I’ve—I’ve got two jacket shells in here—there’s pants with waterproof lining—”
I can barely understand her as she cries harder, pulling clothing from the dry bag and pushing them toward Pam and Imani. “I’m sorry, I’m so, so sorry. Maybe you’re right, and it is my fucking fault. I should have tried harder to—”
“No!” Deborah snaps, her own voice breaking at the edges. “God, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. I didn’t mean it. I’m just … my sister is …” She lets out a wail that would have sent me to my knees. Instead, she just keeps shoveling water.
In the center of the boat, Pam gently tugs Imani’s torn, wet pajama shirt over the woman’s head.
She replaces it with a thick windbreaker from Allie’s bag, smoothing the dry fabric over the woman’s shaking shoulders.
“You didn’t do anything wrong, Allie,” Pam says.
“And you’re the only reason we’ve got these dry clothes right now. ”
The slow current has pulled us to the center of the canyon on a steady line, so Deborah and I stop rowing long enough to grab the dry clothing that Allie offers, not bothering to turn away from each other as we change.
As I peel off my pajama bottoms, then pull on dry pants and a T-shirt, Deborah helps Imani up to the bench seat in the center of the raft and out of the sloshing pool of bloody water.
Pam’s corded tourniquet appears to have nearly stopped the bleeding.
That’s a relief, but there’s no question Imani is still in bad shape.
She needs far more help than a makeshift tourniquet and dry clothes can offer.
Even in the moonlight, her lips are blue, her skin sallow.
Her breaths are so shallow that she appears frozen, her wide eyes unblinking.
I peer into the dark coil of the river behind us, trying to catch a glimpse of Bryan.
When I squint, the bright green nose of his raft is still faintly visible in the distance, unhurried but unrelenting.
I can hear the whistling again, carrying across the water. Softer now, but the same nameless song, like a twisted death march.
I swallow back the terror and exhaustion trying to claw their way out of my mouth in the form of a whimper. How long can we outrun him? What’s going to happen when we reach the next rapid?
The thought alone nearly paralyzes me. I want to reach for Parker’s steady hand, want him to tell me what we should do next, but I already know the answer.
In this moment of calm in the river, we need to take inventory of what we have with us, consider what Bryan might be planning, and figure out how far we are from safety.
We need something that resembles a plan.
“Allie, what else do you have in that dry bag?” I ask. “And does anybody else have water or supplies with them?”
Suddenly realizing that my own water bottle is still rolling around at my feet, I toss it to Pam so she can give Imani a drink.
“I don’t have much else,” Allie says. “Some dry underwear … I have my water bottle. And one granola bar.”
Everyone else is quiet.
“Anyone know how far we are from the takeout—or how many Class-Four rapids there are between here and there?” I ask.
“Should be a whole bunch of Class Threes coming up,” Pam says tentatively, tucking a short strand of red hair behind one ear.
“We might be able to handle those on our own.” She shakes her head, like she doesn’t want to say the next part.
“Last night, I overheard the guides talking about the satellite phone and the drinking water situation. Josh said that if there was a catastrophic emergency, one of them could make it to the takeout in about twenty hours, if they didn’t make any stops. ”
My chest tightens. That amount of time might have sounded fast to me at one point. Now it sounds like an eternity. I can only imagine how it sounds to Imani.
Pam adds, “If I’m remembering right, the Class Fours … I’m pretty sure there are three of those left.”
I think back to the satellite phone. The potable water catastrophe.
Even the spilled cooler and spoiled food at the beginning of the trip.
I realize now that Bryan was probably the one responsible for each of those “accidents.” Not mistakes, but calculated moves to create chaos—and paint himself as a bumbling newbie—before delivering his deadly blows.
Even now, he’s toying with us, milking the chase.
A new spark of anger flashes through my fear. He must have been planning this for a while now, patiently plotting all of this suffering and death.
“Wh-why the fuck is he doing this?” Imani suddenly asks through chattering teeth, her voice thick with anguish. It’s a question I’ve barely had time to consider.
I look over my shoulder again, clocking the position of Bryan’s raft. It takes a few seconds for my eyes to find him this time, but then I catch the faintest glimpse of neon green, persistently trailing.
Nobody answers Imani’s question for a minute, but I realize we’re all looking to Allie—suddenly eager to hear her Camas Creek theories. Because this nightmare has to be connected to what happened there seven years ago. I believe that now. I just don’t know how it’s connected.
And if anybody has ideas, Allie does.
She opens her mouth to speak then closes it again tightly, shaking her head back and forth like she’s struggling with where to start.
After a few long seconds, she lets out a shaky exhale. Then she says, “My mind has been spinning all night. I didn’t think anybody would want to hear it, though.”
“Hear what?” I ask, dread filling my chest.
“I’m pretty sure I have an idea of what’s going on here,” she says slowly. “And it’s really, really bad.”