The Book of Kell

by Amy Briant

  Myriad stones, pebbles and loose dirt made the footing treacherous. The bare rock was cracked and weathered by eons of exposure and who knew how many earthquakes. A fissure as big as my hand was easily crossed, but gave me the shivers as I peered into its dark depths.

  If the climb up the other side had been dangerous, the way down was doubly so. We resorted to cautiously sliding on our butts. East was maybe ten feet ahead of me, which meant she’d be in the path of any rocks I dislodged. I eased up even further to avoid that.

  “Be careful,” I called to her. This time, she was the one who didn’t bother to answer, merely flapping a dismissive hand at me without looking back.

  “Slow down, East! You’re going to start a slide.”

  “Do you want to get down there or not?” she yelled back.

  She’d apparently elected herself team leader for the day in the wake of my meltdown. Which would have been great if she knew what the hell she was doing.

  “East, stop! You’re going to bring the whole damn hillside down! Wait for me on that ledge, all right?”

  She had almost reached an outcropping on the slope, a brief flattening of the otherwise sharply descending terrain. What lay beyond and below it was not visible to me from my higher position, but we were still well above the valley floor. I moved down a few inches and then a few inches more. Easy does it, Gran said in my brain. Or maybe it was Gabriel.

  Irritatingly, East didn’t pause on the ledge as I’d asked, but turned her head to glance back for my reaction. Laughing at my expression, she scooted herself over the edge without looking.

  She vanished.

  She screamed.

  Chapter Forty

  The End Of The Beginning

  “East!” I shouted, abandoning all caution and scrambling down to the ledge as fast as I could. Pebbles and larger stones came rolling down with me, but I got to the ledge without setting off the avalanche I’d been so worried about just a moment ago.

  Once there, I saw, to my horror, what she had not. The slope beneath was fractured by a large fissure, a crevasse four to five feet wide. There was no sign of East. She must have slid right into the chasm, unable to stop her forward momentum after she pushed off the ledge. Even more alarming than her sudden disappearance was the total lack of sound. Her one heart-stopping scream had cut off abruptly. Had she fallen in? Could someone—or something—have attacked her? I listened fiercely as I cut my eyes around in all directions, but heard only the wind. Saw only rocks and dirt.

  I climbed carefully off the ledge, then wormed forward on my belly, my body at nearly a forty-five-degree angle. I was praying to every deity my various ancestors had imagined that the hole wasn’t deep. Maybe she was just winded. Maybe she wasn’t dead at the bottom of a bottomless pit.

  I peeked over the side, still wary that some enemy other than gravity awaited me.

  “East!” I yelled, relieved to at least see her. And only her. The crevasse narrowed as it deepened. She appeared to be wedged in pretty good about twenty feet down. Better than a bottomless pit, but not much. This was bad. Really bad. I fought back the panic churning in my stomach and tried to breathe, tried to remember everything I’d been taught.

  “East!” I tried again. She wasn’t moving or responding. I didn’t see any blood. She might have been knocked out by the fall. I looked around me despairingly. The barren hillside was markedly devoid of handy resources. No tree limbs, no vines. The sides of the crevasse were fairly smooth—no handholds there. I had no way to climb down. I could jump down there, but I didn’t see how that would help either one of us get back up, even if I somehow managed to land without injuring myself or East. Resources—I had my gear and the clothes on my back.

  East stirred below. I saw an arm move slightly, then her head. That was good.

  She screamed. Not good. It was a scream of pain, not fright. Somehow, I could tell the difference. I was in agony as well. I had to help her—had to. But how?

  She was moaning now, sobbing.

  “East,” I said, just loud enough for her to hear.

  She jerked her head up to look at me which clearly hurt. A lot. She gasped and tried to clutch her right leg. I presumed it was broken.

  This is bad, my brain said unhelpfully. Shut up, I told it. Think about resources. My gear…and hers. As luck would have it—dreadful, devastating luck—she had the pack with the cord in it that day. I thought there was about thirty feet left—but how to get it from her to me? And did I really think I could pull her out? One step at a time, I told myself sternly.

  “East, the cord’s in your pack. Can you reach it?”

  The look she gave me was stark and full of fear. Pain was etched in every line of her tear-streaked face.

  “I think my leg is broken,” she said. “Christ, it hurts so bad.” Her breath was coming short and fast.

  “I know,” I said. “Don’t worry, I’m going to get you of there.”

  Or die trying.

  “Try to slow down your breathing, East. I know it hurts. Come on, I’ll breathe with you.”

  We tried some shallow, measured breaths. It took a while, and I hated how much it was hurting her, but she managed to get the cord out of the side pocket of the pack.

  “I don’t think I can throw it to you,” she said weakly, shading her eyes with her hand as she stared up at me.

  I’d been busy up top as well, cutting my flannel shirt into long, thin strips with my knife. I finished tying them all together to make a rope of my own. I attached a small rock to one end to keep it steady and lowered it down to East.

  “Tie the end through your coiled cord and then I can lift it up to me.”

  “And then what, Kell?” Her voice was flat. Bleak. The full measure of her calamity seemed to be sinking in.

  “I’ll figure out a way to secure it up here, lower one end back down to you, you tie it around you and I’ll pull you up.”

  Great plan, but what the hell was I going to secure it to? There was no handy tree or boulder. One look at East’s face told me she knew that too.

  Not to mention I seriously doubted I could pull her up. I’d heard of people exhibiting superhuman strength in emergency situations, but I felt weak. Feeble. I was on a steep downward slope, with nothing to brace against, and slippery footing. East weighed at least twenty pounds more than I did. Jesus, I wouldn’t pull her out, she’d pull me right in. The panic surged into my chest, like acid, but ice cold.

  Stop it. One step at a time. I scanned the hillside again, desperately searching for something, anything that could help.

  But there was nothing.

  “Kell.”

  “Hang on, East, I’m gonna get you out of there. Just give me a minute to figure this out.”

  “You can’t.”

  I looked down at her.

  “We both know you can’t,” she said simply.

  “You shut up!” I yelled at her angrily. “I’m getting you out of there and that’s that.”

  “Kell,” she said almost gently. “You should go. Go on to Segundo. It’s okay.”

  “It is not fucking okay! I’m not going anywhere, all right, East? Just let me figure this out. We’ve been through worse, right?”

  That wasn’t technically true, but I needed to keep her talking. Keep her positive. You lose heart in a survival situation and the odds against you go way, way up. You never quit, Gran said in my head. Never.

  “We’re never giving up,” I said out loud to myself, to Gran, to East. “Now tie my line through the cord. We’re doing this, East. We’re a team.”

  She laughed or sobbed or maybe both, I couldn’t tell. But she sent the cord up to me.

  “Okay, that’s good. You’re doing great. Just give me a minute to think, okay?”

  I shut my eyes and concentrated. I could dig a hole and…what? Rappel down there somehow and…Run down to the valley, find something useful and run back up—but she didn’t have that kind of time. She must have already been going into shock, her b
ody trying to protect her from the trauma of her injuries. I could hear her moans and sobs and the scrape of fabric on the rock walls as she struggled with the pack, probably trying to find a more comfortable position.

  She needed a doctor. If I got her out—when I got her out, I corrected myself—we were fucked. If she couldn’t travel and I couldn’t leave her…I blanked my mind to all of that and ignored everything that wasn’t helpful—like the horror and distress threatening my self-control.

  “Kell,” she said in a small voice. I opened my eyes and looked down at her. She smiled up at me. So beautiful, even then.

  The gun was in her hand. At her temple.

  “I love you,” she said. And pulled the trigger.

  Chapter Forty-one

  The Seagull

  I sat by the crevasse for the rest of the day and into the night. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t think. My bones, my muscles, my brain had all forgotten how.

  I didn’t look down.

  A cold, drenching rain passed through shortly before sunrise, bringing me out of my bewildered, stuporous grief and rousing me to fresh waves of misery. I was freezing, for starters, shaking from head to toe. Starving, but at least the rain let me quench my thirst. Tired, so goddamn tired. Heartbroken and shattered as the pinkish gray light of dawn slowly revealed the world to me again. I felt old—I was seventeen when I got on the bus, but I was much, much older now.

  I had the same choices as the day before—give up or go on. It really didn’t matter. Either way, the clock was just about all ticked out. I hadn’t eaten since…I couldn’t remember. I had maybe one more day’s worth of walking in me, if that. It was hard to think, hard to focus. Hard to care anymore. Without East, my journey was done. We’d reached the end of our road together. How could I leave her now?

  The rainstorm moved on just as quickly as it had come. The gray clouds sailed on serenely to their next destination. The sky above me was clearing to a pure pale blue.

  A lone white bird soared overhead—a seagull, cruising with the air currents first this way, then that.

  Get up, said a voice in my head. I couldn’t tell if it was Gran or Gabriel or East this time. Maybe it was my own. It was just a voice, but it wouldn’t stop. Get up. Go.

  A hot tear trickled down my face as I struggled to stand. My joints were stiff, my voice broken and hoarse from all the screaming I’d done since she left me.

  “I gotta go, East,” I said quietly as I painfully donned my pack. Go, the voice agreed.

  I took a big breath and leaped over the abyss that had taken my girl. I paused on the other side for one more moment. I looked up, not down, watching the white bird glide.

  “I love you too,” I said finally.

  And then I walked down the hill into the burnt-out valley. There was no creek. Just ash. What did it matter? I staggered onward. One more hill to climb and maybe then I could lie down and sleep forever. The rasp of my breathing was the only sound besides my footsteps. My feet kept moving, shuffling mechanically forward. One more step. One more. I didn’t know if it was hours or minutes that had passed when I reached the foot of the hill on the far side of the valley.

  Looking up hurt my eyes with the sky so bright and blue. Why I was even bothering to climb this hill when every step was painful, every inhale a knife in my chest? But something deep inside simply would not let me stop. Not yet. Walking was easier than thinking. There wasn’t as much ash on this hillside as it was all rock. No dirt, no vegetation, just bare, gray stone.

  But it was steep. Panting, I dropped to my hands and knees as dizziness overcame me, little black dots once again swarming my vision. I was close, so close to the top. The black dots withdrew. I tried crawling a few feet. The dots returned. Stop, breathe, crawl.

  It was no good. I had to rest, at least for a few minutes. I wrestled out of the pack and sat with my back against a boulder. There wasn’t much of a view, just the fire-ravaged valley. I averted my eyes from East’s hill. The top of my hill was only a few feet above my head. I glanced up and saw what had not been visible before. Green. The waving tops of a few green tendrils of the most beautiful grass I’d ever seen. The steep and rocky incline must have stopped the fire. Green on the other side meant life. Green meant maybe one more day, if not more.

  I hadn’t even had time to stand up when the second miracle occurred. Faintly, but distinctly, came the small but unmistakable sound of someone clearing his or her throat.

  Wait—do mountain lions clear their throats? Do bears?

  I wondered abruptly if I was hallucinating all this—if there was no grass, no throat-clearing, just me face-down in the bitter cold ash at the bottom of this hill, ready to rejoin the earth from which I’d sprung. I looked at my hands. They were shaking and scratched and dirty—but they looked real. I took a deep breath and slowly, silently crept up the final few feet to the summit. I peeked over the edge.

  The ocean. Whitecaps and dark blue swells, a quarter mile away. It looked cold and turbulent. A winter sea.

  Beneath me the green hillside gently sloped to an off-white beach where people were moving about at the water’s edge. Looked like a work crew, gathering food. I saw no buildings or encampment, no sign that they lived here. A young guy slumped under a tree halfway down, fidgeting. Every thirty seconds or so, he would glance around in a half-hearted attempt to be vigilant. He looked familiar.

  Suddenly I knew him—Burroughs! The butterfly-chasing kid from the Settlement, my erstwhile baseball pal. I could have told them not to put him on sentry duty. That kid had the attention span of a three-year-old.

  And then I was running, running down the hillside. The people on the beach—one stood out. A young woman with long dark hair.

  “Hey!” shouted a startled Burroughs as I shot past him like a deer.

  The young woman on the beach stopped, turned, put a hand to her forehead to better see.

  My mind was a jumble of random words and images, each like a separate jolt to the brain with each jarring footstep.

  Gran.

  Nancy.

  Me, the freak, the outcast.

  East. My whatever-she-was.

  Mr. Giovanni and the Aptitudes list with “Messenger” written next to my name.

  Burroughs was still yelling behind me, but I didn’t care. My brain was clearing as I ran faster and faster. I wasn’t a kid anymore. I wasn’t the same person who got on the bus in October. I didn’t know everything, but I knew my life had to be my choice.

  The young woman on the beach was running now too. Running up a path to meet me.

  Gabriel.

  Then she was holding me tight, kissing my hair, saying my name over and over again, both of us crying like maniacs, I so filled with joy and relief and sorrow and fatigue I thought I might break in two.

  And over her shoulder, in the distance, beyond the surging deep blue of the Pacific, were the forbidding sheer cliffs of the west coast of Nevada. Where the earth had torn asunder from this island of California.

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