The group gazed over at the west bank in unison. The wolves were picking their paths across the shore carefully to avoid the sharp pieces of splintered shale and the broken bottles left behind by careless fishermen, yet somehow they seemed to keep their orange eyes glued to their prey in the river. Dollops of saliva would occasionally fall from their flexing jaws and plop on the rocks. They growled constantly. It was a subdued growl now, quieter, like the rumble of an engine idling. It had become the sound track of their journey toward town. The growling was punctuated occasionally by a whimper, always a reminder to Heath that the wolves were in horrible pain. So were the rest of the animals on the shore.
“I feel sorry for them,” Heath said.
“Yeah, boohoo.” Floaties rubbed invisible tears from his eyes. “You know who I feel sorry for? All of those dead kids back at camp, and the ones trapped in the main lodge, if they’re not dead already, too.”
“The animals are sick,” Heath said. “The disease attacks their brains. It’s not their fault. Do you have a dog at home?”
“Sure,” Floaties said. “A sheltie named Corker. Good dog.”
“Barkly was a good dog, too,” Heath reminded him.
Floaties let that sink in. “Okay, I get it. I’ll knock off the hating, but just to be clear, I’m rooting for us, not them.”
“Know your enemy,” Will said, only Heath wasn’t sure who or what he was referring to. In Will’s case, he guessed it could be just about everyone. And it didn’t escape Heath’s attention either that Theo glanced over at Floaties right after Will spoke.
The chatter picked up from there, but most of it came from a single source, Dunbar the Question King: “If a plant like the Venus flytrap ate meat from a rabid animal, would the plant get rabies, too? What would happen if a dolphin got the virus since they live in water? What about other animals? Would they die from fear of their own pee?”
That last question was pretty stupid, but it got Heath thinking. He doubted the animals following them would be urinating much since they were refusing to drink and replenish themselves. If the Flash was similar to regular rabies in that regard, the animals should start to slow down and eventually die of dehydration. Worst case scenario, they could try waiting them out in the river until then. Unlike their situation in the livery, they had plenty of fresh water, and probably food, provided they were willing to get a little creative. How long would it take to outlast them? A few days at the most? But he doubted it would come to that. They’d find help in Granite Falls.
When Dunbar asked if the group thought a camel would be afraid of its own hump, since it’s really just a built-in water tank, Floaties reached his breaking point.
“Would you shut up already? Man, how many questions can one kid have inside of him?”
“Loads more,” Dunbar promised.
“Yeeesh, being in the river with you is like being stuck next to the guy on the plane who talks to you the whole flight. The only way to get away from either of you is to jump out and die.”
Heath hid a smile. Floaties may be a jerk, he thought, but the kid had a point.
“I don’t know what your problem is,” Dunbar said. “It’s not like I’m asking you questions.”
“That’s because you already know my answers: shut up, shut up, and shut up.”
“Figures.” Dunbar sniffed. “I’m sure you’ve got a lot to hide.”
“I know what you’re trying to do,” Floaties snorted. “Reverse psychopathy.”
“Reverse psychology, you mean,” Emily corrected.
“Whatever. I’m not falling for it. Go ahead and ask me a question.”
Heath and Emily glanced at each other and tried not to laugh. Poor Floaties. Dunbar’s reverse psychology seemed to have worked just fine.
“Okay.” Dunbar thought for a moment. “This is what I want to know. Why would you be best buddies with a butt-munch like Thumper?”
“Dunbar!” Emma snapped. “That was a rude question!”
“What? Why?” asked Dunbar, turning pink.
“Seems like a reasonable question to me,” Theo said with surprising resentment in his voice.
“You’re not supposed to talk bad about someone who just”—Emily paused before finishing—“died.”
“It’s all right. I’ll answer his stupid question.” Floaties took a few seconds to assemble his response, then said, “I knew Thumper—wait, it’s not right to call him that now that he’s gone. His name was Renny. If we’re gonna talk about him, we’ll call him Renny, okay?”
The others agreed.
“I sort of knew Renny from back home. We weren’t friends or anything growing up, but when we were both sent off to Camp Harmony that first summer years ago, he found out my dad was in jail, same as his. They were in for very different reasons. Mine robbed a liquor store. His dad got drunk and plowed his car through a school crosswalk. A bunch of kids died.”
“That’s horrible,” Emily gasped.
Heath was stunned. Will knew why Renny’s dad was in prison and had used that information against him like a choke chain earlier that afternoon. Now that Heath had the whole story he felt pretty low. He’d rather have been Thumper’s runner all summer than take advantage of such a tragic situation. Was there any line Will wouldn’t cross? He was afraid they’d eventually find out. Knowing how Will had used the information to curb Thumper was just more evidence for his case against Will and the noisemakers. He vowed to keep a close eye on him.
“It was bad,” Floaties agreed. “Renny’s dad got sober in prison, but the whole town hates him now. They hated Renny, too. I think people resented him for being alive when the kids his dad ran over weren’t. Maybe they wished Renny’d died in their place. It wasn’t fair, but that’s the way a lot of people are. I guess they got their wish today.”
“People can be so cruel,” Emma said, her eyes brimming with tears.
“Yeah, they can be. Renny figured I’d relate to what he was going through.” Floaties thought back. “I couldn’t though, not really. It was different for my family. People forgave my dad. Some people in our church even petitioned for his early release. They wrote letters to the judge saying that he was basically a good guy who was desperate to keep food on the table, which was true. What Renny’s dad did…people don’t forget…or forgive. You’re right, Dunbar. Renny wasn’t a nice guy to most people, but that’s because most people weren’t nice to him.”
“That’s a sad story,” Theo murmured. “But it doesn’t excuse the way you two went around camp making life miserable for the smaller kids who were too weak to fight back.” Something about Floaties was drawing hostility like a magnet from Theo. Heath had a feeling he knew what it was, and it was probably the reason that he was staying as far away from Floaties as possible without going ashore.
“Leave him alone!” Emma said sharply. “You too, Dunbar! Whatever happened before today is history. We need to get along now. You asked the question and he answered. Let it go!”
“No, let them keep talking,” Floaties told her. “The animals go for the noisy ones first, remember?”
“Har, har. Okay, then,” Dunbar said. “I’ll get off your case. But I have one more question. For all of you.”
“Dunbar…” Heath said, angling for some peace. “Maybe you should give it a rest with the questions, okay?”
“Well, no one else has asked this one, and it seems pretty important.”
“Fine.” Heath sighed. “Shoot.”
Dunbar stopped wading. “What do we do if we get to Granite Falls, and everyone there is dead?”
The question rattled them. Heath wondered why it had never occurred to any of them before that Granite Falls might have been attacked, too. If the rabies virus was in the air, it stood to reason that the wind might have carried it into town. Or maybe, for all they knew, the virus came from town. Should Granite Falls pr
ove unsafe, how far would they have to continue on down the river? Did the mild-mannered Dray eventually rejoin its source, the much wider, often turbulent, Skagit River, or did it run a course all the way to Puget Sound, thirty miles away, dumping out into the Pacific Ocean? Either scenario meant they’d eventually have to leave the Dray and take their chances on land. They had to cling to the hope that Granite Falls hadn’t suffered an outbreak and there were people there who could help them.
No one had the answer for Dunbar or even the time to think about it.
Heath noticed when Will looked up sharply, scanned the trees, and narrowed his eyes. Will’s whole body tensed. He’d obviously heard something, but all Heath picked up was the sound of rocks gargling water. Then he realized the wolves had stopped growling and were looking up, too, every muzzle aimed in the same direction as Will.
“Will?” Heath said. “What’s wrong?”
He didn’t reply. Instead, abruptly and without explanation, he burst through the water, charging at Floaties with a wild look in his eyes. Floaties lifted his arms to fend Will off, but Will slipped between them easily and before Floaties knew what had happened, Will had unsnapped the two plastic latches on the front of his life vest.
“What are you—? Knock it off!” Floaties grasped with wide-eyed fear that Will was trying to remove his life vest. He threw wild swings at Will, but Will was too fast and, Heath observed, too strong for Floaties to fend off. There was a lot of unexpected power in Will’s body. He yanked the life vest over Floaties head and fed it to the river.
“He’s trying to drown me!” Floaties screamed. The fear in his voice was palpable.
Will’s attack didn’t stop with the liberation of the life vest. He leapt on Floaties and dragged him forward onto his knees. The water splashed against Floaties’s neck and chin, and he screamed bloody murder. All his strength left him. Will shoved Floaties onto his back and his whole body disappeared beneath the river except for his head, which Will yanked above the surface.
The group, realizing that Will might actually drown Floaties, finally woke up and rushed to stop him.
He’s mad, Heath thought. Then, just as he tackled Will from behind, a chilling thought crossed his mind.
Humans aren’t immune to the virus, after all.
“When Darkness Falls Upon Us”
(Sung at Camp Harmony’s Agape supper ceremony)
When darkness falls upon us,
We’ll focus on the light,
And hide from gathered enemies,
Safe within plain sight.
“DON’T LET WILL BITE YOU!” Heath warned the others. “He’s like the animals now!” He tried to tie his cabinmate up by hooking his arms through Will’s, but both boys were slippery wet and Will escaped easily. Sylvester jumped on Will next, but Will grabbed the strap on Sylvester’s quiver and tugged it hard sideways, launching him headlong into Heath, knocking them both stupid. Several of the arrows spilled out of the quiver, and their fearless leader opted to chase them in the current rather than return to the fray.
Cricket, emitting a primal war cry, ran at Will but froze in check when Will held his palms straight out and yelled, “Stop! I’m not sick! Listen, you idiots!”
It was a faint squeaking sound, like thousands of pieces of Styrofoam rubbing together, coming from somewhere above and beyond the black tips of the pine tree canopy.
“What’s that noise?” Emily whispered.
Years ago, Heath’s doctor suggested to his parents they vacation “someplace warm” to celebrate their son’s renewed health. They took Heath to Mexico as part of a church mission team building a medical clinic in a poor, rural town. Every morning, Heath was roused from sleep by one of four things: the snarls of two dogs fighting; the mangled crowing of a sickly rooster; the drawn-out squeal of a pig being slaughtered for breakfast; or, most disturbingly of all, the dreadful chittering of bat swarms racing the sunrise to their caves. When you hear something like that, hundreds of flying rodents using screams as eyes, you never forget.
“Bats!” he shouted. “That sound is bats!”
The group tipped their faces to the sky.
“That can’t be,” said Emma, her eyes tracing the contour of the blue dome that lidded the forest. “Bats don’t fly in the daytime.”
“It’s the rabies,” Will explained, easing his weight off of Floaties, who was still too stunned to get up. “It tends to reverse their sleeping patterns. They’re almost here. We have to hide.”
“Hide where?” Emma turned a full three-sixty degrees in the water. “We can’t leave the river!” As if in protest of this statement, the wolves started a new chorus of howls.
Will pulled out the drinking straws he’d scavenged in the livery. “I know. We have to hide beneath it.” With a few quick yanks, he skinned the straws of their mushy paper wrappers then held them out to the group. “Snorkels,” he explained. His gift to Heath in the livery finally made sense.
“You—you predicted this,” Heath said, flabbergasted. He considered the kind of mind that could foresee something so random and realized that Will was operating on a whole different level than the rest of them, like Einstein or Batman.
“No, I prepared for this,” Will clarified, as if the distinction made a difference. The group stared at him in an accusing way that suggested he probably plotted this. “Chess, Heath,” Will said, his tone now pointedly defensive. “Play chess more and you’ll see bats coming, too.”
Heath doubted it. “All right then, we go underwater.” He pulled out his own straw, yanked it at both ends to extend the flexible, ribbed bend.
Sylvester took the arrows out of his quiver, mined the river for a large, egg-shaped rock, and slipped it into the opening. He adjusted the strap so that it ran across his chest, the quiver itself snug in the valley of his spine. “For ballast,” he explained.
“Good idea, boss.” Will searched around for a rock, too. “The rest of us can set them on our chests.”
“You mean he’s not trying to kill me?” Floaties asked piteously from his seat on the river bottom.
“Your life vest would’ve kept you afloat. You’d be exposed to the bats.” Heath plucked a good-sized chunk of shale from the bottom, sat down in the water, and clutched the rock to his stomach. “Will was right to get it off you. You wouldn’t have done it yourself. I know this isn’t going to be easy for you, buddy, but you have to submerge entirely. Even your head.”
“I can’t,” Floaties whimpered. Horrified, he stared at the water lapping at his chest as if it were writhing maggots.
Emily eased into a sitting position in the water next to him. The water line was parallel to her collarbone. She placed her hand on Floaties’s arm and squeezed it gently. “I’ll keep my hand right here the whole time,” she said. “You won’t be alone.”
Heath thought that was a bad idea, since the human body, full of gasses, had a tendency to float to the surface. He suspected they’d need every limb free and in motion to keep them anchored to the riverbed.
The Styrofoam squeaking sound was close now and deafeningly loud. The sheer number of bats required to make such a racket would dwarf the swarms Heath heard in Mexico. He realized the bats were probably a half mile away when Will first detected them, and in seconds they’d be breaking over the tree line.
Emma and Dunbar lugged rocks over to Emily and Floaties and set them carefully in their laps. Heath was pleased with the way the group was acting protectively toward one another. He’d experienced it himself when they’d saved him on the shore.
“Okay,” Floaties mumbled and placed the bendy end of the straw into his mouth. Emily did the same, and then together they slowly leaned back into the water. Emily went straight under until only her hand on Floaties’s arm and the top half of her straw were left exposed. Floaties went below at a much slower speed. When the river flooded his ear canals, he sniveled.
Floaties took a deep, sucking breath through the straw, then finished his recline. Heath watched for a few moments to make sure he didn’t resurface. He could hear Floaties hyperventilating through his straw, but thankfully he stayed down.
Theo and Molly must have submerged while Heath was watching Floaties. Good, he thought. Let Theo worry about the egg for awhile. Heath wiggled his rock up to his rib cage, rolled the straw on his tongue until it was in the middle of his lips, and waited. The others were submerged except for him and Will, a garden of straw tips sprouted up from the water between them.
When the bats fluttered over the tops of the pines, they came in numbers of thousands, flying in such tight ranks they reminded Heath of spilled ink seeping across the sky.
Heath and Will exchanged one final glance, and then Will melded into the river. Heath watched the bats spiral madly above, a living tornado, and then they plunged like a sword toward the Dray. He went under.
Even though most people referred to a group of bats as a swarm or a colony, there was another name for it, he remembered. Sometimes a group of bats is also called a camp. Heath processed the irony of that underwater as the blurry sun above was blotted out by a black cloud of roiling, screeching death.
The attack lasted maybe forty seconds. Heath had hoped that once his group was under the water, the bats would simply pass over. But he watched from beneath, eyes wide open, as a substantial piece of the massive swarm broke off and dive-bombed the Dray. He could hear the bats spearing the water with their echolocation, hunting for anything moving. They knew Heath and the others were there, he was sure of it.
Even with the stone weighing on his chest, Heath found it a challenge to stay in a supine position. No matter how hard he focused on staying glued to the bottom, some part of him would randomly buoy up toward the surface. When he felt a breeze on his kneecaps he seized them down so forcefully that the crown of his head broke the surface. Immediately he felt a shock of his hair twisted tightly and yanked by tiny grasping feet. A bat had landed on his head and tangled itself good. Heath plunged back down to the bottom, dragging the animal under with him. It thrashed against the side of his head, convulsing and flapping its paper-thin wings madly as it died of fear or drowning—he couldn’t be certain which—before it could find purchase in Heath’s flesh with its small fangs. He could hear the waterlogged howls of Quilt Face and her pack, either egging on the bats or in protest of being cheated out of their hard-earned kill.
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