Somehow Heath managed to keep the straw in his mouth, but during the struggle, it filled with water and was useless as a snorkel. He tore the dead bat from his hair, removed the straw from his lips, breached the surface, and spit the water out in a vertical spout, like a whale. In the few seconds he was above the water, he glimpsed the vastness of the attack. The swarm of bats was so thick that only slim shards of sky were visible through their collected mass. Most of them stayed above the river, but some of the bolder bats were strafing dangerously close to the surface. He killed two or three simply by splashing hard in their flight path.
He saw someone floating face down, drifting in the current. A dozen bats were crawling across the person’s back, using their twiggy arms as crutches. They were stabbing their victim’s skin with their ugly faces. He caught glimpses of identification…a tanned human leg maybe. A scrap of cloth. But that was all. It was too risky to stay above the surface any longer. He ducked back under just as another bat swooped in for his eyes.
Who was that? His mind raced. Molly? Floaties? They were the most likely to panic and surface prematurely. What if it was Emily? Please let her be okay. He had to know.
He took a long drag on his straw, capped the other end with his fingertip, and turned his head so that his left ear pressed into the slimy film of algae covering the rocks on the riverbed. He could see Dunbar easily enough, even though Heath was churning up silt with every twist of his body. His chunky friend was resting motionless, corpselike, beneath his rock. He made it look effortless, like Houdini. If it wasn’t for the fact that the straw was still planted erect in his mouth, Heath would have thought him dead. How Dunbar was able to stay so sunken, he had no idea. He had to question the adage that muscle weighs more than fat. Heath couldn’t see past Dunbar. He wished he’d thought to position himself next to Emily on the opposite side of Floaties, but hindsight is twenty-twenty.
Heath felt something cold and slimy wriggling against his armpit. Something trying to burrow. He lifted his head until his chin was pressed against his left shoulder. He saw a flicker of a mottled, dark-tipped tail wriggling under his arm and naturally assumed it was a trout. His instinct was to leap up out of the water, but he forced himself to stay calm. The fish would eventually swim away, but the bats would kill him for sure. Other than tickling his side, he knew the trout was harmless. Then, to his horror, the thing he thought was a fish crawled up between the rock on his chest and his chin and looked him right in the eye. It was a Pacific giant salamander, and a big one, maybe thirteen inches long. Heath knew they were in the Skagit River system, but had never seen one before. It was almost a folktale in these parts, like Bigfoot or a decent phone signal. If he’d come across a giant salamander before everything went nuts, it would have been the highlight of his summer—something to write home about, for sure. But flat on his back underwater, the king-size amphibian crawling brazenly toward his face was the cherry on his terror sundae. He’d forgotten most of what he’d read about the species, but not the scary stuff. Giant salamanders could growl like dogs. Bite like them, too—it could tear Heath’s lip off and swallow it down. And when faced with capture they could emit a toxic secretion that would burn his skin. It wasn’t rabid—amphibians were immune to the virus—but it was still notorious for being an aggressive hunter, the number one predator living in the river. He had no choice but to let it explore his face. Heath tucked his lips inside his mouth, just in case they looked too much like delicious earthworms. The salamander bumped its rounded snout against the straw, then tilted its head and wrapped its mouth around it. It jerked on the straw and for a few seconds the creature and Heath engaged in the strangest tug-of-war in history. Heath knew that if he lost, he’d be without his source of air, so he held his breath and bit down hard on the plastic tip, locking it in place. After a few tries to steal the straw, the salamander decided it wasn’t worth the effort. It quickly lost interest and swam away. Heath had never been so happy to be deemed boring.
With the massive amphibian no longer blocking his view, he could once again make out the shapes of the bats as they crossed over the river—shadowy blades slicing the rays of the noon sun, which hovered bright and watery overhead. The effect was comparable to blinking rapidly while staring at a lightbulb. It was night attacking day.
And then, like a black veil yanked off a blue canvas, the bats were gone.
Heath stayed submerged for twenty Mississippis just to be safe. When he was positive the bats were gone, he sat up slowly, wiped the water off his face, and dumped the rock over the side of his lap. He was the third up—Will and Cricket had risen before him.
“You both okay?” he sputtered.
“Yeah.” Cricket nodded.
“We’re fine,” said Will.
Theo and Molly popped up simultaneously like marionettes with their strings entangled. Molly was sobbing hysterically, frightened not to death, but as close as a little girl should ever have to come to that.
Emma came up next. She spit her straw out into her open palm and peered down into the water beside her. To Heath’s relief, a grin spread across her face. Emily rose beside her, alive and well. Floaties followed. He sat hunched over in the river and cried like a baby while Emily rubbed his back to console him. Floaties kept repeating the same words over and over between heaving sobs: “I’d rather be buried alive.”
Dunbar surfaced effortlessly, like Dracula from his coffin.
That left…
Sylvester’s body was bobbing in the current twenty feet down the river, snagged on an anchored piece of driftwood.
Molly started screaming, and it was a good long while before she was able to stop.
While the rest of the group fished for arrows and Floaties tossed rocks at the coyote shredding his lifejacket—it had washed up on shore—Will, Theo, and Heath freed Sylvester from the dead branch.
Will insisted they perform a visual autopsy. “This is our chance to get a close-up look at the Flash. Let’s do it before the girls come back.”
“Stop being such a creep,” Theo said, disgusted by the suggestion that they treat their dead friend like a science experiment.
Sylvester was a human being, so it felt irreverent to examine him in the same way Marshall had handled the porcupine in the health center. But Heath agreed with Will. They weren’t exactly CSI detectives, but they might learn something useful. “Hurry up and get it over with.”
Outvoted, Theo fumed. “Try not to enjoy yourself too much, Stringer.”
Will went to work. After scraping the bat droppings off Sylvester with a piece of rigid bark, they looked him over closely. The most evident sign of the Flash was the dark purple, nearly black, tendrils covering every inch of his skin. They looked like veins that had risen to the surface, similar to blood poisoning, only much more prominent and densely woven.
“Dilated pupils,” Heath said, holding Sylvester’s eyelids open. “Same as the porcupine.”
“No one should have to die like this,” said Theo. “Bats. It’s just not right.”
“He should have stayed underwater.” Will slipped the quiver from Sylvester’s body and passed it to Theo. “Here. Wash the guano off of it. And don’t let any get on you. I can’t remember if rabies can be spread through contact with feces. Probably not, but better safe than dead.”
Theo stared at the quiver balanced on Will’s fingertips, as though it were a bomb. But reluctantly he took it anyway.
“What was he thinking?” Heath said, shaking his head. “Why’d he do it?”
Will lifted Sylvester’s sopping shirt. “Who knows? Probably panicked.”
The body was covered with dozens of tiny puncture wounds, raw and seeping runny blood.
“I didn’t know bat colonies could get that big,” Heath said.
“In Texas they do. They all migrate in from different parts of Mexico to breed,” said Will. “There’s a place called Brack
en Cave between Austin and San Antonio that holds twenty million of them. The swarm that attacked us isn’t natural for the Cascades. We were attacked by a super-colony. Multiple colonies joining into one big one, like Bracken Cave.”
“Why would they do that?”
“Probably because there’s no point in sticking to territories anymore,” Will surmised. “Now that they’re rabid, stuff like social groupings and food supplies don’t matter. Like all the other mammals in the forest right now besides us, their only goal is to kill every human they find. They’re more effective as a super-colony, like locusts attacking crops.”
Will lifted Sylvester’s right arm out of the water.
“He never let go of the bow,” Heath said sadly as he watched Will pry the weapon from the dead boy’s grip.
Theo returned with the cleaned quiver. Dunbar accompanied him, holding an arrow straight out in front of his chest. There was a dead bat impaled on the end of it. “We found a couple of these bat-kabobs in the water,” Dunbar informed them.
“Well, now we know why Sylvester was killed,” Will said. “He was trying to be a hero. Stupid.”
“Man, he was a good shot,” said Theo, and he and Dunbar left to show the bat to the girls.
“Not Molly!” Heath called after them.
“Yeah, Sylvester had skills. Too bad about him,” Will said, slinging the bow around his own neck, claiming it as his prize. “We could have used him.”
Heath was instantly furious. “Is that why you pulled the life vest off of Floaties? You wanted him alive in case you needed him, too, at some point? He is pretty strong. Maybe his muscles would come in handy along the way. He could move a log out of your path or keep Emma from pounding your face in. When you say we needed Sylvester, don’t you really mean you needed him?”
Will’s eyes were cold, the color of ice in the sunlight. Equally frigid was his reply. “Don’t ever assume you know my motives. Not with the noisemakers and not with Floaties. You’re not up to it.” He waded away toward the arrow collectors leaving Heath alone with warmer company—Sylvester’s corpse. Heath thought for a moment, then hollered after him, “We’re people, Will, not chess pieces!” He received no response, not even a glance back. Either Will hadn’t heard him, or he didn’t care. It didn’t take a genius to determine which it was.
It was near four o’clock (judging by the sun, since Dunbar’s dunk in the river had rendered the only watch in the group useless) when they decided to push on. At Dunbar’s insistence they discussed trying to haul Sylvester’s body to Granite Falls, but in the end they agreed it was too dangerous. The effort would slow them down and the risk of not making it to town before dark was too great. Instead they secured him to the branch as best they could and said their good-byes. It was rough. Even Dunbar, who had called Sylvester a show-off at the archery range, couldn’t help but tear up during Emma’s eulogy. She was probably the last one who should have spoken on the group’s behalf. Besides Will, she was the coldest cube in the freezer, a comparison Heath’s dad used to describe the charge nurse who kicked visitors out of Heath’s room not a second past eight. Emma’s speech was clunky and quick, but still surprisingly touching, not the stoic words Heath had expected to hear. Emma showed she had a heart after all.
“He was a good dude,” Cricket said when she’d finished. “Really cool.”
“Amen,” Heath added in agreement.
Heath tented Sylvester’s cold hands over his still chest. Molly and Emily picked some flowers—purple foxgloves—growing tenaciously from a fissure in a boulder in the river and weaved them into his stiff fingers.
“We’ll tell the authorities in Granite Falls where we left him,” said Dunbar. “When everything goes back to normal, they’ll come get him.”
Back to normal. What was normal? Heath tried to remember. They’d gone maybe two miles, less than halfway there, and they’d already lost Sylvester. Dunbar was acting like someone—the mayor of Granite Falls, maybe—could flip a switch and it would be like nothing ever happened. Like the lights coming back on after a blackout. No, he thought. Things would never be normal again. Not for them, at least. Definitely not for Heath. The pain was back, gnawing at his body. He’d known worse, but, coupled with the onset of fatigue, it was making walking difficult. They still had at least three miles to go. For the first time since starting their journey, he questioned his ability to finish it, even if there were no more animal attacks to contend with.
Quilt Face growled hungrily from the shore. Heath met her determined gaze with his own. One mile. You were supposed to pursue for one mile and then give up. That’s what the expert on the nature show said. But that’s not your plan, is it? You’re coming all the way to Granite Falls, so you can kill us on the verge of rescue. But we’ve got something in common, Quilt Face—an early expiration date. Neither of us has much time left, do we? So if it comes down to it, then you and I are going to end each other’s misery. Better to finish things up on the shore of Granite Falls than to wither away in some hospital bed in Seattle.
The group waded south without much conversation. They were too tired to talk. The water was getting deeper, the effort to push through it was wearing them down.
Heath expected Dunbar to break the silence, but instead it was Floaties with a surprising plea.
“I have to learn how to swim.” Floaties blurted the words out like they were dirt in his mouth. “If I don’t, I’ll drown, I know it. Can someone please teach me?”
Happy little buzzards, eating up the dead.
Chewing with their mouths full, until they’re nice and fed.
They swoop right in and feast, these uninvited guests.
Leaving bones and wallets, and nothing for the rest.
“HE’S NOT EVEN TRYING!” Will said, throwing his hands up in surrender, catapulting droplets of water onto the group. When the kids came upon a chest-deep pool in the river, they formed a circle around Floaties and started his swimming lesson. Will had insisted he could teach anyone to swim like a fish in five minutes, which was all the group was prepared to allot for it, since getting to Granite Falls by dark was vital. But Floaties was proving to be a difficult student, and the lesson had run into serious overtime. Will tried to instruct him on the Olympics-regulation breaststroke, but that was a complete disaster. Floaties just leaned over until his chest was touching the water, rotated his arms like a double-sided windmill, then asked if he was swimming. He looked ridiculous.
“Not really, buddy,” Heath said, trying not to laugh and hurt his feelings. “You kinda gotta get your head wet, for starters.”
“It’s still wet from before,” Floaties replied. He was serious.
“No, I mean you have to put your face in the water.”
“This is getting annoying!” Emma nagged. “Will, you said you could teach him in five minutes. It’s been close to half an hour now.”
“I suppose you could do better?” Will scoffed.
“No, and that’s my point,” Emma said. “It’s hopeless. We can’t spend all day stuck between camp and town. Just teach him the freakin’ doggie paddle and let’s move on.”
“The doggie paddle isn’t really swimming, Em,” Emily said. “It’s more like…crawling on water.”
“Teach it to me! That sounds perfect!” Floaties pleaded. He rationalized, “How hard can the doggie paddle be if he can do it?” then he pointed toward a grimy border collie that had joined the shore party.
Heath agreed with Emily. “I think we better teach you something more advanced. Just in case.”
“Can I try?” Molly asked. Up to this point she’d been like someone on the subway, traveling in the same direction but keeping to herself. Heath had never noticed her before the livery because she was one of the junior campers and had a different schedule than he did. Uncle Bill came up with a naming system—kids Molly’s age were called Chicks (both the boys and girl
s hated this title, but for different reasons), and older campers like Heath were called Fledglings, which Heath thought was stupid because in the bird world, chicks and fledglings were basically the same thing. Molly couldn’t have been more than ten, the baby of the group.
“Where’d you come from, chicken nugget?” Will seemed ruffled by Molly’s offer. “I didn’t know you could speak. Thought all you could do is whimper and cry.”
“Be nice,” Emily reprimanded him.
“Let her try,” Emma insisted. “She can’t do much worse than you, Will.”
He directed his ire at the little red-headed girl. “If I can’t get through his thick head, how the heck can you? If you think you can pull off a miracle,” Will grumbled, fed up with it, “then be my guest.”
Molly positioned herself right in front of her student, as if initiating a dance. She was shorter than Cricket; the waterline was at her chin. “First things first. Blowing bubbles.”
Will snickered.
“Ignore him,” Molly told Floaties. “The hardest part of learning how to swim is putting your face in the water. This will help.” She dipped down until her mouth was below the waterline, then she blew bubbles, little ones that popped on the surface. She came up, took a breath, and smiled. “Fish farts.”
“Okay, that doesn’t seem so hard,” Floaties agreed, then mimicked Molly.
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