“I didn’t know. I knew the gun went off, but I didn’t know it hit him. I didn’t.” She buried her face in her hands and began to weep without inhibition.
Callie frowned in distaste and stared at Jack. “Well, that went well, Einstein. Perhaps we’ll nominate you for a Nobel Peace Prize.”
“I was trying to cover the main points quickly,” he muttered. “We’ve got to get back on the trail.”
“And now we’ll spend twice as long putting the group back together. Ever heard of ‘more haste, less speed’?” She stood, and spoke briskly. “Okay, listen up, you lot. Erica, stop blubbing. Rachel and Kain, you’ve got the wrong end of the pineapple, so stop calling Erica a murderer, and listen.” Everyone looked at her, even Erica, though she still sobbed quietly. She pulled Jack’s grungy hanky out of her pocket and started to wipe her face.
Callie gave a more detailed explanation of Erica’s story, one that covered motivations and feelings. Her embarrassment about the gambling debts. The uncertainty of how to admit she had the gun. The shock of the landslide and its aftermath.
A long silence followed, but Rachel’s expression had softened a little. “I guess I can see how you could get yourself into a mess like that.”
Erica shot her a thankful glance, and fresh tears began to well in her eyes.
“I can’t,” Kain said, his face hard. “We only have her word for how it happened. How do we know she didn’t shoot Adam on purpose?”
“It’s a reasonable question,” Callie said, her voice mild. “But then, why would she shoot Adam? He was our best asset, with all his wilderness skills. If I was going to cull this group, and I wanted to make it out of the wilderness alive, I wouldn’t start with Adam.”
“Maybe not,” said Kain, his voice silky and dangerous as he gave Erica a poisonous stare. “But you might start with Sharon.”
Rachel inhaled quickly. “Did you kill Sharon?” Her expression was agonized.
“No!” Erica said, desperate. “I swear to you, I’m not the one who killed Sharon. I tried so hard to save her. I did everything I could.” She gave Kain a hard stare. “But we could ask where you went that night, Kain.”
“Oh, what, so the little murderer wants to blame me now, does she?”
Erica stared at him, her expression intense. “Please look me in the eye and tell me you didn’t kill Sharon. Please Kain. I have to know. You went for a pee in the middle of the night, but you wore your gloves.”
He huffed. “So what? It was freezing that night.”
“I think that’s a weird thing for a guy to do, and Jack agreed with me.”
Don’t bring me into this. Jack cringed internally. But it was too late. Kain turned on him.
“Oh, so you’ve all been yarning round the campfire and deciding that good old Kain’s a murderer have you, just because he gets cold hands?”
Callie said, “Erica, why did you bring Jack into it? It was your idea, so own it. Don’t go making even more trouble between Kain and Jack. How are we going to keep this team moving if you stir them up like that?”
“I’m sorry,” Erica said. “I didn’t mean to…”
Callie turned to Kain. “What actually happened was that Erica mentioned it, because it had been playing on her mind, like lots of things are playing on our minds out here, and when she asked, Jack agreed that he probably would find it inconvenient to wear gloves when going for a quick slash in the middle of the night. Stop thinking you’re so important that we can’t stop talking about you. We’re all wondering about each other, and it’s making us crazy, which is exactly what Bryan wanted. So how about we stop fighting and suspecting each other, and get on and decide what we’re going to do next.”
There was a long pause while everyone readjusted their minds, and then Callie spoke again. “So, Scout, what did you find up the mountain?”
Kain stared at her for a long moment, his eyes steely, and then apparently relented, at least a little.
“It’s a hard climb,” he said, his voice flat and controlled. “Very hard for non-climbers carrying rucksacks. Past that cliff-edge we can see, there’s a fairly long section where we’ll need to sidle along a narrow ledge. I’ve been right along the ledge and you can get around the end of it onto a boulder field. Some hard scrambling there—pulling ourselves up by our arms, a lot of it. But once we get past that, I can see a section of that tussocky stuff, quite a large area, and I hope it should take us over into the next valley. Or at least give us somewhere reasonably flat to camp the night before we come back down, if we have to.”
He’d been looking at all of them during the speech—except, significantly, Erica—his eyes flicking from one to the other, but now his stare settled on Jack.
“So, what’s your recommendation?” Jack said.
“I don’t make recommendations. I’ve learned that much.”
Rachel frowned, and Erica stared at her feet, but Callie spoke up.
“Oh, stop being such a grump, Kain.” She sounded irritable. “We’re all just doing the best we can.” She looked from him to Jack and back again.
Kain redirected his stare to her, and remained silent.
Jack sighed and rubbed his face with both hands. He felt constrained, as though he couldn’t take part in the decision. But then, that was undoubtedly Kain’s goal, so he decided to proceed as though the discussion had been civilized. He struggled for a mild expression to paste onto his face.
“Do you think the ledge is wide enough for us all to manage it?” He kept his voice neutral.
Kain shifted his stare back to Jack, but didn’t reply immediately. In the end, he settled for a neutral voice too. Some kind of detente. “If we’re careful, we should all be able to do it. There’s a bit of a swing to get off the other end of it, which I found easy enough, but it will be harder for a shorter person.” He didn’t look at Erica, the shortest person there.
Callie joined in. “And the drop from the ledge?”
“Ten meters or so. Not huge.”
Jack looked around them at the sweep of cliffs. The shadows were beginning to lengthen, but the long summer twilight and the thinning of the cloud cover gave them extra time. “What are our chances of making it to that grassy area before dark?”
“It looks to me like we could probably do it in two or three hours. But it won’t be easy.” Kain’s eyes slid to Rachel. “And it may tax our strength quite a bit.”
“I couldn’t bear to go back the way we came,” Rachel said, her voice catching. “We have to get out of this valley.” Her glance flickered round the group. “Please.”
Jack gave her an assessing look, and then glanced at Callie, who raised her eyebrows briefly. They couldn’t navigate by emotion if they wanted to reach the lake and safety. But they also couldn’t keep going if they were utterly demoralized. Whoever said an army marches on its stomach only had half the story; an army marches on its spirits, especially when there’s next to nothing in its stomach. “If we went back, we’d have to go the other side of the river anyway,” Jack said, squinting down the valley. “That major landslide would be hard to get around. And the ocean is that way. We don’t want the ocean, we’ve been to the ocean. We want the lake.”
Callie said, “There could be a pass up there. I’d really love to get over this mountain. I know we won’t magically see the lake from the top, it’s too far and the valleys twist and turn too much, and there might be more mountains and more valleys yet, but I just feel sure we’ll be closer to the lake beyond that peak.”
“You need to remember that if it is harder than it looks, and we can’t get up this way,” added Kain, apparently reconciled to taking part in the discussion now, “we’ll have used up most of our daylight. We won’t get back to last night’s camp in time, even though it’s downhill. And the wind’s picking up. It’s sheltered here, but I got hit by a few serious gusts up there.”
“Sheltered?” Erica said, her tone uneasy. The wind was beating at the looser sections of their garments, tossing th
e hood of Callie’s jacket as it lay down her back—flip and snap, flip and snap.
“Is it really strong wind?” said Callie in quick concern. “Will it make it too dangerous on that ledge?”
Kain shrugged. “I got along it and back okay. But if we’re going, we probably shouldn’t wait too long.”
“Well, we need to make a decision, and we don’t have a coin to flip,” Callie said, her voice brisk. “We’ve lost confidence in ourselves because of that plane, and the idiot searchers who didn’t see us. But we’re not dead yet. We can still make it home. I say we go up. What does everyone else think?”
“I’m scared of that ledge. And the wind.” Erica looked on the verge of tears. “But I’m even more scared of having to go back the way we came, and lose another whole day.”
Callie said, “So what is it? Up or down?”
“Up, I guess.”
“Rachel?”
“Up, definitely. I don’t want to go back there.”
“Jack?”
“You’ve got three ‘ups’ already. I don’t have to vote.” He was uneasy about both options, and part of him didn’t want to be responsible for whatever happened next.
“Jack.” There was a warning note in her voice.
“Oh all right. Up. We might as well try it.”
“Kain?”
He shook his head. “I’m not voting. I’ll go along with the majority.” When Callie gave him a stern look he simply ignored her, stood and walked over to his rucksack, busying himself with preparations for the climb to come.
Another snack of the endless ferns, gathered that morning and eaten raw, was the best they could do for an energy boost. They didn’t sit easily in anxious stomachs. Jack saw Kain fiddling with a bulging plastic bag, but the contents looked dark, not green like everyone else’s fern tips. He angled for a closer look. “Not those berries!” The man couldn’t be going to eat something Bryan the Serial Killer had recommended, surely. His dislike for Kain didn’t extend to wanting him dead. Or disabled, for that matter. The team needed him.
Kain was holding one of the tiny berries in front of him, studying it. “Almost a complete food in itself, Bryan said. And we could certainly do with the energy.”
Jack saw the others staring at the berry between Kain’s thumb and forefinger, transfixed. Callie looked worried, Erica fearful, but the expression on Rachel’s face could only be described as longing. Who could blame her, in her situation? What if it turned out to be true, and the berries were miniature lifesavers but they didn’t eat them and died of starvation? And searchers found their bodies in days or years to come, with a little bag of desiccated berries, and wondered why the stupid fools hadn’t eaten them?
Callie spoke. “Kain, you can’t trust what Bryan said.”
“Why not? He told us a lot of things that were true, and that are helping keep us alive. About the weather, and camping. And he told me about the berries way back, on about the second or third day.”
“Kain, please don’t eat them,” Erica said, her voice intense.
He snorted. “As if you care if I die.” She put her head in her hands.
Callie frowned in Jack’s direction, and mouthed the words “do something”.
What and win another peace prize? Jack rubbed his face. “Kain, you’re right that Bryan taught us a lot of things about survival. He was a compulsive teacher, and he also wanted to get us all to Poison Bay in good order and condition for his big announcement. But he didn’t show us any other ‘bush tucker’ among all the things there must be to eat out here. Why did he point them out to you, the person Liana cheated on him with? He may have known that, don’t forget. And how can a berry be a complete food? His main goal was to kill us, even on the second or third day. It’s apparently been his goal for months at least, if not longer.”
Kain stared at Jack, holding the eye contact, and put the berry in his mouth, slowly, deliberately, and chewed it, and swallowed. Jack shook his head in frustration and looked away.
“Kain, please!” Erica was close to tears.
He stared at her while he fished another berry out of the bag by touch, and put it into his mouth, chewing deliberately. He stood in a quick fluid movement, shoved the bag of berries in his jacket pocket, and shouldered into his rucksack. Without another word, he set off up the mountain, his hand fishing in his pocket for more berries as he climbed.
45
Callie was more scared than she’d ever been in her life, even counting the terrors of the past few days.
She’d slotted in behind Kain in their little conga line when they set off from the rest stop, mostly to make a buffer between him and Erica, leaving Rachel to be watched by Jack at the rear. And as the minutes passed and dragged and added themselves on top of each other, she regretted the decision more and more, wishing she could talk to Jack about what she was seeing. But she couldn’t turn back to reach him on the end of the line, or Kain would get away from her altogether. And she didn’t want to frighten Erica.
The berries. She cursed those berries in her head, using every epithet, profanity and blasphemy she could think of. And then she cursed Bryan even more lavishly. His determination to hang on to past hurts like incendiary trophies, fanning their flame until they burnt a hole right through the center of his soul, and turned to charcoal the lives he touched.
It had been a missed foothold here and there at first, as they clambered up the mountainside. By the time they reached the ledge they must traverse, Kain’s feet were barely coordinated.
As Kain had promised, the initial drop from this ledge was indeed only short—by Fiordland standards, that is. The ledge below it however—wider, flatter, and yet frustratingly inaccessible from the downhill end—edged into a cliff that fell sheer and straight to the valley far below. A voracious wind swirled along the narrow shelf with battering-ram force.
She tried to stop him stepping out there, called to him, reached out to grab at his arm.
He twisted to look at her, and the desolation in his eyes made her gasp. He seemed to be working hard to form the words clearly, but even so, she struggled to understand his meaning. “He set me up. Make sure you survive, and tell them. He set me up. I can’t believe I listened to him. I can’t believe what I’ve done. Tell the little boy…” he swayed, “…I’m so sorry.”
“Kain! Please!” She grabbed at his arm again, but he batted her hand away, steadied himself, and launched out onto that awful ledge.
What could she do but follow him?
And everyone followed behind her, Erica too governed by her fear of heights to notice anything else, Jack focused on keeping Rachel on her feet and moving, moving, while trying not to look down himself.
Behind her, she could hear Erica whimpering aloud, apparently no longer able to control her vocal chords, so overwhelmed was she by atavistic fear. Not usually given to vertigo, even Callie could feel the vastness of it pulling her, luring her, out and down, and down and down.
Kain was nearly to the end of the ledge, and Callie was keeping close to him, letting Erica fall behind to battle her demons alone.
Maybe he could make it. Maybe they’d be safe on the boulder field Callie was beginning to see ahead around the curve of the cliff. And he didn’t have the strength to fight them off now, so they’d be able to hold onto him, stop him marching upward, and somehow make him vomit. Get those berries out of his system, and perhaps he’d recover.
Kain’s boot caught on the uneven surface, and he stumbled and teetered. “Watch out!” she shouted. He half-turned to look back at her, his eyes glazed. His pack scraped on the rock wall alongside him, pitching his upper body outwards, at the very moment his knees bent and gave way beneath him.
Callie grabbed instinctively for the straps dangling from the back of his pack. It was too little to save him, but it was enough to unbalance her. She felt her right boot slip off the edge into nothingness in the same instant that Kain tumbled from her view. She grabbed for the cliff face, but there was nothing to
hold her, and she kept sliding. Sliding and falling. Her whole world was sliding and she was going to die. She heard the sickening crunch from below, and she was next, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.
“God! Callie! No!” It was Jack’s voice, and suddenly, her fingers found purchase on that edge, and she hung, dangling in space, the great weight of her rucksack pulling her outwards, dragging, dragging, drawing her down.
Now there was screaming, long and hoarse. That was Erica. Useless and screaming. Behind her, Rachel. And Jack trapped behind them both, unable to reach her. “Oh God! Save her!” That was him again, desperate. She didn’t want to be one of the ones who didn’t make it home. She didn’t want to go wherever Kain had just gone.
Callie found strength from somewhere unknown, surging up through her body. She thrust herself upwards, pushing with her feet against the cliff face. She managed to hook the fingers of one hand into a groove near the back of the ledge. Eroded by rain? Who knew. Thank God for it. The other hand followed, and she struggled to swing her left leg to the ledge. It wouldn’t go high enough, so she used her arms again, every muscle fiber in her chest and shoulders shrieking and howling with the pain as she struggled up onto her elbows, and swung the leg again. Like getting out of a swimming pool with a gorilla on your back. This time her leg found purchase on the rim of the ledge, and she pushed and groveled till her other leg could join it, and then lay flat on her face, full length along the ledge, the weight of her rucksack crushing her, the smell of the beautiful, solid granite filling her nostrils as she gasped for oxygen, her lungs rasping, that pain in her side piercing with a vengeance, her torn hands now beginning to make themselves heard above all the other agonies. But, oh sweet Lord, she was alive.
Erica was still screaming, like someone was murdering her in slow and brutal ways. Callie struggled to clear her head enough to think what to do next.
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