Over the next fifteen minutes, the river’s fury intensifies. We get spun like an out-of-control carousel. Raindrops fall as if flung down in fury. And that ever-present hissing gains volume. We gather around Epap. He loops the rope around our bodies, tying us securely with tight knots. We squint against the spray of water and cold wind, trying to keep balance on the bobbing, spinning boat.
“Look at me,” Epap says. “Everyone. Look at me. We need to jump off this boat, swim to shore—”
“Epap, I don’t know!” Jacob says. “The river’s flowing too fast! We might get swept away, separated, pulled under!”
“We have no choice!” he shouts back. “Everyone hold onto this rope. If you get pulled under, if you get swept away, just hold onto this rope!”
“We’ll still get swept away!” Jacob shouts, shaking his head.
“No!” Sissy barks back. “Epap’s right. We have to jump.”
With one loop of the rope circled around our chests and wound tight under our armpits, we tiptoe to the edge. Sissy turns to me, her mouth right at my ear. “You and me. We have to stick tight together.” She checks my rope, pulling it taut, with wet, white knuckles bulging from her hand. “The others. They can’t really swim. David and Jacob, a little bit. But Ben and Epap will be dead weight. Do you understand?”
I nod. The speed of the boat is now terrifying. For a heart-stopping second, the boat goes airborne before pummeling back down.
“Everyone on my count!” Sissy shouts. “Remember: Don’t let go of the rope. Kick with your legs, don’t use your arms. Your hands never let go of the rope, understood? Never let go!”
I stare into the river, the water a swirling madness. It’s not going to work; we’re going to get swept away. Jacob is right. The current’s too strong now.
“Three…” Sissy shouts.
As soon as we hit the water, we’re going to get sucked underneath, then pulled in six different directions by deadly undercurrents. It’s a dark, watery death hole we’re leaping into.
“Two…”
Next to me, Jacob stiffens suddenly, as if realizing something.
“One!” Sissy’s knees bend, preparing to leap into the black river. Down the line, the others are gray smudges readying to leap.
I bend my knees, jump—
“STOP!” Jacob shouts, thrusting his body away from the edge.
The rope pulls taut, catching me midair. I’m wrenched back, an oomph escaping my mouth, then I’m crashing on the deck. Seconds later, like delayed echoes, comes the sound of the others hitting the deck.
“Jacob!” Sissy yells. “What are you doing?”
“We’re supposed to go over the waterfall!” he shouts. “We’re supposed to stay on the river!”
“What are you talking about?” Sissy yells, rain smacking her face.
“Look, the hunters can’t swim!” Jacob shouts. His eyes are brimming with excitement. “They drown easily in water. That’s what the Scientist told us. Remember? He said a panic reflex kicks in if the water goes above their jawline. They freeze up, drown within seconds.”
“So what?” Sissy says.
“So think about it. For them, a waterfall is certain death. They would never venture farther than this, it’s suicide. But that’s not—not necessarily—the case for us. We swim. We can survive a waterfall. It’s like a keyhole that only we can fit into. It’s the bridge to freedom only we can cross. That’s why the tablet instructs us to stay on the river.”
“I don’t know,” Sissy says.
Jacob is not deterred. “I think that’s why the Scientist taught us about waterfalls. To prepare us for this. But remember, he always described them in a scenic, beautiful way. Like it’s a gateway to paradise.” His arms flail excitedly about, and suddenly I’m remembering the sketch Epap was working on yesterday. It was a beautifully rendered waterfall, an oasis of beauty. “We’re meant to go over the river,” Jacob says. “And down the falls.”
“You’re not thinking straight, Jacob,” Sissy says. “That’s a waterfall ahead of us!”
“I know, I know, I know,” he says, eyes squeezing shut. His hands clench and unclench. “But we’re supposed to stay on the boat! I know this.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Stay on the river!” Jacob shouts. “That’s what the tablet says! That’s what the Scientist wants us to do. Stay on. Keep heading down.”
“Within reason!” Sissy says. “That’s a waterfall coming! What you’re suggesting is sheer lunacy.”
“Please, Sissy?” Jacob says, his eyes pleading. “Let’s not deviate one bit. Let’s do exactly what the Scientist instructed us to do. Stay on the river and not get off. Because it’s what gets us to the Promised Land. To the milk. The honey. Fruit and sunshine. To streets filled with other humans, sports stadiums, playgrounds, amusement parks with thousands of kids milling about. We stick to his instructions, we get there.” He shakes his head violently side to side, tears coming out. “It’s all worth taking a chance for. Please, Sissy?”
Sissy bites her lower lip, stares ahead at the river, her face racked with concentration. She looks at Jacob. “We always stick together, don’t we?” she says to them.
“Always, Sissy,” Jacob says, his voice thick with emotion.
“So whatever I decide, we’re all in, agreed?” she says. He nods. “You trust me, then?”
“I do.”
She draws in a deep breath. “We’re getting off this boat. Now.”
Jacob’s shoulders slump.
Lightning suddenly streaks across the sky, silhouetting the eastern mountains, a hunched, black colossus, so close now I smell the musk of a mahogany forest. For a millisecond, I see the river. Bands of water slide forward with terrifying speed and eagerness. It is a raging beast now, surging and frothing with anger straight into the mountain. Not around it, or through a steep narrow pass. But somehow right into the very heart of darkness.
I put my hand on Sissy’s arm and shake my head. “It’s too late, Sissy. The river’s a grave now. We’ll surely drown.”
Her eyes narrow against the wind and rain, her lower jaw jutting out with frustration. She knows I’m right. There’s nothing more to say. River water mixes with the cutting wind, drenching our faces. We stare forward, wondering what awaits us.
* * *
Five minutes later, the rain suddenly stops and the temperature plunges. The night becomes darker, black ink dousing us. The river roars in our ears now, an echoic tenor that rumbles.
We’ve entered something. A cavernous black tunnel. Inside the eastern mountains.
“Can’t see anything, can’t see anything,” David murmurs next to me. “We’re in the mountain, we’re in the mountain, somehow we’re inside the mountain.”
I close my eyes. Open them. It makes no difference: just the same impenetrable black then black then black then black until the disorientation almost causes a physical panic. Everything is blacker, faster, wetter, louder now. The roar of the waterfall is deafening.
“Get ready, everyone!” Sissy shouts. We’re crouching together, arms linked, the rope connecting us. “Get on one knee! Stay low on one knee! Be ready to leap outward—”
Her voice is drowned out. I pull myself up on one knee, lifting Ben up next to me. I feel a mist of fine spray on my face. We must be mere moments from going over.
“When we go over, jump as far from the boat as you can!” I shout, not knowing if they can hear me over the din. “Curl your body into a ball, don’t let go of the rope. No matter how far we fall, don’t let go of the rope!” I look over to see if anyone’s heard me. But I can’t see a thing. I only feel the tension of their bodies, the fear pouring off them in droves.
Then we’re at the waterfall. The roar is deafening.
I open my mouth to scream but even fear has fled away.
The boat tilts forward and in that instant before we plummet over the precipice and the sick vacant falling sensation hits, all I want to do is grab Sissy’s hand; and somehow
in the darkness we find each other’s hands and our grip is fierce and untidy and blood-warm human. And then the waterfall is here, then it is not, and then we are falling down a throat of blackness.
We fall for what seems like forever.
7
THE WATER HITS us—just when I’d given up on ever hitting bottom—with the concussive force of a concrete sidewalk.
And then I’m in a world of murky underwater darkness, the swirl of bubbles, the deafening churn of water smashing water. The rope looped around my chest pulls taut as metal, whiplashing my head backward. An arm claws across my face; somebody’s leg kicks out at me. I don’t know which way is up, which way is down.
Follow the bubbles up, I tell myself. I do, kicking hard. I feel the tug of rope against my chest. They’re all under me. I’m pulling up the whole chain of bodies myself.
Then I’m breaking surface, from liquid black to empty black, stroking and kicking furiously. There are no shapes to be seen, only black-gray silhouettes. I push forward, reaching for a blackness that is darker than the surroundings. My hand hits something solid, and it is the feel of salvation. I grab it with two hands, and hoist myself up. I’m on a rock.
I spin around, start pulling the rope toward me. And like a miracle, they surface, one by one, sputtering, crying, cursing, coughing.
Alive.
8
THAT NIGHT, WE lie in a crumpled heap on that hard limestone rock. We have no idea how large or small it is, nor the inclination to find out. We are only too glad to be alive as we huddle together, sobs of relief racking our bodies.
“We wait till morning,” Sissy says. “Wait for the light.”
Nobody says anything. Not then, not for the next few hours. But I know what we’re thinking: What if Sissy has it all wrong? What if morning doesn’t bring light? What if in this womb of darkness, morning offers no reprieve from the unremitting black?
* * *
“Whoa,” David says, the first to wake up. Turns out, we’re on not an isolated rock, but the actual bedrock surrounding the plunge pool of the waterfall. Around us, countless shafts of sunlight shoot down from hidden openings in the ceiling. These shafts are so defined, they are like physical columns holding up the massive cave. And massive is too gentle a term: the cave is a behemoth. More sunbeams form, shooting down hundreds of meters in every direction, exposing the cavernous lay of the interior.
The waterfall itself is not nearly as tall as it had felt while plummeting down its length last night. It kicks up a huge spray that moistens thick layers of moss on the underside of the waterfall’s overhanging rocks. Although there is no sign of the boat, a few of our bags are afloat and pressed up against the side of the plunge pool.
“Check those out!” Ben says, pointing up.
Stalactites cone down from the ceiling hundreds of meters above us, hanging like fanged teeth, sunlight glazing them reddish orange. Interspersed between the stalactites, vines dangle down like stringy food caught between teeth. Huge towers of calcite lift off the cave floor at leaning angles, and ferns and palms rope themselves around the base of these towers. Thinner stalagmites rise fifty meters tall, but it is the sheer gargantuan size of the cave that bedazzles us the most.
“You could fit a city in here,” I yell, wanting to be heard above the din of the waterfall. “Skyscrapers twenty, thirty stories tall. Whole city blocks a mile long.” Nobody responds; nobody hears me. I move away from the waterfall where it’s quieter.
The others follow and we gather in a large column of sunlight. The warmth is glorious. The sunlight bleaches our skin, makes us glow with a nuclear effervescence.
“Now what?” Epap asks. All heads turn to Sissy.
“We explore,” she says.
“Is this it?” Ben asks. “Is this the Land of Milk and Honey, Fruit and Sunshine?”
“I hope not,” Epap says, shaking his head. “This place is the dumps. I’d take the Dome over this, actually. I haven’t seen any milk, honey, or fruit. There’s sunshine, drips of it, anyway, but we had more back at the Dome.”
“This is what we’ll do,” Sissy says. “We break up into two groups. We look for a clue, a sign, anything. The Scientist must have left us something.” She looks around, then hikes into the depths of the cave, Ben and Jacob in tow.
“All right, you two,” Epap says to David and me. “Let’s go this way. Eyes peeled, guys.” We head off perpendicular to Sissy’s direction, along the bank, following the river.
* * *
Hours later, there’s nothing to show for our efforts. The terrain makes walking difficult, with loose rocks seemingly designed to sprain our ankles scattered everywhere. David, Epap, and I proceed slowly, not wanting to miss anything, but we spend most of the time with eyes fixed in a narrow cone of vision on the ground, negotiating around stones and slippery moss. And though we’re heading toward what we hope is the cave’s exit, after two hours, there’s still literally no light at the end of the tunnel. If there even is an end. The river plunges down into a succession of large bowls at three different tiers, the descent steep and treacherous. Several times, we have to sidetrack considerable distances to get around huge boulders. We slip often on moss-laced rocks, our hands flailing wildly, grabbing at towers cloaked with flowstone and at tall rocks with scalloped surfaces. Eventually, our path is completely impeded by a wall of fluted limestone, massive and algae-skinned, ten stories high. The river snakes through a relatively narrow opening and into another tiered series of waterfalls. We head back, bodies hunched over with fatigue, starvation, and discouragement.
The other three are sitting in a column of sunlight near the waterfall when we return. Judging from their drooped shoulders and dour faces, they haven’t fared much better. They hand us our share of lunch: a few berries they’d found that we scarf up eagerly.
“So much for the Land of Milk and Honey, Fruit and Sunshine,” Epap says. “No food, no milk, no honey. Not even any wood to burn.”
“We should head outside,” Jacob says. “Follow the river out.”
“We just did that,” I reply. “Tried to, anyway. It’s farther and more difficult than you think.”
“It’s our only move,” Jacob says, glancing at the waterfall. “We can’t backtrack—we’d have to climb up the sides of this waterfall, and they’re way too steep and slippery. But we can’t just stay here, either. We need food. We should leave now.”
“No.” Sissy says this without looking at us. “We stay here.”
“Sissy—” Jacob begins to say.
“Look! I’m staying,” she snaps. “You go if you want. I’m staying.”
Jacob clams up, hurt shooting into his eyes. “I only meant—”
“I’m not arguing with you, with any of you! There’re only two things we need to do, okay? Find some kind of sign left by the Scientist, and keep Gene alive. Is that simple enough for you to understand? This is our life distilled down to its rawest elements right now. Find a sign, keep him alive. Two things, people.”
We sit stunned by her outburst. She walks away, her chest heaving, disappearing behind a large boulder.
I follow her. She’s staring into the waterfall, arms crossed against her chest.
“Hey,” I say, as gently as I can. I step through a short narrow pathway between two boulders.
She doesn’t reply, only bites her lower lip, just half of it; the other half loops out in a fat curl. Her eyelids shut halfway, and a tear spills out that trails down over her cheekbone. She doesn’t turn away as I thought she might. Her hand rises—to wipe the tear away, I think—but stops in front of her lips. She half-cups her mouth, her fingers quivering, her lips collapsing. Now she turns away from me, just as I see her face breaking.
The pressure has gotten to her. The burden of all their lives carried squarely on her shoulders alone.
I place my hand on her. She doesn’t move away as I thought she might, but leans into my hand, the curve of her shoulder fitting perfectly into the cup of my hand. Her fles
h is soft, but there is a fierceness in it, too, in the thin coat of hard muscle and the solid protrusion of jutting shoulder bone. She turns and looks at me with a fierce intensity. It is the kind of attention my father taught me to always avoid. Eye contact meant you were at the center of a person’s attention; get out of it, fade out of it, move away.
But I cannot look away. I never realized how aquiline and beautiful her eyes are.
“I feel like I’m failing everyone, Gene.”
“You’re being ridiculous. We’d all be dead by now if it weren’t for you.” I move closer to her until I can feel heat thrumming off her body. “I’m with you, Sissy. I want to find him as much as you do. If not more.”
For a moment, something swims across her eyes that is yielding and soft.
It’s too much for me. I flick my eyes away.
We don’t speak for a few seconds. Then she shakes her head. “I feel like I’m missing something obvious,” she says. “Something he’s left behind. A clue, a sign. Something right under my nose. Like the games he used to play with me.”
A strange jealousy rises in me. So he had played the same game with her. I thought I was the only one.
“Everything okay, Sissy?” It’s Epap on the other side of the narrow passageway. Sissy pulls away from me as Epap slides between the boulders.
“Is everything okay?” he asks again, peering intently at her.
She wipes quickly at her tearstained cheek. “Fine,” she murmurs and brushes past him. She slips through the narrow passageway.
Left alone with me, Epap gives me a sharp look. I tuck my head down, walk by him. When I return to the group, Sissy is already sitting next to Jacob, ruffling his hair, smiling. Jacob laughs.
* * *
We’re too tired to move. The beams of sunshine have held up so far, but there’s no telling how much longer they’ll last.
An hour passes; a few of us drift off to sleep.
Sissy suddenly sits up. “Oh, so stupid!” she says, smacking her forehead.
“Sissy?” Epap says.
She doesn’t reply, only walks toward the waterfall. She steps carefully on the wet bedrock around the perimeter of the plunge pool. One slip into the pool so close to the waterfall, and she might find herself pinned underwater by a deadly undertow.
The Prey Page 5