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Alarm bells went off in Sam’s head. She quickly pulled on her clothes and scooted out into the damp morning. At four a.m., it was still dark. Dense fog snaking between the trees made it seem even darker.
She walked with Maya to the solo camps. Olivia’s and Nick’s tents were empty. Olivia’s pack was gone, too.
“Shit!” Sam cursed, staring at the vacant campsite. “Aidan said they were all in their tents when he checked at ten p.m. What made you get up and check, Maya?”
The girl shrugged. “Just a feeling. The closer we get to the end, the less Olivia’s eating and the quieter she gets.”
Sam had noticed that as well. “I’ve been worried about Nick, too.”
“When I saw Olivia’s tent was empty, I went to the next, Nick’s. The others are all still there.”
“We got runners?” Aidan’s voice came from behind them, startling them both.
“How could they?” Sam couldn’t believe it. Troy and Maya had told her about other expeditions where kids hightailed it during the wee hours. She’d halfway expected escape attempts by Ashley and maybe Justin, but Nick and Olivia? And why now? Only one more one day and night remained in their expedition. They were so close to completing this journey. “I thought they were both preparing themselves.”
“Guess they were.” Aidan scratched his beard. “You never know what they’re thinking.”
Sam’s stomach was roiling. The dark. The fog. The teens could fall off a cliff; that happened to hikers walking in the dark in unfamiliar terrain. They could drown in a river or creek; every stream was swollen and swift after the storm, they were camped near several watercourses. They could meet that cougar from the lookout; they were probably still in its territory.
“You’ve had runners before?” she asked Aidan and Maya.
“Yeah,” Aidan said. “We usually call the rangers and the highway patrol and we catch up with them sooner or later, usually hitchhiking on the nearest road.”
Sam groaned. “We’re a long way from any road.”
“We’ve never lost anyone permanently,” he assured her.
She couldn’t lose two kids. Kyla had never lost two kids, had she? And Nick and Olivia? They both seemed so responsible. They couldn’t be runners.
“We’re not calling 9-1-1,” she told her peer counselors. “At least not yet.”
She yanked at the cord around her neck, pulled the whistle up out of her shirt and blew it long and hard. “Aidan, go get Taylor and Gabriel. Maya, you get Ashley. I’ll take Justin.” He was camped in the closest solo site. “Make them dress appropriately and grab their headlamps and a water bottle, too. Make sure they have their whistles around their necks. Meet at the group site ASAP.”
“What the gex is going on?” Justin’s voice was even deeper than usual as he crawled out of his tent.
“Get your headlamp and water bottle. This is your chance to be a hero, Dragon Man.”
“Can’t I do that later? Noon might work for me.” He yawned dramatically as he stuffed his shirt into his pants.
“Put on your boots and jacket, and follow me.”
As she was grabbing supplies and their remaining rope from the bear box in the group site, the rest of her crew emerged out of the mist. Ashley’s hair was wild, Gabriel hadn’t tied his boots and Taylor had jammed the zipper on her rain jacket. Sam handed them each a packet of granola bars.
“What is this, a fire drill?” Justin yawned again.
Gabriel guessed, “Alien invasion?”
Taylor and Ashley shifted from foot to foot, chafing their arms to warm up.
“This is not a drill,” she told them. “It’s a real search. Nick and Olivia are missing.”
Justin raised both eyebrows. “Lightning and Martini ran away? Sweet.”
“It’s not sweet, and we don’t know that they ran away,” Sam told them. “They might be in trouble somewhere.”
“Oh, they’re in trouble all right,” Aidan said.
“They need our help, crew. Gabriel, tie your boots; you’re with Aidan. Ash and Taylor, you’re with Maya. Justin, you’re with me. Aidan, Maya, carry your cell phones.”
“What? They have cell phones, too?” Gabriel was astonished. “Didn’t you tell us only the captain could have electronic?”
Sam ignored him. “Let’s go find them.”
Unfortunately, they were camped near a T intersection where a side path met the main trail they’d taken the day before, so there were three options about which way the two escapees had fled. Sam assigned Aidan’s team and her own to head in opposite directions down the trail the kids had traveled for the last two days, reasoning the runaways might pick the most familiar route. “Blow your whistles if you find them, and call me on my cell. Maya, you and Ashley and Taylor take the intersecting trail. We’ll search for an hour and a half, and then check in before going farther.”
“Copy that,” Aidan said.
Maya nodded. “Got it.”
It took eighty minutes of stumbling around in the brush, darkness, and fog before Sam heard a whistle. Then two more whistles.
Sam’s cell buzzed. “Got ‘em,” Maya said. “We’re at the creek.”
“Are they okay?”
“Mostly.”
“What does that mean?”
“You’ll see. You’ve got the rope, right?” Maya asked.
“In my pack. Call Aidan and keep blowing your whistles so we can all find each other.”
“Roger that. Hurry.”
It took nearly another hour for Sam and Justin to follow the whistles back to the creek. Maya stood with Taylor and Ashley on the crest of the river bank, gazing down into the narrow channel the river had carved.
“Damn,” Sam said. “The trail’s completely gone.”
The creek channel was known to be unstable, especially in periods after heavy rain. The soil was extremely soft and sandy here, ground into powder by ancient glaciers. Conditions shifted with the seasons. Most years, the trail had to be rebuilt to cross the creek. She had planned to take the long route around this area to their last campsite at a lake.
Nick and Olivia were on all fours about fifty feet down the steep slope, their hands and feet invisible, buried in the soft earth. A boulder rested a few yards down the slope from them, perched on the edge of a sharp vertical bank that dumped into the raging creek. The water surged beneath them, as wide and deep as the main river now, carving out a huge chunk of the sandy bank as they watched. As the earth collapsed into the stream, the boulder slid further down the slope. So did Olivia. Shrieking, she reached for Nick’s ankle above her, and they both slid a foot closer to the roiling water.
“Every time they move, they slide,” Maya said.
Aidan and Gabriel arrived just as Sam was pulling the rope out of her pack.
“Well, crap,” Aidan observed. “That’s quite the predicament.”
“And the falls are downstream.” Maya moaned.
“Shh.” Nobody had ever survived the long drop onto the rocks below those falls.
She tied the rope to the closest tree. “Olivia, keep hold of Nick,” Sam shouted to the kids below. “Nick, try to grab this rope.”
She flung it toward him. The end snapped into the dirt a foot above Nick’s head. But when he pulled his hand from the sand to reach for it, he and Olivia began to slide again. Nick pinwheeled his arms, trying to swim upward through the sand for the rope, but slipped even further downhill. Olivia screamed until they stopped moving, then dissolved into hiccupping sobs.
Sam felt like screaming herself.
Taylor stated the obvious. “The rope’s not long enough.”
Gabriel took a step closer to the edge. The sand beneath his feet slumped, and Aidan grabbed the boy by the back of his shirt just in time to keep him from tumbling down the slope to join the other two.
“Everyone step back, now!” She hated to lose sight of Nick and Olivia, but the rest of them were in danger of collapsing the soft sand hill into an avalanche that would bury the two kids below or shove them over the bank into the raging stream.
Six pairs of eyes focused on her, waiting for instructions.
Shit, don’t look at me, she thought, save yourselves! She paced. There had to be a way.
She couldn’t see any branches long enough and stout enough to be helpful. Cut down a tree? Right, with what? Her pocketknife? All she had was a rope that was too short and a paralyzed audience of six horrified people.
Six strong horrified young people, plus one middle-aged terrified field guide. Each with two good arms. The standard Wilderness Quest uniform was high quality, with belted pants and Gortex rain jackets. She uncapped her water bottle, took a swig to wet her throat, then untied the rope from the tree.
Below them, Olivia shrieked again. Sam prayed she and Nick were not being swallowed by the river. “Nick! Olivia! Hang on, don’t move. We’re coming!”
She turned to the others. “Okay, crew. We’re going to form a human chain. Justin, take off your jacket, loop it through your belt, and then use it to tie yourself to that tree.”
He hesitated, confused.
“I need you at the top of the chain because you are the strongest, but you can’t hug a tree and hold us at the same time.”
Nodding, he did as she asked. “Gabe, take off your jacket, loop it through your belt and hand the sleeves to Justin to hold you.”
She positioned the rest of them, the boys at the top and the girls toward the bottom, linked with jackets and belts. Maya was the last link she added to the chain, because she knew Maya would stay calm even if the worst happened. She tied one end of the rope to the belt around her young friend’s waist and the other around her own.
“Now, we’re going to walk, or more likely slide, down that slope. I’m going to grab Nick and Olivia. And you guys will pull us back up. Ready?”
Although their faces were tense with anxiety, they all nodded.
“We’re going over to the left side. We don’t want to push more dirt down on top of them. Got it?”
Six heads bobbed again.
“Here goes. Everyone, hold on. Maya, play my rope out gradually, and wait until the rope goes tight before you follow.” Sam stepped over the crumbling edge. Her feet sunk into the soft sand, which gave way beneath her. She slid a yard down the slope before the rope jerked her to a halt. A river of sand shifted beneath her boots, sliding down and over the edge of the bank, sloshing into the roiling water.
The boulder resting on the edge tilted sideways. So did Olivia and Nick. The pink light of the sunrise over the flank of Mount Baker revealed the terror in the eyes of the two teens.
As the steep bank slid away from her, adrenaline coursed through Sam’s veins. At this rate, half the hillside would give way and they’d all go in. Sam sank onto her backside, shifting only a little sand. Better. She inched her way down the slope on her butt until she reached the end of the rope. Her boots were at least twenty feet from Nick’s outstretched hands.
“Okay, Maya,” she yelled up the slope, “sit as carefully as you can on the edge and slide down slowly. Everyone sit down as you come over, and move as slowly as you can.”
The progress was slow, but as Sam felt slack in the rope at her waist, she inched downward. Rivulets of sandy earth piled up behind her backside and slithered down beside her legs as the pressure on the slope above increased with the weight of the human chain.
“That’s it!” Aidan yelled from above. “That’s all we’ve got.”
Sam’s left foot was still above and to the side of Nick’s hand, a good eighteen inches away. The boy’s expression was no longer terrified. Instead, he looked resigned to his fate. She had no idea what Olivia was thinking. The girl’s entire focus was on her own hands, gripped tightly around Nick’s ankle above his boot.
“Crew, stay strong,” Sam yelled up the slope. “Hang onto each other, no matter what.”
She turned to the fifteen-year-old. “Nick, I’m going to take off my jacket now. That’s going to be our rope. When I say, I am going to toss it in your direction, you’re going to grab onto it, and hold on for dear life. You got it?”
“Got it.” His voice was hoarse, little more than a whisper.
She peeled off her jacket, knotted a sleeve around her right wrist and passed it through her fist. “Ready? Now!”
She flung the jacket in his direction, reaching as far as she could. The loose sleeve slapped Nick’s shoulder. He pulled his hands out of the soil to grab it. The earth beneath him shifted, and Olivia shrieked as the ground slid away from her. The landslide shoved the boulder beneath them over the edge. As the huge rock tumbled, it pulled more dirt with it, and suddenly the whole bank was moving beneath them.
Everyone in the human chain screamed.
