The rain had started coming down in a heavy torrent, muting everything: their vision, their hearing, their perception of what was happening around them.
Oliver kept shining the flashlight at each person in turn, compulsively taking tally, keeping track of everyone. The van was gone, and there were no adults, no one in charge to tell them what they were supposed to do. No rules to follow. They were the only ones left.
So he kept shining the light—click-click—face by face. There were thirteen of them: nine survivors pulled from his van, and four who had managed to escape from the other before it sank—or at least that’s all they knew of.
“Cut it out,” Ian said, hand up to block the glare.
Oliver cut the flashlight for the count of ten seconds. Then he turned and illuminated the group at the base of the cliffs. Because of the light, he was in charge of checking on the injured. Trinity, with a broken leg. Morgan, with a head injury, he thought. And the thing he was most concerned about, the wound in Ben’s stomach, and the way Cassidy had her hands placed over it.
She stared back at him, wide-eyed in the beam of his light. There was a flicker of terror in her face.
Click-click, he turned it off.
Oliver was afraid in the same dull, ever-present way he was afraid of most things: saying the wrong thing, making the wrong impression, choosing the wrong path. An anxiety that crept in whenever he was fully awake, that he noticed every morning, as he lay in bed and felt the familiar feeling wash over him. Otherwise, he could go hours forgetting it existed. It was background noise, a permanent condition, something for which he could find no obvious cause.
He had already survived the circumstances of his birth, which his parents often proudly recounted to others, like it was something Oliver had accomplished. When really it had all been outside his control: he had been born, he had been wrapped in a blanket and left under an overpass, and then he had been found. It was all very passive, none of which Oliver could claim credit for himself.
But he was a miracle, his parents were fond of saying: the miracle they had been hoping and waiting for.
He’d always felt like he had been waiting for something too. Only he wasn’t sure what.
And now, at the edge of a river, at the base of a cliff, he could finally put a cause to that dull, ever-present fear. Standing in the dark, in the thunder, in the rain, he was afraid that he was about to lose it all. Everything he had managed to overcome. He was afraid that he had not taken advantage of his second chance. That he had spent it, always, waiting for something else to happen. And that this time, he would not be found.
Click-click: Hollis, staring at Brody.
Click-click: Brody, staring at the water.
Click-click: Joshua, staring at him.
He’d brought the flashlight on purpose, hooked to the belt loop of his shorts, to read in the dark van. (Which he did until Clara and Grace complained.)
But it was an accident that he had brought the knife. In any other circumstance, he probably would’ve gotten in a lot of trouble for having it in his possession.
They only discovered his father’s switchblade in the outer pocket of his luggage as they were rummaging frantically for anything that might help them after the crash. The duffel bag belonged to his father, and so did the knife, which must’ve been left inside after his last camping trip.
The handle of the knife was red, and there was a crown engraved on one side—which his dad thought fitting, given their family name, and which had become the only way Oliver could convince people it belonged to him, after Amaya pulled it from the bag.
It was his. And therefore, he argued, he should be the one to hold on to it.
Jason had backed him up, even though he’d probably never seen it before—but he’d spent plenty of weekends at Oliver’s house. He was a dependable witness, a dependable friend.
Oliver was not particularly outdoorsy. In truth, he was not particularly anything—no one would describe him as either athletically gifted or academically inclined—but he wasn’t exactly the opposite either. He existed in what their small school would designate as the middle fifty percent.
But standing on the rocks with his classmates after they’d crawled out of the van, one by one, he discovered he was not particularly afraid either.
The dull, ever-present fear was there, of course. But not something sharper, deeper, that seemed to have taken over the others.
At least, he was okay until the knife went missing.
He kept looking for it—a red handle sticking out of someone’s back pocket; the glint of the blade in the beam of his light.
They’d used it to cut the seat belts out of the van, in their shitty attempt to make a sling for Ian’s shoulder, which was probably dislocated. And then they’d used it again, in their failed attempt to rig a tourniquet around Trinity’s leg (she kept screaming; it seemed they were doing more harm than good), and now no one could remember who had the knife last.
He knew someone else had it now. He knew someone was lying.
So he wasn’t just keeping an eye on the injured anymore; he was watching everyone.
One by one.
He started at the base of the cliffs, shining the beam in Morgan’s face. He called her name, and her eyes fluttered open.
“Don’t let her fall asleep,” he said to Trinity.
“I’m trying,” she said, through a grimace. Oliver worried she might also slip into shock, from the pain.
He cast a quick look over at Cassidy and Ben again. God, there was so much blood seeping through the balled-up clothes she had pressed to the wound. Oliver jogged to the luggage to find a new, clean shirt for her to use.
But someone had beaten him to it.
Ian was rifling through the luggage with his one good arm. He jumped back, as if Oliver had snuck up on him.
“Jesus,” Ian said, then held out a white T-shirt. “Cassidy said she needed this.”
“Thanks,” Oliver said, bringing it back, leaving the light on Cassidy while she swapped out the makeshift bandaging.
Then Oliver returned to the rest of the group and started his tally again:
Click-click: Amaya, pacing back and forth, from end to end of their rocky clearing. Her mouth was moving, and Oliver couldn’t tell if she was talking to herself or counting her steps.
Click-click: Clara and Grace, in a heated conversation. Clara was near hysterics, her voice at a fever pitch, and it seemed like Grace was trying to calm her down—
Hollis was suddenly in his face, closer than she’d ever been to him. She looked behind her once. “There have to be others,” she said. He left the light shining on her panicked face.
“Where?” he said.
“The other van. They might’ve made it out.” He could see her throat moving as she swallowed.
He had already started tallying the dead. Most of them had helped one another climb out of the back of Oliver’s van, except for Mr. Kates, who they’d left exactly where he was, obviously beyond saving. Oliver had seen his body, seen it hunched over the wheel, his arms floating, but the rest of him unnaturally still, a haunting emptiness. The end, laid fully bare. But there were so many still unaccounted for from the other van. Oliver had seen it hurtling down the river, and he could only imagine the worst. He did not want to find them. He did not want to see them, or count them.
“I heard something out there,” Hollis said, peering across the river, toward the far side. “A noise. People or…”
“An animal,” Brody said, emerging from the darkness. “Did you see it too? The deer in the road?” A deer, leading to all this carnage.
Oliver swung the light his way. “I didn’t see anything,” he said. He had been sitting with Jason near the back of the second van, where they’d seemed to have the best luck, injury-wise. From the first van, only four people had escaped and made it to their group, Hollis included. They seemed relatively unharmed from the crash itself, beyond cuts and bruises and Ian’s dislocated shoulder. But there were seven people from that van still unaccounted for…
“Listen, they were alive—” Hollis said, grabbing on to Oliver’s wrist.
“Do you hear that?” It was Cassidy, his neighbor, and she was suddenly standing outside their group, but facing away. Her hands were covered in blood.
If Oliver listened closely, he could hear something too, the faintest sound of an alarm. A car in the distance, maybe. God, they had to be so close.
“What if that’s some severe weather warning?” she said, eyes unnaturally wide.
Oliver felt a prickle of panic. He pictured a dam releasing, waters flooding through the ravine—
“The storm is only going to get worse,” Hollis added, just as a bolt of lightning lit up the sky. The thunder followed in a near immediate clap, and Oliver felt himself ducking, felt his hands go to his ears, on instinct. “We have to go look for them now.”
The circle around him had grown, the light drawing them closer, moths to a flame.
“What are you all talking about?” Amaya asked, raising her voice to be heard.
“The rest of the people in the first van,” Hollis said. “They could be out there. We should go look.”
They all stared back at Hollis.
Oliver didn’t know what had happened in the first van, but it made sense to him that the group who made it out would feel a responsibility to go check. Not just Hollis, but Cassidy and Ian, maybe even Joshua Doleman, who rarely seemed to have an opinion either way. Oliver already understood that so much came down to being on the right side of a count.
“It’s too rough now,” Brody said. “We’d never make it back.”
Wasn’t there some kind of saying about this kind of problem? The devil you knew? At least they knew what they had now, what they were up against.
“We wait,” Brody continued. “There’s no other way.”
“We could send one person,” Oliver said, and now Brody turned to stare at him, unflinching.
“Whoever makes it, if someone makes it, it’s not like they’d be able to come back,” Brody said.
“We have the cables,” Jason added. “From the van. We could pull them back.” Even now, the one person Oliver could count on to take his side.
“He’s bleeding out,” Clara said, her entire body trembling, her voice high and tight and desperate. “You see that, right?” She gestured behind her. They could. They could all see that. The wound in Ben’s stomach was not the same as a broken leg or the busted nose or the cuts from the glass or the bruise Oliver could feel forming on his hip. “We need to get help,” she said. Everyone knew that Clara had a crush on Ben Weaver. Or maybe crush was too mild a word: she sat next to him in class and at lunch; she knew his schedule; she laughed too loudly at his questionable jokes.
“Where is this help coming from, Clara?” Grace said, arms thrown out, like she was giving up, giving over. “Who’s going to get it?”
“If we can go look for the others, then we can get some fucking help instead, don’t you think?” Clara yelled.
“They’re the same thing, Clara!” Hollis said, her voice rising to match Clara’s. She gestured down the river. “Someone has to get in the river, either way! We find the others, or we find a way to get help. It’s better than doing nothing.”
Half of them were bordering on hysterics now; something was happening here, and he couldn’t find the knife, and they were trapped in a deep ravine with a storm gaining force and the river growing louder, more menacing.
Someone had to make a decision. Someone had to take control. There was no more time for waiting.
Oliver heard the words coming from his mouth without even thinking of them first. “We’ll take a vote,” he said.
Brody laughed dismissively, but the others started nodding. In their silence was a permission.
“Hold on. Who put this guy in charge?” Brody asked, incredulous.
This guy. It occurred to Oliver then that Brody had no idea who he was. Had no idea who half these people were. “My name,” he said sharply, “is Oliver King.”
Oliver needed to do something. The knife was missing, but somebody had it. He had been given a second chance, but he would have to take the third. All life required a risk. A moment of vindication that only crystallized in hindsight. Even now, Oliver could feel that this was his.
He raised his voice. “We go look, yes or no,” he said, turning the flashlight on the first person in the circle. Knowing, already, what she would say.
Click-click.
Hollis stared back with her icy-blue eyes, trembling in the rain. “Yes,” she said.