20

Victor has been waiting for the downpour to subside, even a little, for over an hour. Lying on top of his sleeping bag, his boots laced tight, his jacket zipped, a dormant headlamp strapped to his forehead. Waiting.

Midnight. The hands on his watch still glowing brightly, and of course they are. A gift from his mom. Only the best for her soon-to-be Eagle Scout. One o’clock. He stares at the tent ceiling, but the thick clouds block out any moonlight, and the darkness is total. Waiting.

Or is the rain just an excuse? Once he unzips the tent, there’s no going back.

He feels the reassuring outline of the knife in his pocket. He runs the checklist over in his head. First, the packs. Cut Santi’s down and take what food he can. Then to Amelia’s pack for the map and the radio, so they can’t call Search and Rescue.

Five, ten minutes at the most, and then he’s gone. Up past where they were supposed to camp tonight, and off the trail before sunrise. From there, it’s not long to Winslow’s cabin. Maybe a day, just because of the elevation gain. If all goes well, he’ll be there by mid-morning the day after tomorrow.

He sits up and reaches for the door’s zipper, but a tremendous gust of wind rattles the tent. Just a little while longer, he thinks. And then I’ll go.

How easy it would be to take off his boots right now, to wiggle into his sleeping bag, to pretend he was never going to do anything.

But he can’t do that. If he bails, then every time he sees his stepdad’s face, he’ll be reminded of his own cowardice. And even though ol’ Winslow will never find out, Victor will know. He has no follow-through. Over and over, every time he sees his stepdad, he’ll hear those words. No follow-through.

It will eat at him until it kills him.

There’s a rumble in the distance. More thunder.

Next to him, Santi sits bolt upright. Victor instinctively lies back down.

“What is that?” Santi says, turning on the headlamp dangling from the tent ceiling.

Victor’s heart jackhammers against his ribs. He rolls the sleeping bag over himself and whips the headlamp off his own head. “Turn the light off.”

There is something out there, a rumble, and it’s getting louder. And then the tent is moving, the ceiling is the floor, and Santi screams out. And they roll again. And again.

Victor can’t breathe and he can’t see and he grasps at his face but his arms are caught and his head smashes against the ground and he thinks this is it. The thickness in front of his face, the repeated pounding to his head. His inability to make it stop. His weakness.

And so he gives up. He hears screams through the fog, but he doesn’t fight.

Then everything is still.

The pressure disappears, and the sleeping bag comes away from his face. Victor gasps as if breaking through the surface of a swimming pool. Santi shines the headlamp in his eyes, and Victor notices blood dripping onto the sleeping bag, then on his hand when he touches the throbbing above his right eye. And there’s water. So much water.

Santi crouches back down and begins to sift through the mess at his feet. “You already have your boots on?”

Victor mumbles something about needing to take a piss before the world fell apart.

“Everything’s gone,” Santi says finally. “Just gone.”

***

A thick, soupy darkness. Victor follows Santi away from the tent, both of them screaming for help, for the others, for something. The destruction, or what Victor can see of it through the beam of his headlamp, is apocalyptic. Three-foot tree trunks snapped at the base like toothpicks. Boulders poking through the mud like so many icebergs, the exposed tops hinting at their massive size below the surface. And the mud. The mud is everywhere. In some places it’s like chocolate pudding; in others it’s as thick and rocky as damp concrete. They slog through it, fight across it.

Victor turns and scrambles up the hill, away from Santi, away from the debris. His pack has to be there. It has to be.

And it is. Santi’s too, stuffed with food, swaying gently in the wind and rain as if nothing had happened.

Victor collapses underneath his pack and leans his head against the tree. He closes his eyes and smiles, thinking what the guy who sold it to him would say if he saw it now. The seam-sealed roll-top closure, the adjustable GridLock shoulder harness, the ultra-durable fusion points. The salesman rattling off a list of features that meant nothing to Victor at the time.

Santi shouts. And again.

“Don’t add yourself to the victim list,” Victor says, an impulse from somewhere deep in his brain, remembering the wilderness first-responder course he had to take for scouting. But he’s already on the victim list, isn’t he? He presses two fingers against his injured shoulder and rolls his elbow up and forward, relieved by the absence of pain. He wipes moisture from his forehead and cheek and uses the beam of the headlamp to check the blood on his hand. Watery, like weak cranberry juice. It could have been so much worse.

Victor looks now to Santi. Panicked, soaking. One boot missing. It’s time to go. If they find the kitchen, they’ll be able to find the others. And if they find the others, they’ll find Amelia’s map.

Using the packs as a point of reference, they aim their lights downhill and enter the devastation. With the trees mostly gone, with the ground covered in feet of debris, it’s nearly impossible to figure out where they are.

“We’re almost there,” Santi says. “I’m sure of it.”

Except they’re not. There is no kitchen, no tarp. Even the ravine doesn’t seem to be where it had been.

“They’re gone, Santi,” Victor says.

Santi keeps stumbling forward, but Victor hangs back. A realization spreads through him, a tingling that reaches his fingertips. He’s alive. He survived. Maybe, somehow, there’s even a silver lining in all of this.

He can ditch Santi here. Right now, in fact. Santi would be on his own, sure, but it’s not like he’d die or anything. Someone would find him. With his missing boot, his torn up heels, and his total wilderness ineptitude, he’d have no choice but to stay here until help came. And he wouldn’t starve.

Victor will leave some food from Santi’s pack. He’s not an animal, after all.

Santi leans over and vomits.

“Did you hear that?” Santi says, wiping his eyes and mouth. “She’s screaming for help.”

Victor has already made his decision. He’ll wander around for a little while longer, letting Santi get farther away, and then he’ll head back uphill to the packs. Even if he doesn’t have a map, he has an opportunity.

Suddenly, Santi takes off down the hill. He does an awkward hop-jump, lurching forward every time his bare foot touches the mud. Three hops later, Santi disappears into the curtain of rain, and Victor spins in the other direction.

Now’s his chance.

But what if there’s really someone down there? And what if it’s Amelia? And what if she has her pack with her?

Damn it.

He follows the sound of Santi’s voice downhill, to the edge of a thunderous river.

Santi points his headlamp across the water, the beam flashing off of something—the reflective stripes of a jacket?

Amelia. Clutching the side of a boulder like it’s a raft, a dark torrent of water at least fifteen feet across rushing between them and her. Santi’s light flickers back and forth across her body. Just like Victor, she’s fully clothed. Shoes, jacket, pants, everything. Fully clothed, which means she must have gotten dressed after the mudslide. Which means she still has her stuff. Which means she still has the map.

Victor turns off his headlamp and watches the two of them screaming at each other in the rain.

What comes next looks like it happens in slow motion. A roar from above, and a curtain of black, and then she’s gone.

Victor flees uphill, scrambling away from the deafening noise. He trips on a splintered branch and crashes to the ground, slamming into a boulder and bouncing onto his back in the mud. Rain fills his mouth as he struggles to catch his breath, and he coughs and his chest throbs and for the second time tonight, he gives up.