An electronic pinging noise roused me from the darkness. I tasted grit. I tasted the coppery tang of blood in my mouth, the air thick with gasoline vapor. Trying futilely to piece together what had happened, I wiped my hand across my raw eyes and began to frantically pat my body to ensure I hadn’t broken anything, wasn’t missing a limb, or bleeding out and just didn’t know it yet.
The van’s interior was crumpled, and it took a moment for me to get my bearings and realize the van now lay on its passenger side. A limp body slumped against me––unconscious or maybe even dead. At that point I had no idea. Suddenly a sharp pain shot through my hip, from the seatbelt digging into my hip bone. I braced my arm against the plastic interior, unbuckled myself, and dropped against the paneling with a thud.
Standing up on unfirm footing, I strained my eyes, making out shapes––seats, bodies, the remains of windows like tattered spider webs, and mud, rock, tree branches, and other plant debris.
A landslide had struck the van on Windigo Road. That much I knew. And now we were buried somewhere in it. Questions flooded me: How deep were we? How far had we been carried? A half a mile like that house? A mile or maybe two? Was anyone else still alive? Would I die? Would we all die? I was shocked by the extent to which the van had been crushed. I thought of a stomped popcan. Simon’s body dangled lifelessly against me like a broken doll.
“Simon, Simon,” I said, tugging his arm. My heart was racing.
No words, no movement, nothing at all. I couldn’t tell whether he was alive or dead. Colby was on the other side of him, slumped against a mound of earth that’d thrust into the van. One of the girls was there amidst the carnage. Over the driver’s seat, I made out Conroy’s shoulder.
“Oh, shit, shit, shit,” I said, my heart quickening. I reached up, gave Simon’s arm a shake, and waited. This time he murmured something, like he did when he talked in his sleep on the bed across from me in the room we shared at Halton House. A wave of relief washed over me for the briefest of moments. What kind of shape was he in? I had no idea. But he was alive. That was all that mattered.
I moved toward Colby and pushed at his shoulder.
“Hey, wake up. Colby––Colby,” I said. He didn’t move, speak, murmur—nothing.
A clump of earth dropped on my head, and a single shaft of bright light lanced down into the van. It was only a few inches around, but it might as well have been a light from heaven. It meant we were near the surface. It beckoned me and I scrambled to the hole with renewed strength and a will not to allow the van to be our steel coffin.
I pulled at the debris, widening the hole, which allowed more sunlight to penetrate the darkness. Then it hit me. Sunrise was around 6 a.m. and we’d been driving Windigo Road at 9 p.m. With it being light outside, it meant that we’d been buried for at least nine hours. Nine hours? Unconscious for nine hours? We could’ve suffocated to death, I thought.
I recalled the moment before the initial strike, the rumbling, Carol’s screech, then the terrifying sounds that I thought would be the last ones I ever heard. But they hadn’t been. Beat up, cut, and addled I was. Not dead though. Then something bumped my shoulder and I turned. The whites of Colby’s eyes fixed on me from his mud-streaked, panicky face. He didn’t speak but looked up at the light. I’d never seen him in such a way. Then he suddenly began to tear at the debris in a frenzy, as if he was single-mindedly focused on getting out and would do whatever it took to do just that. I joined him then. Together we pulled at debris and dug at the dirt like those machines had been doing on Highway 10. Shoulder to shoulder, we widened the hole, better teammates in survival than in basketball. We didn’t talk. The only sounds were that incessant electronic pinging and our grunts of heavy breathing from exertion.
Then Colby grabbed a large ball of roots, yanked it a few times until it fell inside, opening a hole wide enough for a person to crawl through, filling the van with fresh air: profusely pure and full of hope. And I knew right then that I would live, that we would live.
“I’m getting out of here,” said Colby, his voice shaky.
“What about the others?” I said. “Simon’s alive––they might all be alive.”
“You’re crazy. Let’s get out. We can come back for them,” he said. He reached up and began to haul himself up through the hole, his feet kicking the air as if he was a swimmer who’d just spotted a shark fin.
Somewhere inside the van a cry erupted. I turned to look around, but couldn’t make out anything because Colby’s body blocked the light that we’d worked so hard to get. Then another cry, from one of the girls, I was sure. It wasn’t a cry for help, more of a primal cry––frightened, confused, searching.
As Colby’s feet vanished through the hole, I climbed over the bench seat and the broken molding, groping about in the darkness, following those cries like a rescuer following cries in the rubble after an earthquake. Then a hand seized my wrist and jerked it. A face appeared from the shadows, like a ghostly apparition.
Mud plastered Anna’s face. One eye was swollen shut, the other wide and desperate. There wasn’t so much as a speck of arrogance left in her. Her world had been completely annihilated. Everything that she thought she knew about the predictability of an affluent life had been robbed by Mother Nature’s ferocious and unforgiving natural state of change, a change of whimsy that didn’t discriminate by race, religion, or social status. An unstoppable force in its magnitude, which could be avoided if there was enough warning, but never, never stopped. I knew this power intimately, and so too did my mother. She’d spent her life chasing Mother Nature’s turmoil––up close and personal––floods, hurricanes, tornados. Until one day, in Oklahoma’s Tornado Alley, an F5 that she and her two friends had been chasing swung around 180 degrees and engulfed their truck. I wondered if they’d been in the same predicament as us, entombed in a steel coffin, terrified, hurt, disoriented. Had they been tasting grit and blood in their mouths while looking at death’s door, unsure if those moments would be their last, questions filling their minds, wondering if those questions would ever be answered? Who knew? Maybe they’d been unconscious from the onset. That would’ve been a whole lot better.
“What about Tabby?” said Anna. “What about my uncle?”
Unable to answer because I didn’t know, I groped for her seatbelt. Hearing a commotion behind me, I turned back to see Simon’s legs disappear through the hole. Anna whimpered as she pushed against the van’s paneling, which gave me the bit of room I needed to unbuckle her seatbelt. She fell against my body and clutched me, beginning to sob hysterically.
I pushed her away. “Through the hole,” I said.
She fixed on me with her good eye, her expression all terror.
“Go, get out of here,” I said, pointing at the light.
She began nodding frantically. She let go of me, and I helped her scramble over the bench seat. Then the van shifted. Maybe only a foot or two, but it shifted.
There was a shadow over the opening, and Simon yelled down, “You need to get out––NOW!”
My heart leapt; sweat ran into my eyes, stinging them. Anna and I moved with a new urgency to the hole where Simon reached down and grabbed one of her outstretched hands. With him pulling and me pushing, Anna went up and through quickly. No sooner had her feet left my sight than the van shifted again, its metal scraping loudly against rock. This time it didn’t stop at a mere foot but continued for several. My heart raced crazily.
“Help me,” said Tabby. She’d come to and gotten out of her seatbelt on her own. She was wedged in between the front seats frantically shaking her uncle’s shoulder.
“We need to hurry,” I said, and climbed over the debris toward her. “Move, let me see.” I reached around her and stretched over Conroy’s body and began to grope for his seatbelt.
The passenger seat was empty, the seatbelt hanging. Carol was gone. The passenger door was gone. The landslide had torn it off. I followed the driver’s belt to the button on the buckle, pressed it, and Conroy’s body thudded against the warped dash. The engine had been pushed through the firewall, the front end looking like it had collided head on with another vehicle. Then I recalled the tree that had struck the front of the van, right before the lights went dark.
“Where’s Carol?” said Tabby.
“Gone.”
“Gone where? What are we going to do?”
“Help me,” I said.
We each took one of Conroy’s arms. We tilted him off the dash, and then dragged and wiggled him out between the seats, his limp body all dead weight. Once in the light, his head rolled to the side to reveal a large gash on his temple. The dried blood coating the right side of his face gave it the look of a zombie mask. I tried to find his pulse, but I couldn’t and didn’t know if it was just me or because he was dead.
“We need help. Help us,” I yelled at the opening. I heard footsteps above me again. A shadow appeared over the hole.
“Hurry,” said Simon. “It’s going over.”
“Over what?” said Tabby.
“Just hurry,” he repeated. “Hurry, hurry.”
Working together, Tabby and I positioned Conroy directly under the hole, and then we hoisted him up to Simon, who reached down and grabbed his shirt. I held his body up while Tabby moved down to his legs to lift.
She gasped, and said, “Oh my God, his leg––I think it’s broken.”
It looked like a piece of white plastic was protruding from Conroy’s thigh, a broken bone, bloodied and covered in body tissue. I felt sick to my stomach, and I reflexively glanced away, gagging. I took a deep breath and lifted Conroy with every bit of strength that I could muster.
“Push, now, push,” I yelled to Tabby.
Conroy’s head and shoulders rose through the hole, then some of the weight was taken off his body as Simon worked him from his end. Dirt and debris rained down on us. Conroy went through the opening, his bone sickly snagging a few times before his legs and feet exited. Then the van began shifting again. This time down a slope. It didn’t feel like it was going to stop.
“Go, go, go,” I said.
Tabby reached up desperately and made a few false grabs before she was successful. She began climbing out. I got under her kicking legs to push her up and caught a heel square in the nose, which caused my eyes to water. The van continued to slide. It was a horrible feeling: closed in and moving God only knew where. Simon’s words echoed in my head like a tolling bell––“It’s going over”––just as Tabby made it out.
Outside the van the others screamed and yelled, only I couldn’t make out what they were saying. Everything seemed to be closing in around me.
Glancing around for anything we might be able to use, unsure if we’d be able to get back inside, I saw Simon’s gym bag and Anna’s Gucci purse in the debris. I grabbed them by the straps, feeling the van speeding up, scraping against rock. I tossed them through the hole, almost losing my balance as the van continued to slide. And then, as I was about to climb out, I spotted All the Pretty Horses near my feet, picked it up, and shoved it into my waistband. Simon’s headphones were broken into pieces so I left them. Then I began to scramble through the hole just as the screams and yells outside grew to a fevered pitch: “A cliff, a cliff.” The van rotated, picking up even more speed. It made me think of a carnival ride that I’d once been on––what a thing to think!
The light momentarily blinded me, disorienting me, and I quickly blinked away until I could see. The van was sliding toward a canyon as vast as the Grand Canyon. I had only moments to spare. With one final pull, I burst through the hole. I snatched the gym bag and Gucci purse and leapt from the sliding van to land on the high side of the slope, which was covered in landslide debris. Not looking back, I scrambled and clawed as fast as I could up the slope toward the others, worried I might somehow be swept away.
They were on a rocky portion. Colby and Simon yelled and waved me onwards. The girls huddled beside Conroy’s reposed body. As I hustled toward them, I heard the van shear against rock like a death cry before a whooshing sound told me that it had dropped over the edge. An edge I’d almost went over. An edge we all would’ve gone over if I hadn’t come around when I did.
By the time I reached the others, I was sucking wind. They were sorry looking. They reminded me of images that I’d seen of tsunami survivors in National Geographic. Their faces were slack and dazed, covered in dirt, their hair wild and tangled, the flesh of their arms scratched and bleeding from hundreds of small cuts and scratches, and their clothes were muddy and torn. An air of shock and bewilderment hung around them like a heavy fog. I figured I looked pretty much the same.
It was eerily silent on the slope. No more sounds came from the canyon, as if the van had dropped into a bottomless void. Maybe it had. The landslide was the size of a soccer field, a patch of earth and rock, broken trees and limbs. It looked like it had fallen from the sky, not formed naturally from coming down the mountainside as landslides do.
“What the hell are those?” said Simon slowly. He was pointing up at the sky across the canyon. Three enormous planets ran in a vertical line. They were peach-colored and each was circled by a set of white rings. The nearest one to the horizon was the largest, the other two smaller as if farther away.
“Planets,” whispered Tabby in awe.
“They shouldn’t be there,” said Simon angrily. “Right?” He looked at me, but I was too glued to them to meet his eyes.
“And those trees look like giant broccoli,” said Anna, her voice distant.
Simon said, “We can’t see planets like that from . . .”
“From Earth,” I said, swallowing.
The fog of shock and bewilderment seemed to thicken, and I became lost for a while as we all gazed around speechlessly at our surroundings. I didn’t know how it happened. But the world had somehow changed. We were no longer on our way home to watch Hena give birth to her colt. No longer navigating potholes on Windigo Road. No longer on Mount Romni. No longer in the Pacific Northwest. No longer in the United States of America, Canada no longer an hour to the north.
I turned around. There was a prehistoric-looking forest miles away, with oddly shaped trees (yes, like broccoli) as tall as skyscrapers, their tops brushing the clouds. And above them a gigantic sun bigger than the largest of those three planets––or what looked like a sun––only more reddish than orange, casting everything in a peculiar, fiery glow. Rising into the clouds behind us were tiers of rocky, jagged mountains from which a strong breeze carried a raw, earthy smell. Like Mount Romni earlier, only this was stronger, almost palpable. I’d never smelled anything so wild.
Simon was the only one who was standing when I climbed up onto the rock. Colby had sat down. His arms were crossed over his knees and he was slumped forward as if he’d given into exhaustion, as if the accident and escape had robbed him of all his energy. The girls were still huddled against Conroy, one on either side of him.
“Grabbed what I could,” I said, tossing the bag and purse onto the rock.
“Man, lucky you didn’t go over,” said Colby.
I was about to call him out for leaving me―call him a coward or chickenshit—but didn’t think it was the time or place. Instead I just huffed, turned away. Disgusted. Pissed off.
“We’re all lucky,” said Simon.
“What about Carol?” said Anna, grabbing her purse.
I faced the debris. Conroy, pale and trembling, propped up on his elbow to speak: “She’s gone.”
“What do you mean gone?” said Anna, her voice cracking.
“From the van,” he said hoarsely. “Ejected from the van.”
“Oh my God,” said Anna. She put her shaky hand to her mouth, stifling a sob.
“Her door was missing,” said Tabby, her voice tremulous. Both girls began to cry and reached for their uncle to embrace him in a hug.
“She didn’t have her seatbelt on,” I said, in a faraway voice that didn’t sound like my own. “It was just hanging there.”
Colby looked between his legs like he was searching the bottom of a well, shook his head, and said, “And she’s always telling us to buckle up.”