I sat gasping and shuddering on the shale. My legs and feet were laced with scratches and small cuts and bled in places, but I couldn’t stop staring at my arm. I held it out, slightly away from me. It looked like someone else’s arm, a broken doll’s arm. I moaned something about Rachel, something about dying.
“Shut up, Wini. Don’t move.” Pia whipped her T-shirt over her head, blood pumping out of her left shoulder. I saw the mouth of the wound, a good four inches long and deep too. I saw the meat of her. She grabbed a torn end of the shirt and ripped it in half.
She glanced at her shoulder, at me, eyes bright with urgency. “Help me with this.”
“What do I do?”
“I want you to hold the skin together before I wrap it.”
She dropped down into the eddy and dunked once before she climbed back out and sat in front of me, facing the water. “Hurry up and do it,” she said.
I reached across her back and gripped her shoulder, already slippery with blood, and tried to draw together the lips of the wound with my one good hand. The iron taste of blood mixed with the cool evening air. Now wearing only her black sports bra and shorts—her helmet tossed aside—Pia slipped the armhole of one of the T-shirt halves over her bad arm and slid the remnant up to my hand that still clenched her wound. I could feel her heart pulsing in her arm.
We stiffened as a sound floated over the boom of the river. “Where are you?” came Rachel’s voice, part scream, part moan.
Fifty yards downstream, helmet askew on her head, Rachel hugged a boulder near the bank. She pushed herself to her feet, her footing bad on the tilted rock. We screamed her name and she waved both arms in our direction, then ducked down and dropped out of sight behind the rock.
“What the fuck is she doing?” I said. “Where did she go?”
“Hurry up with this, will you?” I finally got that Pia wanted my good hand to act as her other hand, so together we tied a feeble knot over the cut and she stood up. In seconds, the improvised bandage was heavy with blood and sagging. “Keep this,” she said, tossing the other half of the shirt in my direction. “I’m going to get her.”
Through a haze of pain, I watched as Pia, clutching the bandage, blundered off into the woods near the river. For long minutes I sat slowly closing and opening my eyes, praying each time that I would spot my friends in the distance. Finally, Pia emerged dragging Rachel up the bank. I shut my eyes and whispered my thanks, opening them to watch Rachel as she tripped along behind Pia, anchored to the back of her shorts.
Rachel collapsed down next to me, panting and shivering. “Pia says your arm is broken.”
I nodded. “How did you get past me in the river?”
“Fuck knows.”
“Are you all right?”
“Still blind, but compared to you guys I’m really good.” Her bare feet were scraped and blotchy with bruises. It hurt to look at them. She tossed aside her mangled helmet and repositioned herself, squatting on a ledge just below me. “Let me see your arm,” she said as she moved in close, her head inches from my arm as she first scanned it with her eyes, then fluttered her fingers over it. Pia stood over us, a bleeding sentinel.
“You don’t have to break it again or any of that shit, do you?” I said, realizing I was still crying, and that it had become almost perpetual.
Again her mop of drenched hair tracked up and down my forearm, dripping on my gooseflesh. I tried to leave my body for a bit, but, no. Even though I could feel the wisdom in her fingers, I shuddered with pain at any touch, including her hot breath on me. As she uttered the words “This’ll just take a sec,” she gripped my wrist and elbow, leaned in with her shoulder at the break, and with her body weight snapped my arm back into place.
I screamed. Partly from surprise, but mostly from agony. Pia slapped her hand over my mouth. “Quiet, Win, come on, you have to . . .”
I wailed into her palm.
Cradling my arm, I rolled over onto my good side and stuffed my screams back into my throat and down into my body. My cheek pressed against the cold stone. A balm. I floated in and out of consciousness, maybe to grab a few seconds away from detonating pain. From far away, I heard Pia and Rachel shuffling around me, talking in low tones.
Consciousness returned with the feel of Pia’s hand cupping river water to my mouth. “Come on,” she whispered. “You have to get up. We have to hide.”
I pushed myself up to a sitting position with my good arm. It had grown dark enough so the colors of things had leaked away, and the trees behind us reached up like wraiths against an azure evening. A few yards beyond us the river rumbled blackly, intent on its night business.
Rachel squatted next to me.
“Sorry, but I have to do this.” She laid a stick along my forearm and looped Pia’s belt around it several times, finally buckling it in place. I struggled to not cry out. Patiently she held open the other half of Pia’s T-shirt as I slipped my injured arm through it, then jury-rigged it into a primitive sling.
“You are one slick asshole with that arm-breaking thing,” I said.
“You’ll thank me later, hon,” Rachel said, “when your arm isn’t shaped like a horseshoe.”
“Hey, you guys,” Pia stage-whispered from somewhere behind us in the gloom where the forest met the rocks we sat on. “Get over here. You’re too out in the open over there.”
Rachel helped me to my feet, and we made our way to the sound of Pia’s voice, which came from the base of a massive beech. Impossibly heavy branches encircled the trunk, extending several yards at waist height before curving skyward as if reaching up to grasp something. Rachel got down on her hands and knees and crawled to the base of the tree to join Pia. I crouched down, my head and arm pounding. Inhaled the peaty smell of moss and damp wood. Soon we sat butted up against the tree, peering out at the descending shelves of granite and shale and the river beyond. Pia was right. No doubt we’d been practically glowing in the moonlight on those rocks. Still, no tree was going to save us. The air rose up chilled from the river, full of the smell of wet stones.
“I’m going to get some rocks together,” Pia said. “In case someone comes.”
Rachel and I watched her silhouette hunt along the river. Though she treated her bad arm gingerly, still she used both to forage. She gathered sharp sticks and fist-size stones, every now and then dropping a bundle of forest weaponry next to our tree. I watched the pile grow, too blown out to comment on the futility of the thing, trying to picture how stones would defend us against bullets and arrows. I wondered why none of us had had the presence of mind to stash a knife, matches, anything of use into the many fancy pockets of our vests or clothing at the beginning of this trip. Idiotic. But I also thought about Pia’s harping about living in the present and realized I had been present more than ever these last few days, and maybe that was the only reason I was still alive.
Pia tossed one last armful on the pile and crawled in with us, shivering. “We have to be ready,” she said hoarsely.
“How can we be ready?” I said.
“We have to be ready to kill them. Do you know what I’m saying?”
“Jesus Christ, Pia,” Rachel said.
“Well, are you?”
We didn’t answer her. A lusty chorus of night insects started up, cued by some unknowable agreement. Full dark dropped down over us along with the reality of spending another night outside. I wanted to fragment into one giant panic but forced myself to pull back from that. There was an energy to being outside in the woods at night, I had learned. I thought, Maybe I can use it. A fizzing sort of calm came over me.
But my arm would not settle. Pain mushroomed in fantastic colors in my head. For a moment I closed my eyes to watch my agonized fireworks, but I snapped them open right away. Something buzzed around my ear. Another creature—segmented and much larger, winged—hummed against my cheek. I held my breath, then made myself exhale. Only insects, flying past.
“Maybe they’re done with us,” I said. “Maybe he’s gotten her to stop. Convinced her to let us go.” But even as I said it, I didn’t buy it. It felt silly hiding under a tree in the dark. Three wounded sitting ducks. Three children playing hide-and-seek with killers.
“You can’t think that way, Win,” Pia said. “You’ll make yourself helpless. We don’t know what’s happened. All we know is Sandra is dead and they’re both still out there.”
The mention of Sandra made me ache. I couldn’t even look at her with my mind’s eye, as if all that had happened was too large to take in just by looking or it would be too damaging to do so, like staring at an eclipse.
“Who knows what happens in these woods?” Rachel said. “People must disappear all the time, right? We can’t be the first. Just look at this godforsaken place.”
Whimpering, we moved closer together and tried to warm each other, avoiding our various wounds. Lit by the moon, the river flowed like pearly lava around the big rocks that divided it. The one Rachel had clung to an hour ago rose up like a ghost rock. I wondered if I could kill someone. Could I kill Dean? I pictured the tide of intelligence in his hands as they spoke to me, the photos he rubbed between his fingers like talismans, the way his face broke open with joy the first time I signed to him. I remembered his swift fingers nocking the arrow on the string, heard the creak of the bow as he aimed at my heart.