by Gary Paulsen
Their feet hit the water almost at the same time. Amos was introduced violently to some basic laws of physics concerning fluids and gases. He found that his upper half, attached to the glider, kept moving through the air much better than his bottom half, which was in the water.
In fact the bottom half stopped dead.
“Pluummphh!”
As their bodies entered the water, the glider tried to keep flying. It couldn’t, and in half a second it slammed forward and down into the water in an impact that shot water thirty feet into the air.
They were on the edge of the rapids—Dunc had brought the glider down as he said he would—but the sudden jerk forward pushed the nose of the glider out into the current.
The glider material acted in the water like a parachute, caught the full force of the river, and took off at a speed matching the current.
The boys were still attached in their harnesses. Upside down, tumbling, the hang glider thundered down the river, cartwheeling in the current, breaking spars and snapping cables, dragging Amos and Dunc end over end behind it.
Dunc grabbed at the harness and fought to get free. He clawed, missed the release, and found it again when he was upside down. Air bubbles streamed up from his nostrils. He pulled, tore free, then reached back for Amos.
And missed.
He had one glimpse of Amos, head down, eyes squinched shut, stiff as a poker under water. Then the current ripped the glider away from Dunc, and Amos disappeared downstream.
.4
Amos was dreaming.
In the dream he was standing in the center of his living room, turned toward the door, ready to go outside, when the phone rang.
Even in the dream he had good form. He wheeled in one smooth motion and felt his legs power him, driving him off sideways at a perfect angle to grab the phone on the wall just inside the kitchen door, to get it by that all-important second ring. There was another phone on the end table in the living room, but his mind, quick as a computer, reckoned it to be nearly eight centimeters farther than the one in the kitchen.
Both legs driving, arms pumping, a little spit out the side of his mouth—classic form.
Then the cat.
“Amos!”
They didn’t even have a cat. His sister Amy, whom Amos called the Dragon, was allergic to cats. But in the dream there was a cat. A big old tom, scarred and mangy, and just as Amos made the pivot it moved from beneath the dining-room table and stepped perfectly between his ankles. As the phone began the second ring, he started down. With one clawing hand he caught the phone—just as his face slammed into the carpet so hard, he felt the fabric drive through his skin.…
“Amos—wake up.…”
Amos opened his eyes.
For a moment he couldn’t remember anything, and he was startled to see Dunc leaning over him wearing a helmet and apparently wrapped in some kind of red cloth.
“Dunc?”
“Oh, man, I thought you were gone this time.” Dunc rolled Amos on his side. “You must have puked five gallons of water.”
“What are you doing here?” Amos stared at Dunc. “I was just going to answer the phone.… Oh. Oh. Now I remember. It was a dream. Man, even in my dreams I can’t get to the phone.”
Dunc stood. He had grabbed some of the material from the glider and pulled the glider off Amos so he could pump his chest, and he was now tangled in the cloth. He pulled it away and dropped it onto the ground. “I can’t believe I found you.”
“What happened?”
“You want the whole story?” Dunc asked.
“Yes.”
“Well, we decided to break the record for two boys our age on a hang glider—”
“No, I remember all that. I mean in the river, with the glider. What happened?”
“We got separated. I broke loose, and the current took you on down. It was just a fluke—you got caught up on a snag that jutted out from the bank, and I saw the red of the glider cloth. Otherwise you would have been in trouble.”
Amos stared at him. “This isn’t trouble?”
“Well—not as much as it could have been.”
“Dunc, we didn’t decide to break the record. You decided to break the record, and if you hadn’t decided to break the record, we wouldn’t be in this fix.”
“Amos—”
“Admit it.”
“Amos—”
“Admit it now. It’s all your fault.”
“All of it?”
“Yes.”
“Even the thermal?”
“Everything. Everything in the whole world that has ever gone wrong is completely and totally your fault, starting with maybe the Second World War and going right up to the present time and maybe even in the future.”
“All right. It’s all my fault.”
“Thank you—I feel much better now.” Amos took his helmet off and leaned over. He wiggled his head to clear the water out of his ears, then stopped and looked up at Dunc with his head cocked. “So what do we do now?”
Dunc didn’t answer right away. He took his own helmet off, pulled his jacket and T-shirt off, and wrung them out. Then he sat on a rock, pulled his shoes and pants off, and hung all his clothing on a branch to dry.
Taking it all as a suggestion, Amos did the same. The two boys sat in their underwear on a large, flat rock overlooking the river and let the sun bake them. The glider, or what was left of it, lay in a crumpled mass to their rear.
“Well?” Amos said.
“Well what?” The sun was warm, and Dunc felt a strange urge to just close his eyes and sleep. Maybe, he thought, it will all go away if I sleep—maybe it’s all a dream.
“Well, what are we going to do?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea.”
“Stop it, Dunc—you always have ideas. That’s how it works. Your beady little brain is always cooking. That’s why we get into all the trouble we get into—because you’re all the time having ideas.”
“Not this time. It’s like my brain stopped when we hit the water. I remember seeing you head off downstream, and I was scared you would drown, and somehow I got to shore and ran after you—but there wasn’t any thinking going on.”
“Dunc …”
“Honest. And it doesn’t seem to be happening now, either. It’s just a blank in there.” He scratched his stomach where a tree limb had bruised him while he was swimming to shore. “Isn’t it nice, just sprawling out in the sun? Kind of like being a lizard or something.”
“Are you out of your mind?” Amos sat up and looked down at Dunc. “We have crashed in the middle of a wilderness with no kind of survival gear or food. Nobody knows where we are. We could die. In fact, we probably will die. So think of something!”
Dunc opened one eye and studied Amos. “You make it sound worse than it is.”
“The heck I do!” Amos looked at his digital watch, which amazingly was still working. “We’ve got two, maybe three hours until dark. Dark is when things happen out here in the wilderness. Bad things. Big things move around and eat little things when it gets dark. I saw that on the Discovery Channel. And we definitely classify as little things.”
Dunc sighed. “Really, Amos—it’ll all work out. Mr. Meserman saw us go and probably went for help. They’ll start searching for us pretty soon. I’ll bet there are planes and helicopters starting up right now—we’ll probably be home in half an hour. So just lay back and enjoy the sun.”
“You really think so?”
“No problem—you’ll be home watching television and eating chips and dip in a couple of hours.”
It was the second-wrongest thing Dunc had ever said.
.5
Dark didn’t come gradually, the way it does in movies and on television.
One moment it was light and sunny, and the boys were relaxing on the rock drying their clothes. Then it seemed the next minute it was stone dark, so dark they couldn’t see their hands in front of their faces.
Amos had been wrong about big things comi
ng to eat them. No big things bothered them at all. What came to eat them were small things. Millions of them.
Mosquitoes.
And they didn’t come slowly.
All in one motion, it seemed, it became dark. Amos turned to Dunc and said, “Didn’t it get dark fas—”
That was as far as he got before the air was filled with the shrill whine of clouds of mosquitoes. And each and every little one of them was hungry.
Dunc tried slapping them. He killed ten or twenty, but then another eight or nine thousand took their places. He put his jacket on and pulled it up over his ears.
Amos went completely crazy. “They’re after me, they’re after me—little vampires!” he screamed, and ran into the river.
Dunc heard the splash and pulled his jacket down, but it was so dark, he couldn’t see anything. “Amos?”
He heard a bubbling sound, then a whoosh. “I’m here—in the shallow part next to the bank. They can’t get you under water.”
“You can’t stay in the river all night.”
“Watch me! If I stay up there, I wouldn’t have enough blood for a blood test by morning.”
Dunc pulled his jacket back up, zipped it over his head, and talked through the cloth. “I can’t understand it—they should have come for us by now.”
There was another whoosh—something like a whale blowing—as Amos held his breath and went under water to get rid of the mosquitoes around his head. He came up in fifteen seconds. “It’s like the book.”
“What book?”
“I read this book—Hatchet. About a kid who crashes in the wilderness. He had trouble with mosquitoes too.”
“What did he do?”
“He made a fire. The smoke scared them away or something.”
“How can we make a fire? We don’t have any matches. And if we had them, they’d be wet.”
“He had this hatchet, see, and this porcupine attacked him and he threw the hatchet, and it hit some rocks and made sparks.…” Amos trailed off and went under, then came up again. “So he beat on a rock with the hatchet until he got a fire. Then he ate raw turtle eggs and berries and puked a lot.”
“And this is supposed to help us?”
“Well. It worked for him—Brian, his name was—and he made it all right. He went fifty-four days.”
“Amos, we don’t have a hatchet. We don’t have anything except our clothes and a busted-up hang glider and just about every mosquito in the world.”
Amos sighed, went under, came up. “I’m just trying to help.”
There was a soft rustling sound in the brush, a scuffle, then quiet.
“Dunc?”
Dunc didn’t answer.
“Come on, Dunc, this is no time to fool around.”
Silence, except for the whine of mosquitoes.
Amos crawled out of the river and felt around in the darkness. “Dunc?”
He swung his hands, then moved across and back across the clearing along the river where Dunc had been sitting.
“Dunc?”
There was no answer. It took him a full five minutes of searching, running back and forth in his underwear, to realize that not only was Dunc gone, but so was everything else—the hang glider and his clothes.
Everything.
“Dunc?”
.6
It was the second-longest night in Amos’s entire life. (The longest was the night he turned into a werepuppy and had to fight two pit bulls, a werewolf, and a volleyball net and nearly ate his own foot.)
The mosquitoes did not let up. In fact, they seemed to be mad that Dunc was gone, and twice as many homed in on Amos’s bare skin.
Amos moved back into the river and crouched under water. He rolled on his back and put everything under except his nose and mouth—which the mosquitoes quickly found and tore into. Periodically he ducked under water or sloshed water in his face. He spent the night ducking, sloshing, and spitting out dead mosquitoes, then repeating the process in the cold water for a time that seemed longer than the history of the human race. Finally, finally, the sky began to turn gray, and the sun at last crawled up.
With daylight the mosquitoes went back to wherever they hid and Amos pulled himself out of the river. He was nearly blue, so cold his teeth chattered. He found a rock above the river where the sun could get at him, and he pulled himself up to sit in the warmth.
He lay back and thought of what to do, thinking out loud. “It’s all pretty simple—just like the book. First I’ve got to take stock. So—I’ve got a pair of underwear shorts, a body that looks like a prune, and—”
He looked around, down at his body. “And that’s it. Underwear and prune body, and Dunc is gone.”
He knew he would have to start looking for Dunc, and he fully intended to stand and do that very thing, but the sun was so warm, so comforting, that it seemed to bake the wet and cold out of his body. His eyes closed, opened once, closed again, and he was sound asleep.
Another phone dream took him.
This time he was just about to leave the front door of the house when the phone rang.
He wheeled and dropped into a leaping run in one smooth motion with absolutely flawless form—an easy ten, if anybody had been keeping form score—but Scruff, his dog, was lying there. If somebody was being kind, they would say Amos and Scruff weren’t compatible—if they were being honest they’d say that Scruff had hated the ground Amos walked on ever since an accident with a hot burrito. Even in the dream Scruff didn’t like him.
Amos’s foot came down on Scruff’s tail, Scruff rose like a wolf and sunk his teeth into Amos’s leg, and pulled the leg over to the side. Amos had been going nearly at terminal velocity, and he hit the wall, skipped sideways, plowed through the stand his mother had put in the entry hall for people’s hats even though people didn’t wear hats, ricocheted sideways, and drove his head completely through the wall next to the kitchen door.…
And he woke up.
He was not alone.
Sitting at the end of the rock where he was sleeping was a Neanderthal man.
It took a full second for this to register with Amos. Part of him was still spitting drywall out of his mouth and shaking Scruff off his leg.
The Neanderthal man bared his teeth and made a growling sound.
“Yahhhh!” Amos screamed, and tried to scrabble away on his back. He forgot that he had climbed four feet to get on the rock in the first place, and he fell backward and down and drove the top of his head into another rock with the full force of his body.
I wish I’d paid more attention to that kung fu class I took, he thought when he saw the Neanderthal man coming over the top of the rock at him.
Then he thought nothing at all.
.7
Amos opened his eyes slowly. It was dark except for an eerie blue light, and musty smelling. This time it hadn’t been a dream. This time there’d been nothing but a crashing pain and then unconsciousness.
Things, he thought, are improving.
Then he remembered the Neanderthal man and jerked to a sitting position. Or tried to sit.
“Ohhh …” His head felt as if it were coming apart.
“Just take it easy—you took a bad fall.”
Amos turned to see Dunc kneeling next to him. “What …?”
“It’s complicated,” Dunc said, shaking his head. “How much do you remember?”
“Start at the beginning.” Amos lay back and closed his eyes. His head was throbbing.
“Well, we decided to break the record for two boys our age on a hang glider—”
“Dunc.”
“Oh—okay. You remember flying over the wilderness area—and by the way we did break the record, about six records.”
“I remember that. And crashing. And you deserting me. And mosquitoes. And a Neanderthal man.”
“Milt.”
“What?”
Dunc sighed. “That was Milt.”
“A Neanderthal man named Milt?”
Dunc shook his he
ad. “He’s not a Neanderthal man—at least, I don’t think he is. His name is Milt, and he’s a hermit or something. We’re in his cave. I saw his name written on the wall.”
Amos sat up again and looked around. They were in a large cave, almost a grotto. The blue light came up from water along one wall, which Amos figured must be the way in. And the way out. By squinting, he could just make out a very high ceiling and the front and side walls. Something—rain or bits of damp dirt—kept falling from the ceiling and he felt it in his hair. It was impossible to see the back wall—the cave just disappeared in the darkness.
“It goes back forever,” Dunc said, watching Amos look around. “I checked.”
There was junk all over the place—boards and crates and boxes and bits of rags. A complete rubber raft sat in the middle of the room on the floor, and across it lay two fishing rods. The hang glider lay by the side wall, dumped in a heap. Amos could just make out his own clothes near the wreckage, also dumped in a heap. Everything seemed to be covered in a layer of dirty gunk—even the hang glider and the clothes.
“What’s all over everything?” Amos asked. “And why does it smell like that parrot has been here?”
“Everything is covered with guano,” Dunc said. “That’s why it smells.”
“Iguana—isn’t that a big lizard?”
“Not iguana, guano. That’s the name for bat poop. The ceiling is filled with bats. Thousands and thousands of them. That’s what’s falling on you.”
Amos looked up, then quickly brought his face down. “You mean thousands of bats are going to the bathroom on me?”
Dunc nodded. Amos moved to the side and took up the cloth from the hang glider and covered himself with it.
“Don’t do that, Amos.”
“Do what?”
“Don’t touch the hang glider. It’s his.”
“What’s his? Who?”
“The glider. It belongs to Milt. See, some of the things are his and some are ours—well, I guess they’re all his now—and if you touch the things that are his, he gets all upset.”
Amos closed his eyes, shook his head, and opened them. “Look, Dunc, is all this supposed to make sense to me? Because if it is, I’m in deep trouble or maybe I got hit harder than I thought. I mean, I don’t even know how I got here. And where is the beast from the wilderness—Milt? And how do you know all this?”
