“It went for my throat,” Preston said. “The big one. He went right for my throat.”
“That’s what they do,” Olivia said. “That’s how they hunt.”
“If I fall …” Preston said, but he didn’t complete his statement.
“You won’t fall. No one’s falling. We’re going to stay up in these trees until we have a better idea of what’s going on,” Olivia said. “Trust me.”
Tock felt as though he should say something. He needed to say why he hadn’t immediately jumped in when Olivia called him. He had chickened out. He could switch it around in his mind any way he liked, but facts were facts: Given a chance to be heroic, he had clung to the tree and thought about how not to volunteer. Maybe that was smart, or maybe it was simple self-preservation, but he understood he would have to live with that knowledge — his chicken identity — from this point forward. It bothered him to think about it. He wondered if maybe everyone was part chicken, part lion.
“Sorry,” he said.
No one answered from the other tree.
Quincy threw up in the middle of the night. It was the rich food he had eaten, he knew, but it was almost worth it. At least it wasn’t like it could be if you had the flu and you had to upchuck a half dozen times, your guts straining like crazy. No, he simply walked in the bathroom, got sick, then washed his mouth out with a finger of toothpaste and headed back to bed.
He had almost made it back to bed, too, when Devon appeared with two other people who wore search-and-rescue gear. They were majorly rigged out, complete with two-way radios and yellow outdoor jackets that glistened in the dim light of the hallway. Devon stepped forward and spoke quietly to him.
“Could you come back out and tell us again where you think the other team went?” Devon asked.
“I already told you,” Quincy said.
His stomach still wasn’t great.
“I know you did,” one of the search-and-rescue guys said. His voice was high and thin, and it surprised Quincy to see that the search-and-rescue guy wasn’t that much older than he, Quincy, was. The guy was only a teenager. That struck him as odd.
“They just went the other way on One Hundred Mile Road. Or One Hundred Acre Road. Whatever.”
“Can you give us more information about what they took?” the second search-and-rescue person said. It was a woman. She was tall and middle-aged, and her hair had tiny strands of gray in it. She seemed very calm, nearly to the point of boredom. But she also had a sense of competency, Quincy figured. If anyone found Olivia’s group, it would probably be this woman.
“I’d like to help if I could, but I’ve already told you everything.”
“You said they didn’t have food,” the young guy said.
“No one had food!” Quincy said, slightly annoyed that they wouldn’t accept what he had told them. “I’ve told you all this. We had a little food and divided it up, then ate it pretty much.”
The woman stepped forward and put her hand on Quincy’s shoulder. Her hand felt cold.
“Here’s the thing,” she said. “We’re having trouble locating them. We’ve been up and down the road, and we’ve come up with nothing. No results. So now we’re back taking it around again. Thinking it through, you see what I mean? Sometimes a small detail can help us locate what we need. You never know what the small detail might be, but it’s usually there.”
Quincy tried to think of any significant detail he might have overlooked, but he came up blank. His stomach rolled deep down below his beltline. He felt weird and a little nervous, and the lights — they had a bunch of vehicles out in the camp, all of them with orange or blue flashers twirling around — stirred everything up. It felt like an alien invasion.
“Olivia said they were going to go straight out on the road,” Quincy said. “That was her last instruction to us. If anyone came to get us, that’s what we were supposed to tell them. Right on the road.”
“Okay, thanks,” the woman said. “You hit the hay. Don’t worry, we’re going to find them.”
“Hope so,” Quincy said, and wandered back toward his bed. His stomach made a low grumbling sound, but he fell back asleep before he could worry much about it.
Preston could no longer hold on. That was okay. He had tried and failed, and there was no dishonor in that. He was pretty sure he was bleeding badly, because sometimes he felt something shift in his body. It was almost as if his body contained a tidal wash of seawater and gravity. The moon, he thought, could change the blood inside him. He had never known that before. It was very interesting to know that, and he wished he could think more about it, but it was too late for that.
Sorry, I must be going, he thought.
That was a punch line to an old joke, but he couldn’t remember what the start of the joke might be. Sorry, I must be going. It made him smile to recall it. And, really, if he had to fall out of the tree, if the coyotes had to get him, well, what could you say about that? The only expression that made any sense was, Sorry, I must be going.
“I don’t think I can hold on,” Preston said.
Or maybe he said it. He couldn’t say for sure if he spoke or not. He wanted to speak, but his head felt cloudy. He had tied his one good arm to the pine branch with his belt, but he doubted the belt could hold him if he fell. He didn’t want to think about dangling halfway out of the tree and coyotes leaping up to get him. No, it would be better to untie the belt, to be free to go if you had to go, because really, I must be going.
He smiled at that. Blood rocked around inside his body.
When he looked down, he saw the coyotes pass under the tree. They knew what awaited them. He had no doubt about that.
“How we doing?” Tock called from somewhere in the forest.
Preston didn’t have a clear idea of where Tock was located.
“It’s getting lighter,” Olivia said. “How many can you spot?”
“I can see three,” Tock said. “The big one is back under you. Patient little buggers, aren’t they? They’re in no rush.”
“Just hold on,” Olivia said.
Sorry, I must be going, Preston thought.
It was really not that hard. You simply let go. You simply surrendered. Then, once that happened, you didn’t have to worry anymore. The coyotes took care of the rest. Right? Wasn’t that right? He wished he could ask Olivia, but he wasn’t certain his tongue still worked. Maybe it did. It was hard to say.
He reached up and checked his belt. His fingers undid it. He dropped the belt to the ground. A coyote came over quickly and smelled it. Then it retreated again into the understory.
Sorry, I must be going, Preston thought finally.
He let his hand drop from the branch where he had secured it with the belt. The sudden liberty of his arm threw his body off balance. He began to fall, slowly, remarkably, piece by piece. First his hand, then his leg slid off the branch. He caught himself with his other hand, but his balance was forfeit now. It was the seawater in his body pulling him downward. Something hard hit him on the wrist, then his foot slid off the last tree branch, and it was not far to fall. Not at all. It was just a little way, just into the sea beneath them, and he did not hate the coyotes, he did not even fear them.
And he was well on his way when the first rescue person appeared under the tree.
“Hey!” Olivia shouted. “Hey, up here.”
Preston couldn’t stop his fall. He landed with a soft umph against the tree branches. When his vision cleared, he saw a woman in a yellow jacket bend over him.
“You didn’t stick to the road,” she said. “Did you?”
“I guess not,” he said, amazed at what had happened. Sorry, I must be going.
“Well now, look at that,” G-Mom said, finally shuffling into the bakery. “It’s flooding, isn’t it?”
“That’s what I was trying to tell you.”
G-Mom nodded and kept shuffling straight across the room. She went to the front window and looked out. Kuru almost laughed to see her. G-Mom looked like an old turtle, or
a chicken, turning her head this way and that, trying to get her eyes zoomed in on the water.
“Something must have broke,” G-Mom said finally, pulling back as though nothing had been determined until she had witnessed the water herself.
“That’s what I thought.”
More water had come under the door even in the last few minutes, Kuru saw. She grabbed the broom from behind the cookie counter and tried to sweep the water out. But it did no good. If anything, more water followed the sweeps back inside.
“Give your mama a call and see what she says,” G-Mom said. “I’ll turn to the news.”
“And miss your stories?” Kuru said, teasing her grandmother.
“That Illinois River is famous for flooding. You mark my word, that’s what’s happening.”
“I’ll call her …” Kuru said, then stopped when the electricity cut out.
It went out in one large humppphhhh. Then something made a loud cracking sound, the lights flashed for a second, and finally everything cut out again.
JOSEPH MONNINGER lives in New Hampshire. He is the author of the young adult novels Baby, Hippie Chick, Wish, and Finding Somewhere.
Copyright © 2014 by Joseph Monninger
All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Inc., Publishers since 1920. SCHOLASTIC and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.
First Printing, August 2014
Cover art by Dave Seeley
Front cover design by Natalie C. Sousa
e-ISBN 978-0-545-56356-7
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.
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