by E. F. Jacks
Red blooms on his neck up to his forehead. He sticks the radio in front of my face. The wires at its back are cut and twisted.
“This can’t be…It has to work.” I grab the radio from him.
I shake the radio and a horrible crackling sound rolls out: “… Tom from River Tours here. Police went to Fiona’s house. She’s…she’s dead. Ellis, are you guys still out there?”
Then silence.
One final voice from civilization.
I drop the radio as fast as if it has fangs and it bounces off the raft’s soft plastic bottom. Then I fall down next to it and press my face to the floor’s surface, which is cool from the moving water below. “Did you here that?” I croak out. Ellis’s hands work their way under my arms and lift me up.
Ellis seats me, then picks up the radio. He shakes it, and it sputters once more, then nothing comes out.
“Oh, no, did I break it?” Concern overtakes my voice.
“It was already broken. I left it outside the tent last night. Someone must have—no, that’s not possible.”
“What were you going to say? Someone must have what?”
“Done something to it, I don’t know. But who would’ve—”
I’m on my feet again. “Who could’ve done it? I’ll give you a list. The person who did this to Doug and Helen. The person who was watching me the night I went swimming.”
Ellis’s face whitens, as though the likelihood of this has dawned on him, too. I sit down again and the scenery around me seems different. We’ve drifted more over to the river’s other side.
I open my case and pull my laptop out and settle with it in my lap. It has nearly a full battery, but no internet connection. My phone has barely a quarter of its battery left and zero bars. It bleep bleeps when I search for a signal. Useless. I shove it back in my bag along with my laptop.
Ellis shakes his head at my pitiful efforts. “We might as well be living a hundred years ago. It wasn’t supposed to happen like this.”
“It happened. So let’s deal with it.” A shadow spreads across his face as I rise to my feet in desperation. “Plenty of people know we’re here. My family knows. The tour company knows. Somebody will help us.”
“They aren’t expecting us back for four days.”
Four more days out here with who knows who. My mind kicks into pure survival mode. “Okay. So the situation is tricky. Do we wait for help?”
“Didn’t you hear what I said? No one thinks we’ll be returning for four days. And no one’s likely to pass through here for, maybe, days. Possibly even for weeks. It’s not like we can walk out of the woods and straight onto a road or into a town. It’s miles and miles of wilderness.”
Tears clog my voice and spill over my eyes at the realization of how isolated and trapped we are. I hide my face from Ellis. The last thing I want to do is cry in front of him and let him know how much his pessimism wounded me.
He’s motionless for a moment or two, then his hand lands on me and moves in slow, reassuring circles across my lower back. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have taken my concern out on you.”
I nod but don’t look at him. “So, what do we do now?”
“We keep going until we reach the end, as planned. At that point we’ll be in a town and can tell the police what we’ve seen here. With any luck, we’ll run into a ranger along the way. But if we don’t, once we’re in the town, I’ll direct the police back here to see if they can find anything I might have missed.”
I tilt my head toward him and close my eyes against the sun’s intensity. “It might be too late to help Doug and Helen if we do that.”
“I’m sorry, Pauline, but we have no choice. I can’t leave you on your own while I go off searching for God knows how long.” Ellis picks up his paddle and reseats himself as though he’s already made his decision.
I waver, then lift up my paddle and follow his direction as he navigates down the river again. My arms twitch from the labor of controlling the paddle. It’s harder moving with the burden of the extra raft dragging behind ours. Ellis seems so calm. It’s somewhat unusual. Yet he’s always been so composed throughout our trip. It’s his military training.
I keep my qualms to myself and instead concentrate on helping Ellis get us to our last destination as fast as possible. I try not to think about what it could mean if the blood on the raft wasn’t from an accident and what dangers could be waiting for us up ahead. Who is out there? “Ellis, what if…”
His back faces me as he paddles. “Are you okay back there?”
My voice is soft. “Yes.”
“Are you sure you’re okay?” He glances at me.
I raise my voice and tell him the lie he and I both want to hear. “I’m fine.”
Chapter Ten
Pauline
We coast along smoothly despite everything. We almost would be back to our normal routine, except for the bloody raft we drag behind us, a gut wrenching reminder of reality. I can’t help wonder what happened to Helen, Doug, and their boys. Did someone hurt them? Are they alive? Or what if somehow we made a mistake and what we’re towing isn’t their raft. But that cowboy logo can’t be a coincidence.
There’s tension in Ellis’s voice. “Hold on.” He sees something he doesn’t like coming up.
I struggle to see what he does, but not before we’re jerked into the chaos of swirling water. Genuine rapids. This can’t be the hardest leg of the journey he’d warned me about earlier. Yet it is. I curl my fingers around my paddle so tightly my skin burns.
“Hold on,” Ellis says again.
“Should I paddle?”
He shouts back. “No. Secure your paddle on the floor, and hold onto the side of the raft as hard as you can.”
I do as he says and decide it will be better if I keep my eyes shut through this. As I press them closed, the sound of water rushing past us is thunderous. My jaw aches from clenching my teeth in apprehension. Water sprays my arms and face. I crouch down in my seat.
For what seems like hours I’m bumped and tossed around in my seat as my hands practically scream with pain from how firm of a hold I have on the raft’s side next to my seat. A few times, I peek and Ellis is using a small red bucket to toss water back out when it starts to fill the raft.
The noise diminishes. Have we gotten through the worst? My grip slackens and I open an eye to check. We’re approaching a section of the river that is spinning so fast it appears more like a mass of twirling foam than water. “Oh, my God, I thought it was done with.” My eyes snap closed as I whimper and murmur a prayer for our safety.
Ellis’s reply is neither anxious nor soothing. “From the maps I’ve studied, the worst is yet to come, unfortunately.”
I laugh, because this can’t be happening, not after what’s occurred with Doug and Helen’s raft. How much awful can a person take? “You’re kidding, right?” Ellis spoke as though he hasn’t taken this course before. “You’ve been on this river before, right?”
Ellis slides a silent glance behind me, and something’s different about his face. Darkness imbues his eyes. His jaw is tense. His features have put on a stiff appearance to disguise something…His alarm? Ellis is scared, and this isn’t good, because I’ve never seen him afraid. If what he’s about to paddle through terrifies him, I can only imagine how I should feel about it.
“Are we going to die?” I ask.
Ellis doesn’t respond. Perhaps he’s too busy guiding us through the rough water to hear me. I should help him steer. We’ll move faster with two of us paddling. I’m frozen in my protective place, tucked into the corner of my seat with my head lowered and my arms hugging my knees together.
Ellis yells. “Oh, shit.”
I sit up. There’s a mountain looming within inches of us. The raft makes a hard left turn as Ellis angles it away from what I now see is a huge rock in the middle of the river.
I’m jolted forward, and then I’m flying, or at least that’s how it feels until I flop down toward the water. One second I’m airborne,
and then the next second the smack of my body making contact with the surface is like the ends of multiple sowing needles jabbing into my flesh.
I’m immersed in inescapable cold up to my chin. The water is so roiled waves are forming and threaten to suffocate my face as they approach. The life vest is ripped off me. My chest tightens, and my lungs burn as I fight to breathe and stay afloat. Ellis screams my name again and again from somewhere I can’t distinguish. Is he still on the raft, or has he fallen into the water, too? As I lose the battle, everything around me fades, turns deep blue, and then I don’t remember.
I lift an eyelid. I’ve resurfaced above the water, but must fight the river’s robust current dragging me away and under with it. My helmet’s gone. I’ve drifted near the raft, and Ellis is leaping from it into the water. He’s ripped off his shirt. From the way it dangles off the raft’s side, it appears as though he’s literally torn it from his skin to help him swim faster to me.
He makes his way through the water with power and speed. How does he have the energy? Ellis must care about me in some way, or he cares about looking out for his customers and not losing his job. His fingers find my sleeve as it fills with water, and clamp down. He fortifies his grasp and yanks me to his chest, with my face pressed into his smooth, firm skin, which is cool from the water.
Vulnerability leads me to confess. “My sister. She didn’t just die. She killed herself.” I cough out water and dig further into him. His heart pounds steadily against my chest. The tears come to my eyes, hot and burning.
Ellis’s chest is a place where I could stay forever, but I’m not ready to die yet. He tugs me in close and squeezes me. Rather than combat the water, we let it carry us downstream, much like it did our raft, which, when I glance over his shoulder, is gliding down the river without us.
I fight to speak as he cradles my head in his chest and keeps my face upright so I’m not swamped by water. “The boat…” When I try to point over his shoulder my arm feels so heavy it’s as though my skin’s filled with stones. “The raft...we’ll lose it.”
“We might end up where it does.”
I peek up at him. “But it could flip over, and we’ll lose our stuff.”
“It might.” A crooked smile spreads across his face. “Or it won’t, and maybe we’ll land at the same place it does.”
“That could happen?”
“It might.”
“What if it doesn’t? How will we survive out here?”
“We’ll deal with that if the time comes.”
His levelheadedness jolts me, but for some crazy reason, I trust him. He rescued me and has proven himself dependable.
The view of the large rock over Ellis’s shoulder shrinks as we’re swept downriver. Dread is like a steel ball in my stomach as what looks like a sea monster’s back is emerging from the water near the rock as the tide lowers around us. Ellis didn’t mention monsters. Bears and coyotes, yes. Then an arm bobs to the water’s surface and fingers extend from its hand.
The body of a man tied to the rock with a thick, fraying rope around his waist, bubbles up and spins with the current. He’s unable to drift farther from the rock than the rope allows, like a kite attached to a string. It’s what jostled the raft—not the massive rock.
I let out a wail, and Ellis whips around with me tucked in his arms. “I can’t look. Is it Doug?”
His gasp tells me he’s seen the man’s body, too.
“Is he alive?” I say.
Ellis’s hand cups the side of my face and turns me away from the grisly image. “Don’t look.”
I set my face against his chest, and then I peek. The man has on a green uniform, although it’s his hair that sparks a distinct memory. He’s on his back, and his red hair floats out around his head in the water like an exotic sea plant. Hair like Ranger Mitch’s. His eyes are sealed closed, and his face is so milk-white his color is ethereal. No living person’s skin could have such pallor.
I collapse into Ellis’s shoulder. He holds me in a secure way and swims with me in his arms toward the nearest bank. “Is the body…that ranger guy?” I know Ellis hadn’t cared for Ranger Mitch, but I’m sure he didn’t wish something this awful to befall him.
“Yes, from what I could see, that’s him.”
With one final push from Ellis’s powerful upper body he lands us on the shore. He carries me onto the beach with me leaning back in his arms and my feet dangling. “Can you walk?”
I nod, and he sets me on the soft sand with care, intertwining his arm in mine while he guides me onto my feet. My boots are filled with cold river water, and my clothes are dripping. The sun hitting down on the beach warms my chilled skin bit by bit.
I ask Ellis the question that’s been on my mind ever since I saw Mitch’s body. “Do you think what happened to Mitch was an accident?”
His reply is a quick no. “If it was an accident, then he most likely wouldn’t have that rope tied to him. It seems like someone was trying to hide his body in the water.”
“Or intentionally cause our raft to crash.” The knowledge silences us for a few moments. “How many rafters take this route?”
“It’s a pretty well-traveled course.”
“You wouldn’t have to be an insider to know about it?”
“Not necessarily. With all the adventure blogs out there, you could find it plotted out online.” Ellis eases me onto a warm, flat rock.
My soaking clothes hug the contours of my body. I slide off my boots and dump the cold water out of them. My socks are drenched. Ellis’s ears pinken when I indicate for him to turn around so I can peel off my clothes. After, I sit in my bra and panties. I don’t know what I should do with the sopping clothes, so I arrange them on an adjacent rock and hope they dry.
“You can turn around now,” I tell Ellis. I unwind a stringy green sea plant out of my hair and flick it to the ground. “Yuck.”
A banana-yellow-colored inflatable object sticks out from some bushes a few paces down the beach. I jump up and break out in a sprint toward it.
Ellis calls after me. “Where are you going?”
I don’t look back at him when I answer. “Our raft!”
Ellis strapped down our stuff well, and, as far as I can tell when I reach the raft, nothing has fallen out, though it might have gotten wet. A few days ago I’d asked him why he bothered tying down our gear. Now I’m thankful he’s so conscientious.
Ellis follows me to where I am and grabs a strap on the raft. He groans and heaves the vessel out of the snarled jumble of bushes. He brushes twigs and leaves from the inside.
I glide my finger across the raft’s smooth surface with a new respect for it. It’s what will take us to safety. It looks perfectly intact. “How is this even possible?”
“Sometimes things work out well,” Ellis says.
“No kidding.” The beginning of a smile escapes me, but not before he tugs the raft out most of the way. Doug and Helen’s raft isn’t attached to ours anymore. I’m about to point it out to Ellis, but he speaks before I have the chance.
“It must’ve gotten detached back there in the rapids.”
I bend and press my hands on my knees, hanging my head in regret. “All the evidence that was on it is gone.”
The unruffled vibe that has surrounded Ellis the whole trip, and what’s been attracting me to him, returns. “There’s nothing we can do about it now.”
Ellis gives the raft a final yank and rolls it out of the bushes all the way. He’s been moving without much noise, then suddenly the raft slams down between us on the sand and I wince. What if in secret we’re being watched by some creep?
I walk around the raft’s exterior and inspect what’s left of our gear inside. “Yay, our tent’s still here!” I breathe out and clamp my hand on my mouth. I must remember to not be so noisy.
Ellis’s large hand falls on my arm and eases my hand down from my mouth. “It’s okay, Pauline. You’re safe. No one’s around here.” He glances at my bra.
I cross my arms in front of my chest to keep him from getting an eyeful. “How can you be certain we’re safe?”
His eyes wander down the length of my legs. “From the body’s condition. He’s been in the water for quite some time.”
I recoil and look away. Ellis hadn’t gone somewhere in the middle of the night at some point and hurt Mitch, had he? We’ve been sleeping next to one another, but he could have sneaked out of the tent and I wouldn’t have heard. “Shouldn’t we go back and put him—Mitch’s body somewhere? Seems like that would be the decent thing to do.”
Ellis shakes his head in a hopeless way. “I would like to get him out of there, but I don’t think I can.”
I’m not giving up. “We have to take him out of the water. We can’t leave him there. What about his family?”
“It’s too dangerous. I’m sorry.” Ellis turns his back to me. “It’ll be dark before we know it.” He glances at me over his shoulder. “I’ll set up the tent. We leave early tomorrow.”
His statement forces me to look up at him as he retreats. “After all that’s happened, we’re sleeping in the tent out in the open? We’ll be sitting ducks out here.” A puff of laughter comes from me in frantic disbelief.
Ellis returns to where I’ve remained, and his cool hand brushes across my shoulder. “Don’t worry. I’ll keep watch while you rest. There are ways I can deal with someone messing with us. I’m prepared to do anything needed to protect you.”
From the somber tone in his voice he’s serious. I slide out from under his hand.
He and I work side by side in silence, pulling the bags out of the raft, some of which are so damp the contents could be ruined.
“Do you need help setting up the tent?” I ask him.
“No, thanks, I got it.”
Spooked by my thoughts about his whereabouts at night, part of me is relieved we’ll be separated for a little while. While the other half of me is fearful of being alone. “Are you sure you don’t need help? Because I can help.”
“I don’t need your help, Pauline.” His eyes trace the outline of my underwear. “Why don’t you see if your clothes are dry yet, and put them on if they are. Looking at you standing there like that, you’re giving me a…Forget it.”
