Don't Look Back (21 page)

Neto clutched his hair, trudging forward.
“Puta madre.”

Lightning strobed the canopy, chased immediately with rumbling. They circled up, getting doused.

“Is this the only bridge out of here?” Will shouted.

Lulu gave a jerky nod.

Eve flicked her head to where the road continued on the near side of the river, heading into rougher terrain. Fronds folded in all around, turning it into a tunnel. Past the bend, it might have run ten more feet or ten more miles. “Can we get down that way?”

“There’s a shallow run of river forty kilometers downstream that we can sometimes get across,” Lulu said. “But not in this. Not now. No way.”

Eve followed Will to the bank, Claire walking at her side, gripping her arm for balance. A boulder the size of a Smart Car had smashed into the closest foundation and somehow wedged itself beneath the remaining length, giving it an inadvertent boost. That’s what had knocked the portion of the bridge above it skyward, tilting the front section to an undrivable angle.

They regarded one another in the downpour. Gradually their focus shifted to the dense trunks all around. Searching for
him.
Vines swayed, battered by the storm. Shadows flailed. Sue gave a faint wail. Claire lost her footing, and Eve grabbed her arm to keep her from going down.

Will moved first, shouting to Neto against the rain, “Get that Jeep backed off the ledge!”

“What are you going to do?”

Will pointed down. “If we can shove that boulder out into the current, the foundation’ll drop and flatten out the bridge.”

“We can’t get across without that foundation,” Neto said.

“The seven others are intact.”

“There is a reason they didn’t design the bridge with seven foundations.”

“I’m an engineer—”

“You’re a
sneaker
designer.”

“—and I promise you, this’ll work. If you all get out of the Jeep to make it lighter and walk across first, I’ll gun it across the front part of the bridge. If I go fast enough, it’ll hold.”

Neto shook his head, drops of water flying from his black curls.

“What’s the alternative?” Will flung a hand toward the boulder. “He wants us here. That means we need to not be here.”

Lulu stepped in front of her husband. “Get the Jeep ready,” she said. “Or I will.”

Neto’s hand clenched around the keys. He grimaced. Exhaled. When Lulu started back to the Jeep, he followed her.

Will leapt skillfully down the embankment, and Eve went after him, each footstep turning into a miniature mudslide. The white water had risen, claiming most of the flat ground at the river’s edge, but a bar of pebbles thrust above the surface gave them a staging point. Eve reached it, her shoes grinding on the rocks. Almost immediately she was struck from behind, and she stumbled forward, nearly toppling into the current.

“Sorry!” Claire righted herself. “Sorry.”

“What the hell are you doing down here?”

Claire held up a coiled vine. “The river’s too strong. We need to tie him off.”

“How are we gonna get you back up?”

“I can
crawl.
”

They knotted the vine around Will’s waist, and Claire wrapped the other end around her forearm, sat back, and gouged her shoes into the pebbles, the metal braces driving up furrows. The steep rise behind them blocked the others from view, but they heard Neto and Harry shouting directives, the roar of the Jeep engine, the sound of tires spinning and going nowhere. The downpour continued, unrelenting.

Eve followed Will closer to the water, gripping the taut vine, his lifeline. Foam flicked at her legs. He looked back at her, his expression unreadable, then stepped tentatively into the river. Immediately, the torrent almost swept his leg out from under him, but Eve leaned against the vine and he dug in, pausing spread-legged to catch his breath. Cautiously, he waded to the bridge. The foundation had snapped, its upthrust length jam-balanced atop the boulder. He reached the rock, the current pressing his body against it. Fighting himself off the boulder with a vertical push-up, he hand-stepped around to the bank side to get better leverage. Water seethed up his back, pouring around his head. He misstepped, dropping chest-deep, and Eve felt the air leave her lungs.

He bobbed up again quickly, the river dropping to his waist, and gave a nervous smile. Eve coughed out a half laugh. Setting his weight and pressing his cheek to the boulder, he drove into it. The boulder remained, impervious. He stopped, dipped his shoulder like a lineman, and readied for another charge.

Claire screamed.

She was arched against the strain, the cords of her arms pronounced, mud slathering down the slope behind her. Her fists occupied, she flung her head to the right, again and again. It took a moment for Eve to grasp that she was gesturing upriver.

With dread, Eve turned. A rush of white, two feet taller than the surface—a second river riding the first.

Flash flood.

Her only point of reference was the Universal Studios tour she’d taken with Nicolas. The driver had stopped the trolley over a dry gulley, and some unseen hand had loosed a valve upstream. Barreling through the synthetic gorge, the flood had seemed an angry, living thing, gnashing and clawing to get at them. Hidden drains had saved the day, but the special-effects display had awed them in their seats, impressing upon them their absolute helplessness against the fury of nature.

She told her legs to unfreeze, and a moment later they listened. She yanked the vine to get Will’s attention and pointed. Will traced the line of her arm to the coming water. His jaw went slack. He lurched for the bank violently. One hand shot up as he misstepped again, his sinking body twisting so he fell back and chest-hit the boulder with a hug. The big rock shifted, settling a few inches in its tentative bed, and Will howled.

He threw his torso away, only to snap into place against the boulder.

His leg was pinned.

Chapter 29

The surge swept by, Eve leaping back as it washed over the pebble bar and knocked Claire into a sprawl. Using her arms, Claire tore up the muddy bank a few feet, out of the grasping reach of the water. Eve didn’t quite get there. The force spun her into a half turn, the cold slapping through her clothes instantly, slamming the breath from her lungs. She set her legs against the current, driving toward the river’s edge.

The wall of water smacked into Will, driving him under. He popped up, roaring. Water rose to his chest, his shoulders, shoals of tiny fish pinwheeling in the choppy rise. He sputtered, shouting for Eve.

Keeping to the shallower water near the edge, she scrambled toward the bridge, falling, rising, stumbling. Claire clawed along the bank, staying parallel, both fists gripping the vine to keep pressure on the line.

“My foot—” A mouthful of water gagged Will. He spit, reared his head up for more air.

Thigh-deep, Eve fought her way to him, testing each step. His slip had landed him against the downriver curve of the boulder, barely so, but enough that she’d have to rock the boulder against the weight of the current to free his foot. The physics of this took hold not as a thought but as a prickling beneath her skin.

His head was nearly a foot lower than hers; whatever crevice had claimed his leg was deeper than she’d hoped. “Hurry,” he told her, as if this weren’t self-evident.
“Hurry.”

Eve clambered across him, the river adhering her to the bones of his shoulder blades, her body and the water weight grinding him into the stone. But there was no quicker way to get where she needed to be. Though his breaths came in grunts, he didn’t protest.

Once clear of his body, she smeared herself along the boulder, rolling into position. The compromised arch of the bridge overhead notched down the already dim glow of the gray sky a few more watts.

Balancing on her toes, straightening her back, she drove into the boulder with everything she had.

Not a millimeter of movement.

She might as well have been pushing a parked bus.

Will tried to shout something, but a swell washed over his face, leaving him sputtering. His head reared up again, his neck flexing. Eve shoved again, screaming into the effort, rock scraping her cheek.

Nothing.

A surge swept over Will’s head. His arms rattled against the boulder. His uptilted face reemerged, an oval tilted to the sky, his gaping mouth sucking air.

Straightening her arms, Eve pushed herself up, shot a desperate look at the bank. Not a face in view above, all sound lost beneath the storm and the roar of the unseen Jeep, still trying for traction. Panic gripped her insides.

She turned to Claire. “I can’t move it!”

Face-first, Claire slid down the muddy bank, dangerously close to the river’s edge, grabbing a root that twisted up out of the mud like a human arm. Her legs trailed limply. Water snatched at her hair. The initial surge had been absorbed into the river, the upward creep of the surface now slower and somehow calmer, and yet none of the force had diminished.

“The current’s too strong!” Eve shouted. “It’s too strong! There’s no way!”

“You
have
to!” Will yelled. “You—”

Water blanketed his face, a tranquil layering, glassy enough that there was virtually no distortion. His lips stayed barely submerged, his eyes open, his wavering mouth spread wide.

She stared down into his face. A two-inch dip of her head would have pressed the tip of her nose through the looking glass to touch his. She could see the tiny bubbles caught in his eyelashes, along his brow. His upraised arms kept on against the boulder as if detached from the rest of him, fingernails scraping the mossy bulges ineffectively.

He would die here, drowned in the top film of water, his mouth a thumb’s width from air.

Eve pulled back, set her shoulder, and drove again, her muscles locked in a single note of strained stillness, calves to neck. She was sobbing.

Claire’s voice sliced through the vortex of her thoughts: “You have to push from the other side!
With
the current!”

A clump of spray leapt to disintegrate across Eve’s face. She shook it off roughly, the wet tips of her hair lashing her eyes. “That’ll roll the boulder right over him. It could
kill
him.”

“Maybe it’ll just shatter his leg. It’s the only thing left. You
have
to.”

“I
can’t.
”

Claire clung to the root on the bank, just beyond the awning of the buckled bridge. Though they were less than five feet apart, they had to shout to be heard.

“
Yes.
You’re gonna get around the boulder. You’re gonna shove with the weight of the river
behind
you.”

The river swelled, then dipped, letting Will’s mouth break the surface. It spit and gulped, drawing air greedily with a sound like an inward moan, and then he was buried again.

“I can’t crush him beneath this rock!”

“Get up. Get up and do it.”

Eve’s tears mixed with the wet of the rain and river, her face awash. “Why? Why do I have to do this?”

“Because I can’t!”
Claire screamed.

Her face twisted, her mouth crumpling. She was the kind of person whose face became unrecognizable when she cried. She lay sprawled downslope on her stomach, a flipped-over snow angel, her legs slanted uselessly up the bank.

Move.

Eve moved.

She dragged herself around the boulder until the river crawled up her back, splitting at her neck to shoot over either shoulder. The water had ceased being cold, or her body had ceased noticing. The boundaries between flesh and river had blurred; there was pressure and movement and nothing more. She lowered herself until her chin dipped beneath the surface, collapsed her hands above one breast, palms out, and propelled herself against the unforgiving stone.

It didn’t budge.

She kept on, roaring, and at last it gave the faintest lift and the current caught, wedging in the crack and levering it further. The boulder reared up, rolling out of Eve’s palms, and even above the rush of the torrent she heard a muffled cracking of bone.

As the boulder skip-rolled away, the jagged end of the foundation wavered in midair like the stump of a blown-off limb. The massive rock gained speed as it neared the paired beam and rocketed through in an explosion of splintered wood. The front end of the bridge canted, then shot downriver, stripping the deck from the foundations, pulling it behind like a snake taking to water.

The sudden absence of pushback sent Eve floundering onto her chest, and she paddled upright, searching for Will. A flesh-colored stripe fluttered beneath the surface, and she shot her hand after it and closed on an arm.

She splashed for the vine, came up with it, and yanked Will skyward. He broke the surface with a howl.

Claire towed them toward the bank, Eve dragging Will a few feet free of the river and dropping him heavily into a bed of mud. She collapsed beside him and lay panting, her breaths seemingly timed with his grunts of pain.

Four faces came visible above, peering down at them; the bridge’s decimation had finally caught the attention of the others. Neto skidded toward them, shouting, his words sucked away by the wind.

Eve pushed herself onto her elbows and took note of the shard of bone lifted through the skin of Will’s ankle.

Chapter 30

Hideous.

But the rest of Will looked intact.

Eve and others stood around him like reeds rising out of the muddy riverbank, leaning into the incline, summoning strength and averting their eyes from the compound fracture that spelled bad news in any scenario, let alone this one.

Harry spoke first. “C’mon now.” His creased face had hardened into a weathered resolve. Whereas Sue had seemed to fade into frailty, Harry wore his age now as something rugged and protective, the armor of experience.

Harry and Neto took point on dragging Will up the bank, gripping him under each armpit and towing him backward, his ass plowing through mud. He stayed bent stiffly, letting his legs trail and squeezing his thigh in an effort to hold the injured foot aloft. He nearly blacked out several times, his head lolling forward before a jolt or a bump snapped it upright.