Caro points at where the river is still narrowest, and at the bench up higher. “Okay,” she says, a tremor in her voice. “We’re going to cross the river, and then we’re going to climb.”
“Do we have time?” Ash asks, but Caro has made the call; she has to, she is the one who knows this place. “Try to cross if you can!” she shouts. Can Ed and Jean or Spencer and his friends hear her across the rising roar of the river?
Ash is turning back to make sure. Caro seizes her by the arm. “We have togo,” she says. “Now.I’ll go first. We’re going to hold hands.”
They do what she tells them. “Donotlet go,” Caro says, but is thateven the right advice? Will they drag each other under? She plunges into the water. The cobble underneath is uneven and they all struggle to stay upright. The water is up to their thighs. Caro glances back, sees the men gathering things, the couple trying to pack up their tent.
“Leave it all!”she screams.“There’s no time!”
Two of the men plunge into the water, trying to cross, too. She sees their figures, she can’t tell which is which, but then she notices that Spencer has stayed behind the other men. He’s trying to get Ed and Jean to come with them. Caro is sick. The water has gone from thigh-high to waist-high in a matter of seconds.
This is bad.
“Get out of the creek as fast as you can,” she says, her voice tight. Hope catches her eye in the briefest of glances. The walls are sheer. If they don’t get to the bench in time…
A deep, sturdy, steady,whooshfrom up the canyon.
It’s coming for us.
“Up now,”Caro shouts, and, crashing into each other, stumbling, clinging hands, they push for the side of the canyon.
Something bumps Caro’s leg from behind, almost taking her down. The water is filled with small debris—pine needles, pine cones, small plants—and large logs and branches. An enormous branch grazes Caro’s leg before she can move in time, and it tears a gash along her thigh. After an initial sharp burst of pain she feels nothing.
Caro doesn’t look to see what’s happening on the other side of the river with the men, with Ed and Jean.Are those screams she hears farther down the canyon?Caro’s heart sinks.No.She has to be imagining things. There is no way she can hear anything that far away above the rush of the water and of the blood in her ears and the shouts of those around her.The college students, the ones who needed help with the rope. They made it out, right? The high school kids they passed in the canyon—they’re going to be fine, aren’t they?
“Up!” she screams.“Now now now!”
Caro grabs at any small indentation she can find in the rocks. Herfingernails break as she pulls her weight up, but she makes it to the rocky ledge and lies on her stomach, reaching down. She grabs Hope, pulls her up on the bench. Hope reaches down to help Caro haul Ash up; they’re all three out of the water, safe for a very short moment.
“Oh my god,” Hope says.
“We should keep climbing, right?” Ash asks. They’re all breathing hard and fast. Caro looks down at the gash in her thigh and the blood streaming from it. No time to deal with that now.“Yes,”she says. “As high as we can get before—”
The rest of what she says is drowned out by a roar.
“Oh my god,” Hope says again.
“Keep climbing,” Caro calls out, her voice a ragged tear of fear.“Go.”
But it is impossible not to look.
The river bellows from the canyon, swollen and fast, carrying pieces of trees and debris like the flotsam of a shipwreck. The water seemsalive, bearing down on anything in its path with terrible, devastating purpose. Something bobs along in the current that is not a piece of nature—a waterlogged sail, something inside of it. It is there and then gone, but not before Caro thinks,A tent.
“Can you see Spencer anywhere?” Ash asks. “The guys? Ed and Jean?”
“They might have gotten to higher ground,” Caro says. “Like we have to do.Now.”
There’s another bench higher up along the cliff wall, but it is a scramble along the thinnest of rocky ridges, where knotty juniper trees tethered into dirt over the sandstone hold the ground in place, slippery and loose. Caro grabs on to anything she can reach: sagebrush, bushes prickled with thorns. Her hands are cut through and bleeding. It is rock climbing with no rocks, bouldering with no boulders, the river roaring, rising.
“Shit,”Ash says as the ground beneath her gives way, and she slips, crashing into Caro, knocking her off-kilter. For several terrifying, breath-gone seconds Caro slides, slides, slides, until a scraggly juniper arrests her fall, slamming into her ribs. She clings to the trunk with both hands.
“Caro!” Ash calls out.“Caro!”
It wasn’t Ash’s fault, of course, no one can predict exactly where the terrain is loose, but Caro can’t reply. She has to hold on. She glances up and sees that Ash is pulling the extra climbing rope from her pack. She loops it around another small, wiry tree and climbs down to help. When Ash reaches Caro, Caro wraps her hands around Ash’s, which are also bloody and torn. There are tears in Caro’s eyes. It was so brave of Ash to do this, but it’s not going to work.
“I don’t know that it can hold both of us,” she says, nodding to the tree. “I’m going to let go. You climb up.”
Ash looks at Caro, a question in her eyes.
