After a minute, Deborah shouts, “Hello?”
In the silence, bile sloshes in my stomach, and my body begins to shake. I dry-heave over the side of the raft, my gut clenching around nothing. Deborah is paddling now, and I force myself to help as we row toward the first raft.
“Keep your eyes on the water for any sign of movement,” I choke. “A few of the women in that raft were wearing life jackets, right?”
“Yeah, I think some of them were …” Allie begins helplessly. We all look down at the excess of life jackets scattered uselessly at the bottom of our raft. “They all piled into that first raft so fast, trying to get away … there weretoo many of them … Nikki was on that raft … I was so glad she escaped …”
I nod numbly.
“Macy fell off the back,” Pam says, like she’s trying to make sense of what just happened. “She didn’t duck in time, the wire … I think the wire got her. I heard her scream when she fell out, then she went under, and I didn’t see her again. Remember, she said there was a bad undertow at the bottom of the falls …”
The shiver crawls up my back. The images in my mind are unfathomably horrific. I try not to remember what the woman with the pigtails looked like, with her neck hanging at the wrong angle, her head barely attached.
“Look! A life jacket!” Deborah cries, pointing ahead. We all row with purpose again, closing in on the shape bobbing in the water a few yards downriver, moonlight reflecting off its buckles.
As we come alongside the woman floating facedown in the water, I catch a glimpse of short red hair.
“Nikki?” Allie wails, leaning over the edge of the raft. She manages to grab hold of the life jacket. Water sloshes everywhere as Allie tries to reel her in and pleads, “Nikki, please, please.”
But there’s no response.
I force myself not to think, only move, as I hurry to the side of the boat to help Allie. When we roll Nikki over in the water, it takes everything in me not to recoil. That faint but unmistakable smell rises up—river water and the tang of blood. I can hardly breathe.
“Oh god, no, no, no.” Allie’s breath comes in fast, choppy spurts as she stares down at her friend.
Nikki stares back, unseeing, rivulets pooling like tears in her wide-open brown eyes. Her skin is unnaturally pale, waxy in the moonlight. The corners of her mouth are severed cleanlythrough, all the way back to her ears, in a gruesomely wide smile.
She was alive five minutes ago. Now she’s dead.
19
After the frenzy of the falls, the river is mercifully calm, the water like obsidian. It’s the only mercy, though.
Over the next few minutes, we find five more life jackets—each of them buoying up a lifeless body.
Seconds warp into an eternity as we row back and forth across the canyon in the dark, looking for any signs of life. It can’t have been more than half an hour since Gracie’s screams rang out at Camas Creek, but it feels like days. Nothing will ever be the same.
As we comb the water for the others, my heart pounds, knowing Bryan could shoot out of Anvil Falls at any second. And when he does, there will be maybe a hundred yards of river between us at best.
But we can’t bring ourselves to leave without looking for more survivors.
Each time someone cries, “I see something!” a tiny spark of hope flares back to life—only to be snuffed out when we discover it’s another body. One woman floats face up, staring up at the stars. I can’t stop my brain from cataloging every wound, every awful detail.
All of the dead have horrific injuries to the head and neck, sliced in an instant by the wire. There’s no stopping the wails that rise up each time we witness another scene ofcatastrophic damage. A scalp peeled back from the skull. Arms severed at the wrists, where one woman must have thrown up her hands in defense. Another’s throat opened up beneath the chin.
Between us, we’re able to name the five women we find: Kerry, Sydney, Yvonne, Teia, and Beth.
Deborah’s sister, Beth, is the most devastating of all. We find her body floating on the other side of the abandoned raft, wedged against the canyon wall.
Like the woman with the pigtails, the wire has gone straight through her neck, just beneath her chin. When Deborah turns her over in the water, her head hangs on by a strap of skin at the nape of her neck. When it lolls back, I can see the tips of vertebrae, flashing white against the red water that sloshes in her open neck.
Deborah lets out an agonized sob and tries to pull her sister’s limp body into the raft by her life jacket’s lapels. “Beth, oh Beth,” she cries over and over again.
Pam rushes to wrap Deborah in a tight embrace, effectively holding her inside the raft as she tugs at her sister’s lifeless body. “No, honey, no,” Pam tells her. “We can’t bring her with us.”
“I can’t leave her here. I can’t,” Deborah cries. “I don’t wanthimto find her. We have to get her … we have to …” She trails off with an anguished moan.
At the mention of Bryan, Allie and I turn in unison toward the base of the falls.
