Page 72 of Final Approach

A hand clasped around my arm and pulled me forward.

“Marley!” Nikki’s voice was high-pitched and panicked and his bruising grip was painful against my skin. “Marley, I’ve got you. Stop flailing!”

He crushed me to his chest, wrapping his hard body warm and protective around me while the raging river surged us forward into the bank. I coughed against him, the dirty water in my lungs fighting to get free. I fought the urge to puke all over him and turned my mouth to the side, choking up the bile stream into the river instead.

Fuck, the water had to be eight or nine feet deep by now, and rising faster by the second.

“Christ, what were you doing, baby girl?” His question caught in his throat, choking off at the end. “I thought I’d lost you. Jesus fuck, I thought I’d lost you.”

He reached a hand above my head and gripped something tight, pulling us closer up the bank. His arm around my chest loosened slightly when we were pulled into a dense bush partially submerged under water. Nikki released his hold altogether when another set of hands gripped my shoulders and lifted me over the scratchy brambles.

Tessa clung tightly to a jobo tree, body wracked with violent sobs. Brooks and Diaz shuffled me toward her. We were several feet above the river’s edge, and yet the murky water sat just below our ankles, still rising with every breath.

“Holy shit!” Ambrose cried out tersely beside me as a muted thwack against the water echoed from behind.

“Fuck!” Nikki’s shout carried over the splash. Shifting my weight, I turned in time to see Danny’s bobbing body in a swirling pool just beyond Nikki’s reach. Nikki was determined to try anyway, gripping one arm around a length of thick vine while he stretched his lean body outward to grasp the back of Danny’s shirt.

In slow motion, the horror unfolded as the vine in Nikki’s hand snapped. And another swell of water swept upward, pulling him back into the churn.

Another torrent opened up from the sky. The rainforest canopy protected us from its stream, but Nikki and Danny were helpless in the open water against it. I could barely make out the dark ringlets of Nikki’s hair floating above the water before the two bodies were forced back under the waves.

“Nikki!” I screamed into the dense air, desperate to help him despite my aching limbs. Two arms banded around me from behind, making me helpless to move.

“You can’t help him, Marley.” Ambrose's fierce tone hissed into my ear brokered no arguments. “You’ll die if you try. Don’t be stupid.”

Brooks, unencumbered, leaped up to offer help, but with the renewed onslaught of rain, the slope of the ground had become a mudslide. They scrambled for purchase, barely making it back to the waterline without tumbling into it. Clinging to an overextended tree branch, they peered into the water.

No heads, no arms, not a single indicator two people had even existed at all.

I couldn’t stifle the scream—it tore from my throat with a mind of its own as tears tumbled down my cheeks, their weight far heavier than the deluge of rain around us.

When another minute passed, I stared numbly into the pool at my feet and wished for death to take me, too.

Nikki was gone.

I’d once heard a man speak of drowning as if it were a peaceful death. I begged to differ.

The sea of swirling mud and silt stole my breath and every bit of my control along with it. I crushed my glasses in my fist, only managing to grab them within seconds of sinking, but they were of no use to me underwater. The sediment scratched my eyeballs, blinding me more than genetics already had. I clenched my eyes shut in a poor attempt to calm the burning pain.

The raging river thrashed me about, pulling me through its barrage like a puppy with a chew toy, but never close enough to the surface to catch a breath. Flailing through a force far more powerful than I, I knew I needed to relax into it, but it was damn near impossible when the frozen fear of panic slipped into every fiber of my being.

Danny was gone. His lack of fight had settled him like a stone in the water, swept beneath the current before I’d even fallen in. Perhaps his drowning had been peaceful, a reprieve from his suffering. Thankfully, I’d enough sense to draw in a gulp of air before face planting into the muck, so I hadn’t yet drowned in the Amazon’s filth, but I was close to succumbing.

I’d taken up swimming as a boy, learning in the lap pool on our estate the length of an Olympic training ground, so maintaining my strength in the water was not my concern. Oxygen, or rather the lack of it, was.

Focusing on living rather than the painful panic bursting my chest at the seams, I reached outward for any indication of up or down. My hand grasped a gritty clump of pebbles, substantial enough to be considered downward.

Stiffening to have an ounce of resistance against the powerful flood, I used the dragging force to drop my legs and pushed upward off what I assumed to be ground.

My body spun with the motion, but rising like an arrow, my head breached the surface not a moment too soon.

My lungs were aflame and the sweet lungful of balmy air barely soothed the burn. While I drew in another musty gulp, the torrent continued to push me further down river. I couldn’t make sense of my position. It was impossible to turn around, and the surrounding landscape looked nothing like the dried-up riverbed I’d grown accustomed to.

Not that I could see, anyway. My glasses remained tightly held in one fist, their presence my only lifeline if I survived drowning.

If I survived at all. I’d gotten by on the skin of my teeth on a number of occasions, but that was more avoiding bar fights and evading law enforcement. Without Marley, there was no way I could survive this jungle on my own.

Marley.