Poison Bay (16 page)

Fractions of a second passed like hours, and they gained two meters, three meters, four meters, though the ground was like jelly. They were finally in rhythm, and as Jack launched his weight off a rock, Callie’s boot landed in its place.

Jack could see a clear spot ahead where the mountain didn’t appear to be moving, and he dragged Callie towards it in desperate, mindless fear. Run and pull and leap and gasp for air. And again.

Nearly there. Don’t stop
.

And then he felt a powerful jerk through his shoulder and swung around in time to see Callie’s hand wrenched from his grasp, her eyes wide with terror, her mouth open in a scream that he couldn’t hear over the roaring monster. Tree branches and tendrils closed over her face like evil fingers, and she was swallowed whole by the falling mountain.

***

Surfing. Like that horrible day, her thirteenth Christmas, back before Callie was afraid. A girl her age should never have been in that malevolent, cyclone-whipped sea. Flung from her surfboard, tumbled and pulverized and dragged across sand and rocks, her lungs aching for oxygen, her equilibrium struggling to find Up.

Her mind exploded with the pain of a sickening blow across the side of her head.

And everything went black.

***

The rain had not stopped falling, but the mountain had stopped moving, more or less. Jack’s brain could not accept what his eyes were seeing. Where dense rainforest had filled the mountainside moments earlier, there was now bare rock. A vertical strip wide as a football field, and possibly hundreds of stories high—the low cloud made it hard to judge. Ahead, where the rest of the team were presumably still walking unaware, everything looked normal. Behind, a steep and heartless rock face, being washed shiny clean by the torrent from the sky. A deep gash in the mountain, all the way to the bone.

This had to be one of the tree avalanches described by Bryan on the first day. The rainforest now lay below him in a massive ugly pile of tangled tree limbs, mud and shredded vegetation. Parts of it were still settling, and as he watched, a mighty tree that had been perched precariously on top of the mound slowly, regally tilted sideways to a 45-degree angle, and slid from sight beneath the mess. Nearer to him, he saw mud shift and begin oozing downhill, lured by gravity, searching for a way to insinuate itself into the debris. The rain was so heavy he couldn’t see the far end of the landslide, let alone the other side of the valley.

Jack lay askew on top of the muddle of rocks and battered greenery where his downhill slide had finally ended, staring at the chaos, his heart pounding in his ears, his lungs burning in his chest. Somewhere down there, Callie was caught in all that. He had to find her, before the mass shifted any further. But he also had to breathe. He had to find her, but he had to get some fluid into his searing throat.
 

He groped behind for the water bottle in the side of his pack, shoving the rain cover aside. As he gulped thirstily, it gradually registered that his hood had come loose in the fall, and the downpour was now flooding down his back, inside the jacket, drenching his clothing, making him cold. Cold. His sluggish mind finally grasped that this was not a good thing for a man in shock, and he fumbled to reinstate the hood.
 

Jack’s right shoulder throbbed and his left knee seemed to be on fire as he began the difficult descent down the slope. As he went, he searched for a relatively firm and safe place to discard his rucksack, and at length found a large flat boulder a few meters from the edge of the slip zone. It would have to do. He fumbled with the harness clip with fingers that had lost all dexterity, and finally shed the load with relief. The screaming in his shoulder lowered about five decibels. As an afterthought he grabbed the water bottle and shoved it in his pocket before setting off again. He felt the camera in there, and pulled it out, started it recording, pulling the head strap into position so it captured more or less what he was seeing.

Lighter now, he could move more swiftly down the mountain into the danger zone. He crept on all fours, crab-like, eyes seeking out the next reliable hand- or foot-hold, while constantly glancing down the mountain at his goal. The whole enormous landslip was still desperately unstable, and he could see trees and boulders shifting, now just a small nudge, now as much as a meter in one big jolt.

He thanked God for Callie’s revolting orange rain jacket that she’d joked about back at Bryan’s house in Te Anau. It seemed like centuries ago. “Orange is the color of fear, Jack,” she’d teased him. “Are you afraid, Jack?”
Yes, Callie
,
I’m so very afraid. But if anything will help me find you in all this mess, it’s that awful jacket.

He drew level with the heap of displaced mountain, and began searching in earnest.
God help me. Where is she?
If he couldn’t see her near the surface, he couldn’t imagine knowing where to start. Even a bulldozer would take days to shift the immense pile of debris. He moved gingerly onto the unstable mass, still on all fours, and peered down through any gap or cavity he could find.
 

Within two minutes he saw it just ahead: a glimpse of orange. It was the sleeve of Callie’s jacket, emerging from a muddle of torn branches and mud, flung across a pile of tattered vegetation. The fingers of the protruding hand were completely still. Jack maneuvered carefully and discovered he could also see one of her boots and part of her leg. Yes, she had come to rest near the surface! She appeared to be lying face down, partially buried to a depth of no more than about thirty centimeters.

He adjusted his balance and started lifting rainforest trash from where her head and upper body must be, working fast, carefully, always looking around to check what the mound was doing.
Please God, let her be alive
. He kept repeating the words in his head like a silent chant, his breath coming fast and shallow. As he lifted one of the larger branches to toss it aside, his vision was engulfed by gray fog, and he nearly toppled.

He paused a moment, closed his eyes, and breathed out long and slow.
Stop hyperventilating, Jack
.
You’re no use to anyone if you pass out.
One more shredded branch out of the way, and her head was free. She had it turned to the side so he could see her face in profile. Her nostrils seemed clear—hopefully she’d been able to breathe—but the top of her face and eyes were covered in the slippery mud. Jack grabbed his water bottle and started gently washing the muck away, trying to clear enough so that she could at least open her eyes and see. For once, the rain was helping instead of hindering.

She still didn’t move, and in those conditions there was no way to see whether she was breathing. “Callie! Can you hear me?”
Please God, don’t let her die
. “Callie!”

He saw her mouth move, the tiniest fraction. Or was it just the pressure of the rain? “Callie! You have to wake up!” Her fingers moved now, a slight clenching. That was real, not his imagination. She was still in there, somewhere. “Thank you God,” he whispered. “Help me!”

He set to the rest of the debris with renewed zeal, steadily uncovering her torso, both legs, and then her other arm. Incredibly, her rucksack was still firmly attached. None of her limbs lay at an unnatural angle; hopefully nothing was broken. He felt relief welling inside him, until an abrupt jolt through the depths of the mound dropped them a sudden meter down the mountainside and sent Jack’s heart vaulting into his mouth. Callie cried out, but he couldn’t tell whether it was from pain or fear.

“Callie, can you hear me?” His voice was urgent; he had to get her out of there before the whole mess shifted again and swallowed them both. She didn’t respond.

“Callie, say something. You have to answer me!”
 

“Ja-ack. Help me…” Her voice was small and hoarse, and he had to struggle to hear her over the pounding of the rain and the roaring of the river below. She began to weep aloud, a soft guttural keening that tore his heart into a hundred bruised pieces.

Jack’s own eyes filled with tears. “Callie, we have to move from here. There’s been a landslide and we have to get you to stable ground. Can you move at all? I know it’s hard, but Callie, you have to try.” He longed to let her recover quietly while he tried to assess the extent of her injuries, but they just didn’t have the luxury of that sort of time. And throwing her over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift could make things worse if she was bleeding internally. Imprecise though it was, asking her to move her own body seemed the safest way to find out how badly she was hurt before he tried anything else.
 

Slowly and hesitantly, Callie pulled her arms in and rolled onto her side. The movement dragged her hood from her head, and Jack winced as he glimpsed blood matting her strawberry curls. “Do you think you can sit up, Cal? We can’t stay here. I wish we could, but we just can’t.”

As he spoke, he glanced at the mound again, and saw something beyond that horrified him. The river they’d been following through this valley, now in full raging flood from the implacable rain, had been dammed by the landslide. And it wasn’t happy about it. Upstream, the river was rising fast, and they were on the upstream side. Though they were still a good distance above the water level, the monstrous force of the water was pushing and shoving, determined to blast the obstruction out of its way. If it succeeded, it would undermine the foundation of the heap on which they were perched, and send them plunging dozens of meters down the mountainside.
 

“Take my hands, and I’ll help you sit up.” She reached for him and managed to close her fingers around his, though her grip was weak. Gradually he levered her upright, releasing one hand to reach around behind her rucksack and support her back. “That’s good Cal, you’re doing well.” He tried to keep the panic out of his voice, while also monitoring the threat beyond.

“I’m going to lift you now, okay?” He slipped his other arm under her bent knees, and lurched upright. Callie groaned with the jolt of it, and lay in his arms, a dead weight. She turned her face into his shoulder and continued to weep. Jack began the staggering journey across to the stable part of the mountainside, his shoulder and knee screaming in two-part discord. With her pack she must have weighed at least eighty kilos, probably more, but he tried not to think about that. The mound shifted suddenly under his feet, but he dared not slow down or look back.

As he reached relative safety, he glanced up the mountain. The rain had eased a little, enough that he could see nearly to the top, the full height of that astonishing vertical gash. Bare rock, long and straight and wide, like some kind of giant’s laundry chute.

Jack didn’t know if he’d be able to lift Callie again if he put her down, so he kept going, climbing the mountain back to where he’d left his rucksack, pushing on up that forty-five degree slope. A crashing behind him made him pause and look back; the mini-mountain had slid at least another twenty meters down the slope.

The perch where he’d found Callie just minutes ago was gone, mashed into the jumble of rocks and trees.

28

As they walked in the front door, the coldness hit Ellen like a slap in the face. It wasn’t just the temperature. The house was bare, but not like an empty house awaiting new residents. An absence. Or even a presence. Their heels echoed obscenely on the timber.

“What’s with the masking tape on the floor?” she asked Peter as they moved through the living room with its two rows of four rectangles marked under their feet. There seemed to be a narrow walkway between them, and there were a few discarded duffel bags against the walls.

He paused near the hallway and looked at the floor. “Apparently he put all their rucksacks and supplies there. One rectangle for each person.” He lifted his hand in the direction of the hallway, inviting her to go ahead of him. “The thing we need you to see is down here.”

She was still staring at the floor. Each rectangle was marked with a name, in the format of surname and then initials. Girls one side, boys the other, in alphabetical order. “Like plots in a cemetery,” she muttered. She wriggled her shoulders and shook her head, trying to dispel the sinister thought.
 

As she stepped into the hallway, she saw him glance back at the masking tape grid, his eyes narrowed.

“The bedroom.” He nodded in its direction as she paused at the end of the hall.
 

She walked into what could have been a monastic cell, except there was no crucifix on the wall. In fact, there was nothing at all on the walls. No curtains on the windows. Just a narrow bed with a small table beside it, and an old, cheap timber wardrobe, the kind sold at charity shops.

“Now Ellen,” Peter began, his voice firm, “you are going to find this upsetting, so I would like you to sit down, and do whatever it is you do to prepare yourself for things that are upsetting. There are some photos on the back of the cupboard door—a sort of shrine, I guess. I wouldn’t ask you to look at it, but the fastest way to identify some of the faces is to ask you, and we need to get some answers quickly so we know how to proceed. Do you understand?”

She nodded, perched on the edge of the hard bed, and took several deep breaths, exhaling long and slow. Outwardly at least, she was calm, but she could feel the terror fighting to crawl up into her mouth. Peter was watching her. “Ready as I’ll ever be.”

The long creak jarred her nerves as he swung the door open, and then he came to sit beside her on the bed, his long legs crossed loosely at the ankles, his hands clasped in a relaxed position in front of him. He sat so close she could feel the warmth of his upper arm only millimeters from hers, and the almost-contact was comforting.

Her eyes were drawn straight towards the top of the door, where a studio portrait of a beautiful young woman took pride of place, her features delicate, makeup perfect and hair glamorously-styled. “That’s Liana,” she said, pointing. It looked like a photo the girl would have used to audition for acting and modeling jobs. “She was his girlfriend who committed suicide. On the last day of high school. They had a party at Bryan’s place that night, and she shot herself. In front of them all. In his living room. It was unbelievably traumatic.” She glanced at him. “She was pregnant, too.”