I can barely believe what I’m seeing. Josh is still alive.
He collides with Bryan with a loud grunt, and the two men crash down hard into the brush for the second time. Josh loops an elbow around Bryan’s head in a chokehold, grasping desperately toward one of the slashing knives with his other hand. For a second, I can’t make sense of the shadows, the flailing limbs in front of me. Then Josh lifts his head and looks at me. There’s a smear of dark blood across the bridge of his nose, and a gaping wound at his collarbone. “Get to a raft!” he rasps. “Go!”
Bryan roars and alligator rolls, sending Josh onto his back like a rag doll.
I choke back a horrified cry as my mind stutters.
Bryan lifts the knife, locks eyes with me, and drives the blade directly into Josh’s throat.
I jump to my feet and Irun, faster than I ever have, scrambling past the men toward shore, barely feeling the sand and rocks as I fly over them.
My blood pulses in my ears like a drum as the moonlit beach comes into view. The two neon-green gear rafts are still wedged onto the lip of wet sand where we parked them last night.
Otherwise, the shoreline is empty.
Besides Bryan and Josh, I’m the only person who hasn’t made it onto a passenger raft—and the nearest one is rowing away into the current, drifting downriver faster by the second.
Shit, shit, shit.
“Wait, stop rowing!” calls Deborah. “I think that’s Kaia!”
“What if it’s a trick?” comes Allie’s voice, frantic with terror.
The bulky raft drifts farther away from me, picking up speed.
“Please, don’t leave!” I call out to Macy again, just loud enough for her to hear my plea. “Come back!”
If Bryan isn’t behind me yet, he will be any second.
I glance in desperation at the two unmanned neon-green gear boats on the sand, still half-loaded down with supplies. There’s no way I can drag one into the water on my own before Bryan catches up with me, let alone handle it down Anvil Falls.
“Shit!” I cry again, and splash into the ankle-deep water, looking over my shoulder into the darkness behind me. Nothing yet, but it’s only a matter of time. I’m about to jump into the swift-moving black river when the passenger raft whips back in my direction, fighting the current.
“No, we can’t go back for her,” someone cries—Pam, maybe—but the raft struggles through the water toward me anyway.
“We’re not leaving her,” Macy shouts. “Come on, Kaia! Can you get to us?!”
It’s all I needed to hear. I plunge into the freezing water up to my waist, gasping as the swift current threatens to pull my legs out from under me.
In a matter of seconds, the raft reaches me and someone grabs hold of my arms, pulling me out of the water and onto a pile of unclaimed life jackets and paddles. I land hard on the taut rubber floor, my sweatshirt heavy and soaked. I grasp onto the first life jacket I find at the bottom of the boat and secure it, then take up a paddle. As I sit up, I look around, clocking the other passengers. It’s just me, Macy, Allie, Pam, and Deborah. Five people out of twenty.
In the moonlight, I catch a flash of movement downriver—the second orange passenger raft, faintly glowing against the dark water. That means everyone else—everyone who isn’t already dead—is packed in the other passenger raft that’s ahead of us. The overloaded vessel has nearly reached the whitewater that will funnel them into the thundering Anvil Falls. In a few more yards, there will be no holding it back. The sound is building to a crescendo now, the mist from the falls visible in the moonlight—a pale curtain against the black canyon walls.
“Get away from us!” Macy suddenly screams so loudly that I nearly drop my paddle.
Everyone in our raft whips their heads back toward shore, where a hulking figure stalks the shoreline beside the gear boats. Moonlight glints off the wet blades in his hand.
Bryan.
If he charges into the water right now, he’ll still be able to reach our raft. Just like I did a few seconds ago.
Macy stands, facing him while she wedges one foot into the crease of the raft floor and places her other foot on the back bumper, in a fighting stance. She pops one of the heavy guide oars from its lock, holding it like a bludgeon as she growls, “I will fucking take your head off if you get near us.” Then, quieter so only we can hear, she says, “Row hard downriver, but do not take us over Anvil yet. We need to get in front of that other raft. Get as far right as you can.”
To my surprise, Bryan seems to listen to Macy’s warning, staying exactly where he is at the edge of the water.
We obey Macy too, plunging our paddles into the water as hard and fast as we can, moving into deeper water as we angle right, across the river.
My blood runs cold at the sight of Bryan, watching us. “He’s crazy,” Macy chokes, her voice thick with tears as we row away from him, cutting toward the first raft. “I told our manager he wasn’t a good fit, that there was something off about him. But my boss said we had to give him a chance. That he had his reasons.” She lets out a low wail. “And now he killed Gracie and Josh, and somebody else too, I couldn’t see—”