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  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 unb
elievably traumatic.” She glanced at him. “She was pregnant, too.”

  He nodded, slowly, obviously thinking. “We’ll need more on that, but later will do. What about the others?”

  She looked back at the door, her eyes moving to the images circling Liana—a collection of photos cut from nature magazines, and a faded print of a young boy blowing out candles on a cake, a smiling man and woman behind him. She gestured in a circular motion. “Those are Bryan’s parents, but I guess you know that.”

  He nodded. “I thought so.”

  Her gaze now moved down the door. Eight photos cut into perfect squares, aligned into two rows—four men across the top, four women across the bottom. She gasped and her hand went to her throat as she saw Rachel. A heavy black cross had been drawn across the photo with marker pen, going from corner to corner with mathematical precision, just as with the other seven images. Transfixed, it took a moment for Ellen to speak. She drew a deep breath and fought the desire to scream. She swallowed hard. “That’s my daughter. Second from the left.” She looked at Peter, frowning. “I’ve never seen that photo before, and it’s recent—she’s only had that hairstyle this year. I wonder where he got it. We live in the same house and she’s always enjoyed showing me her photos.”

  He spoke calmly. “Except for the shot of Bryan, they’re all taken with a long lens. We think they’re probably surveillance photos.”

  “But why...? I don’t understand.” She shook her head. But she did understand. At least enough to know that she was looking at the product of a very disturbed mind.

  “Would you like a drink of water?” Peter’s hands were still relaxed, the heat of his upper arm still near enough to hers to give support without professional impropriety.

  “No, let’s get this done and get out of this place.” She shivered and wrapped her arms around herself, one hand each side of her waist. One by one she identified the other photographs. They were older now, but still recognizable as Rachel’s high school friends. “And I guess that must be Bryan. He looks so different with that hair. I wouldn’t have recognized him in the street.”

  “Thank you, Ellen.” He stood and closed the cupboard door, hiding its images—although they remained burnt on her retinas. “Let’s get you out of here.”

  He reached for her elbow and helped her to her feet, maintaining the hold as they walked back down the hallway. She was glad of the human touch, and the physical support—her legs felt rubbery, her throat dry. It was a visceral relief to emerge into the sunshine again, and gulp fresh air as Peter locked the house’s horrors within it.

  29

  Callie struggled up from deep inside the earth. It was warm and dark down there, and she wanted to curl into the fetal position till the end of the world, but for some reason she wasn’t to be allowed to do so. Up. She had to come up. There was a murmur of voices, and someone was flicking her face. Something cold. Water. They were flicking her face with water.

  She opened her eyes a crack, and the vicious light pierced her brain like a rapier. Callie instinctively turned from it, and at the movement her head exploded with pain.

  “Callie! Are you okay?” That was Jack’s voice.

  “Stop flicking me,” she muttered. Or she thought she said it. So hard to be sure if her tongue had actually shaped any sounds.

  “Callie! Can you hear us?” That wasn’t Jack. A woman. Rachel? Yes, she sounded odd, but it must be Rachel.

  Callie cracked her eyes open again, and looked up towards that horrible light. Three shapes. She closed her eyes, and tried to pull her thoughts back from the corners of the universe where they had fled. A slapping noise. Slap, sla-slap. Rain. They weren’t flicking her.

  “It’s raining.”

  “Yes, sweetie, it’s raining, but not nearly as bad as before.” That was Rachel again. She sounded anxious. I wonder what’s happened to make her anxious?

  “Callie, can you open your eyes?” Someone else. Callie’s mind roamed around awkwardly, then settled on an answer. Erica, and she was wearing her professional voice. Why?

  “Callie, you need to open your eyes and talk to us.” Erica again, and quite bossy this time. “Callie! Open your eyes!”

  “Bossy-boots.”

  A short gust of laughter. That was Jack.

  “What did she say?” Erica again.

  “She called you a bossy-boots. That has to mean she’s still in there somewhere.”

  “Come on, sweetie.” Rachel’s voice again. “See if you can open your eyes for us. I know it’s hard, but you just have to do it. Please Callie.”

  Something in the timbre of Rachel’s voice pierced the fog. Anxiety, insistence, pleading. Callie struggled to raise her eyelids, so thick and heavy. This time the light didn’t hurt quite so much. The shapes around her took form. Jack beside her in the tent, Erica and Rachel crouched awkwardly in the opening, rain spattering through the gaps between them.

  “Well, hello there.” Rachel was smiling at her, but her eyes looked teary. Or was it just the rain moistening her face?

  “Can you move, Callie?” asked Erica. “Just see if you can roll onto your side for me.”

  Not for you, but I might give it a crack for Rachel. Laboriously, she began to move, and the pain radiated out from her head and started grabbing her limbs, now a shoulder, there a knee. Even her hand and wrist didn’t like it. She moaned. “Why does it hurt so much?”

  She must have said that one clearly enough, because Jack replied. “You’ve been through a blender, love. Keep going. You’re doing well.”

  Eternal minutes later, they had Callie more or less sitting upright in the cramped tent. They’d tried to explain the landslide, and her tumble down the mountain, but her brain didn’t want to absorb the information. Jack had moved out into the rain to let Erica in to tend to Callie’s head wound from her mini first aid kit. The disinfectant applied from Erica’s small, precious bottle felt like razors slicing into Callie’s scalp, and she gasped with the agony of it, her eyes wet.

  While Erica worked, Callie gazed thick-headedly at the puzzling clutter down the end of the tent. Her eyes seemed to have forgotten how to focus. Finally, the orange mound resolved itself into her wet-weather gear, the jacket slung, arms akimbo, over her rucksack. Jack’s gear was down there too, except for his blue rain jacket, which must be on him. Filthy boots were mixed in among it.

  Their sleeping bags had been set up side by side, each inside its big orange plastic waterproof bag, as required in this sort of weather, but they were lumpy, twisted and misshapen. The roof of the tent sagged lopsidedly, and there seemed to be almost as much mud inside as out. She puzzled over an oblong shape above her head, then realized it must be duct tape—Jack had repaired a tear. It looked like a camp set up by a blind and drunken madman. It was a far cry from the shipshape order enforced by Ranger Bryan from Day One of this march, and robotically perpetuated by his reluctant acolytes even after he was gone, for the simple reason that it worked.

  Callie looked round for Jack. Rachel still crouched in the opening, watching her closely, but Jack must be standing up taking a look around. All she could see was his legs from the knee down, bare toes sticking out the bottom of his pants. So that’s why there were so many boots in the tent.

  “Hey, Jack!” she called, and the sound resonating in her head only hurt a moderate amount.

  The toes changed direction on the rock, the knees bent, and in a moment Jack was peering in at her, his concerned face aligned with Rachel’s. “What’s up?” he asked.

  “I just wanted to say: I love what you’ve done with the place. Bryan would be so proud.”

  His face split into a grin. “Oh shut up! You try doing any better in these conditions. It was like trying to wrestle an elephant in a car wash!”

  “Who are you calling an elephant?” she demanded, and erupted into giggles. Jack joined in and then even Rachel started a little muffled snorting, her hand over her mouth as she looked with new eyes at the chaos inside the tent. Each shake of
Callie’s body pounded her bruised ribcage and thumped inside her head, but it felt good in spite of all that. Never underestimate the value of laughter.

  It became one of those spells of uncontrolled laughter that sometimes happen among old friends who’ve been too tired and too stressed for too long—a moment of release.

  As they grew calm again, Callie realized Erica had not joined in. She turned to look at her; lines of strain were showing on the other woman’s face. “What’s wrong?” Her heart leapt into her mouth as she realized Erica somehow might have diagnosed the severity of her injuries; though she could move and talk and even laugh right now, her life might yet be slipping away. She’d seen it before when covering road accidents: people talking to their rescuers, alive and breathing, but when she called the police later to follow up, she’d find out the person had died in the ambulance.

  Callie saw a look pass between the other three, and Erica seemed close to tears. Her anxiety levels rose. Jackson sighed, and looked at the ground. He might have been formulating words, but it was Rachel who broke the silence. When she did, it took a moment for Callie to absorb that it wasn’t her they were concerned about.

  “There was another landslide further along, Cal,” she said. “Up where we were walking. Much smaller and narrower than this one, but not good, just the same.”

  Callie gave her a questioning look. “What happened?”

  “Well, it’s just that…” Rachel shrugged helplessly, and looked at the other two for help. They were both looking somewhere else by now. Her eyes went back to Callie’s and her expression was gentle.

  “Callie, we can’t find Adam or Kain.”