Poison Bay Read online

  Callie said, “How can we be sure it’s not another ten days walk? Bryan wouldn’t have left us near help.”

  “Whatever we do has risks.”

  “He might have assumed we’d think the way we came in was the only way out,” she said. “He didn’t credit us with much initiative.”

  Adam looked morose. “We haven’t shown much, have we? From the beginning, I didn’t like Bryan’s secrecy about the route. It was strange, and dangerous. The more people who know exactly where you are in a wilderness, the better. But I thought that whoever was supposed to pick us up at Milford Sound must at least know where we were meant to end up, so I let it ride. And now we find out that person doesn’t exist. I assumed that even if Bryan didn’t want the whole world to know, he would have to outline the real route when he filed his ‘intentions form’, since it was an official document—but he obviously didn’t. Then we should’ve turned back five days ago when we talked about it. Our tracks were much fresher then. I probably could’ve found them. And if we’d tackled him as soon as he started talking like a loony last night, we probably could have stopped him jumping.”

  Jack said, “Or we might just have fallen into the water with him, and lost a couple more of us, or at least had to abandon our packs to save ourselves.”

  Callie said, “There’s no point in ‘what ifs’. If we’d known Bryan wanted us dead, we wouldn’t have come in the first place. But now we have to find a way to live with reality. What if you two go up the mountain today, see if it’s passable? We don’t want to waste Rachel’s medication on a wild goose chase.”

  “Sure. If you like,” Jack said. He seemed hesitant. “But we all need meaningful activity today. Sitting and waiting won’t keep people’s spirits up.”

  Adam said, “The ones who stay behind could look for things to eat.”

  Jack raised his eyebrows and nodded. “Good idea. Time for a team meeting.”

  11

  What Jack didn’t want to say, and definitely not in front of Callie, was that if anyone was going to test the mountain, it probably shouldn’t be him. Rock climbing was hardly in his resume. It tended to involve heights. And heights made all the blood drain from his brain.

  For a moment he’d expected a reprieve when Kain seemed affronted that he wasn’t the one accompanying Adam. But the idea of “looking after the girls” pacified him and Jack lost his chance.

  And so he found himself toiling up the side valley in Adam’s wake. The terrain was as difficult as they’d come to expect, with slippery boulders, cloying undergrowth, and deep mud from last night’s rain underfoot. They shared one pack for the expedition, containing only water and the emergency warmth and rain-sheltering gear they’d learned to keep near them always. Jack had taken first turn to carry it. Its lightness was a relief. Nevertheless, hiking with little more than fern shoots in his belly made a noticeable difference to his strength.

  But there was no shortage of water. Jack decided to be thankful for it, as they stopped for a breather and a drink.

  “I was hoping the head of the valley would look easier the closer we got,” he said. “But it doesn’t.”

  “No, it looks like a bit of a mongrel. But we have to try, now we’ve come this far.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “You know why I came on this blasted hike? Sheena, my girlfriend—she wanted me to. So I could check out a tourist lodge we were thinking of working at in Darwin’s off-season, and do it at Bryan’s expense. Stupid, hey?”

  “Not really. It makes sense to do it while you’re over here.”

  “I didn’t want to see it without her. And I didn’t want to see Bryan again or think about Liana and all that rot.” He paused. “I had a bit of a thing with Liana, did you know?”

  “No, I didn’t. Before Bryan?”

  “During.”

  “Oh.”

  Adam seemed to be deciding whether to speak again. “I even helped her get the gun.”

  “What!”

  “Yep. One of the proudest moments of my life,” he said, his tone bitterly sarcastic, his expression grim. “She told me she was pregnant and it was mine. And she’d kill herself if I didn’t help her get an abortion. Bryan had refused, apparently. She’d slept with half the school, so I figured she was trying the same line on half a dozen other guys.”

  “But how did the gun come into it?”

  He looked into the distance. “When I wouldn’t give her money for an abortion, she asked if she could have enough to buy a gun. I thought she was just being Liana—being a drama queen, and trying to scare me into giving her the bigger amount. So I gave her enough money for a gun, and even told her where to get a cheap one, and how to use it for the best results. I wanted to show her what I thought of her stupid games.”

  Jack stared at him, gobsmacked.

  Adam saw Jack’s reaction, and nodded. “You can imagine how good I’ve felt about that for the past decade. I’ve never told Sheena, of course. So she couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t excited about the chance to do our research trip at someone else’s expense. I came so I wouldn’t have to explain to her what an awful person I was before she ever knew me.” His eyes looked suspiciously moist. “Should’ve proposed to her weeks ago, instead of waiting for Christmas. Now she’ll probably never know how I feel.”

  “You can talk to her on the video if you like, just in case. I’ll record it.” It didn’t occur to Jack to make soothing reassurances that might not be true.

  “Really? Thanks. I’ll think about it.”

  “No worries.”

  “So why did you come on the hike from hell?”

  “Callie.” He hadn’t meant to tell the truth, it just slipped out into the confessional pool they seemed to be wading through together.

  “Have you told her?”

  “No point. She likes beautiful men who are taller than her.”

  “Bloody women,” Adam said. “We do so many stupid things for them.” He resumed climbing.

  ***

  The temperature had to be close to freezing at this altitude despite the sunshine, but Jack’s face was moist with sweat and his shirt clung to his back. He reached upwards, fingers probing for a handhold as Adam had instructed. A thin trickle of blood crept down his arm from cuts in his palm.

  After a long uphill hike to the head of the valley, the hoped-for series of traversable ledges hadn’t materialized. Jagged granite fell sheer below him, and he was thankful for the mist beneath them, so that he almost couldn’t see how far he had to fall.

  He prayed continually and incoherently: God help me God help me God help me.

  He wanted to live. And he wanted Callie to include him in the “strong men” category. It was foolish to fret about her comment. But every time his head span and he wanted to feel his feet firm on solid ground, her words did another circuit through his mind. Yesterday’s failure in the ocean was bad enough. I can’t give up.

  Adam was above him and to the right. He must have been able to see that Jack was struggling, but he didn’t say so.

  Their shared rucksack lay far below, in a natural half-cave indented into the base of the cliff. Below that, a long, steep scree of rubble-strewn glacial moraine.

  The camera was in his pocket. He’d had it in the head strap at first, until he realized it could only record granite an inch from the lens, to a soundtrack of his gasping breaths.

  He stopped and leaned his forehead against the rock face, trying to rest. When he reached up again with a trembling arm, he saw Adam watching him.

  “Jack, it’s a no go. We’ll have to go back down.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “There’s not enough handholds, we’ll never do it.”

  Or is it just that you know I’ll never do it? Jack pressed his forehead against the rock again. “I don’t know if I can go back down,” he admitted, hating himself.

  “I’ll find a way past you, and direct you from below.”

  When they eventually sat resting beside the
rucksack, Jack’s arms and legs trembled so much that Adam must be able to see it. The full weight of his failure sat on his chest.

  Adam said, “It’s not exactly the rock climbing wall down at the Y, is it.”

  “I wouldn’t know. I was always too scared to try it.”

  “Yeah, well, you’ve been brilliant today. It’s just too hard. How would the girls manage? They’d never do it, especially not Shaz. And absolutely not with the rucksacks.”

  “I guess you’re right. Rachel and Callie might manage, but Erica probably hasn’t got the upper body strength. If we could only see what’s on the other side.”

  “I might get there eventually, but there’s no guarantee I’d find anything useful. And if I fell and killed myself on the other side, how would you know? You’d all wait for help that never came. It was a good idea Jack, but we’re going to have to chuck it and try something else.”

  As he stood on wobbly legs to begin the long trek back to camp, Jack heard a rumbling noise his tired brain could make no sense of. He glanced at Adam in inquiry, but Adam, further out on the platform, was looking up. And then Adam was hurling himself bodily at Jack.

  It was like being hit by a train. Jack felt stunning pain down the length of his back as he slammed into the hollow in the cliff face. There was only a nanosecond to wonder why Adam had gone mad, before he was pummeled again, this time by an explosive rush of air. A series of monstrous booms followed, and still Adam had him pinned to the rock face.

  As the noise died away, Adam leaned back against the rock wall beside Jack, panting and swallowing hard. Both remained under the shelter of their semi-cave. Jack instinctively fumbled in his pocket for the camera, hoping it had survived the impact of Adam, as his sluggish mind registered that the white puffs in the air before them were made of snow. Snow that, seconds before, had encrusted the top of the mountain hundreds of meters above.

  The camera still worked, although the vision jittered from the fierce tremor in the operator’s hands. Thank you God, thought Jack. He glanced at Adam. “If we’d still been up there…”

  Adam said, “As soon as I get my breath back, I’ll get you to record that message for Sheena.”

  ***

  Jack’s back throbbed where he’d hit the cliff face. The downhill run had been quicker than the ascent despite the deep snow now obstructing the upper section, and he hoped they were only about an hour from camp. He could do with a rest. And a square meal too, but that was a thought for another day.

  Emerging from a dense rainforest thicket into a small boulder-strewn clearing, Adam close behind him, he saw Callie and Rachel emerging from the bush barely ten meters away. They stopped and stared, and then scrambled towards the men.

  “Oh, thank God!”

  “You’re okay! We didn’t know…”

  “We heard the boom and saw the avalanche…”

  They were enfolded in hugs, and there was a judicious amount of weeping, mostly from the women. Jack couldn’t avoid a slight gasp when Callie’s hug grabbed his bruised back a little too hard.

  “What’s wrong?” she said.

  Adam answered for him. “He was on the receiving end of a rugby tackle when the snow came down, that’s all.”

  “Your hands! They’re bleeding!”

  “They’re okay,” said Jack, shrugging it off manfully, but making no attempt to withdraw from Callie’s tender examination. Behind her, Adam grinned at him.

  “What about everyone else?” said Jack.

  Callie and Rachel exchanged a glance.

  Rachel said, “They’re fine.”

  “There was a debate over the best thing to do. Kain said we should wait, in case the search party missed you coming down as we were going up.”

  “Logical, I s’pose,” Adam said.

  “But we couldn’t bear to think of you lying there injured or trapped, and no one coming to help,” said Rachel.

  “And I figured we’d see enough of your footprints, and you’d most likely come back down the way you went up,” Callie said.

  “So we agreed to disagree.”

  “That’s one way of putting it,” said Callie with a pert smile. “But tell us, any luck with the mountain?”

  They frowned when they heard the route was impassable, but the disappointment was softened by the avalanche: no one wanted to put themselves in the path of another one.

  The atmosphere was a mix of tension and relief when they arrived in camp, but Adam was back on form, and soon smoothed things over with some teasing.

  The foraging party had come up with fern tips and seaweed to eat, and it didn’t even taste too bad, Jack thought, if you squinted and imagined you were somewhere nice, like a tropical island or your own veranda at home with a dog and a slobber-covered tennis ball.

  The seaweed had been Erica’s idea. “Well, the Japanese eat a lot of it.” It didn’t mean every variety was safe, but there were no immediate signs of illness, and the saltiness added seasoning to the ferns.

  Kain’s find had been less popular: a tree loaded with tiny dark berries Bryan had recommended to him days earlier as good “bush tucker”. No one was eager to trust Bryan’s menu recommendations, but Kain had grabbed as many as he could carry, and displayed them now to Jack and Adam. The berries stood out on stalks like tiny mutant grapes. Apparently, Bryan had eaten one in front of him. Kain said, “How can they be poisonous if Bryan ate one? I tried one, and I’m okay.”

  Jack put a berry in his mouth, afraid to chew too hard. It was bitter and disgusting. When he felt his tongue start to tingle he spat it out instantly, racing to the river to cup water to his mouth, rinsing and spitting until the vile taste was all gone.

  But Kain refused to discard his find. He stripped the berries from their stalks and packed them into one of the ubiquitous snap lock plastic bags they all carried. “They’re not ripe yet, that’s all. They might still come in handy.”

  Around the fire as the light faded, they discussed the next step.

  Adam said, “Jack and I talked about it, and we think we should retrace Bryan’s route for a while, then look for a valley branching off to the east that might lead us over the mountains.”

  “That huge lake we crossed the first day runs roughly north-south,” added Jack, “and it’s sixty-five kilometers long. If we put the ocean behind us and head east, we hope we’ll eventually hit another part of that lake. Tourist boats should be on it most days. If we start a fire, someone might see the smoke.”

  “We’re hoping to find a shorter route than the one we used to get here. We have to find a way east that doesn’t involve cliffs like the one that stopped us today.”

  There were questions, but no serious opposition to the plan. Fear of the unknown was outweighed by a unanimous horror of trying to retrace the brutal route by which they’d come.

  Kain, however, suggested splitting the group. He argued for leaving the weaker members of the party resting near Poison Bay, with shelter and a share of the cooking equipment, while the others went for help. “Once we reach the outside world, we can send rescuers. And they might be rescued sooner, if a fishing boat comes into the bay.”

  Jack responded with a characteristic lack of tact, heightened by his disquiet about Kain’s reluctance to come looking for him earlier that day. “The girls will be in a mess if we leave them here alone. Are you sure you’re not looking for your own best chance to survive, without any liabilities to slow you down?”

  Kain’s tone became snaky. “If I was wanting to leave liabilities behind, you’d be top of the list. You can’t even climb one little mountain to save our lives!”

  Jack’s face reddened. The taunt hit him hard, because he was afraid it was true. “You didn’t even try to climb it, or to come looking for us! You just stayed nice and safe down here and looked after Number One.”

  Kain stepped closer and was drawing breath for another insult, when Adam interjected.

  “Shut up, you two!” he demanded. “Can’t you see how this is aff
ecting everyone?” Sharon was staring at the ground. Rachel was weeping quietly. Callie and Erica were looking daggers at both combatants.

  Kain shrugged; Jack felt ashamed. “Sorry,” he muttered, and looked at his feet. From hero to zero in a couple of hours.

  Adam said, “I don’t think we’d be wise to count on accidental rescue. We need to make a decision based on the worst-case scenario, and we need to do it democratically. Let’s vote on it.”

  Sharon said, “I’ll do whatever everyone else wants.” She didn’t need Kain’s or Jack’s university education to know what a liability was.

  “Yes, me too,” said Rachel.

  Both Rachel and Sharon abstained from the vote, but it was conclusive nevertheless. Kain was the only one who wanted to split the party.

  “And there’s something else,” Adam said. “After the avalanche, Jack recorded a message from me for Sheena, just in case. Telling her where to find the engagement ring, that sort of thing.” He shrugged and cleared his throat. “I thought I’d mention it in case anyone else wanted to do it too.”

  Even Jack could tell Adam had dropped a clanger; the timing was wrong. There were murmurs and fidgeting, but Kain was first to speak. “How will that help, if none of us survive to take the video home? Or have we decided Jack will be the last man standing, emerging from the wilderness to win awards for his stupid movie?”

  Jack didn’t rise to the bait, but he did answer, because Kain’s logic was flawed. “Actually, I don’t have to survive. Only the camera does, and it’s pretty tough. Searchers would probably find it one day with my stuff.” He copped a glare from Callie. Oops. Double clanger.

  “Can we please stop talking as though we’re going to die?” she said. “We’re all getting out of here. We help each other. We focus on the thought of going home. We get up in the morning and get on with it.”

  12

  Monday, Two Days Lost

  Their packs were laden with fern tips and seaweed as they set off eastwards into the cool early light, leaving Poison Bay behind. The sun had still to emerge over the mountain tops. Today Callie should have been flying home to her little old Sydney flat, and getting herself ready for work tomorrow.