Poison Bay (27 page)

Callie said, “There could be a pass up there. I’d really love to get over this mountain. I know we won’t magically see the lake from the top, it’s too far and the valleys twist and turn too much, and there might be more mountains and more valleys yet, but I just feel sure we’ll be closer to the lake beyond that peak.”

“You need to remember that if it is harder than it looks, and we can’t get up this way,” added Kain, apparently reconciled to taking part in the discussion now, “we’ll have used up most of our daylight. We won’t get back to last night’s camp in time, even though it’s downhill. And the wind’s picking up. It’s sheltered here, but I got hit by a few serious gusts up there.”

“Sheltered?” Erica said, her tone uneasy. The wind was beating at the looser sections of their garments, tossing the hood of Callie’s jacket as it lay down her back—flip and snap, flip and snap.

“Is it really strong wind?” said Callie in quick concern. “Will it make it too dangerous on that ledge?”

Kain shrugged. “I got along it and back okay. But if we’re going, we probably shouldn’t wait too long.”

“Well, we need to make a decision, and we don’t have a coin to flip,” Callie said, her voice brisk. “We’ve lost confidence in ourselves because of that plane, and the idiot searchers who didn’t see us. But we’re not dead yet. We can still make it home. I say we go up. What does everyone else think?”

“I’m scared of that ledge. And the wind.” Erica looked on the verge of tears. “But I’m even more scared of having to go back the way we came, and lose another whole day.”

Callie said, “So what is it? Up or down?”

“Up, I guess.”

“Rachel?”

“Up, definitely. I don’t want to go back there.”

“Jack?”

“You’ve got three ‘ups’ already. I don’t have to vote.” He was uneasy about both options, and part of him didn’t want to be responsible for whatever happened next.
 

“Jack.” There was a warning note in her voice.

“Oh all right. Up. We might as well try it.”

“Kain?”

He shook his head. “I’m not voting. I’ll go along with the majority.” When Callie gave him a stern look he simply ignored her, stood and walked over to his rucksack, busying himself with preparations for the climb to come.

Another snack of the endless ferns, gathered that morning and eaten raw, was the best they could do for an energy boost. They didn’t sit easily in anxious stomachs. Jack saw Kain fiddling with a bulging plastic bag, but the contents looked dark, not green like everyone else’s fern tips. He angled for a closer look. “Not those berries!” The man couldn’t be going to eat something Bryan the Serial Killer had recommended, surely. His dislike for Kain didn’t extend to wanting him dead. Or disabled, for that matter. The team needed him.

Kain was holding one of the tiny berries in front of him, studying it. “Almost a complete food in itself, Bryan said. And we could certainly do with the energy.”

Jack saw the others staring at the berry between Kain’s thumb and forefinger, transfixed. Callie looked worried, Erica fearful, but the expression on Rachel’s face could only be described as longing. Who could blame her, in her situation? What if it turned out to be true, and the berries were miniature lifesavers but they didn’t eat them and died of starvation? And searchers found their bodies in days or years to come, with a little bag of desiccated berries, and wondered why the stupid fools hadn’t eaten them?

Callie spoke. “Kain, you can’t trust what Bryan said.”

“Why not? He told us a lot of things that were true, and that are helping keep us alive. About the weather, and camping. And he told me about the berries way back, on about the second or third day.”

“Kain, please don’t eat them,” Erica said, her voice intense.

He snorted. “As if you care if I die.” She put her head in her hands.

Callie frowned in Jack’s direction, and mouthed the words “do something”.

What
and win another peace prize?
Jack rubbed his face. “Kain, you’re right that Bryan taught us a lot of things about survival. He was a compulsive teacher, and he also wanted to get us all to Poison Bay in good order and condition for his big announcement. But he didn’t show us any other ‘bush tucker’ among all the things there must be to eat out here. Why did he point them out to you, the person Liana cheated on him with? He may have known that, don’t forget. And how can a berry be a complete food? His main goal was to kill us, even on the second or third day. It’s apparently been his goal for months at least, if not longer.”

Kain stared at Jack, holding the eye contact, and put the berry in his mouth, slowly, deliberately, and chewed it, and swallowed. Jack shook his head in frustration and looked away.

“Kain, please!” Erica was close to tears.

He stared at her while he fished another berry out of the bag by touch, and put it into his mouth, chewing deliberately. He stood in a quick fluid movement, shoved the bag of berries in his jacket pocket, and shouldered into his rucksack. Without another word, he set off up the mountain, his hand fishing in his pocket for more berries as he climbed.

45

Callie was more scared than she’d ever been in her life, even counting the terrors of the past few days.

She’d slotted in behind Kain in their little conga line when they set off from the rest stop, mostly to make a buffer between him and Erica, leaving Rachel to be watched by Jack at the rear. And as the minutes passed and dragged and added themselves on top of each other, she regretted the decision more and more, wishing she could talk to Jack about what she was seeing. But she couldn’t turn back to reach him on the end of the line, or Kain would get away from her altogether. And she didn’t want to frighten Erica.
 

The berries. She cursed those berries in her head, using every epithet, profanity and blasphemy she could think of. And then she cursed Bryan even more lavishly. His determination to hang on to past hurts like incendiary trophies, fanning their flame until they burnt a hole right through the center of his soul, and turned to charcoal the lives he touched.

It had been a missed foothold here and there at first, as they clambered up the mountainside. By the time they reached the ledge they must traverse, Kain’s feet were barely coordinated.
 

As Kain had promised, the initial drop from this ledge was indeed only short—by Fiordland standards, that is. The ledge below it however—wider, flatter, and yet frustratingly inaccessible from the downhill end—edged into a cliff that fell sheer and straight to the valley far below. A voracious wind swirled along the narrow shelf with battering-ram force.

She tried to stop him stepping out there, called to him, reached out to grab at his arm.

He twisted to look at her, and the desolation in his eyes made her gasp. He seemed to be working hard to form the words clearly, but even so, she struggled to understand his meaning. “He set me up. Make sure you survive, and tell them. He set me up. I can’t believe I listened to him. I can’t believe what I’ve done. Tell the little boy…” he swayed, “…I’m so sorry.”

“Kain! Please!” She grabbed at his arm again, but he batted her hand away, steadied himself, and launched out onto that awful ledge.

What could she do but follow him?

And everyone followed behind her, Erica too governed by her fear of heights to notice anything else, Jack focused on keeping Rachel on her feet and moving, moving, while trying not to look down himself.

Behind her, she could hear Erica whimpering aloud, apparently no longer able to control her vocal chords, so overwhelmed was she by atavistic fear. Not usually given to vertigo, even Callie could feel the vastness of it pulling her, luring her, out and down, and down and down.

Kain was nearly to the end of the ledge, and Callie was keeping close to him, letting Erica fall behind to battle her demons alone.
 

Maybe he could make it. Maybe they’d be safe on the boulder field Callie was beginning to see ahead around the curve of the cliff. And he didn’t have the strength to fight them off now, so they’d be able to hold onto him, stop him marching upward, and somehow make him vomit. Get those berries out of his system, and perhaps he’d recover.

Kain’s boot caught on the uneven surface, and he stumbled and teetered. “Watch out!” she shouted. He half-turned to look back at her, his eyes glazed. His pack scraped on the rock wall alongside him, pitching his upper body outwards, at the very moment his knees bent and gave way beneath him.
 

Callie grabbed instinctively for the straps dangling from the back of his pack. It was too little to save him, but it was enough to unbalance her. She felt her right boot slip off the edge into nothingness in the same instant that Kain tumbled from her view. She grabbed for the cliff face, but there was nothing to hold her, and she kept sliding. Sliding and falling. Her whole world was sliding and she was going to die. She heard the sickening crunch from below, and she was next, and there was nothing she could do to stop it.

“God! Callie! No!” It was Jack’s voice, and suddenly, her fingers found purchase on that edge, and she hung, dangling in space, the great weight of her rucksack pulling her outwards, dragging, dragging, drawing her down.

Now there was screaming, long and hoarse. That was Erica. Useless and screaming. Behind her, Rachel. And Jack trapped behind them both, unable to reach her. “Oh God! Save her!” That was him again, desperate. She didn’t want to be one of the ones who didn’t make it home. She didn’t want to go wherever Kain had just gone.

Callie found strength from somewhere unknown, surging up through her body. She thrust herself upwards, pushing with her feet against the cliff face. She managed to hook the fingers of one hand into a groove near the back of the ledge. Eroded by rain? Who knew.
Thank God for it.
The other hand followed, and she struggled to swing her left leg to the ledge. It wouldn’t go high enough, so she used her arms again, every muscle fiber in her chest and shoulders shrieking and howling with the pain as she struggled up onto her elbows, and swung the leg again.
Like getting out of a swimming pool with a gorilla on your back
. This time her leg found purchase on the rim of the ledge, and she pushed and groveled till her other leg could join it, and then lay flat on her face, full length along the ledge, the weight of her rucksack crushing her, the smell of the beautiful, solid granite filling her nostrils as she gasped for oxygen, her lungs rasping, that pain in her side piercing with a vengeance, her torn hands now beginning to make themselves heard above all the other agonies. But, oh sweet Lord, she was alive.

Erica was still screaming, like someone was murdering her in slow and brutal ways. Callie struggled to clear her head enough to think what to do next.
 

Kain. She edged her head just a little to the right, and saw his outflung hand, thrusting out into that awful void beyond the next ledge. She moved her head a little more, and as the lip of the ledge on which she lay slid from her field of view, like a blind retracting, the rest of him was unveiled. Lying spread eagled across the mound of his rucksack, its harness still firmly buckled. Back painfully arched, legs akimbo. His head at an impossible angle, his beautiful eyes wide and staring straight at her. As she watched and waited for any sign of movement, even the merest hint of life, a thin snake-like trickle, almost black, slid out from under his head, and slithered right off the edge, creating a jagged trail across the rock. Blood.

Poison berries. Broken neck. Head staved in. They were spoiled for choice with cause of death. Callie made a conscious decision to distance herself from the event, defer its emotion, treat it like a news story.
Another one bites the dust.
She would feel the loss and the horror later, the brutal end to a teenage obsession and an adult affection, when there was time and energy for such luxuries. For now, they must survive. She moved her head back in line with her body, and rested her forehead on the cold rock. This ledge had been pure joy in comparison to the recent alternative, but now it was beginning to pall, and the labor of drawing air into lungs compressed by the huge weight strapped to her back was becoming unsustainable. And that terrible noise behind her had to stop.

She levered herself into a sitting position, slowly, painfully and oh so very carefully, her legs dangling off the edge. Erica was a couple of meters away, her left side and rucksack pressed hard against the rock wall, staring down at Kain and screaming, a throaty visceral noise, terrifying all by itself. “Shut up, Erica!” Callie’s voice was harsh, sharp, and shocking, and Erica stopped instantly and stared at her with scared-rabbit eyes, her chest heaving, her breathing loud and guttural.

“Do you think you could make it over here to me?” Callie made her voice softer, encouraging. Erica shook her head, and closed her eyes, two fat tears sliding down her flushed cheeks. But Callie persisted. “C’mon, Erica, just try. See if you can move one foot. Your left foot, just move it a centimeter, that’s all you need to do.”

Erica’s eyes opened, and she stared at Callie, but then shook her head—a tiny movement. “I can’t. I can’t move. I’m so sorry.” Her voice was little more than a hoarse whisper, and Callie saw a tremor in her legs. An especially strong gust of wind drummed along the cliff face just at that moment, and Callie knew she’d have to act fast, or they’d lose another one.

She struggled to her feet, precarious on the narrow ledge. “Erica, look at me for a moment. I’m going to get off this ledge, ditch my rucksack, and then come back, and help you off here, one step at a time. Have you got that?” Erica nodded. “Okay, now I want you to shut your eyes, press against the wall just like you’re doing now, and think about eating lasagna at your dining table at home, all warm and safe. Just do it.” She hoped the diversion would work. Erica loved lasagna back in the day—hopefully the preference still held after ten years. “Smell the crispy cheese,” she added over her shoulder as she set off. “Have a nice glass of red with it, too.”

Adrenalin gave Callie extra speed, and she was to the end of that ledge like a startled ferret. Kain hadn’t lied about the swing-off at the end of the ledge—with her height, she managed it easily enough. The drop immediately below that point wasn’t sheer, more of a steep slope down to the second ledge. But it was extremely exposed, the elevation intimidating even for her. It was going to be seventeen different kinds of fun getting Erica off there in a minute.