“Follow me, Elliots, if you don’t feel like swimming!” Caleb shouts over the wind. Without waiting, he lurches into the storm.
Pete cradles me in his arms, close to his warm body as the wind hurls rain against us.
“Hold on tight, Jack.”
He begins to run.
Chapter 16
THE CAVE
Caleb leads us inland and uphill, weaving between the dripping trunks. Cradled in Pete’s arms, I see his white shirt bobbing like a ghost in the stormy dark. He never looks back.
Behind us Apple Creek boils under sheets of merciless machine-gun rain. Uprooted trees ride the current like crocodiles, rushing past on foamy water. The creek is rising.
Thunder tears the night in two and I twist in my brother’s arms, trying to find Butch, trying to see that he’s with us, not scared senseless and running blind toward rising water. But it’s too dark and I cannot see my dog.
Branches and leaves slap at us and fallen limbs lunge across our way. Pete dodges them, jumping, ducking, leaping. Soon his breaths are ragged gasps, but he don’t quit.
All at once we burst into open space and we’re running along a shelf of rock that rises into the night. There’s nothing above us now but the storm, and it hurls rain and each drop is like ice on my feverish skin. Through it, I see Will and Frankie behind us, coming out of the trees, and finally Butch, bounding alongside them, barking like mad.
Pete’s heart pounds like a jackhammer through his chest, and I am afraid it’s going to burst it’s beating so fast. I struggle to climb down, to let him rest, but he just holds me tighter, his muscles locking me against his body, and all of a sudden we’re flying, dashing through electric air as he jumps from one rain-splattered rock to another, and then another and another, up the mountain.
A ball of blue lightning explodes over us, and suddenly the Indian is there in the rain-slashed night. In the place where his mouth should be is a black hole: the entrance to the cave.
Caleb disappears into the Indian’s mouth and is gone.
Pete don’t even slow down. Ducking his head, he dives into that dark and the warrior swallows us too. Pete’s arms go loose and I slide onto the wet rock floor. I hear him collapse beside me, his breaths echoing off the walls.
I reach for him in the darkness of the cave and my hand touches his heaving chest, and I feel his heart, still pounding away underneath. I want to tell him how sorry I am, but my body shakes so fierce I can’t make any words.
Pete lays a hand on top of mine and gives me a weak squeeze.
Barking outside. Frankie and Will crash out of the night, soaking, coughing, cussing, Butch right behind. My dog finds me in the dark, his coat dripping wet, and starts licking my face and whining, as outside thunder crashes again.
Will shrugs off the two packs he’s carried the whole way, then turns over and throws up.
Beyond the mouth of the cave, the storm roars like a wild animal. But there’s something else in the air now, a terrible, high-pitched shrieking that sounds almost human. Sticks and leaves blow in from the night. Butch whines again.
“What’s that?” Frankie asks in a trembling whisper.
From the inky black, Caleb answers him.
“It’s a twister.”
Outside, the shrieking grows louder.
“Get to the back of the cave!” Pete shouts.
We scramble blindly in the dark over the rough rock, but the cave ain’t deep. At its far end, we huddle against cold rock and a mesh of old roots and wait. I wrap my arms about Butch and hold his soaking body close.
“Hang on!” Will shouts as suddenly the cave is filled with a screaming wind.
It’s Frankie who remembers the rope. As that howling cyclone reaches its fingers into our cave and whips our clothes about our bodies and snatches at the hair on our scalps, our city-boy cousin crawls to the entrance and finds it in Will’s pack. Ignoring our shouting, or maybe because he don’t hear us, he stays at the edge, tearing through the pack. Lightning flashes and we see him, a blackened cutout of a boy, kneeling before a torrent of water and wind and light. When the lightning comes again, the cave’s mouth is empty and I’m certain he’s been sucked out, but in another flash of electric light he appears out of the dark right before me.
He’s got the rope with him.
“Wrap it around you!” he shouts. I do and an instant later the rope tightens and I realize: he’s lashed us to those roots.
There comes a sound like the world is ending, a terrible crash that shakes the rock walls. The ground trembles under us and I think: This is it. This cave is our tomb.