It’s a second later that Will’s pack picks up and sails right out of the cave. The others go right after it, one after the other, and now that awful, shrieking wind is tugging at me, tugging at Butch, trying to drag us out too.
But that rope around my chest holds; the twister can’t have us.
“Hold on!” someone shouts.
That shrieking gets even louder, and I shut my eyes and start to pray, pray that my family won’t die, that they and even Caleb Madliner will live through this, even if I don’t.
A wave of peace, a touch of sadness come over me. And just when I decide that I’m ready to go, that horrible shrieking begins to fade. The wind begins to lessen until, with a last furious breath, that twister blows itself out.
We press against cold rock, barely believing we’re still alive. Even when Frankie lets that rope go slack, nobody moves until, slowly, he crawls to the mouth of the cave and peers out into the night.
Rain hammers the mountain and lightning splits the sky once more, but the twister is gone.
Rain pitter-patters against the Indian’s rock face. Away south, thunder rumbles. The storm has passed. From far below comes a sound like a soft wind rustling in the grass. But it ain’t wind. It’s water. A whole lot of dark, fast water.
Apple Creek is flooding.
Cold and wet, we sit in the dark: five boys and a dog with no food, no blankets, and no fire. It’s the fire I need most. My fever’s back and my wet clothes and that cold air have me shaking like a leaf on a tree.
“Anybody got a match?” Pete asks. His voice sounds weak, haggard.
“In my pack,” Will answers, sounding every bit as tired. “Miles away now.”
There’s a scratching sound and suddenly a single yellow flame cuts a hole in the dark.
Caleb Madliner holds a lit match in his fingers. Where he got it, I don’t know. At first we see only his floating head, and it’s horrifying. Then, in flickering light, the walls of the cave, the tangle of roots, and some scattered, curled leaves.
Frankie grabs two fistfuls for kindling, but Caleb turns the matchstick around in his long, bony fingers, watching the tiny strip of cardboard wither and curl inside the flame. He lets it burn down to his fingertips before dropping it on the leaves.
We gather as many sticks and twigs as we can find in the cave. When the fire is a tiny pyramid of twisting flames we sit close around it, and for a long time we do not talk.
“Too dangerous to travel now,” Pete says at last. “Sleep if you can. We will try in the morning.”
We stretch out best we can in the cramped cave. Pete is so exhausted he drifts off almost at once, and it ain’t long before Will joins him. I curl up on my side against the wall, but I know there won’t be any sleep for me tonight.
A thought gnaws at me, terrible as it is true: I’ve killed my brother. Oh sure, Pete is still breathing just across from me in the cave, but he might as well be six feet under. My plan has failed. We came out here to find that fighter jet, to make Pete famous enough that he wouldn’t get drafted, that he could stay safe. But my fever has ruined our expedition. Pete’s run himself half to death, and we all almost got carried off by a twister.
My brother is as good as drafted, and I know what that means. I listen to the dull roaring of a flooded creek below us and I think of that other riverbank, the one from my dreams, where boys line up and wait for the machine guns to rattle.
Hot tears run down my face. It’s all my fault. And since I am not even trying to sleep, I just lie there and watch our little fire slowly burn down.
But I’m not the only one.
Caleb Madliner sits against the far wall, staring into the flames. The fire’s taken him somewhere else in his mind, and in that place he don’t feel the rough stone or the cold air blowing in from outside. He’s in a trance.
I’ve always been frightened of people in trances. You never know what they’ll do while they’re visiting that faraway place—or worse yet, when they return and find you lying across from them in a narrow cave in the middle of nowhere.
I watch him from under my eyelids as I pretend to sleep, watch him watch the fire burn. Don’t know how much later it is when he finally draws a deep breath—like he’s coming up from being underwater a long time—sits up, and looks about himself. That red firelight reflects in his dark eyes, which sweep over us and then to a place in the back of the cave where the light don’t reach, to a shadowy place beneath those old roots.
Funny how your mind puts things together sometimes. Watching him, I suddenly remember that his burlap sack was nowhere to be seen the whole time we sat around the fire. All at once I figure out that he’s hidden it back there among those roots. He must have done it as soon as he came into the cave, just before Pete and me.