the large vinnie. I felt the numbness in my joints go away and realized much of it had been from the vibrations. If that was the last of the beasts, I could make it up. We could survive this.
As the final bristles passed, I tried pulling myself up, preferring that I be swallowed or crushed by the next vinnie rather than fall to my death. Pressing my feet against the bark—one foot on the outcropping to my side—I made it up to my armpits, where I took a break, my hands clasped together and my elbows spread wide. The guy beside me did the same, our legs brushing together as we both fought for purchase.
In the downward distance, the rumbles from the large vinnies receded and no new ones grew to take their place. I felt a nervous laughter creep up inside, the exhaustion and mania of near-death popping in my brain like tiny bubbles. The person beside me started before I could, wheezing and laughing—
Then someone screamed.
A high voice. A girl’s voice. It pierced the growing quiet like a sharp dagger through a healing wound. It was a shriek as loud as any I’d ever heard, but then it sickeningly—horribly—began receding into the distance. Growing silent.
Falling away.
• 22 •
The Darkness
I kicked at the surface of the tree and pushed myself up to my waist. I leaned over, half my body inside the hole. With another shove, I rolled all the way in. The guy beside me came hurrying after. I moved down the tunnel, groping at the next opening, and felt someone move inside the tunnel and help their neighbor up.
“Tarsi!” I yelled. I patted my way down the line, wondering if the sound had come from the other direction, when I bumped into more bodies. I felt lost, alone, confused.
“Who was that?” someone yelled.
“What the fuck?” screamed another. I tripped over someone lying across the tunnel, patted them, then screamed Tarsi’s name again, selfishly unconcerned about everyone else.
Others did likewise, yelling individual names out as they tried to make contact with each other in the darkness.
“Porter!” someone shouted nearby—a gruff shout. I felt strong hands clasp my arm, pulling my face close enough to see.
Kelvin.
“Where’s Tarsi?” I asked.
He shook his head, and I read it to mean that she didn’t make it, not that he didn’t know. Someone screamed for help further down the tunnel. I pushed away from Kelvin and moved to the next opening; I dropped to my knees and patted along the lip with my hands.
I felt knuckles and reached down for the wrists, my fear of losing another person rising up like a film of metal in my throat. Kelvin landed beside me and fumbled for the other arm. Together, we pulled. I willed my tired and numb fingers to close like two sets of vises, fully prepared to never use them again if it meant dragging that person to safety.
Whoever it was kicked with their feet to help. The fearful energy of all three of us propelled the person over the lip and inside, sending us all flying back toward the core of the tree. We crashed in a heap of quivering, tearful humanity.
Hands groped, discerning identity. A palm on my cheek, a face brought near.
Tarsi.
I closed my eyes and wept, sobbing like a terrified child. Her lips fell to my cheek and stayed there, quivering against me, panting and gasping. Both of our bodies shook with grief, with exhaustion, and with guilt-ridden relief.
• 23 •
A Lonely Patch of Sky
Our group coalesced in the darkness like beads of water. We bumped, hugged, wept and merged. We called out our own names and those of our neighbors, working through the list in our heads. Now and then, a name was spoken and someone else cried out, crawling over the rest of us to be reunited.
It seemed we heard each name twice before someone realized who was missing.
“Britny,” someone whispered, her name said in a manner unlike the rest. It was an answer, rather than a question.
Several girls wailed. I heard Vincent shouting obscenities beside me and reached out for him, knowing the two of them had been close.
Our entire group formed into a ball of consoling hands, patting and squeezing. The scene was so eerily like our birthday, but the fear and grief was so much stronger having spent waking hours together.
“We need to get out of here,” one of the guys said.
“We just lost someone!” one of the girls shrieked.
“He’s right,” a soft voice said, as sobs turned into sniffles. “It isn’t safe in here. If another comes, I can’t do it again.”
“Up or down?” someone asked.
Beside me, Vincent roared. I heard flesh slapping against flesh and I moved to break it up—I felt him striking his own face.
“Stop it!” I told him, wrapping my arms around his shoulders. “We survive to mourn her properly.”
His hands went to the back of my head, pulling our cheeks together. I felt his chest moving in and out with quiet sobs and felt someone else’s hands reach around us both.
“Up,” someone said. “It’s closer, and it’s away from the ones that just passed.”
“Maybe they reverse direction when the tremors stop.”
“The tremors stopped a while ago.”
In the silence that followed, we gathered our courage and our wills and trudged upward.
We staggered forward as a tight group, hands against the inner wall and on each other. I made Tarsi walk inside of me, not able to stand the thought of her anywhere near the edge.
Kelvin walked ahead of us. I rested a hand on his shoulder, needing to maintain contact for more than just finding my way. We moved in complete silence, save for the occasional whistle of a bombfruit outside and the unexplained, unprompted curse from various members of the group.
I tried not to shuffle my feet, lest I pick up splinters from the newly exposed wood. I felt exhausted and depressed, a sensation that seemed to come after working so hard to stay alive. It was as if my body had exhausted all its energy—its desire to preserve itself. Now that it had succeeded in doing so, extending my life for however much longer, there was no more of that juice within me to maintain my will to live.
Consciously, I was happy to be breathing and for my two dearest friends to be alive. But physically, I felt hollow. If another danger posed itself, I would lack the energy to respond. I was walking—but until that mysterious animus of self-preservation renewed itself, I was a staggering husk, half-dead inside.
We moved like that for several hours, the silence stretching out so long it began to sustain itself, the quietude forming into something fragile and precious that none of us seemed willing or able to shatter. Even when the tunnel diverted, heading off at an angle that seemed so foreign after the miles of gradual curving, those of us that had not made the prior ascent went along without question, accepting whatever the world threw at us.
Scrambling up a steepening slope, we fell to our hands and knees as it became too precarious to stand. The tunnel had become solid, the walls on all sides oddly comforting, despite the darkness it created. Another odd twist and the way became even steeper, and then there was the sound of rustling up ahead. Something like waxy paper brushed across my face. The cave of wood ended, as did the silence.
