Cameron imagined being trapped on the island with two creatures. If only she could survive another sixteen hours, she could escape in the helo. But there was no way she'd make it from nightfall to her 2200 extraction, not alone. She imagined the death that almost surely awaited her.
She thought of her father-in-law's gentle hands and white hair, a Christmas table fully set, the slope of Justin's shoulders, the smell of him right before she kissed him, the grocery store, cold fall mornings, the blue sheets on their bed back home, and the reddish glow of their alarm clock. She thought of these things and began to sob.
The agony compounded wherever she tried to turn her mind- Tank's swollen arm laced through the braces, Derek's wobbling voice through the transmitter, Szabla's body shaking as if she were having a seizure, Juan, Savage, Tucker.
There were no tears left. She opened her mouth, expecting something to come out, but nothing did. Snot ran down her upper lip and she tasted its saltiness before wiping her nose with her forearm. Her shoulders curved forward as she slumped into the trunk, spent. She wasn't sure how long she sat with her face pressed to the tree, but when she leaned back, her cheeks felt raw.
Her voice was throaty and uneven, and the operator at Fort Detrick barely understood to patch her through to Samantha Everett's room.
'Yes, Samantha here. Everything all right? Cameron? Cameron?'
Just hearing a familiar voice reduced her to tears again. 'Samantha.'
'Yes. Are you all right? Cameron, talk to me. Tell me what's going on.'
Cameron tilted back her head to prevent more tears from spilling. 'It's down to me,' she said. 'It's just me. And it.'
'Everyone's gone? Even your…Even Justin?'
'Yes,' Cameron said. Samantha could do nothing to help, and they both knew it, but Cameron didn't want to let her go, because then she'd be alone floating up in a tree in the middle of a forest on this godfor-saken island. Now, she at least had a connection to the world, to another life, to another person she could hear breathing in the darkness. She pressed her forehead again to the rough bark and let it scrape against her cheek. 'Are you married?' she asked.
'No. But I have kids.'
Cameron was winded, as if after a long run. 'You hold on to them. You hold on to everything you can as tight as you can because there's a time… ' Her lower lip wavered a few times before she caught it. 'Because there's a time you can't anymore.'
'I will,' Samantha said. 'I will.'
More silence. Something chirped.
'There's nothing I can say or do that will be useful, and I'm not gonna fake it,' Samantha said.
Thank you, Cameron thought. Thank you for knowing and admitting.
'And things are going to get worse, probably, before we can get you out of there,' Samantha continued. 'But you make me one promise.
When you hit bottom, you keep going. You find that small part of your-self that's unbreakable and grip it until your fingers bleed. It may not seem worth it to keep fighting, not now, but it is and someday-in a month, in a year, in five years-you'll know that again.' She paused, and when she spoke again, her voice was filled with intensity. 'Don't you give up. Don't you roll over on me.'
'Don't worry,' Cameron said, her voice edged with a rasp. 'I don't know how.' Her eyes stayed shut when she blinked, and she let them.
Cameron was in another state of consciousness, though it was not sleep. A swarm of gnats circled her head, and she grew drunk on their whirring. She was trying to fight her way back to alertness, but it was like swimming through mud. Her eyelids felt leaden.
The morning light was finally filtering through the leaves. She had not gotten any true sleep. Her face was swollen, her lips parched and sore. Her contacts felt as if they were glued to her eyeballs; she was amazed she hadn't lost them.
Sorrow struck her from all sides, like a talon closing. She braced her-self against it, closing doors in her mind, containing the damage. She could count her breaths, that much she could do. If she counted her breaths, she'd know she was still alive. Pushing away from the trunk and holding it between her hands, she began to regulate her breathing, focusing on her knuckles. She lost count around 190, so she began again, lis-tening to the breaths rattling through her chest, wiping her mind as clear as a pane of glass.
She fought against the weariness, her lips still moving even as she started taking longer and longer blinks. Her head bowed, then snapped back up. She had been trying not to rest it against the trunk, but finally, she gave in. Her eyelids shut, her forehead pressed to the tree, and sleep washed over her like a salve. If she wasn't aching so much, it would have felt divine.
The rhythm of her counting continued, though the numbers were no longer there. Instead of numbers, there were knocks, even and firm, like a blacksmith's hammer. The knocking pulled her up through the layers of sleep, through grief and fear and hunger, and then she felt the tree bark against her cheek.
She opened her eyes.
The knocking continued, continued from below.
Cameron glanced down and saw the mantid halfway up the tree, pushing the hooks of her front legs into the bark, pulling herself up using her claws. Cameron's mouth opened to yell, but her vocal cords were raw, so her scream came out as a rush of air.
She popped up to a crouch on the branch, glancing around. The trees nearby were much shorter, the closest branches a good twenty feet out and below. She had only about five more steps out before the branch would give under her weight. Even with her strength, she could never make that jump.
The mantid pulled herself toward Cameron, each knock of her hooks against the bark followed by the drag of her body up the trunk. Cameron could hear her breathing, feel the air from her spiracles. About ten inches of the spear protruded from the mantid's cuticle, just above the broken eye-Justin had gotten off the shot. The eye was out, shat-tered through the middle in a run of ooze, and Cameron looked franti-cally for anything to plunge into the other. The twigs were all too small.
There were no bushes on the ground to break her fall, and the thirty-foot drop would certainly leave her wounded. About fifteen feet to her right was another quinine with a long, thin trunk. It had been snapped in an earthquake, so it was missing its conspicuous crown. She might make it in a fully-extended dive, but if she misjudged her leap, she could be impaled by the sharp, broken trunk. She looked around at the other trees, but they all seemed much farther away.
When she edged farther out on the branch, it started to bend under her weight, so she shuffled back toward the trunk, her heart rising in her chest as the mantid's head pulled into view. A long leg shot out and hooked onto the branch.
With a cry, Cameron scurried forward and kicked the mantid's leg away, jabbing with her heel. She wobbled like a performer on a high wire, sensing the curve of the branch beneath her arches. The mantid reeled as the hook came loose, but swung right back into place. Cameron knew she would be up and on her in seconds.
She had to move or she was going to topple over, and she couldn't step to the trunk for support because she'd be within the creature's grasp. The mantid wrapped one leg around the branch, the other around the trunk, and began to pull herself up. Her back legs found their footing.
Cameron inched away from the mantid, her boots scraping off bits of bark, sending them spiraling to the ground. She stared at the nearest Scalesia branch. At least twenty feet away. There was no chance.
Behind her, she heard the mantid slide up onto the branch, mere feet away from her. The branch dipped under the weight. Cameron almost fell but regained her balance by doubling over at the waist and waving her arms.
A raptorial leg snapped shut less than an inch from her skull as she pulled herself upright. Having been meticulously cleaned, the spikes were perfectly smooth, the chunks of flesh removed. Cameron saw a tuft of her blond hair dangling between two of the spikes.
She glanced at the narrowing branch, the step and a half she had left, and the drop beyond. The broken quinine was her only realistic option. She'd have to jump far enough to make the trunk, and pray she hit it safely below the jagged end. Whether she could hold on or not was another question, but she didn't have time to debate
