Shoving the bag with the precious letter into her pocket, she pushed to her knees and stood, fighting the need to cough. She could cough later, be sore later, be sick to death later. After she found Joe. She focused on that one thing. Find Joe.
2
The most important element in finding her husband wasn’t the state of her health, but whether her boat was still usable. She ran her hand along the hull, noting a few new scratches, but nothing major. Using her own body weight to test for cracks, she stepped up on the overturned boat and walked along it. It was sound. Forced to use both hands to flip the lightweight, forty-five-pound kayak over, she reeled and nearly fell as the boat rocked lazily upright.
She was weak. Too weak to be contemplating what she was planning.
In her memory, she could hear Joe’s threat when he gifted her with the Pyrahna Micro Bat. “You ever boat alone and I’ll kick your pretty little butt,” he’d said, giving her that grin. Oh, God, that grin. Devil-may-care, skirting the edge of reckless but never giving in, so full of untamed life. She pressed the pads of her fingers against her burning eyes.
“I’ll help you kick my butt,” she whispered, “when I find you. After I kick yours for scaring me like this.” Her voice was hoarse, weak.
Knowing she needed water, she upended the bottle and finished the last drop, capped it, and set the empty near the supply bag. The small, portable water filter was nowhere in sight, and she knew Joe had taken it, leaving her bottles. Which was smart, in case she had been too weak to make it to the river to filter some. She tucked two of the full water bottles inside the bag, and opened the fourth one to sip on. Joe had left her a large packet of trail mix and both of the dehydrated dinners they had brought, but the packages had somehow been punctured. Backpacker meals were similar to Meal, Ready-to-Eat, survival fare developed by the military and now made by several commercial companies and used by survivalists in the wild. Joe always packed a couple when they were going to be out overnight, just in case the fishing was bad. Along with the cell phone, these had gotten soaked and were bloated, the dehydrated food expanded with moisture.
She sniffed each of the freeze-dried packets and tore one fully open, pouring its contents into a metal cup, adding a little of her water to reconstitute it. Carefully, she placed a rock at the edge of the small campfire and balanced the cup on it. The ripped package went into the flames and she tossed the uneaten one into the torn baggie.
There was a smear of red on the baggie. Fresh blood. She inspected her hands. Several of the uncountable cuts on them had broken open. There were no medical supplies left. It looked like Joe had used all the cling and gauze on her already. Nell shrugged. She wouldn’t bleed to death, not from these little things.
While the food warmed, she munched trail mix and considered the dry suit, but there was no way to wear it. She shoved it into the bow of the boat and checked the rigging. The boat was permanently rigged just for her, sculpted pieces of hard and soft foam along the rigging’s hip and knee pads, the bulkhead set just right so the balls of her feet rested against it for leverage and steering. She had lost one of the hip pads, and she pulled the suit back out. Joe and she both boated with rescue knives strapped to their floatation vests, and she cut an oblong strip about four inches wide and two feet long from one of the legs; she folded it over until it was the right thickness and wedged it in place, securing it with a strip of duct tape. The parsimonious part of her cringed at further damaging the expensive suit. The realistic part of her counted it as just another element of the goal—finding Joe.
Shivers racked her. It could be cold in October on the Cumberland. She would miss the dry suit. Undeterred, she shoved what was left of it back into the bow. To counter the cold, she pulled the rashguard shirt over her head, feeling stupid that she had not thought of the warmth it could provide until now. Thus fortified, she dismantled the camp.
The rescue rope had been knotted through the tree branches of her shelter, and by the time she finished removing it, her hands were bleeding freely and stinging from pine sap. She coiled the rope properly and tucked it into her rope bag. Joe had taken none of her flipline, but she was missing two prusicks, webbing, and two carabineers—biners—used for rescue. Joe had likely lost his while rescuing her and had been smart enough to take hers.
An image hit her, Technicolor, surround-sound memory. Her hands. Holding the branch of a dead tree. Blood flowing weakly over her skin. White water rising around her, the river’s might thunderous. Rushing and cold. The smell of the Cumberland was iron-wet in her memory. The roar of power damping any other sound. She was trying to attach a length of webbing to a branch above her, the biner and bright red flex sharp in her memory. She had tried to rescue herself. And somehow had lost the equipment. The image went no further, leaving her with only that single moment—tree, her hands, blood, two pieces of rescue equipment. And pain in her chest, up under her PFD. Where she had been stabbed by a branch she hung from.
When the instant of memory faded, Nell was sitting on the ground again, her white-water equipment before her, trail-mix bag on its side, some of the valuable calories spilled on the ground. Shivering, goose bumps tight on her skin, fever surely rising, she gathered up the mix and brushed it off. Eating it, she went back to work.
Her personal flotation device was missing a strap at the bottom, cut through by a sharp knife, but it would keep her afloat if she had to swim. The neoprene kayak skirt, the device that made boat and boater one and kept out water that would otherwise quickly swamp the small craft, was another matter. When properly in use, a kayak skirt was fitted around the rim of the opening of the boat and snugged around the boater’s waist, making both a watertight unit. The skirt had been damaged and repaired with duct tape, which would make it stiff and harder than usual to fit over the rim of the boat’s cockpit.
Nell pulled against the elastic neoprene, counting the tears. There were three big ugly ones and five smaller ones, all hidden beneath duct tape which had been applied to top and bottom. Nell felt her waistline and compared her wounds to the damaged skirt. The strainer must have punctured through the skirt, up at an angle beneath her PFD, and through her dry suit. Joe had obviously repaired what he could, but the duct tape restricted the elastic of the neoprene skirt. It might last for another run. Might.
But she had not lost her helmet and, miracle of miracles, she still had her paddle. Briefly, she wondered if she had dropped it when caught in the strainer. She had no memory of it in the vision of her hands. If she lost it, Joe must have recovered it for her.
Either way, she was good to go. But first, the river. She walked along the shore, checking out the flow, but the river curled away from her between the boulders lining the South Fork of the Cumberland. Balancing carefully, she climbed up one and worked her way upstream, jumping from the top of one car-, bus-, or house-size rock to another—the only way up or downstream, outside of the white water. Her river shoes gripped the slippery boulders. If she fell and busted her leg, she would be in bigger trouble than she was in now.
The water flow was still high and gave her an idea how difficult the trip was going to be. The roar of the water was like a jet engine. White water foamed and churned, hiding the undercut rocks, strainer-debris, sieves and other dangers.
The cheat was only a few yards upstream, still running with enough flow to take it in a creek-boat. She couldn’t see the tree that had caught her, the cheat curving hard around a huge boulder, the rock the size of their bedroom in the apartment. Big water. Water that had already tried to kill her. Which made her mad, a much more useful emotion than the worry that niggled at the back of her mind.
Nell turned back downstream and walked past her campsite. Ahead, she saw a pair of young tom turkeys, standing on a spit of shore, drinking. With a flap of wings, they whirled uphill, racing into the scrub and out of sight.
Boulders and water-swept trees wedged between rock blocked her way. However, between two rounded rocks she found a glimpse of the white water downstream. The Washing Machine on the Big South Fork. From this angle,