I unscrew the top half of the canister from the bottom half, pull out the peanuts, and munch down a couple of handfuls. I screw the two halves back together, and then I look down toward the lake, scanning with my binoculars, but I don’t see the camp’s green flag. It could’ve fallen like mine did and they just haven’t put it back up yet. I limp a little farther along the ridge, knowing that eventually the whole camp complex will come into view, the outdoor kitchen with the low blue tarp and the dome tents for sleeping.
I keep walking and looking, walking and looking, but when the end of the lake comes into view all I see is a massive pile of boulders and smaller rocks and a brownish-gray dusty haze. When I scan the slope above the pile, I see a monstrous scar on the mountainside.
And then I realize that somewhere under that massive pile of rocks lies the Simon Lake Leadership Camp.
Four staff. Twenty participants—minus us four on our solos, which makes sixteen.
I scan the boulder pile, searching for movement, for a color of clothing different from the gray-brown of the rock. And then I notice the rock slide is so huge that the bottom end of it is actually in the lake. Like a new peninsula has been created from the slide.
And the camp had been thirty or forty feet back from the lakeshore.
I let my binoculars hang from my neck, and I take a breath. I swallow the peanuts that are trying to come back up. I jog back to my food canister, unscrew it, and stuff my binoculars inside. I can’t take them with me right now because I need to move as fast as I can.
Then I start picking my way down the mountain. The wind is blowing from behind me. A dull ache settles into my calf but doesn’t stop me from pushing on. At this pace, in a couple of hours I’ll be down there, searching for survivors.
CHAPTER 3
NOW THAT I’M AT THE lakeshore and walking toward it, the rock pile from the avalanche is even bigger than I imagined. It’s as long as two or three football fields and a couple of stories high.
“Josh,” I hear a faint voice call. “Josh.”
I scan the massive mound of rocks and dirt but see no one.
“I’m coming!” I yell back, and pick up the pace. My calf throbs but doesn’t slow me down. Now I can see a person scrambling down the mountain of rock toward me. If there’s one survivor, I think, there must be more. But as we approach each other at the base of the slide, I shake my head.
“Brooke,” I say. “I thought maybe you were, you know, someone who was actually in the camp.” Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy to see Brooke. But I figured she was okay since she was up high in a mostly flat area and I saw her green flag.
“I’ve been screaming your name,” Brooke says, “since we both started walking toward the lake. Didn’t you hear me?”
“No,” I say. “The wind was at my back the whole way down. It was pretty strong up there.”
Brooke nods. “The wind. Duh. I didn’t even think of that.” She points behind her to the ocean of rock. “What are we going to do?”
We’re standing next to each other now, staring at the slide. The scar on the mountainside above it—where it all came from—is like the inside of a huge brown bowl that’s been tipped on its side.
I turn to Brooke. “We need to search for survivors. Maybe people are trapped under there. Maybe when the rocks settled there were spaces left.” I pause, trying to picture it in my mind. “You know. If two huge rocks ended up like this.” I put the tips of my fingers together to form an inverted V. “If a tent was squished between them, and then more rocks piled on top, then the tent and whoever was in it would get buried but not squished.”
“Josh,” Brooke says. “Are you looking at the same thing I’m looking at?” She makes a sweeping motion with her hand, and that’s when I notice that it’s all cut up. “The pile is like thirty feet tall. And, it’s long.” She points. “It’s sticking into the lake. The camp might be underwater and covered with rocks.” She shakes her head. “How are we going to search?”
I look her in the eye and say, “We crawl all over the rock pile. We yell. We listen. If we hear something, we try to move the rocks.”
“And if we don’t hear anything?” Brooke asks.
“Then we move the rocks we can move and keep searching,” I say softly. “If there’s someone alive under there, we need to find them. They might be injured. They might die if we don’t get to them in time.”
“Josh, I’m just trying to be real.” Brooke brushes her hair back, and I see a bruise on her forehead and scratches on her cheek. “I climbed over that rock pile to get to you and there’s not one scrap of clothing or a food canister or anything visible. Nothing.”
“With Derrick and Shannon there’ll be four of us to move rocks,” I say. “Their camps are farther away than ours, but they’ve got to be on their way down by now.”
“What makes you so sure of that?” Brooke says. “My tent was swallowed into a crack that opened up, and I was inside it. While I was clawing my way out, a rock fell and hit me on the forehead. I thought I was going to die right then.”
“I saw your flag flying, so I knew you were okay,” I say. “I saw Derrick’s and Shannon’s, too.”
Brooke shakes her head. “I never touched my flag. It stayed up through the whole quake. I could still be in that hole, but my green flag would be flying. This little flag system only works if someone can actually get to their flag to change the color.”
I start telling Brooke about how I almost got swallowed as the ground split beneath me when I hear a humming noise in the distance. I stop talking and we both look skyward.
We yell and wave our arms when we realize what we’re seeing, but the planes are so high up we must look like specks of dust to them down here. The camp buried under a pile of rocks must make us an even harder target to spot.
“I counted twelve planes or jets or whatever they were,” I say.
“Who cares?” Brooke says. “They didn’t see us.” She’s got her arms crossed over her chest like she’s angry.
“It must mean lots of people are helping out,” I say. “Think about places where people actually live. The quake probably caused a lot of damage. Maybe whole houses were swallowed like your tent was.”
Brooke shivers. “I hear you, Josh. I just want to get out of here and see if my parents are okay.”
“Our parents will make sure someone comes for us. But right now, we’ve got to search for more survivors.”
The wind is starting to chill me now that we’ve been standing around talking. I glance up the ridge. I have warmer clothes and rain gear up there, but it’ll take at least three hours to get back up. Maybe longer with my injured calf.
I turn my attention to the rock slide. “Let’s crawl around on top of it and listen. And yell into the rocks and see if we hear anyone yell back or make a noise.” Last night I kept trying to think about a way to stay in touch with Brooke after the Leadership Camp ends, a way to have her want to spend time with me once we’re back in Fairbanks, but right now all I can think about is Theo and everyone else buried under this enormous pile of rocks.