Alosha

  Another minute, she told herself; she would find a way off the cliff. She imagined herself running into the logging camp. They would be happy to see her, they wouldn’t get mad. After all, she thought, she was only thirteen years old, and they were not bad men.

  Ali heard a sudden noise—a dragging sound, something heavy was being towed through the trees. A pebble fell from above, bounced past her face, almost stung her nose.

  She froze, heard it again, the heavy breathing, or rather, a creature that normally breathed heavily, but which was now trying to move quietly. Slowly, she raised her head and looked up. A dark shape, much bigger than a man and far more hairy, was walking along the edge of the cliff.

  It was forty feet away!

  Ali tried to scream. She opened her mouth to let it out, but her throat felt as if it was filled with sand. All she could manage was a squeak.

  She wondered what she should do. It didn’t matter.

  She wasn’t given an opportunity to do anything.

  The creature vanished behind the edge of the cliff and an avalanche of rocks came crashing down. It came all at once, not in bits and pieces. She wasn’t given a chance to think; she had to react instinctively.

  Beside where she stood was a small hollow, carved in the side of the cliff wall. As the first stone brushed the side of her face, she threw herself into it and covered the top of her head with her arms.

  The noise was deafening. She felt as if the world were ending. Sharp rocks tore at her poncho, at her legs, pulling her down, to her knees, down into a cyclone of dust and dirt. The worst thing was, it wouldn’t stop. The rocks kept coming, piling up all around, blocking out the trees, the sky, and she felt as if she was being buried alive.

  The monsters didn’t want to eat her, after all.

  They just wanted her dead.

  “Mommy!” Ali screamed.

  The noise stopped. The rocks stopped. Everything went still. For a minute, she just breathed, let herself shake, even cried a little. She was alive, she kept telling herself. She was okay.

  Everything was dark; she thought her eyes must be closed. But when she opened them, the dark remained. She blinked and rubbed her eyes and nothing changed. It took her a minute to realize the truth.

  She was buried.

  She was no longer standing, but sitting, her legs stretched in front of her. Behind her was cold stone; she assumed it was the granite cliff. Her daypack was twisted to one side, off her back. She could feel rock pressing into the bones of her spine. There was a burning pain in her right knee; her entire left leg felt numb. She tried to move her legs but found them trapped.

  She stretched out her hands, felt around. She had maybe two feet of space in front of her, probably more to her sides. Only she could not reach far to her sides because she was pinned hard, like an ant under an avalanche of dust.

  “Help!” she cried. “Help!”

  She stopped. What if the monsters were prowling around outside? It would be better if they thought she was dead. She should sit quiet, give them a chance to wander off.

  Ali waited. The darkness around her seemed to deepen, to close in. The silence also grew deeper. She could hear her heart, her breathing, but little else. It was as if she had been transported into deep space, beyond the galaxies, where there were no stars. Time went funny; she could not tell how much of it was going by, whether it had been minutes or hours since she had been buried. She felt like she couldn’t breathe.

  “It has only been minutes,” she told herself.

  But her breathing problem was real, she was not imagining that. She was buried in a tight space, not much bigger than a coffin. How long did buried-alive-people live?

  She had to be realistic. She could not wait for hours for the monsters to leave. If no light was reaching her, then neither was any air. In less than an hour, she figured, she would smother to death.

  “You have to get out of here,” she told herself. “You have to get out now.”

  Okay, how? She couldn’t think of anything.

  She started yelling again. “Help! Help! Help!”

  She screamed for perhaps five minutes before realizing it was hopeless. Before being buried, she had barely been able to see the logging trucks. She had not been able to see the lumberjacks. What were the chances that one of them had been looking her way—and been able to see her—when the rocks had started falling?

  “Zero,” she said.

  Okay, no one was going to rescue her. What was the big deal? She was covered with a few small rocks. It was not like she was pinned under a boulder. She could move the rocks out of the way.

  Ali set to work, picking up rocks and shoving them either left or right. Yet getting ahold of them was difficult. Most were buried under dirt, which she had to shove out of the way, and a lot of them were jammed under other rocks. In her cramped position, she had no leverage; as a result, the muscles in her arms began to cramp as her back tightened.

  Worse, she began to breathe real hard. After ten minutes of work, she felt as if she were sucking on an empty scuba tank. No matter how deep she breathed, her lungs were not satisfied. Dizziness swept over her, and she saw black stars in the darkness.

  She understood what was wrong. She remembered her science from school. She was breathing in more carbon dioxide than oxygen. Trees could do that, but not people.

  Sadly, she had only begun to uncover her legs. She needed an hour, minimum, to dig herself out. And she had at most twenty minutes of air left before she would pass out.

  The truth settled over her like a blanket made of despair.

  She was going to die.

  “No,” she said. “No!”

  But the darkness said yes.

  “Help!” she screamed. “Help!”

  This time she screamed until she was hoarse. But she suspected that a person could be standing five feet from where she had been buried and not hear her through the rocks and dirt.

  Her body would never be discovered, she thought. Her father would never know what had happened to her. Her bike would be found, though. People would think a crazy person had kidnapped her. Ted would tell the police about his talk with her. Such a nice girl, he would say. But stubborn, that Ali Warner, she wouldn’t listen to a word I had to say.

  Ali began to cry, to cough, and her coughing turned into choking. She couldn’t breathe! The air tasted like swamp gas. When she drew it in, she wanted to vomit. Still, it was all she had; her lungs grasped the drained air as if it were a life preserver floating in the middle of a sea.

  “I can’t die,” she moaned. “I don’t want to die.”

  Then she felt it, the stick. It was nothing, really, a piece of wood, leaning against the wall beside her. She didn’t even know why she bothered with it. She could not use it as a lever to move the rocks out of the way. It was way too flimsy for that.

  Nevertheless, she picked it up and studied it with her fingertips. The stick was round, hollow—both ends were open. The feel of the wood was curious—it reminded her of some type of reed . . .

  “It’s bamboo,” she said, amazed. She lived in the Northwest. Bamboo grew in the Caribbean, Hawaii; it did not grow on pine-covered mountains. With her oxygen-deprived brain, she must be hallucinating.

  “No, it’s real,” she said as she stuck a finger down each end of the stick. It was definitely hollow, but she could not blow through it. Like all bamboo, it had places in it where it was blocked. That was too bad, because if the tube had been hollow, she could have pushed it between the rocks and dirt and out into the open air. Then she would have been able to breathe, and have time to dig herself out.

  Her despair returned. To find something that could have saved her life, and then to not be able to use it—why, it was just too hard to take. She threw the stick aside in disgust and wanted to cry.

  Yet a part of her refused to give up.

  “Why is this bamboo here?” she yelled suddenly. There had to be a reason. She picked it up again, strained to think clearly. All
she had to do was hollow it out. All right, she could not use her fingers. She could not use rocks. She could not use dirt. What did she have left?

  Then she remembered. Her pocketknife! She always put it in her daypack when she went into the mountains. Opening the pack, she searched through it, and for a horrible moment she couldn’t find it. But then—finally!—she saw the knife, dug into the bottom of the pack.

  Her hands shook as she locked the main blade straight up.

  Her father had given it to her the previous Christmas as a gift.

  Her plan—it was really an act of desperation, she thought—was to aim the tip of the blade at the blocks in the tube; to shake the thing up and down and force the blade to cut into each block. Then she planned to shake the knife loose, ram it back in, and so on, until she cut all the way through the tube.

  Unfortunately, she ran into a problem. Slipping the knife into the tube, the blade pointed down, she put her hand over the top end and shook hard . . . but the pocketknife stuck. She had to turn the stick over and pound the blade out. She worried that she might break the tube. Then it would be useless as an air pipe.

  The pocketknife got stuck another four times, but then she got a break. The knife burst through the first block and stuck in the second block. That was good; that was part of the plan. But because the knife was stuck even deeper inside the tube, it made it harder to shake loose.

  What did it matter? It was working!

  Finally, she cleared all the blocks. It was a good thing. She was down to her last breaths. The air felt drained of oxygen. She suspected her face was as blue as a corpse’s. She had to fight to keep from blacking out.

  Ali shoved the tube into the wall that covered her legs. She hit a block—a big rock. She rammed it into another spot, hit another block. The third place she tried, the tube went in two feet before it blocked.

  “Please. I need a little luck here,” she told the darkness.

  What she needed was a gap in the rocks that was only covered with loose dirt. It took her a dozen tries before she found such a hole. The tube appeared to slip all the way outside.

  But no light appeared, no fresh air flowed in.

  The bamboo tube was stuffed with dirt. Leaning over, she tried blowing it out. That worked about as well as her screaming for help.

  Ali had no choice. She had to pull the tube out of the hole and pound the dirt out with the palm of her hand. But she kept one finger in the gap so she wouldn’t lose it.

  The dirt was jammed tight. It took her another two minutes to clear the bamboo. Then she rammed the tube back in the hole. Once again it went all the way through. The other end should be on the outside, she thought. Still, no air, no light.

  Again, she blew on the tube. This time there was only a few inches of dirt stuffed inside, and the junk popped out.

  Suddenly, there was light!

  “Yeah!” she cheered. Greedy as a starving man for a meal, she leaned over and sucked on the tube. That cut off the feeble light but the taste of the fresh air in her lungs more than made up for it.

  Ali drank from the tube for over ten minutes before her heart stopped pounding and her head cleared. Then she sat back and enjoyed the circle of light that now illumined her black grave. Only now it was not a grave.

  “I’m not going to die,” she whispered.

  But she had plenty to do before she would be free. Returning to her dirt and rock digging, she worked around the bamboo stick. It didn’t take her long to fall into a rhythm. She excavated for a minute, spent a minute breathing through the tube, then went back to digging. It took her only a dozen shifts before she had her legs free. As the blood gushed back into her numb left leg, she wanted to scream, it hurt so much.

  Ali took it slow, rock by rock, one handful of dirt after another. The work did not bother her. She felt so grateful she had found the bamboo. But where had it come from?

  An hour later she removed a rock and huge gobs of sunlight burst through.

  Ali rolled on her side and peered outside. She couldn’t see any monsters. Boy, she thought, it sure would be a drag to fight back from death’s door and then end up in some hairy creature’s stomach.

  She worked faster, and a few minutes later the hole was big enough for her to climb out. The sky was still cloudy but to her it was the most beautiful sky in the world. She almost shouted out with joy!

  But the monsters, she told herself, they might still be around. The best thing to do was to make a dash for the logging site.

  Fixing her pack on her back, Ali resumed her hike along the ledge. But her right leg slowed her. The pants were torn away at the knee, and the skin underneath wasn’t in much better shape. She wasn’t bleeding at the moment, but she had plenty of dried blood up and down her leg.

  The cliff finally dropped low enough that she was able to climb down into the trees and resume a straight line to the camp. Besides knowing that the loggers were in front of her, she began to hear Mercer River off to her right. The river flowed from near the top of the mountain—winding back and forth through the woods, and gaining strength from smaller streams—until it poured into the sea on the north side of Breakwater.

  Had the day been clearer, she would have been able to see the highest point for hundreds of miles around, Pete’s Peak. The peak was covered in snow year-round and reached a murderous altitude, but she often fantasized about hiking up there.

  She wasn’t sure why.

  The monsters did not reappear, and she reached the camp not long after. She was lucky—the first person she ran into was Ted Wilson. He was working alone on a broken saw. He had tools out and looked absorbed in his task. But one glance at her torn pants and bloody hair—she had cut her head on top of everything else—and he dropped his saw and came running.

  “What happened to you?” he asked.

  Ali tried to act calm. She did not want her father to hear about her ordeal. He would get upset. Worse, he would forbid her to hike in the woods.

  “I slipped and fell,” she said. “I’m all right.”

  Ted studied the cut on the side of her head, then knelt and looked at her knee. His face darkened; he pointed to the leg. “That needs stitches,” he said.

  “No.” Stitches would mean a hospital visit, and that meant her father would hear about her little adventure for sure. “It’s nothing, it’s just a cut.”

  Ted was doubtful. “I’ve hiked with you before, Ali. You’re as surefooted as a squirrel. How did you fall?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Ted stood and took her hand. “I have a first-aid kit in the truck, I’ll treat your cuts. Then I’ll give you a ride back. I assume you ditched your bike by the side of the road and hiked here?”

  “Yeah.” She added, “Sorry I didn’t listen to you.”

  “Don’t be sorry. You have spirit. Few kids your age do.”

  Ted’s truck was parked away from the others so she didn’t have to face the gang of lumberjacks. Her plans for the day were ruined. She was emotionally and physically drained. She left her spool of red ribbon in her pack. She barely looked at the trees she had come to say goodbye to.

  Ted cleaned her cuts with water and alcohol—which hurt, wow—and bandaged them with tape and gauze. While he worked, she asked if he could please keep what had happened private.

  “As long as you promise not to hike in these woods alone anymore,” he said.

  “I want to promise you.” She added, “But I’ve already broken one promise today. I don’t want to lie.”

  “Ali . . .”

  “I’ll be more careful in the future. I can promise that. But this forest is where I go, you know, to forget about stuff.”

  He knew she was talking about her mother.

  Ted gave her a ride back to her bike. His truck was bumpy but warm. On the way she asked if he had ever seen anything peculiar in the forest.

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “Oh . . . nothing.”

  “Did anyone chase after you toda
y?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “You’re sure?”

  She hesitated. “Yes.”

  When they reached her bike, she told him she felt strong enough to ride back to town. But he loaded it in the rear and insisted on taking her all the way home.

  He dropped her off in her driveway. By then it was raining and she was glad to be home. As he lifted her bike out of the truck, he admitted he had seen something strange in the forest. Just the other day, in fact. He seemed embarrassed to talk about it.

  “What did it look like?” she asked.

  “I didn’t get a real good look at it.”

  “Was it big? Was it hairy?”

  “It was small and green.”

  “What was it?”

  “I’m not sure. It was there one second and gone the next.” He stopped and shook his head. “I must be imagining things.”

  “I know the feeling,” she said.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Ali was in the house ten minutes when her father called from the road. He was a long-distance truck driver. His usual route ran from Breakwater to Los Angeles, to Santa Fe, then back again—three thousand miles altogether. Occasionally he drove to Florida to pick up freight. When he did that he would be gone for a week, and she would stay with Cindy.

  “How’s my Hunny Bunny?” he asked.

  “Where are you?”

  “Three hours away,” he said.

  “Great! I didn’t think you’d be back until tomorrow.”

  “I’ve got to go back out this evening. All the way to Miami.”

  “No, Dad. We talked about this. You can’t drive when you haven’t slept. It’s dangerous and, besides, it’s against the law.”

  “No choice. Jerry’s down sick. I’ve got to pick up his freight.”

  “Jerry’s not sick, he’s lazy. You’re always doing him favors.”

  “We need the money.”

  “We have enough money,” she said, unsure if that was true. Since her mother had died, they’d had financial problems. Her mom had worked for a software company downtown, and had earned the larger check. Ali added, “At least take a nap before you go back out. A few hours won’t make any difference.”