But John, as Gideon well knew, was not big on tactical plans. "We’ll make a chain," he said tersely. "I go in first. Then Claire gives me her hand, then you grab hers, Doc, then Ray grabs yours." He moved to the edge of the bank.
"John, wait-" Claire said.
But he was already sliding feet-first into the stream, riding down the crumbling bank on the seat of his pants. "Well, it’s not too cold, anyway." He rocked slightly as his feet hit bottom. The water level was up to his hips. "But watch out; the current’s stronger than it looks." He held a hand up to them. "Let’s go. Doc, can you sort of pass Claire down to me?"
In not much more than a minute they had worked their way across without mishap. John, who tended to see himself as captain of the ship at times like this, stayed in the water until he had handed everyone out.
Then, as Gideon knelt to give him a hand up, there was another hissing, grumbling prelude, and another dark tidal surge, much larger this time, like a ship’s wake, boiled angrily down the stream. It slammed into John as he tried to clamber up, ripping his hand out of Gideon’s and carrying him on its crest for twenty feet, like so much Styrofoam, before flinging him carelessly aside, leaving him to claw himself to a stop against the opposite bank, the one from which they had come.
"I’m fine, I’m fine!" he shouted, streaming and spluttering, but he flopped and stumbled before he could right himself. "Boy, the flow’s getting stronger by the second."
And higher, Gideon noticed. The water now swirled above John’s waist, billowing out his ski jacket. The next surge would have it up to his armpits. "Come on, John, it’s rising. Do you need help?"
"Nah, I’m okay. I’m-"
He froze, open-mouthed, with an expression that Gideon, a native Californian, had always associated with the first startling tremor of an earthquake: a puzzled, listening sort of expression, as if you couldn’t quite make yourself believe that the dependable old earth had actually lurched beneath you. No matter how many earthquakes you’d been through, that first incredulous reaction was the same.
Only there hadn’t been an earthquake.
"Quicksand?" Gideon asked urgently.
"I think so," John said. "My foot’s-I can’t-"
"Oh, my God," Claire said. "John, don’t try to move!"
He managed a laugh. "Who can move?" But he pulled against the bank anyway, to no avail. The edges crumbled under his fingers and slid in tiny avalanches into the stream. He shook his head and looked up at them. "What do we do now, folks?"
"We get you out," Gideon said. "How deep are you caught?"
"I don’t know." He bent, holding his face above the surface while he explored below with his hand. A stray wavelet lapped at his mouth and made him cough. No, not a stray wavelet. The water level had climbed another inch. Gideon fidgeted uneasily. He had no doubts about being able to rescue his friend, but John Lau helpless and dependent was an unnatural and disturbing phenomenon.
"Just above the ankles," John called above the rapid gurgle of the stream and the deeper roar in the background. He wobbled in the current’s pull and tried to steady himself by propping one arm against the bank. There were more avalanches of sand.
"That’s not too bad," Claire said to Gideon. "We should be able to pull him out."
"We need something he can grab hold of," Ray said, distracted enough to let the terminal preposition stand.
Claire nodded. She was the only one in a long coat and she quickly stripped it off and handed it to Gideon. She shivered as a burst of raw, wet wind plastered her silky dress to her thin frame. Quickly Ray peeled off his mackintosh and put it over her shoulders.
Gideon took Claire’s coat but shook his head. "No way. It won’t reach from the bank," he said quietly. "I’m going in and pull him out."
"But the quicksand-" Claire began.
"Maybe it’s only over there where John is. You and Ray hang on to one end of the coat and I’ll go in holding on to the other. It’s only a few steps to him. If I run into quicksand you can pull me back and we’ll try something else."
Like what, he wondered darkly as he lowered himself down the bank, holding on to a sleeve of the coat with one hand. Let’s just hope Ray had a nice, neat alternative tactical plan all worked out. Above him, the two of them hung on to the coat with teeth-grinding determination, their slight bodies braced as if they had a tank on the other end.
It was a good thing they did. He had prepared himself for a stiffer current than before, but it caught him by surprise all the same. It was no longer the hard, pummeling push they’d waded through a few minutes earlier, but an intense suction that clutched at his heavy, sodden clothes and yanked him to his right like a bug caught by a vacuum cleaner. He lost his footing before he ever found it, and would have tumbled downstream if not for Claire’s and Ray’s dug-in heels and resolute grip on their end of the coat. With his legs drifting like streamers in the current, he held doggedly to the sleeve until he righted himself, turning sideways to the flow to offer as little resistance as possible. The sand under his feet seemed solid enough.
"Sort of grabs you, doesn’t it?" John said, barely audible over the increasing tumult of the water.
"No problem," said Gideon. "Everything’s under control. You ready to be rescued?" He glanced warily to his left. No surges on the way.
"I don’t know about this," John said. "This is going to be a hell of a blow to my ego."
"Gideon!" Claire called. "If your feet are all right, don’t take any chances-try to reach him without moving them!"
That made sense. All they needed was for both of them to be stuck in the quicksand. Keeping his feet planted and one hand twisted firmly around the coat sleeve, Gideon reached out his other hand and leaned across the stream, trembling with the strain of staying upright in the powerful and unrelenting drag of the current. But even with his arm extended to its utmost, so that he was grunting with the effort, his straining fingertips were a foot short of John’s.
On the bank, Ray was going through the contortions of getting out of his tweed jacket without releasing his grip on Claire’s coat. "Gideon, if I give you my jacket, you can let John grab hold of it. If I can just…"
But Gideon doubted that the coat-to-Gideon-to-jacket-to-John arrangement would provide enough leverage to pull John’s 200-pound body out of the sand. And he wasn’t sure the struggling Ray could extricate himself in time anyway. Even in the minute or so that he had been in the stream there had been a frightening rise in the level. It was up to his ribcage now, and very soon it would be impossible to stay on his feet. Already it was almost at John’s armpits, so that he was trying to keep himself upright by paddling his arms like a man treading water.
No, there was no time to wait. What he should have done, he realized now, was to ford the stream where they’d crossed it before and knew it was free of quicksand, and then pull John out from the bank on the far side. But it was too late for that now. He was going to have to take a chance with the quicksand.
Carefully, he moved toward John, "skating" over the surface as Claire had told them to do if they found themselves near it. He inched his left foot gingerly forward, feeling for the quicksand (what did it feel like?), listening tensely for the next surge. His outstretched fingers were within ten inches of John’s…six inches…By God, he was going to make it. Two inches…
John strained toward him. "Just…a little…"
" Unnh…" Gideon slid his foot forward another couple of inches.
At the precise moment their fingertips touched, he stepped into it, and he understood the expression John had had on his face. It felt as if he’d put his left foot into a swaying rowboat, or taken a step on an unsteady trampoline, or an old-fashioned waterbed. Or a huge, wobbly bowl of gelatin that would capsize if he put any weight on it. It was nothing like what he expected, and it was weird, all right.