Boom boom boom . . . Boom boom boom . . .
The triple beat echoed around them like a dark waltz, growing louder by the minute. Tiny pebbles of concrete fell like sleet in the dark.
“How much time do we have?” Drew asked.
“I don’t know,” answered Tory. “This thing isn’t exactly the wall of the Neptune Pool. It could be a minute, it could be an hour—there’s no way to tell.”
Michael stopped suddenly. The others bumped into him in the dark.
“What is it, Michael? Did you find something?” Tory asked.
“I think . . .” said Michael. “I just think it’s time we got ourselves ready . . . " He took a deep breath and let it out. “Ready to die, I mean.”
“Been there, done that!” said Drew, quickly cutting him off. “No burning need to do it again.” Then he heard Michael fiddling with something, and reached out to see what it was. Michael was leafing through his wallet.
“Um, I don’t think we’re gonna buy our way out of here, Michael,” said Drew.
“Do you two have any ID?” Michael asked.
The shaking around them grew stronger, and the significance of the question hit home. They would need identification, if they didn’t make it out—so that whoever found them would know where to send their bodies.
The percussive waltz grew louder, filling with discord and sibilance.
“Maybe . . .” said Tory, with a quiver in her voice. “Maybe it’s best if we don’t. I wouldn’t want my mother to know I ended up like this.”
“No,” said Michael. “They have to send us home—or else Dillon won’t know how to find us.”
It was something Drew hadn’t considered: Dillon bringing them back. With all that he had seen, Drew didn’t even know what death was anymore. Was it an end? Was it a beginning? Or was it just an inconvenience?
“My name’s engraved on my bracelet,” said Tory.
“Put it in a pocket,” suggested Michael. “A zippered one, if you have it.”
“I don’t have anything,” said Drew, and Michael handed him something laminated.
“It’s my library card. It’ll be good enough to get you home.”
Drew slipped the card into his pocket. “Yeah, but I’m not gonna need it, ’cause we’re getting out of here. C’mon, let’s move out!”
“The Cowardly Lion finds courage,” Tory said.
“Things change,” Drew answered. “I’ll tell you all about it sometime.”
Dillon Cole always had a plan, but as he marched with his thousand followers, he had nothing—no plan; nor a single idea of what he should do.
Shiprock.
The thought of that massacre still nagged uncomfortably in his mind. The details of it—the missing old man, and the deputy who had continued where he had left off—such a horrible thing . . . and yet Dillon knew there was a message in it for him, like a flare in the desert that was meant for his eyes only. Something so important. Dillon had seen the massacre as the beginning of the end, but if Okoya had thrown his perspective so far askew all this time, perhaps Dillon was seeing it all wrong. In a world turning upside down, perhaps a massacre is not what it seems. He followed the path of that thought to its logical end, and finally saw the light of the flare.
As Dillon reached the rim of Black Canyon, the thousand followers spread out, craning their necks to see the incredible depth of the gorge, and the majesty of Hoover Dam rising almost a mile away.
There was a switchback trail that led down into the canyon—but before leading them down, he turned, shouting to the crowd, “Some of you will come down with me. The rest will stay up here.”
Shouts of disappointment surrounded him.
He could feel the ground beneath his feet rumbling with the shaking of the dam, as it tore itself apart from the inside out. There was not much time for choosing the members of this expedition, but he had to take the time to do it. Putting his hand out, he began to touch their heads.
“You will come. And you . . . and you . . . and you.”
The followers pressed forward, each one hoping to be chosen. He saw Carol Jessup—the woman who had been one of the first to follow him. “Please, Dillon,” she begged. “After all we’ve done to help you, please take us.”
Dillon looked into her eyes, then the eyes of her daughter and husband. “I’m sorry, Carol,” he said. Then he touched her husband’s head. “You will come down with me, but your wife and daughter have to stay.” He could see the sting of betrayal in the woman’s eyes. Her husband hesitated. “I said, leave them and come with me. Now!” The man obeyed, kissing his wife and daughter, who cried at the prospect of being called, but not chosen.
He continued through the mob, looking into their eyes, making his choices that, to them, seemed random and capricious. Out of the thousand, he chose almost four hundred to march with him down the switchback trail into the depths of the canyon.
Tory, Michael, and Drew knew they only had minutes left—if that—for the echoing booms had evolved into the throaty roars of shattering stone, as the dam began to fail.
Dull thuds echoed from above, as the falling pellets of concrete sleet became hail, impacting on their backs.
Tory saw a shadow of a golf ball-sized chunk of concrete drop past her.
Wait a second. . . . A shadow?
“We’re getting closer!” Michael shouted. “Keep moving—there’s light up ahead!”
They scrambled under the hail of falling debris, pulling themselves into a corridor no more than two feet wide. In a dim gray-on-gray, they could finally see the cratered walls. The ground was littered with heavy chunks and up ahead they saw spears of light.
“I think this is the way I came in!” shouted Drew over the thundering around them. “Come on!”
They moved more quickly now that they could see, ignoring the rusted iron rebar jutting from the walls, tearing at their clothes. Finally they turned a corner, and saw what was perhaps the most wonderful sight of their lives—an open doorway flooded with light. They picked up their pace, their exhaustion quelled by the adrenaline rush of their salvation.
Drew had not intended what happened next.
He was in the lead, just a pace in front of Michael and Tory, and so was the first to emerge onto the catwalk that hugged the face of the dam—and then something struck him from above. He cried out in pain as it clipped his shoulder, breaking his left collarbone. Drew saw it only for an instant: the massive bronze form of an angel, its sharp, pointed wings aimed down instead of up, like the arms of a diver. The falling statue tore the catwalk away from the fractured face of the dam, and then plummeted through the power plant four hundred feet below, at the foot of the dam.
The catwalk swung out wildly, like a crane, with Drew still on it. He felt his body slide off, and reflexively he reached up a hand, grabbing on to the rail. With his collarbone broken, his left arm was useless, so all he could do was cling with his right hand to the railing, while his feet dangled above oblivion.
“Drew, hold on!” he heard Michael shout from the doorway in the dam. “Don’t let go!”
Drew’s fear swelled, about to overtake him, and he knew the moment it did, he was gone . . . . So he clenched his teeth, strangled his fear, and began to pump his legs back and forth as if he were on a swing, like a human pendulum.
“Go on, Drew, you can do it!”
He swung, he swung again, and once more. He kicked up a foot; it brushed the edge of the catwalk. “Damn.”