Note: The waterfall is based on Cathedral Falls, which, while being closer to Anstead than Fayetteville (ah, that creative license!), is beautiful and majestic; I have climbed all over the thing and taken some photos from near the top that fairly give you vertigo just by looking at 'em. The "path" leading up (and down) is thin, steep, and muddy, and yes, I have wiped out more than once while I was climbing. Some great photos, though.
I just realized that Bridge Day 2004 is in a few weeks, and that I'll have been working on this fic for three years (!) at that point, so, um, I'm gonna try to get it finished before then. Yeah.
Somewhere in between discovering that the remaining kayaks had "mysteriously" vanished from the riverbank (meaning they'd been stolen, no doubt by some enterprising rafter), and discovering that Ethan didn't have a cell phone either, Trip had lived up to his name.
He'd slipped on a patch of algae-wet rock and wrenched his ankle - just a sprain, Kat and Josh had decided, using their lengthy first-aid emergency medical training, but bad enough to make walking difficult. For once in his life, Ethan Raptor had shown some kind of human feeling and had not only donated his backpack to the makeshift splint, but had taken on the responsibility of acting as a de facto crutch for their hike through the mountains.
They'd washed up on the wrong side of the river to hitch a ride with a CSX coal train - not that Josh thought they could or should flag one down - and apparently, they'd also washed up on the only stretch of West Virginia river that didn't have a miserable, salt-pitted road twisting alongside it. So they'd checked the maps and gone hiking.
"Where's the road again?" Kat asked.
Josh threw her a darkly unamused glance. "On the other side of this mountain."
Which was much steeper than he would've expected, given the low profile of the Appalachian mountain chain. He'd been staring at a sixty-five-degree tilt of a landscape for almost three hours, going at a snail's pace to accommodate Trip's injury. Some patches had even been steep enough to force them to crawl, which was, frankly, demeaning.
"I hate this stupid state," Ethan said with heartfelt venom. He and the much-slowed Trip were some distance behind and below the Team Steel athletes, but Ethan's voice carried. Oh, yeah, it carried. "Nothin' but freakin' trees and rocks. Where is everyone?"
Josh looked over his shoulder and called back, more resigned than exasperated (although he was that, too), "People come here for the scenery, Raptor, not the city lights."
Ethan kept grumbling, but it was drowned out by Trip's strained-but-cheerful, "Hey, I think we're almost there. I can see light and stuff."
Swinging his attention forward again, Josh realized that the steep incline did, in fact, come to an abrupt stop a dozen yards ahead. The ground leveled out and light was shining through the trees near the base of their trunks, instead of the tops of their branches.
"I'll go check it out," Kat said immediately, before Josh could volunteer, and darted up the slope with an energy born of the excruciating boredom of holding back.
Josh waited for Ethan and Trip to close the gap and then began trudging on. Kat had reached what was hopefully the top and came scrambling back down to meet them halfway.
"Nothing up there but a big downhill run. And a road at the bottom," she added, sounding as though she was personally responsible for the road.
"Awesome," Josh said, relieved, at the same time Trip cheered, "All right!" and Ethan snapped, "It's about time!"
Kat flashed a rare, genuine smile - the kind that always made her look positively angelic, and wasn't that the lie of the century - then turned and started climbing again. Josh spared a glance at Trip, already knowing what he'd see, and when he proved himself correct, he refocused on the trail ahead.
The mountainside was mostly dirt and trees, with a heavy underbrush of green weedy plants and a few rock slabs sticking out like broken bones; the fallen leaves coated everything and made climbing a slick and not always certain business, especially given the steep incline. Nevertheless, it was almost too easy to close the last few yards, now that he wasn't trying to wait for Trip and Ethan.
Kat had stopped at the suspected top of the mountain and was waiting, hands on hips. Josh saw why when he caught up with her.
At their feet, plunging straight down into a wide horseshoe of a depression in the mountain, was a waterfall. It certainly wasn't on par with Niagara Falls; for sheer volume, Josh had seen more impressive artificial waterfalls in people's backyard pools. It was a straight drop, however, and it was slimy wet, and it was the shortest way to the road, and it was a pain in the neck that they really didn't need.
"Forgot to mention the obstacle course," he said to her, unconsciously copying her posture as he tried to figure out what the heck they were going to do next.
"It gets worse," she said with a nod to the side. "Check that out."
Josh looked and saw a wall of sheer rock stretching up, up, and up. The beginnings of the waterfall had carved a dripping, slimy channel in the vertical face of the rock, but there were no other indentations or possible handholds to be seen.
"Over there, too," Kat said, gesturing in the opposite direction, where an even more featureless rock face loomed. "So we can either hike up and around or try our luck with the obstacle course."
"That's only, what - seventy, eighty feet down?" Josh asked, peering over the edge of the waterfall. They were actually standing on a shelf of dry rock that jutted out over the wet and slimy part. It looked like a shallow pool of water formed beneath them, then fed the meager waterfall, which cascaded down a series of similar shelves of rock. If they were careful, they could climb down into the pool and wade over to a place where they could climb down to the next shelf of rock, then the next, then the next, and so on. The shelves bulged out towards the last twenty feet, increasing in number but also decreasing in width; that part could be tricky, but by no means impossible. "We could do that."
"But could Trip?" she countered, and gave him an exasperated glare when he shot her a "you-do-too-like-him" look.
"Maybe. If it's pretty easy for us, he should be able to make it. If not, we can hike back up and go around, or flag down a car or something," he said, flinging up his hands at the end. He just wanted to get to the road and back to civilization. The unscheduled deviation from their plans had been worrying him endlessly, and he was starting to feel the first twinges of the fatigue that came with being low on t-juice. Not surprising - they'd been hiking all over West Virginia, and been in a very tense situation before that; both physical and psychological stressors burned him out these days.
Kat looked skeptical, but he chalked it up to her paranoid-street-girl nature and called back to Ethan and Trip, "We're going to try to climb down! Stay here until we find out if it's safe!"
Ethan accepted that as graciously as he did anything, which was: Not very. "If I hear any creepy banjo music, I'm out of here, got it?"
"Be careful!" Trip added.
Kat waved in response, and then they began to climb down the waterfall. Although the water, the slime-covered rocks, and the admittedly daunting height made it somewhat more challenging, the descent was comparatively easy - almost embarrassingly so - when stacked against their wilder spy missions, and Josh felt another flush of humiliation at being stuck in the situation.
"This is undignified," he told her.
"No, this is a broken neck waiting to happen," she said, trying to get a secure foothold on the next downward shelf, which of course was wet, slimy, and sloping to boot.
Josh agreed. They had no climbing gear, no safety gear - not even helmets, which had been left in the mine. Desire for expediency aside, the small, nagging part of him that kept up with such concerns took over, and he started searching for an alternative.
He edged out from the waterfall, leaned around a jutting, slickly mossy boulder, and found what he was looking for.
"That way," he said, pointing. "It looks like there's a trail we can take down and maybe hold off on the broken necks."
The trail was a razor-thin strip of foliage-free ground that angled away from the waterfall before plunging down the mountainside at a wicked angle; not ninety degrees, but close to it. It was slick with mud and fragments of shale, and looked about as stable as either of the Barkowski siblings.
"Huh. Muddy shale," Kat said, eyeing it with a faint look of disgust. "What a surprise."
Josh heaved a sigh of the long-suffering and began to gingerly pick his way down the trail, using the few tough, spindly trees as handholds. "Come on."
He'd gone all of a yard when the shale fragments beneath his left foot slipped sideways and he lost his balance. Kat grabbed for one of his arms, evidently in an effort to keep him upright, but her footing was none too stable either and all she accomplished was getting pulled down with him. That left him even more uncentered than before, and the end result was a very unwelcome and unplanned slide down the cold, muddy, rocky slope for both of them.
Josh kept a grip on his teammate, reached out with one hand and snagged a jutting rock that was anchored into the mountain, but was every bit as slimy as the trail; his fingers slipped off almost as soon as they caught hold. It nearly wrenched his arm out of its socket, but he'd managed to shed some momentum. Instead of sliding all the way down the trail, they came to a grudging stop about halfway. A few stray shale fragments kept going in a gentle, plinking avalanche.
Kat groaned and pushed herself to a sitting position, extricating herself from the inadvertent two-person dogpile with no small amount of jostling to her partner. "Ouch. I coulda done without that... You okay, McGrath?"
Josh McGrath, aka Max Steel, was a multimillion dollar secret agent, the most advanced and unique organism in the world - a nearly flawless blend of nanomachines and human daring. He regularly saved large chunks of the world from destruction and chaos, busted bad guys, and generally did all the kinds of larger-than-life stunts that heroes did.
But right now, he was covered in mud and bits of rock flake, had been trapped in a mine all morning, had hiked on foot all afternoon, had lost two state-of-the-art kayaks to an unknown thief, and had just fallen down the side of a mountain because he, the extreme athlete and superspy, had slipped on wet rock.
He couldn't help it; it was too absurd. He started laughing.
"Guess not. What's your malfunction?" Kat asked, giving him an arch look as she brushed at a streak of mud on her face.
"Nothing," he said, waving the question away without quite stopping his laughter. "Nothing, just - what a day!"
She snorted, but it was more amused than disdainful. "Yeah, what a day."
Inexplicably feeling better, he hauled himself to his feet and, once certain that he was properly braced, stuck a hand out to help her up too. "If I had to fall down a mountain with anyone, Kat, you'd be my first choice."
She accepted his hand and the compliment graciously, then spoiled it with a wink and a grinning, "You're just saying that so I won't tell all the guys on the circuit about your wipeout."
He was, but that wasn't the point. "Go ahead," he said, flippant, as they gingerly picked their way down the remainder of the trail to where it terminated in a boulder-choked pool of calm water. "I'll tell them about your X-Files moment."
"Would not," she countered.
"Would too, Scully." He debated jumping over the pool and decided to wade right through it; with any luck the water would get rid of some of the mud. He didn't count on the water being ice cold - much, much colder than the river. "Whoa!" he exclaimed, entirely involuntarily.
Kat splashed in with an indrawn hiss of breath, then ducked under the water until she was completely submerged. It lasted all of two seconds and then she came up gasping and shaking her head; water flew everywhere, including at Josh, who was not appreciative of the shower.
Sometimes - make that most of the time - he did not understand his partner at all. "What was that about?"
"Mud in my hair." She pushed her wet and thoroughly mud-free hair out of her face, gave him a critical glance, and added, "Same deal for you."
He finished slogging across the pool and climbed out on the other side before she could get any smart ideas. "The great thing is, as a guy, I don't have to care."
"Chicken," she said, before shouting up at the waterfall, "Yo! Raptor! Climb down, but watch your feet!"
"Okay!" came the response from Trip - and then Ethan's familiar whine started up as the two other athletes began picking their way down the face of the waterfall, with Kat giving additional supervisory directions to her puppy and his master.
Josh ignored it all and focused instead on the cheerful thought that only a car ride lay between him and freedom from Team Raptor in all its forms.
Of course, a car ride in West Virginia was not necessarily something to look forward to. Team Steel had been in a competition in Atlanta before hitting Bridge Day, and rather than pay for airfare, they'd driven up on the Interstate. That had been fine - they were making good time, the weather was okay, the roads mostly clear - until the Interstate turned into the West Virginia Turnpike.
They called their primary transportation a van but it was more accurately a bus, and although it handled a far sight better than most vehicles its size, it had not been designed for high-speed travel on narrow, winding mountain roads with semi trucks doing eighty (nevermind the signs declaring they could go no faster than fifty-five) blowing past on one side, and a drop of hundreds of feet on the other. What with the helpful light rain that had begun falling as soon as they passed through the Big Walker Mountain Tunnel, it had been a white-knuckle ride even for Josh, and he was supposed to be the daredevil adrenaline junkie. Plus he'd had to pay a buck fifty at each toll station.
So it was with a less-than-charitable attitude that Josh picked his way through the boulders and the scrubby grass that separated the waterfall pool and the two-lane road, which appeared to be a smaller and more unkempt version of the Turnpike. The far side of the road sprouted a guardrail and a thin strip of weeds, gravel, and trash before summarily dropping off into oblivion.
The sun was starting to get close to the uneven, unbroken ridge of the mountaintop across the valley, which added a new worry to Josh's list: hitchhiking on this road after dark. If that happened, it seemed a forgone conclusion that his crummy day would end in a fatal car accident.
"I need to listen to Berto more," Josh said to no one, then, because he was thinking about it, tried the biolink again. It came back with the flat dull hiss of an empty line, just as it had all afternoon. Not unexpected, but annoying anyway.
He checked to see how Trip and Ethan were doing - a third of the way down, and Kat was chewing Ethan out for not being careful, so that was a bonus - before stepping out into the road and looking for a car. Praying for a car.
An hour later, when he'd forked over his extra candy bar to Ethan in a futile effort to stop the complaining, and Trip had said "like" for the six hundredth time, and Kat had all but cleared the ground of small rocks by slinging them across the road and into the valley beyond, Josh was fairly sure that not only were his prayers going unanswered, they were being actively mocked.
Please, he thought. Just let one thing go right today. Just one. Just get me back to Fayetteville before I lose it, and I swear I'll...
"Hey, what's that?" Trip asked suddenly, pointing down the road.
Josh squinted at the distant flash of light and, boosted just the slightest bit by nanoprobes, was relieved to see salvation. "It's a car!"
As far as godsends went, it wasn't the most awe-inspiring: a full-size, rusty black van, held together by bumper stickers advertising what looked to be every single band that had ever performed in the Southern United States. But it was running, and it pulled over, and the passenger window rolled down, revealing two men who were much more clean-shaven than the van indicated.
"Hey there," the driver said, giving them a wave and a friendly grin. "Y'all stranded?"
"What does it look like?" Ethan snapped, scowling. Kat gave him a discreet but painful elbow to the ribs; Josh made a mental note to thank her later for her many valiant efforts to inflict punishment on Ethan Raptor.
"We could use a ride to Fayetteville," Josh told the driver. "And I mean, really use a ride."
"Well, climb on in and find a seat. We're playing there all weekend. Bluegrass," he added, clearly very proud of his genre.
The invitation was met with enthusiastic thanks by the extreme athletes, even Ethan, who was by his own (loud, shrill, repeated) admission very sick of hanging around with Team Steel. They all clambered inside the van, somehow managing to fit around the loads of musical equipment already in place. The man in the passenger seat rescued a guitar case before Trip could put his big feet all over it.
"It's a mandolin," he told Josh, who had claimed the spot in between the back of the driver's seat and the smallest amplifier. "It's worth more than this van."
"I believe that," Ethan said from the back seat, followed quickly by a muffled, "Ow!" and a vituperative, "Quit hitting me, Ryan!"
"Quit making me."
"Whoa, guys, be cool, okay?"
"Shut up, Trip."
"Way to talk to your teammate, Raptor."
"You need to shut - Ow!"
Josh groaned and rubbed his forehead, trying to dispell not only the headache but the lower-grade, full-body ache of lost transphasic energy. He no longer wanted to have fun in the West Virginia wilderness; he wanted to get back to the van, plug in the generator, eat a hot, unhealthy meal, and complain to Berto. "This day will not end."
"Don't worry," the driver said, putting the engine in gear and easing back onto the road. "We'll be in Fayetteville before you know it."
Fifteen minutes later, the engine sputtered, coughed, and died.
"Oops," the driver said. "Looks like we're out of gas."
"That's gonna be a hike, getting to the nearest station," the mandolin player said, in the detached tones of someone discussing the weather. "Could take hours."
"Hours?" Josh demanded, while Ethan launched into complaints and Kat turned to start a new conversation with Trip, wherein he would no doubt say "like" a few dozen more times.
"Hours," the driver confirmed, nodding.
Josh put his head down and did his best not to scream.