Pause

BOOM! Thunder overhead. And Lindsey had a gaggle of newbie tourists in her raft.

The dark cloud out of nowhere snagged on the treetops fringing the rocky canyon, burst open in drenching rain, and the river was swelling, racing faster through the rapids and black boulders. Damn, where’d this come from? But Lindsey had handled worse before.

“Forward, forward. Okay, left back. All forward!” she called out to the tourist paddlers as they burst through another rapid, spray flying, rain stinging. They’d listened to her coaching, they were doing fine.

Then a blast of boombox punk rock behind them, drunken hooting, and a raft of idiots burst around the bend, out of control racing toward them.

“Left, left!” Lindsey shouted. “All forward!” They needed to get out of the way.

Too late. The idiots rammed them, went spinning and whirling on still laughing, as Lindsey’s raft hit a boulder and tipped, spilling two. “High side!” she ordered the rest as she lunged partly over the stern, head and shoulders submerged in the swirling maelstrom, managed to snag the woman’s life jacket. Lindsey dragged her in as burning pain ripped through her shoulder.

She ignored it, got her paddlers back on track, caught up to the bobbing young boy in his helmet, stabilized the raft as the boy’s father dragged him back in sobbing.

“Okay, okay, everyone okay?” Lindsey was fighting red pulses of pain in her vision, fire running down her arm now. “Jimmy, you’re a real trooper!”

The boy was okay, giving her a grin through tears. They all hunched in the downpour, whitewater crashing over them, racing down the canyon. Lindsey gritted her teeth against the pain as she steered. No choice, gotta keep going—