Read HIGHWATER: a suspense thriller you won't be able to put down Online
Authors: T. J. BREARTON
The Adirondack chair rocked back and forth in the wind as it was pelted with rain. The windows of the Kingston house, left open, let the rain in, it puddled on the hardwood floor of the living room. Upstairs, the bedroom curtains flapped and the rain soaked the carpet.
Christopher walked through the house.
He entered the upstairs bedroom, turned left and into the bathroom with the slanted ceiling. He looked at himself in the mirror. He looked into his blue eyes. They used to be green. He unbuttoned his ripped black shirt. He didn’t really need to — he could have easily just torn it apart — but undoing the buttons seemed the right thing to do.
He blinked. He looked at his chest. He had never believed in resurrection — that wasn’t part of his thing; it hadn’t been, even after his change. For a while, anyway.
The OD two years ago hadn’t been accidental, but a conscious attempt at suicide. Between the night he’d spent scoring and injecting the hotshot which would take him down, and the moment he had found himself by the road in Red Rock County, there had been nothing. This new form of himself, this incarnation, was someone who had the same memories as his former self, the same tools in his brain, one might say. This new Christopher shared the same way of walking and talking. Everything felt the same except for the two years unaccounted for, the mutated gene of the eyes, and the fact that he felt encoded with something new.
He also carried with him a sense that he had been displaced. Suffering amnesia. He’d concocted a few theories, and went about living, his instinct telling himself not to go to the authorities, but to lay low, to wait and see what might come.
A week after he’d found himself in the Adirondacks, he was approached by a young man named Samuel, wearing a ski parka, making his way through the snow. Christopher had been living in an abandoned farmhouse some miles outside of Red Rock Falls, and Samuel had discovered him there.
Samuel explained what had happened to Christopher. He had been brought back, quite simply, because he had a job to do. He’d been repurposed. It was possible, Samuel had explained, because eternity is not just time, but time and space together. Eternity was both everywhere and every
when.
Christopher had learned that his old girlfriend Elizabeth Goldfine had moved to the area. And then she’d shot him.
His chest appeared unmarred in the mirror, save for one small mark that looked like a scratch. He touched it. Sluggishly, black-cherry blood began to ooze from it. He watched it slowly form rivulets, down from his solar plexus and spilling over his belly button and then branching off to one side. That was right, he remembered, he had slumped onto his side.
He remembered Liz pointing the rifle at him — a high-powered rifle, an A-bolt, and it had kicked back against her shoulder where she’d seated it like a decent amateur, like her boyfriend had taught her.
And now, here he was. Just like before. Only this time, it had been no more than a day which had passed.
Getting shot felt like being punched really hard. Not like you might think a bullet would feel, small as it was, entering into you, but as though your whole chest had been smashed with a wrecking ball that had come whistling out of the sky.
It had knocked the wind out of him, and he was on the floor beside the bed, and then, it was as it had been before. Only this time, Christopher remembered.
It was both a hallucination and a narcotic nod. It was nothing he could explain beyond that, nor, he knew, would there be a need to. It wasn’t some experience to dwindle into an anecdote. It was quick, quick for time on Earth, he figured, but it was also long — oh so long, like becoming an adult, maybe, where there was no definite beginning, no real end. And the noise, the same sound he remembered from before, something Samuel told him was called background radiation. Three-degree black-body radiation.
He took his fingertips away from the wound, which seemed to stop oozing almost immediately, the blood drying and becoming tacky. He thought that surrounding each individual, all the time, were the answers, but they were encoded. The trip, his experience
not being,
had broken the code.
The trip was the decryption, and the answers were revealed — only the questions that were answered weren’t exactly the same as those asked in life.
The meaning of life.
The search for something after.
The existence of God.
These pursuits didn’t apply in the same way during the trip. They were their own answers, fulfilling questions never asked. And how could they be? The questions we ask are part of the DNA of the world which surrounds us.
Samuel had recruited Christopher. He was working on new men all the time, he explained. Some of them succumbed, some of them prevailed. “It’s not a perfect state,” Samuel had said.
“Succumbed to what?” Christopher had wanted to know.
But Samuel had told him that it was best not to focus his mind there. Best not to look deeply into that abyss.
“
Vacie
,” said a voice, now.
Christopher looked out the bathroom door, and listened.
“
Der robians vacie
.”
Christopher re-buttoned his shirt. He left the bathroom, switching the light off. He also switched the light off in the bedroom, and then the one downstairs, in the kitchen, and the porch light as he walked out.
He headed down along the fieldstone walkway, towards the edge of the pond, the rain shushing down. Behind him, the house was now completely dark. Now he could see the ripples of water out in the middle of the pond amid the silver splash of the rain. He could see that the rising water was beginning to spill over the banks, and creep into the woods. That which floated in that glacial scoop of a pond would soon be spilling out as well, able to sluice its terrible body through the darkened, aphotic muck of a flooded land, freed.
* * *
At the end of the path were a chair and a footrest and a small table. A neatly folded blanket, drenched by the downpour, lay on the footrest. Christopher reached into the pocket of his long coat containing the thick, crystal glass Tom Milliner had given him at his house in the Acres. It clinked against the coins he carried. He brushed them aside, swabbing them with some sticky blood he was unaware of, and pulled out the glass. He carefully placed it on the wet, green woolen blanket, so that it sunk in a little and settled.
He made his way down the steep embankment, dragging one hand behind him along the dirt and rocks to avoid slipping. The air smelled rotten like the water, laced with mineral elements, and some other stink. The homes near the pond, Christopher knew, had sewage that drained into leach fields and then traveled via aquifers into the pond. Bullhead fed along the bottom, bass swimming closer to the surface.
The other smell was of gas.
Natural gas, siphoned up from the depths. Christopher knew these things because others knew this. It was one of the things that happened during the trip; there was a convergence of information, to say the least. Somewhere, amid the bullhead and bass and pike and frogs, loons, otters and beavers, somewhere below the clusters of black flies, the waterbugs skimming the surface, where the bats swooped and took mosquitoes and gnats and even dragonflies from the air, was the thing in the pond.
Long, powerful, its black sacs of organs on its outside. Smooth and rubbery.
It was talking, not to him, but to someone else.
“
Very cricky robians
,” it said. “
Der robians vacies, mu jere
.”
Christopher knew the voice. There were a few people that did, that had heard it in their lives. He’d met one or two of them in NA, and in other places, back before his conversion. Even then he’d known, and they’d known, and their eyes were unable to meet for very long. He was sure Liz knew the voice, too.
He reached the edge of the water. It was high indeed, the rim of it only a few feet away from where the embankment leveled out. A rowboat was tethered nearby, the rope hanging from the prow disappeared into the slippery black covering the submerged dock.
Christopher walked to the dock anyway, wading through water up to his knees. His feet squished into the bottom. The sand tried to suck him in. He climbed up onto the planks of the dock, water at his ankles now, and walked out to the end where he squatted and called out:
“Mobius. Der robian mobius.”
Out over the water, something swirled. A wind eddy, like a small cyclone. He saw the water ripple, the whirlpool form. On the other side — his eyes felt very keen in the dark and rain — he could see the embankment, the trees, and above that, the glow of the setting sun. He took in the scent of the air again: oil and gas.
Still squatting there, both of his arms dangling between his legs, his fingers dipping in the water, Christopher looked to his right. He saw what remained of the small beach there, and footprints that disappeared into the water. In the center of the pond, the eddy continued to swirl, gathering centripetal momentum. He could hear the wind of it, and beneath it, the burbling sounds of the water in the pond from fissures along its bottom, cracks in the earth, releasing the dank, wet rot of its underbelly, and what lay below that.
In the trees, the sounds of the birds, whickering.
The voice: “
De donde eres
?”
Christopher watched the growing cyclone and the deepening whirlpool of water and replied, “I’m a wagerer, Mobius. You know where I come from.”
“
Bag
,” said the thing in the pond. “
Bag robian der Mobius. Vacie.
”
Christopher lowered his head. He flicked his fingers through the water for a moment, and then lifted his eyes to the pond’s center again.
He saw, along the circumference of the whirlpool, the swish of the thing’s long body, the snake of it slicing though the purling, rippling water. Air bubbles were popping out beyond its widening perimeter.
“
Du er ikke noe
,” said the thing in the pond. The smell of gas grew stronger.
Christopher nodded. “Maybe so,” he said. “But my son is something, isn’t he?”
A jet of water, as though from the blowhole of a great whale, shot up into the night, and the whirlpool seemed to tilt, and bubbled more violently.
The voice came again, brimming with an ancient anger.
“
Ich werde Sie TOTEN!
” it boomed, and pond water sprayed out in a funnel all around the whirlpool, and the cyclone undulated and picked up even greater speed, growing in circumference.
“Come and get me then,
Getragen
.”
Christopher slowly stood up after he said this, feeling the water rise around his legs. He thought he heard the thing laughing. It was unlike any earthly laughter, nothing that any sane person would qualify as laughter, a sound both shrill and blunt and penetrating, a noise that sounded like the amplified nattering of those freak birds, a screeching static, shredding canvas, nails on chalkboard — and the gas-tinged air now filled with an even more putrid, sulfuric smell.
The cyclone, the eddy, the torrent of the spray and jettisoned water calmed and settled, and the pond became almost still then, only moving as if a swimmer, perhaps, had just dived beneath the surface, leaving behind quiet ripples.
Then, an instant later, the water boomed up in a tremendous spray, a mini-tsunami rolling towards the shore, and Christopher held his breath.
“Jim,” said Tom, “the one and only.”
“I’m known from coast to coast,” said Trooper Jim.
“Like butter and toast,” Maddy finished for them.
She remained in the doorway to Caleb’s room. She was staring past Jim at the body on the elevator floor. Then the doors closed.
Jim smiled broadly at Madison Kruger once again. “Guard that came down and tried to intercept me,” Jim said. “He’ll be alright.”
Tom saw the teenage boy in that smile, bare-chested and leaping into Macmaster Pond. His hay-blond hair. Taller than Tom Milliner, more masculine. Jim had already got to home base with a girl. It was Jim who had initiated things with the three of them, wasn’t it? Maddy who had brought the wine and the food and the LSD dessert. It had been Jim, though, who had gotten them to take off their clothes. Jim who had later disappeared into the woods, frightened of something he’d said he’d seen in the pond. Jim who had never really been the same after that summer.
Jim who had gone to war shortly thereafter.
The pleasantries were brief, and Jim’s smiled faded.
The big state trooper orchestrated everything that came next with the skill, Tom thought, of a trained choreographer, director, and drill sergeant all rolled into one. It helped, of course, that Tom was brandishing a Western .38 Revolver. Tom knew the gun, and knew that Cruickshand liked to use KTW ammunition, commonly known as “cop-killer” bullets. It was the kind of irony that Jim Cruickshand was known for.
Tom could smell his old friend, an odor of sickly sweet sweat, like rotten corn, his breath like a bird dog after a day in the rivers and ponds, carrying fowl around in its maw. Though his eyes were sunken and his skin waxy, Jim exuded a dark vitality, and moved with speed and determination.
His execution was precise. The body on the floor of the elevator, dead or alive, was a loud statement: this was no bullshit. The .38 was pointed at Jared Kingston’s temple, who winced every few seconds, as if Jim was really ramming the barrel into the kid’s flesh.
Minutes later — with a dozen of Burlington’s finest watching from the hoods of their vehicles, guns drawn in a small fleet comprised of Chittenden County Sheriff’s Department, volunteer firemen, and two Feds — Jim marched his three hostages out of Fletcher Allen to his Caprice Classic, his expression incongruously relaxed. He held the boy to his chest and used the other two, Elizabeth and Jared, as human shields. Jared was in front, and the girl behind, towed by her hand. She was able to move, but remained catatonic, the goop covering her eyes as it had Caleb’s.
Jim shoved her and Jared into the back of the car.
The trooper actually paused as he prepared to put Caleb in between them. He looked up at Tom and said, “I forgot to bring a car seat.”
Tom looked into Jim’s bloodshot, sparkling eyes, “We’ll make do.”
Jim handed Jared his department-issue Glock.
“Goddammit,” muttered someone next to Tom, one of Mahoney’s men. The cops held their weapons aimed at Jim Cruickshand, but he never gave them a moment when he wasn’t shielded by a hostage or by his Caprice.
The kid sat with the Glock in his lap, his face blank and tired-looking, the child next to him, and the girl slumped in the seat on the other side.
It made Tom’s chest hurt to see the three of them like that. He tried to make up his mind if the Kingston kid was going along with it because he was just scared, because he was malicious, or because he had been taken over by whatever plague had finally worked its way into the nettles of Jim Cruickshand. Into his muscles and bones, his endocrine system, his mind.
Tom glanced up at the hospital before getting into his car. Dozens of silhouettes were visible in the windows, and he thought of when the boys had appeared on the lawn of the RRMC. Maddy was already pulling her seatbelt across her chest.
“Looks like we’re going back home,” Tom said to her.
She smiled, it had lost some of its usual radiance. “That’s right, babydoll.”
* * *
Cruickshand led the way. Tom followed directly behind in the Blazer, per Jim’s orders. A Burlington cop waved his hand in the air, an indication to the rest of them to pursue, and a caravan of law enforcement left behind the hospital in the wet night.
As they mounted the ramp to highway 81, headed north to the ferry, Maddy said, “I can’t believe this.”
“Yeah,” said Tom. He lit a cigarette. He shook the pack and looked in. There were only three left. The first drag made him cough.
Maddy scowled and batted away the smoke. “You’re crazy. Put that out.”
Tom cracked the window. The wipers slapped back and forth, sloughing off the fat drops of rain.
She redirected her ire, “A hundred fucking cops and we just let him put the kids in the car and drive off?”
Tom looked over at her. It was maybe only the second time he’d ever heard Maddy Kruger use profanity.
“You had another plan?”
She shifted and looked out the window. He could feel the anger in her rising. It was something new, coming from Maddy. She had always been powerful, but always positive.
“All you boys, all your radios, all your guns, all your strategy. Mahoney and his army of Burlington cops. The Chittenden County Sheriff’s Department. Now FBI, for God’s sake, Tommy. Half of them are behind us. We could get the National Guard in on this and it wouldn’t do a damn thing.”
For some reason, it agitated him. Not because she was coming down on the law, not because she was pointing out their ineptitude, but because she was mad, she was right, and Tom didn’t know how to handle it.
“What would you have us do, Maddy? Huh? What would be your big solution?”
She looked at him, seeing she had gotten under his skin. Her eyes had a wizened, owlish look.
“We need those other boys. The ones from the lawn. The ones who had the coins.”
“They’re gone, Maddy. Their role is over.”
“Role? What role? How do you know?”
Tom was silent. He didn’t know how he knew, or even if he did know. It was ridiculous, all of it. It was lunacy. Was he jealous of some teenagers who could float in the air or some kids who could pull coins out of their butt? He felt laughter welling up within him, and some of it came to the surface in a short bark of laughter, which brought on a coughing fit.
“Good,” said Maddy, with some true spite in her voice this time. “Keep smoking those.”
“Maddy! There is no superman coming to save us. There are no saints swooping down from heaven. Alright? Those boys, whatever they are, their job was to try and pay this thing off. Do you get it? That’s what a ‘wagerer’ is.”
Tom felt certain of his words, as though he were at last articulating the thoughts which had been forming over the past forty-eight hours.
“Jesus Christ. Even in the netherworld there’s fucking capitalism.”
“No, Tom. You’re wrong. When did you get to be so cynical?”
“Me? You’re the one talking about how futile this all is, Maddy. I’m being realistic. They gambled something, a long time ago, and they lost. That’s what I think. They did something bad, Maddy. I don’t know — maybe they betrayed Jesus for thirty pieces of silver, for all I know. Maybe they’re Judas’s descendants. And now they pay down their debt. That’s what they do, they pay down their debt, and they try to block this . . . thing.”
“I don’t agree.”
“Fine. Don’t agree. But whatever has gotten into everything and is screwing everyone up, people like Jim, and this girl, and the little boy, now maybe even you and me. Whatever it is . . .”
He glanced at her in the swirls of color thrown by the police lights surrounding them. He flicked the cigarette out the window.
“. . . we’re on our own.”
He expected her to snap back at him, for the two of them to really have it out. But she didn’t argue this time.
The moment passed, and the road rushed towards them. Jim had them doing seventy-five miles per hour. Behind him, the caravan followed, at least two-dozen vehicles, their sirens silenced, as Jim had instructed. Tom heard the thudding of a helicopter in the distance. He watched the rear of Jim’s Caprice. The car seemed to float on a shifting, lashing cloud of rain.
Tom imagined the backseat: the Kingston boy sitting with the gun in his lap, vapidly watching the wet, black road unspool towards them. The Goldfine girl, sitting up like a dummy, her eyes closed covered with that kind of plastic patina, her mouth slightly open.
He imagined Caleb holding on to her arm, like a person might hold a flag as they went into battle. His other hand closed into a small fist, as if holding something special to him. His feet dangling off of the bench seat.
Tom imagined looking through the darkness at him, and the child smiled back, his red pacifier bobbling in his mouth. His eyes were also glued shut, with what looked to Tom like conjunctivitis, pale-green, suppurated slivers of it bonding his small lids together, but the child didn’t seem to be upset by it. Tom lingered for a moment in this astral space, sure that somehow the baby boy knew he was being watched, and then Caleb took his hand from Elizabeth’s arm, pulled the pacifier from his mouth with a delicate
pop
sound, and said, “Charlie.”