Read HIGHWATER: a suspense thriller you won't be able to put down Online
Authors: T. J. BREARTON
“So what do you bet?” Christopher asked.
The question hung in the musty air of the kitchen. Christopher felt time draw out, the air somehow thinned, as though a vast phalanx of tightly stretched strings, having been plucked, were trembling back to momentary stillness.
Liz, Maddy, and the child stood behind Jared.
Christopher saw the bristling of the flesh along Jared’s arms and neck, goose-pocked and changing. Christopher saw the vacancy in him, the vacuum being filled with poison. He watched a nerve twitch — two, in concert — one beneath Jared Kingston’s left eye and the other on the side of his neck.
Jared’s lips drew back into a snarl, his yellow, smoker’s teeth bared, his eyes blended grey-black like shale.
“We live our cozy little lives,” Jared said, looking at the coins in Christopher’s hand. “We have our ideas about meaning and God in our lives, and we might pray, and we’re so petty, so small. Talk about God to the tigers of the Serengeti. How does God relate to the survival of man? The brutal centuries, millennia of struggle. Ice-cold deep space. Talk about God when a man sits with the blood of a kill on his hands, fighting off the wolves that want to claim it. Tell it to the starving coyotes roaming the woods, who will do anything to survive. God is a human idea. The reality is that life is as dark and cruel as nature; God isn’t represented by robed men preaching peace and tolerance, or a messenger from the sky. God’s not a guy under the Bodhi tree, or a man on the cross. Not when there is the wild. Not when there is war, famine, pestilence, terror.”
“Maybe I’m not here to repay a debt,” said Christopher. “Maybe I’m a gambler.”
“Then I bet there’s no such thing as God,” said the thing taking over Jared Kingston, the thing afraid of a time it could not remember.
And he lunged for the three of them.
* * *
Jim and Tom both heard the scream.
Jim followed Tom, who leapt the three steps onto the porch and banged through the storm door. He heard cars pulling into the driveway, unwilling to let it drag on any longer, and behind him, just before the storm door swung shut, the thrash of the thing in the pond, the violent displacement of the water, and, finally, the first crack of lightning.
* * *
Dandy Gramone heard the thunder. Isaac Palyswate did, too. He stood, with the white pail dangling from his right arm, his washed-duck Carhartt coveralls on over a bright-green flannel shirt, in front of the chicken coop.
Three of the five Jersey Giant chickens he had got just recently from Gramone were dead. Well, one had been decapitated, one was just some guts and loose feathers, and the third was MIA. The two who’d survived, he noted, were the bigger of the grey-bodied hens, the elders, the ones who had been first in line for feed the past couple of days since he’d gotten them.
Survival of the fittest
, he thought.
Hmmpf.
Isaac’s church, Pilgrim Holiness, where he ministered, had been abuzz lately with talk of roving packs of coyotes, melting snowpacks, natural gas drilling, and inordinate rain and highwater. There had been word of the commotion at the Kingston house on Macmaster Pond, and how the events there were or weren’t related. That’d been last night. Saturday night. At this morning’s service he imagined the buzz would be even stronger, as Isaac had heard on the scanner about the even greater trouble at the Kingston place — he’d heard the helicopters early this morning, and then, of course, there were the rising ponds, lakes, and rivers to consider, the fact that the water coming from his tap contained unearthed natural gas that he could light on fire, if he wanted to.
The sixty-eight-year-old minister, with his sweep of silver hair and salt-and-pepper sideburns down to the curve of his jaw, his iPhone in his bib pocket, set down the white pail. He squatted. The two surviving Jersey hens babbled and clucked and wound around each other in the corner of the coop his son, Jessiah, had built only a few weeks before.
“Come here, my girls, come here,” he said, and spread his hands out before him.
Red Rock Falls had nearly burned to the ground once before. In the twenties, the village had been luminous, a beacon, a vacation spot, and a place of recuperation from the various diseases of the early part of the century. The powerful built their great camps. The institutes thrived. And then — with bootlegging at its height, the population at its peak — fire destroyed most of downtown, the tremendous burning creating spectral heat that choked the air and breath, smoke that could be seen as far away as Montreal.
What was left of the historic buildings, the cure cottages, the abandoned railroad station, was now awash in the flood; the water had breached the banks of nearly every lake, pond, and river. It coursed through the streets, carrying forest material with it, picking up the trash in the streets. It foamed at the edges; it rose past the hubcaps of vehicle tires and to the wheel wells. It started to pull along the vehicles in its thrall.
First it had claimed the camps, great and small, tucked away along the edges of Red Rock’s overflowing bodies of water. It drowned the tenant houses and sheds in the spillover, and crashed through the multi-paned windows, and soaked the birch-bark-trimmed interiors. The water bunted against rocks, boulders, and erratics as it hoisted to higher elevations. Only the places built in the mountains, places like the Kingston home, remained unflooded. But as the rains came again, they wouldn’t stand a chance either.
The fact that the highwater was multi-locational had led to the speculation that the culprit was natural; caused by a lasting deluge of rain and the still-frozen ground. In a sense, an early, abrupt and intense spring. But Dandy Gramone, along with some others, felt there was another element, that the natural gas released by hydraulic fracturing had risen to the surface and was poisoning the water, making it combustible.
In Darrah’s auto body shop, as a surge of water filled the fake-wood-paneled walls of the office, the wiring tore free and copper zapped copper, lighting the floodwaters on fire. Water had begun to seep across the pristine bottom level of the Red Rock Medical Center sometime during in the night. Around the same time, the old Water Department building had Styrofoam coffee cups floating along its second floor, and the Red Rock Hotel basement had filled, its ancient wood-fired boiler in the backlot belched out a
woof
of flame which, once it took, began to claim everything.
It was an incongruous sight; the town of Red Rock running with grey water one minute, and crisscrossed with flames the next, the flotsam burning, the buildings beginning to burn.
The natural-gas drilling company was considered culpable for the fires, but the young men in their drab clothes, hidden beneath cowls and popped-collar jackets —had been seen the evening of the fires on the front lawn of Red Rock Medical Center and were considered to be somehow responsible too, along with Jim Cruickshand. Everybody was sure it all tied together, but nobody quite understood exactly how. Jim’s father was at the hospital which had been attacked, and Jim, by many accounts, had been gradually losing his mind, so there was a link of sorts.
The young men were being sought by what minimal force was left to be deployed. Rory Blaine had held Sheriff Blake Johnston at bay as long as he could. But, at some time just after seven on that Sunday morning, Sheriff Johnston led the remaining members of his team down the private drive to the Kingston home, ready to take down Cruickshand at any cost. It wasn’t just about apprehending a wanted man anymore, the Sheriff claimed, it was a rescue mission for the region.
The child was to be protected as much as was humanly possible. However, to Sheriff Johnston’s thinking, the Goldfine girl, the Kingston boy, and the stubborn, often bumbling Tom Milliner were all complicit in the ongoing madness, as was the mysterious young man with them, a suspicious drifter from out of town.
The National Guard had been called in to Red Rock. Johnston had just been given the official notification that the first Black Hawk had been deployed from Plattsburgh Air Force base, when he gave the order for his group to take the Kingston house. His own reinforcements had been re-routed. There was far too much going on in the rest of the region to warrant keeping half the police force there, kidnapping or not. The Feds had their hands full, too. Though the highwater seemed restricted to the northern Adirondacks, that area alone was hundreds of thousands of acres where hundreds of thousands people lived. DEC scrambled, and Forest Services from Vermont and Canada were called in to deal with the multiple crises. Every fire department in the region, including all volunteers, were working on the gas-caused blazes. For now, the Sheriff was on his own.
Rory Blaine sat smoking in the passenger seat of the Sheriff’s car.
“We get that kid out of there first thing,” Johnston said to Blaine.
Blake Johnston didn’t like Rory Blaine. Couldn’t stand him. Any man who wore pink shirts, tie or not, was a questionable sort. Especially when he had no family to speak of. And he smoked. Sheriff Johnston smoked, but he didn’t like other men who did.
“Yes, we get the kid out first thing,” said Blaine.
They bumped down the road, rounded the bend, and the Kingston place came into view. Behind it, a great gathering of smoke billowed into the sky, now a part of the horizon, a black storm cloud. The first drops of rain started to fall, each one breaking on the windshield in a forceful way, as if trying to be recognized for their martyrdom.
No hostage negotiators had been called in, but a woman with some psychological training or other, who dealt with situations involving kidnappings, had been called down from Ogdensburg, not by Johnston, but by Red Rock Falls Chief of Police Craig Baylor. Johnston didn’t much like Baylor either.
Johnston saw the woman get out of the State vehicle and proceed on foot, jogging, holding a wing of her jacket over her head to protect herself from the rain. She managed to catch them and leap into the back of the Sheriff’s vehicle moments before Johnston stopped it outside the house.
“I’m here on behalf of Child Protective Services,” said the woman.
“I know.”
Johnston checked his weapon, and texted something on the mobile data terminal. The woman leaned forward, presumably to look at what he’d written, and he swung the screen away from her on its arm. He got out of the car.
The rain hit Sheriff Johnston like a cold bath, taking his breath away. Blaine got out on the other side. Johnston could smell the smoke of his cigarette between the staccato graphite scents from the raindrops pummeling the driveway. Blaine had his own pistol out, and he was raising it up into the air, his jaw set, and his eyes wide.
Johnston didn’t move. The porch door swung open and Trooper Jim Cruickshand stepped into view. The door slammed shut behind him. He had a rifle in his hands and his hat was gone, revealing the black and grey of his hair.
Johnston could see the hollowness of the big man’s eyes. He thought he caught a whiff of something else as well, something like rot, coming from the shed to his right. Either that or it could have been an odor carried on the wind. Blaine had acted very squirrely about that pond.
* * *
A minute before, Tom and Jim had run into the kitchen to find Jared and Christopher in a struggle together.
Jim got between them and managed to pry Jared away. He said to Christopher, “Go, do what you have to do, help them,” and Tom knew that Jim meant
help the child
.
Somehow, Tom thought, it was what Christopher had been here to do all along.
Tom saw the coin glinting on the linoleum floor of the kitchen. Without thinking, he bent and plucked it up.
Jared thrashed and bucked in Jim’s arms, but Jim was strong and held the young man tightly, twisting one of Jared’s arms behind his back and pinning him to the ground. Jim had dropped the rifle, and Tom picked it up. Christopher took Elizabeth by the hand, and, with Caleb in his arms, left the house and headed, Tom knew, to the water.
Tom heard the vehicles pulling up outside. He heard the doors slamming. The Sheriff, he figured. Blaine too, maybe. Jim looked at Tom. “Here,” Jim said. “Take this over.” Tom set down the rifle and got into position on top of the Kingston boy, to keep him pinned. Jim then took the rifle up again, cocked it, and walked towards the back porch
“Jim,” said Tom, “what are you doing to do?”
“Just keep him there for a minute.”
“Get off me!” The Kingston boy yelled and tried to twist and roll free. Tom pushed his arm up towards his neck and the kid cried out in pain. He screamed, “You old bald fuck.” Tom huffed and puffed, trying to keep the kid pinned. He was like a mass of snakes, coiling and shifting. “You trying to run one in me? What’s the matter — can’t keep a woman? You let everybody down, Tommy. You let your brother down. You killed your own cocksucking brother.”
Tom watched Jim take a position just inside the kitchen door, hiding his large frame off to the right of it. Tom could then see through the door, to the porch where shadows moved and boards creaked.
Jared writhed beneath Tom’s weight.
“You killed that kid, too, Milliner — you let him dive right down that well.”
Jim looked back at Tom, there just inside the kitchen doorway, on top of the Kingston boy, and Jim jerked his head sideways, indicating that Tom take Jared out the front.
“They’re not after you,” said Jim.
Tom nodded and got the boy up, careful to keep a firm grip on him. But the Kingston boy was still a live wire, his skin scaly and cold, his body filled to the glands with fury, and he bucked and slipped himself free.
He turned and ran up the stairs, up to the bedroom.
“Shit!” said Tom under his breath. At the same time, he heard the porch door open and bang shut as Jim stepped outside.
And so Tom started towards the foot of the stairs, shielding himself behind the doorway to the hall, darting his head around the corner to look up, his gun drawn at last.
Tom swallowed. His heart was galloping.
He looked back into the kitchen one last time. “I’ll see you, Jim,” he said to the empty room, and then started up the stairs after the Kingston boy.
* * *
They half slid, half walked down the slick fieldstone path to the overflowing pond, the rain quickly soaking them. Liz’s hair was clinging to her face in wet strands. Caleb seemed to be enjoying himself, smiling with his red pacifier still bobbling in his mouth.
Christopher managed to get them to the edge of the water and maneuvered Liz into the Adirondack chair.
He set Caleb down, took the boy’s hand, and put it in his mother’s hand. She remained in her stupor.
“Stay here with mommy.”
“Okay.”
Christopher picked up the crystal glass from where it sat on the blanket, filled about halfway up with rainwater. He glanced out over the pond, careful not to lose his footing. The water was almost up to the top of that steep bank, its stippled surface shimmering and deceptive.
Underneath the waterfall sound of the rain, Christopher heard the thing move. He turned away from the pond and stood, hanging back behind the Adirondack chair. He pulled Caleb away from his mother and put his arm round him.
“Okay, stand back.”
The child whimpered some protest. He didn’t want to see his mother like this.
“Come on, buddy. We have to do this.”
Caleb allowed Christopher to take hold of Elizabeth around the shoulders. He lifted her up, allowing her head to fall back. Her exposed neck glistened, the pulse of her carotid artery visible through the taut skin. Christopher poured the rainwater over her eyes.
There was a hissing, and smoke. Caleb cried out. Christopher held Elizabeth tightly. She seemed unaware of any of it, her arms limp at her sides, her body suspended in his grip. Christopher knew where she was; she was not there, not exactly. But the glass of rainwater had healed her eyes. The rest, now, would be up to her.
“I love you,” Christopher whispered, and kissed her forehead.