HIGHWATER: a suspense thriller you won't be able to put down (6 page)

PART II

NEW RECRUIT

CHAPTER SEVEN

Madison was flipping through a
People
magazine (Jennifer Aniston’s tits were fake, she didn’t care what anyone said —
nobody’s
baby pillows were that perky). It was a quiet Wednesday morning at the branch hospital called Little Rock. The clock on the wall read 2 AM.

There was only one patient on the ward, a snowboarder who had tried to ram a tree down her throat after deviating from a groomed trail, slipping beneath the orange tape and doing a little rock-surfing. There was one like her every week.

The ambulance arrived. Madison got up off of the stool and headed down the hallway.

Roland and Dash came in rolling the gurney. On it was the kid they had called in about moments before.

They parked the kid in room one. He was very pale as Madison rigged him up to take his blood pressure.

“How are you, babydoll?”

The kid looked at her. He had wide, bloodshot blue eyes.

She smiled at him and winked. “You okay?”

“I can’t really feel my mouth,” he said. His breathing was rapid.

“Okay,” she said soothingly, “calm down. I want you to take it easy for me.”

Blood pressure was normal. Heart rate was high, but not dangerous. Roland had taken his vitals in the ambulance, things were about the same now. Roland asked the kid if he carried insurance, and scribbled on his clipboard. Roland was a big man, getting on in years, a guy with hair sprouting from his nose and ears, the sort of man who always smelled of Old Spice and Chiclets. Madison was fond of him.

“Babylove,” she said to the kid, “sit up for me.”

He did, looking at her with wide, blue eyes underscored with purple semicircles. His left hand was crooked-up like a paraplegic’s. Both his hands shook. She put the heated pillow behind his back. He was wheezing.

“Okay, just breathe nice and slow, nice and slow.”

“My hands are numb,” he said.

“You’re hyperventilating. I need you to relax. I know you can do that for me, kiddo. Just breathe nice and slow. Not too deep, just relaxed.”

He looked at her and he was listening to her. He was lucid enough. She could smell a kind of fruity sweat, the alcohol coming out of him.

“Okay,” she said, “be right back.”

Madison popped into the room next door. She was a larger woman, a plus-sized-model, she thought of herself. She had bright blue globes of her own. Roland told her she wore too much eye makeup. Roland didn’t understand what Farah Fawcett had done to women in the seventies and eighties.

She smiled and procured the necessary paperwork. She and Roland would soon be scribbling on the forms together.

“Maddy,” said someone. She looked up.

In the hallway was the PA, George. “What’s the haps?”

“I think we got some minor detox going on. He’s pretty freaked. He’s a sweetie. He’s gonna need something for his anxiety or he’s never going to get his breathing down. Maybe some Prednisone. He’s gunked up in there too.”

George nodded and snapped his gum as he looked down the hallway. His hands were shoved into the pockets of his teal uniform which gaped at the neck revealing a hairless chest. He looked down to the other end of the hallway, then at Madison, and said “Thanks.”

Madison smiled and went back to her paperwork. Henrietta came into the room, and Madison handed the stack off to her. Henrietta took it wordlessly and walked back into room one, where the kid was, and started asking him all of the attending questions. Madison could hear his tremulous voice. Mid-to-late twenties, she put him. Probably old enough to know better, but her heart went out.

She pushed herself up from the desk, groaning, and then laughing quietly at the noise she’d made. She went into radiology to tell Katrine to boot things up. They’d run the kid through the X-ray and then she’d talk to him about the drinking.

As she walked across the hallway she saw that, a little ways down, her
People
magazine had fallen off the counter where she’d left it. It was spine-up, and the faces of Jennifer Aniston and her father, Victor, the guy from the soaps, with the headline “Reunion Turns Ugly,” were sideways and distorted and yawed. The sight of the magazine in disarray like that, for some reason, was the only thing that had disturbed her peace all night.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Elizabeth screamed again. Something was crawling about on the back porch now as well. There was a distinct scrabbling noise — the kind of noise that only fingernails, long and tough, could make — as something fumbled with the door handle there.

Elizabeth wheeled around at the noise and looked through the living room, out to the porch and beyond that to where snow fell over the pond. It was pretty snow, with big, fluffy flakes drifting and twirling down. The fact that it was pretty somehow made things even worse. It was as if heaven was right there, within reach — peace, tranquility, normalcy, freedom. But between her and salvation, something on the porch awaited.

It clawed at the door, trying to open it.

“Jaaaaareeedd!”

He came up behind her, his breathing rapid, and the smell of him very strong. He wiped his nose with his sleeve. She wondered if he’d done a couple of lines tonight in the back of the bar, CCR blaring on the jukebox, an overturned shot glass on the wood, as his buyback for the next drink.

“What,” he panted. “Another one?”

There had to have been two of them, one at each end of the house, because this fresh break-in attempt had come only moments after Jared had fired the shotgun.

Elizabeth fought the urge to turn around, to look through the kitchen to the front door, where the first creature had been trying to get in. She knew the damage done to the front door, and she calculated that whatever had been on the other side must’ve suffered significantly. But a terrible, rat-toothed inner voice told her that some vestigial piece, an appendage, one of those twisted hands, was left there, flopped over the threshold. If she looked back she would be able to see part of it lying there, and if she did that she would surely lose it.

Better to focus. Better to stay right where Jared was, think what he was thinking, look only where he was shooting, killing. Best just to kill and to keep killing until whatever was going on was over, and then they would leave, and he would put her in the Jeep and drive her back to Glastonbury, to her parents’ house, and he would leave her there, and she would go into her room where she’d lived not so long ago, alone in her room, and everything would go back to normal and sane.

They watched the door to the front porch.

A hand slapped the Plexiglas, making her jump and cry out. The hand then slid down, leaving some greasy trail behind it that made Liz think of oily hair. Filthy, dandruff-ridden, foul junkie hair. Her stomach clenched and threatened to empty itself.

Jared started his crouch-walk forward.

To his right, past the fireplace, next to the stairs that went down into the shallow basement, outside the quadripane window came another
thwack
. Jared jumped and swung that way and pulled the trigger. Liz hadn’t been expecting it. The sound of the blast was terribly loud again, but the glass seemed to shatter silently, as her ears closed down and began to ring.

“Jared!” She screamed. Her voice sounded muffled in her own head. “You’ll let them in!”

From outside came a shriek, cutting through the gauze of her hearing. It sounded like tires squealing on pavement. The sound conjured an image, it made her think of those same tires running over some species of bird. The kind of bird likely to flap around in the spilled paint of nightmares, one with misshapen human eyes; oddly long-necked, with a bloated body and curved, tawny talons — but sickly cartoonish in a way specifically designed to scare the living shit out of little kids.

The buckshot had flung into the wall by the window, chewing up the drywall there, leaving it ragged. The glass tinkled down and away now, crystalline, jagged chunks. Jared swung the shotgun back to the front porch’s storm door, and then back again to the blasted window. Liz could already feel the cold air blowing in, the heat gasping out into the night. She opened her mouth to say something else, perhaps, to see if her vocal chords were reliable again, when she heard yet another noise from behind her.

Something else there was getting in, climbing over the thing Jared had killed, the thing that, indeed, had one twisted limb sticking out over the front door threshold, lying on the linoleum floor. It was looking at her, this new abomination, its head squeezed in through the gap between the door and the door frame. It didn’t make sense what she was looking at. The face she saw there, it didn’t make any sense.

“Jared,” she tried, but now her voice was gone completely.

The thing in the door, its face, trying to enter, looked like a little baby bird’s, a dark rust-red color, only twisted, wrung up like a towel. The feathers encircling its head were entwined and covered in some kind of wet char. The body behind it was fleshy, devoid of feathers, with smooth, pink and pliable skin. The face of a wretched bird, the scrubbed, waxen body of a person.

Trying to crawl into their home.

Liz’s legs gave out beneath her and she crumpled at the foot of the stairs, there in that little vestibule, next to the closet with the missing towels.

“What—” said Jared.

It was the only word she discerned. What she heard next was Jared loading more shells into the gun. He racked it. He fired. There was no shriek this time. Where had he fired? Liz felt like she was choking, like she had a large piece of coal stuck in her throat. Fissures of hot and cold raced through her body in corkscrewed, wiry pulses.

She heard the sound of breaking glass again — this time from upstairs. She looked up there. It took tremendous effort; her head weighed too much, her neck felt small, skinny, like a bird’s.

There was a thump above her. Something had gotten in upstairs.

Jared fired again, and began yelling.

* * *

Tom banged back in the house, Christopher following on his heels. “We need to go to the hospital,” he said. “The one called ‘Little Rock’.”

Tom ignored him.

“What are you doing?” Christopher asked.

Tom threw a hasty glance over his shoulder. He gripped the Kimber Montana rifle, reluctant to set it down anywhere the kid — or his cronies — could get at it.

“Calling the troopers,” said Tom. The phone was mounted to the side of one of the kitchen cabinets. Steph had asked him repeatedly (and with as much patience as anyone could muster, he remembered) to get a cordless phone. Tom had said he would get around to it. He now plucked the handset from the cradle. The pigtail cord was twelve feet long, and, as usual, bunched around itself.

Tom clumsily worked towards the living room, trying to keep hold of the rifle and free the phone cord at the same time. He debated dialing 911, but that would put the call out to everyone in the vicinity, the state troopers and the Sheriff’s Department. Tom didn’t much like the Sheriff of Red Rock County, but that wasn’t why he didn’t want the Department here. He just felt, given the strange nature of the situation (
spontaneous combustion?
) he felt a little discretion could be called for. Bill Wepple would be able to help handle things.

Tom reached the living room, having managed to untangle the knotted cord most of the way.

Background radiation. Left over from the origin.

He watched out the window as the kid, the last in the group, the lookout, continued to burn. The three others seemed to have taken no notice of it. They hadn’t moved. They remained as still as statues.

“Jesus Christ,” Tom said. He hadn’t been sure he was going to speak. For a moment, he stayed standing there like that, the rifle gripped in his armpit, the phone in one hand, his other hand poised to punch in the numbers. He looked down, remembering that Wepple’s number was back in the kitchen, on a list stuck in one of the knick-knack drawers. At the same time, he realized that Christopher had followed him, soundlessly, and stood close behind him.

“Tom.”

Tom licked his lips. He found his throat was dry. He found himself thinking something he hadn’t for a long time. He wanted a drink.

He couldn’t take his eyes off that last kid standing there. The lookout wasn’t just burning, not like a log on a fire, but sparking, brighter in places than others, fulgid. There were white lights about him, tiny explosions, like a chemical reaction — like his combustion was interacting with the air.

Nuclear
, he heard a voice say. It sounded like Charlie. It sounded like Charlie, full of his usual colorful bullshit.
It’s nuclear.

I miss you, Chuck
.

“Tom,” said Christopher, his tone calm and firm. “Remember what happened the last time you waited for them.”

Tom blinked. He winced, as if he’d been struck along the back of his neck. It felt hot there, like a hand gripping him, and he had to step away, and turn. As he did, the phone cord slack tightened. And the handset slipped out of his grip. The unit hit the floor and went sliding across the kitchen towards its cradle, dragged by the elasticity of the cord scrunching. Neither Tom nor Christopher paid much attention to it. Even the burning “lookout” kid on Cherry Road was temporarily forgotten, too.

“What did you say? What did you just say to me?”

Tom searched the kid’s eyes. At the same time he felt the old familiar feelings: that coming-to-a-boil anger. The firmer tug from the drink muscle.
Come on, Tom. Lay him down. Lay him down and forget all of this shit
.

“You don’t need to call and wait for back up, Tom. It’s not that kind of situation. You’ve got everything you need right here.”

“What did you say about that? About ‘the last time I waited?’ What do you know? Who are you?”

“Tom,” said Christopher. His voice was endlessly calm, while Tom’s had escalated to a full-throated growl. There was no stopping it this time. Fuck AA, fuck anger management. Fuck
Understanding The Costs Of Anger
,
or
Distortions of the Anger Payoff.
Tom knew what the payoff would be. This kid would be out of his life, and the others with him. What the hell had he been thinking?

“The payphone where you were tonight. Where you first saw me, at that old payphone. You always said the kids slowed you up, the kids who’d been hanging around.”

Tom was on the verge now. The urge to reach out and put his hands around the kid’s throat was incredibly strong. He could taste it, this urge, literally taste it. It tasted the way paint thinner smelled. It tasted the way blood shone under an arc-sodium light in a parking lot, rendering it black as tar.

“It wasn’t the kids. It was you, waiting for someone else to come and handle it. Waiting for back-up, waiting for someone sober to do your job.”

Tom stood, unable to move. He had been a deputy then, working for the county on road patrol. There had been a call from dispatch that someone had called for the Rescue Squad — this had been in the days before the 911 offices had been set up in the county seat. The call had been generated from a phone booth at a convenience store just on the edge of Red Rock Falls. Hang-ups were usually nothing, almost always pranks, but of course, it had to be investigated. He’d been notified by dispatch over the radio at around 8:30 PM. But he’d sat for a minute, smoked, watching the darkening trees sway in the wind. It was summer, and the sun still cast a fading glow. When he’d gotten to the convenience store, there had been plenty of people around, many of them young — the pre-adolescent group (“tweens” they called them now) tended to loiter there, a group caught in that awful and awkward middle place where staying home and playing Cowboys and Indians in the back yard had long since lost its zeal, but the sufferings of freedom — bars, late nights, illicit sex, genuine trouble — were not yet available. There in the in-between, bored, full of energy and blooming sin, the kids were apt to do about anything.

Tom had pulled in and asked a group of kids about the phone call and no one had known anything, of course. They’d played dumb and smoked cigarettes they were too young to buy and scuffed their feet over the bits of fresh summer asphalt. “No, sir, officer, we don’t have no idea,” and yet there had been a pall over them, particularly over a couple of them on the other side of the phone booth mounted on the corner of the convenience store. They were gathered just beyond the air hose (
25 cents
!) and the ice machine. Tom had approached those kids, and had sensed something, but he’d dismissed it.

“I’ve been an investigator for thirteen years,” Tom said now, staring blankly into the kitchen. His eyes found the phone, lying on the floor, emitting a buzzing tone. The sound resembled the strange noise outside. “On road patrol for the county starting fifteen years before that. That phone-booth call hang-up came my third year on the job. That would have put it at least twenty-four years ago.”

He finally looked up at Christopher, gripping the rifle with both hands again. He pointed the muzzle at the ceiling. As Tom advanced, Christopher retreated. They moved back into the kitchen like this.

“How do you know about that night? What has it got to do with you? Who have you been talking to?”

“I know about the things you see, Tom. The ideas you have that you don’t like. You followed me tonight because I remind you. I remind you of what you could’ve done, what you should’ve done, and what you never let go of.”

Tom stood still.

“It’s hard, keeping an open mind,” the kid said softly. “Doesn’t take long before the system can grind you down. Most things are incidental; most things have a simple, easy explanation behind them. People are predictable. They get drunk, they get in fights or wreck cars. They have weapons in the home; someone gets shot accidentally. They’re poor, they squabble over petty things. They’re wealthy, they squabble over petty things. People are simple. Sex and money is near the heart of everything, and the core itself, is that everyone is afraid of dying.”