So Cold the River (2010) (24 page)

“You’d also understand,” the man said, “I might be needing you for a piece of work when we get home.”

Josiah asked what that work would entail.

“A good mind and a strong back,” the man said. “And an ability to take direction. Might those be traits you possess?”

Josiah said they were, but he wasn’t overly pleased at the prospect, and it must have shown in his face.

“You don’t think that’s a fair exchange?” the man asked, his eyes wide.

Josiah didn’t answer that, and up ahead the steam whistle blew again and the engine began to chug. The man smiled at him and
spread his hands.

“Well,” he said, “you know another way of getting home, you’re welcome to it.”

Josiah was unaware of another way home, and he’d already missed this train once. Time came when you had to make a sacrifice
or two in the pursuit of what you desired, and right now Josiah desired a ride home. He told the man he’d get aboard.

“About time,” the man said, and then he rose to offer Josiah his hand and help him into the boxcar. When he stood, water streamed
from his suit. Josiah edged closer to the train and leaned forward.

Took his hand.

A
N HOUR AFTER
K
ELLEN
dropped him off, Eric’s headache was back in full force, and he took more Excedrin and drank a few glasses of water and turned
the volume on the TV louder, searching for distraction.

It didn’t work.

By eleven he had the TV off and was holding a pillow over his head.

I can beat it,
he told himself.
I can wait this out. I will not drink the water.

The hum soon returned to his ears, quickly built to a bell-clear ring. His mouth dried and when he blinked, it felt as if
his eyelids were lined with fine grains of sand.

It’s terrible, but it’s real, too. These things are better than the alternatives. I am seeing nothing but the walls of this
room and the furniture and the shadows, seeing no dead men in train cars filled with water. This I can take. This I can bear.

When the nausea caught him in full stride, he made it to the bathroom before vomiting, taking that as a comfort until the
second wave hit and drove away what little strength he had left.

Let it come,
he thought savagely as he lay with his cheek on the cool tile and a string of spit hanging from his lip.
Let it come with the best it has, because I’m not drinking that water, won’t take a sip.

The sickness returned, even though his body was empty, and then came again, and by the end, he could no longer lift himself
from the floor, racked by vicious dry heaves that seemed to spread his ribs even while squeezing his organs, the headache
a crescendo and his conviction a memory.

The visions were bad, yes, but these withdrawal effects, they could
kill
him.

His mind went to Kellen’s suggestion, the words floating through his pain-fogged mind as he lay on the floor:
Things get worse tonight, try her bottle before you go back to yours
.

Anne’s bottle was on the desk, looking as normal as could be. It had been when he last saw it, at least. That had been on
his way to the bathroom, and who knew how much time had passed since then. Maybe five hours, maybe fifteen minutes. He really
couldn’t say.

He couldn’t stand. Managed only to get to his hands and knees, wobbling and bumping against the door frame, spit hanging from
his mouth, a human pantomime of a rabid dog. He crawled forward, felt the tile change to carpet under his hands, and went
left, toward the desk. He blinked hard and his vision cleared and he became aware of a glow from the top of the desk, a pale
white luminescence that seemed like a guiding light.

He pulled up then and came to an abrupt stop, the rabid dog told to heel.

The light was coming from the bottle. Alyssa Bradford’s
bottle. It offered a faint glow that seemed to come not from within it so much as from an electricity that clung to the outside,
a sort of Saint Elmo’s fire.

Drink it
.

No, no. Don’t drink it.
The whole point, the reason for this absurd suffering, was to avoid taking any more of that water.

Things get worse tonight, try her bottle before yours.

Yes, her bottle.
It wasn’t glowing, wasn’t covered in frost, looked entirely normal. He pulled himself over to the desk and reached for it,
and when he did, his hand went to the glowing bottle first, and some part of him wanted that one desperately. He stopped himself,
though, shifted his hand to Anne McKinney’s bottle, and got his fingers around it, brought it down. His breath was coming
fast and uneven again, and he opened the bottle quickly and brought it to his mouth and drank.

It was hideous stuff. The sulfuric taste and smell were overpowering, and he got only two swallows down before he had to pull
away. He gagged again, sagging back against the legs of the desk, and then he waited.

“Work,” he mumbled, running the tip of his tongue over lips that had gone dry and cracked.
“Work.”

But he was sure it wouldn’t. The water his body desired so desperately was in the other bottle, the one putting off that faint
glow and gathering ice in a seventy-degree room. This version, this
sane
version, would do nothing.

Then his breathing began to steady. That was the first perceptible change; he could fill his lungs once again. A few minutes
after that, he felt the nausea subside, and then the headache dulled and he was on his feet again, splashing cold water on
his face from the bathroom sink. He stood there with hands braced on the counter and lifted his face and stared into the mirror.

It was working. Anne’s water. What did that tell him? Well,
for one thing, the Pluto Water was involved in whatever was happening to him, was part of it.
Part.
He couldn’t believe it was the sole cause, because Anne’s water didn’t have any of the same bizarre properties as Alyssa
Bradford’s. And yet it had quelled the agony that came from Alyssa’s water. Whatever had been put into his system seemed satisfied
now. Content.

As if it had just been fed.

How he’d slept so long on a rock ledge, Josiah couldn’t imagine. No pillow for his head, even, and still he’d managed to sleep
past sunset. When he opened his eyes, the treetops above him were a rustling mess of shadows, and when he sat up with a grunt,
the pool of water far below was no longer visible. Full night.

Two of the beers remained warm and unopened at his side. The gulf gurgled down below, and he got to his feet stiffly, thinking
about the dream and unsettled by it. Wasn’t often that Josiah dreamed when he slept, and he couldn’t recall ever having the
same dream twice, or even a variation of it.

But this one had returned, this dream of the man aboard the train. Strange.

He’d ordinarily hike back the way he’d come, but he had no flashlight and it was a difficult trek in the darkness even if
you knew where you were going. Too many roots to stumble over and holes to turn an ankle in. Taking the road would be longer
but easier.

He left the ledge and climbed to the top of the ridge and found the trail that led to the gravel drive the state had put in.
From there he came out to the county road as a dog barked in the distance and the moon and stars glittered and lit the pavement
with a faint white glow. To the right he could see the white sides of Wesley Chapel gleaming against the dark, and a few pale
orbs
surrounding it, the stone fronts of the monuments in the old cemetery also catching the moonlight. He turned left, toward
home.

Not a single car passed. He hiked south, open fields on each side of him for a spell, then into the woods of Toliver Hollow,
and there the road curved away and he walked east for a time before leaving it for another road and moving south once more.
A half mile farther and he left the paved road for a gravel one. Almost home. He’d taken no more than twenty steps on the
gravel when he pulled up short and stared.

The moon was three-quarters full and bright in the periods between clouds, and it was glittering off something just down the
road from Josiah’s house.

A windshield.

A car.

Parked on the Amish farm property. Last time Josiah had checked, his Amish neighbors didn’t have cars.

He hesitated for a moment and then left the road and went into the weeds as he continued on. As he got closer, he could tell
it was a van. Funny place to leave a car, and funnier still was that it was parked in one of the few locations where Josiah’s
home showed in the gaps between the trees. He could see the outline of his house from here. The Amish barns were visible,
but not their home. Just Josiah’s.

Someone had run out of gas or had engine trouble, no doubt, pushed the thing off the road and left it till daylight. Nothing
to trouble his mind over; Josiah couldn’t give a shit whose car it was. Had nothing to do with him.

That was his thought for another fifty paces, until he saw the glow.

A brief square of blue light inside the rear of the van was visible for about five seconds and then extinguished. A cell phone.
Someone was inside that van. In the back.

He felt something dark spread through him then, a feeling he knew well, his temper lifting its head on one of those occasions
when it would not be denied, when fists would surely be swung and blood drawn.

Somebody was watching his house.

There was nothing else to see from there. Nothing but fields and trees and Josiah Bradford’s own home.

A memory hit him then, a flash of something seen but ignored—the blue minivan that had been pulled off the road near Edgar’s
house when the man from Chicago and the black kid left. Josiah had driven right past it, had seen that it was parked off the
shoulder and in the grass. Just like this one was now.

Son of a bitch was following him.

This would not be tolerated.

He dropped the beer cans he’d been carrying into the grass, then slipped down off the road and into the weed-covered ditch
and picked his way along in a crouch. The van was parked facing the cattle gate, both sides exposed to the road, but its occupant
was in the rear, and odds were he was watching the house and not the road.

It took him a long time to work his way down until he was directly across from the van. Twice the blue light appeared and
disappeared, and he decided that whoever was inside was checking the time. Impatient, wondering where the hell Josiah was.
Waiting on him.

Ideas tumbled through his mind, endless options. He could walk right up and knock on the door, call this son of a bitch outside.
Could pick up one of the large loose stones from the ditch and use it to bash the windshield in. Could sneak home and get
his shotgun. One way or another, he’d get this asshole out and answering questions.

That should have been his desire, at least. Find out who this was and what in the hell he was doing following Josiah. Funny
thing was, Josiah was having trouble bringing himself to care. Those questions he should be asking, they didn’t seem to matter
anymore. All that mattered was the fact that someone was here watching his home. The hell with answers—Josiah wanted punishment.
Wanted to crawl under the car, puncture the gas tank, set the thing on fire. Watch it blow this nameless son of a bitch sky
high in a cloud of orange flame, teach him there were people to be fooled with and people not to be fooled with, and Josiah
Bradford was absolutely of the latter set.

He dropped his hand into his pocket at the thought and wrapped his fingers around his cigarette lighter, actually tempted
for a minute. But no, those answers were important, and if he blew up the van before the questions had been asked, he would
surely regret it. So the dilemma was how to get the man inside the van out of it and willing to talk. Well, the cigarette
lighter might help with that after all.

He pulled off his T-shirt and felt around the bottom edge of it until he found one of its holes. Worked his fingers in and
tugged and then the cheap cotton tore, the sound loud. He went slower, quieter, tearing again and again until he had five
separate strips of fabric. When he had the shirt torn up, he crammed the strips into his pockets, patted around the ditch
with his hands until he found a large stone—felt like the broken-off corner of a cinder block—and then dropped to his belly,
the weeds and gravel tearing at his skin as he crawled up onto the road and toward the van.

Slow, patient going, stopping occasionally to catch his breath and adjust his position. The ditch on the other side of the
road was deeper, and it came to an end right where the van was parked, had a steel culvert that ran from one end of the dirt
farm lane to the other. It was packed with dry leaves. Josiah waited
for a moment, hearing nothing, and then he slid right under the van.

He left the cinder-block chunk behind, pushed across the gravel on his stomach until he was beneath the front of the van,
and put his hand back in his pocket and took out the strips of T-shirt and the lighter. Then he sparked the lighter’s wheel
and got the flame going and held it to the end of one strip of cloth and then another. When he had them both going, he reached
out and tossed them down into the ditch, which was filled with leaves and grass and was dry from days of sun and wind. Wouldn’t
do anything but burn itself out, but all it had to do was burn.

He had a third strip of shirt out, ready to light another, but the fire had already caught some fuel down in the ditch, so
he dropped the cloth and slid backward, under the van again.

It was a good thing he’d moved when he did, because the man in the van spotted the fire when it was still in its infancy.
Josiah heard a murmuring from inside and then the door slid open and someone stepped out, said, “What in the hell?” under
his breath, and then walked down into the ditch and began stomping at the fire. When he did, Josiah slid out from under the
van on the other side, screened from view, and crawled around to the back, kneeling and grabbing the chunk of cinder block.