The Night Season (25 page)

CHAPTER

55

He lost them
immediately when the water hit. It was like being swallowed, forced down a tube by peristalsis. There was no staying on the surface. Archie was sucked under, tumbling, the water thundering in his ears. He had no sense of direction, no clue which way was up. He managed to get his flak jacket off, and when he slammed against something hard he somehow had the instinct to grab hold of it and grapple his way to the surface.

It was a streetlight.

The water seemed to draw back, like the undertow of a great wave breaking shore, and Archie had to hug the streetlight with all his strength to keep from being sucked off toward the river.

And then it was over.

Suddenly everything was incredibly still, the water waist-high, cold, and black, without a ripple on its surface.

“Susan,” Archie called, his voice hoarse, looking around in the darkness. “Patrick?”

The damage was obvious all around him. Half the cherry trees from the Japanese American Plaza were gone, a car was on its side, half submerged, all the windows of the storefronts were broken. The chair from inside the aquarium store floated by.

He heard splashing nearby, and turned to see a man’s clawing hand emerge from the water. Archie reached for it instinctively. It grabbed hold, and Archie pulled the person to the surface, expecting to see Flannigan.

But it was Elroy Carey who came up bellowing.

He exploded from the water and got his hands around Archie’s neck. Archie was knocked off balance and fell back into waist-deep water. Carey fell on top of him, and Archie flailed at Carey’s wrists, trying to pry them off, but the water stole all his leverage.

It also stole Carey’s.

Archie held his breath, put his feet together, bent his knees, and kicked Carey in the shins. The force pushed Carey’s feet out from under him and he belly-flopped forward, losing his grip. Archie got out from under him and came to the surface for air.

But Carey got his footing back and turned and came back at him.

Carey’s head was matted and bleeding. He’d been knocked against something when the flood surge hit. His skull had been cracked open. Archie could see the pink shimmer of brain tissue where Carey’s wet brown hair parted around the wound. Rage and adrenaline were the only things keeping him on his feet.

Archie reached for his gun, but the flood had ripped the holster right off his belt.

Carey lunged for him.

But Archie was ready. Carey had killed Heil. He’d taken Patrick Lifton from his family. He’d tried to kill Henry. He deserved to die.

Archie clenched his fist and swung hard for Carey’s head wound. His fist slammed against bone and hair and something slippery. It knocked Carey over on his side, back into the water.

Carey pulled himself to his feet, doubled over, heaving, soaked in filthy water.

He lifted his head and looked sideways at Archie.

Blood gushed from his scalp, over his face, into his eyes, and down his chest. He adjusted the suspenders of his waders. His eyes rolled back. And he sank to his knees, disappearing almost completely beneath the water. He managed to stay there for a moment, only his forehead visible, the gaping wound pulsing blood. Then it sank below the surface. Archie watched until the bubbles stopped. It only took a few minutes. He waited a few minutes more, just to be sure. Then he felt for the body, and lifted it by the shirt collar.

Carey’s scalp was clean. Archie could see the full extent of his injuries now—a two-inch section of his brain exposed. The wound had stopped bleeding. He was dead. Archie looked around. He was alone. He released Carey’s body and watched it sink and vanish in the river.

CHAPTER

56

Susan surfaced and
took in a great gasp of air. She was alive. She’d been tossed and tumbled and rolled underwater until she thought her lungs were going to burst, and she was still alive. Air—humid, fetid, flooded-city air—had never tasted so good. She was still in the water, but she was swimming, above the surface. She could breathe.

Then the absence struck her.

Where was Patrick?

She’d lost him when the water hit.

“Patrick?” she yelled. She paddled in frantic circles in the water, searching for him in the darkness, calling his name again and again.

But he didn’t answer.

“Archie?” she called.

He wasn’t there.

They were both gone.

Or maybe she was the one who was gone.

She looked around for landmarks, but couldn’t orient herself. She didn’t see any buildings. Rain pattered against the surface of the water. Compared to the water she was in, it felt warm.

The floodsurge was still moving, and taking her along with it. She could feel it all around her—a billion pounds of pressure all rushing in the same direction. She realized then that she wasn’t swimming. She was treading water, paddling against the current.

The muscles in her arms already burned. She was getting more exhausted by the second.

She strained again to get a bead on where she was. And then she saw the shadow of something overhead. A bridge.

She was in the middle of the river.

Frantic now, she swam for the shore, wide strokes, straight kicks, employing every ounce of energy in her possession. She swam like an Olympian. Like Esther Williams. But every force she exerted was met with twice the resistance. The current was too strong. She couldn’t fight it.

CHAPTER

57

Archie stumbled through
the waist-deep water, calling out for Susan, for the boy, for Flannigan. He coughed after each name, as if even the effort of producing sound were too much for his lungs. He didn’t know if it was from his cold or all the water he’d inhaled.

The flashlight was gone, along with his shoes, torn away in the flood. His phone was dead. Some of the buildings had exterior emergency lights, and the flashing white and yellow beacons illuminated the scene in splinters of light.

He kept walking. Kept calling for them.

His knee jammed into something immovable underwater. He put his hands in the cold river and ran them over the obstacle. A concrete public trash can. He could see its former contents now, a trail of paper cups and red plastic straws, crumpled take-out bags and water bottles, stretching out in a vague trail across the water. Archie found his way around the trash can, and then nearly lost his balance going over a curb. A branch swept past and Archie grabbed it, using it to trace the ground ahead like a blind man.

He could wade out. Make his way up to the rescue crews on Burnside. Get help. But it would take valuable, maybe crucial minutes.

The Willamette had pulled them in opposite directions, Archie guessed. If he was right, if Susan wasn’t nearby, then she was in the river.

The helicopters still hovered overhead, only now their spotlights scanned along the edge of the waterfront. They were looking for survivors.

Archie could hear sirens. And see some kind of light gliding on the surface of the water, getting closer.

He saw other lights then. Skating along the water, appearing from behind buildings and dispersing.

Rescue boats.

The first light he saw was headed toward him, moving north down what had been the parkway.

“Here!” Archie yelled, waving his arms. “Here!”

A spotlight beam hit him in the face and stayed fixed on him until the boat was right at his side.

An arm reached under each of Archie’s armpits and pulled him, belly first, onto the black Zodiac. Someone put a blanket around him.

When Archie looked up he saw two National Guard soldiers wearing black life jackets.

“You find anyone else?” Archie asked.

They shook their heads no.

Archie coughed, and when he caught his breath he looked out toward the river. He knew what the current was like out there. If Susan and Patrick had been swept into the Willamette, they’d be a half mile away by now.

“How fast can this thing go?” he asked.

CHAPTER

58

Susan stopped swimming
and let the river take her. She tried to inhale deeply and float on the surface like she’d done a thousand times in a hundred hotel pools, but the water was too rough, and pulled her under, and rolled over her face, leaving her even more exhausted and disoriented and sputtering. So she stayed vertical, her socked feet kicking, the boots long gone, arms shoveling water, her head like a human buoy on the surface. There was so much junk and wreckage in the river that she had to stay vigilant just to keep from getting beaned by a log or loose street sign. She kept her paddling arms near the surface and her strokes wide, so that she might brush with her hand anything headed her way. So far she’d swatted away split wood and branches and what felt like the rearview mirror of a car. Her hair was matted with twigs. Her hands felt like they were bleeding. Her skin shuddered. A frigid chill had settled deep inside her bones.

She turned her face up at the midnight sky, the rain hitting her lashes.

It was as black as the water, except for one bright star.

Not a star. A planet.

Venus.

No, Jupiter.

She could never get those two straight.

It was too big to be a planet. It was close. Susan felt the water flatten around her just before the wind from the chopper blades hit her face.

“Hey!” she yelled, swallowing some water. She choked and lifted her hands to wave, but that only made her sink up to her hairline. She kicked hard, as hard as she could, and managed to lift one arm up and beat it against the sky. “Down here!” she yelled. “I’m here!”

But it streaked overhead without pausing, and she was left alone again and without light.

They couldn’t see her. It was too dark. There was too much debris.

She was going to die.

She started to breathe hard, sharp little pants, and her eyes burned with hot tears. Her head felt light. She bit her tongue and tasted blood.

They might never find her body. She’d sink. Get stuck under all that crap and be carried off and end up decaying under a dock somewhere. If she was lucky the bacteria in her stomach would create enough gas for her bloated body to disentangle itself and bob to the surface.

Susan didn’t want to die.

Her legs were cramping up, her lungs throbbed. She needed to calm down, to slow her breathing.

The first stage of drowning was fear.

She thought of Patrick, out there alone, scared, if he was still alive.

Talk to yourself
, Susan thought.
Talk yourself through this
. That’s what reporters did, didn’t they?

They took notes.

They did research.

And they hoped that one day all of that useless knowledge they’d stored up would come in handy.

The water was cold, and Susan clawed at it, trying to keep her chin above the surface. It was dark and she couldn’t see anything. She didn’t even know which way the current was taking her. The river water tasted like mud and metal. All her life she had been told not to drink water from the Willamette, that it was polluted with mercury and sewage and radioactive runoff from Hanford. Now she’d probably swallowed a keg of it. If she didn’t drown, she’d die of cancer.

Most people who were drowning didn’t cry out for help. They were too busy trying to breathe.

It’s not like you see on TV.

It’s silent.

People just slip under the surface, and are gone.

Sticks and debris snapped against her legs, focusing her mind like a slap in the face. The river groaned and roared. It was the only sound.

Her body burned with exhaustion.

It took everything she had to take that last breath. She could have held it. Bought herself another few minutes. But she’d never been the type of person to go quietly. So she yelled. That whole lungful of sweet oxygen—she let it go in one word. “Archie.” It rang in her head as loud and clear as a bell, but she wasn’t even sure she’d said it out loud. His name echoed in her brain, fading into a mantra as she sank below the waterline.

Archie.

It took her a split second to realize she was underwater. It was quiet, the roar of the river a distant hum.

She stretched a hand up and managed to find the cold night air with the tips of her fingers, but she had no leverage, no way to push herself above the water. She could feel her body panic, like a spark bursting into flame, and she inhaled water, a great cold gulp of it. She choked, and it hurt. But she couldn’t stop. She inhaled more of it.

Her brain wasn’t working. She searched sloppily for some sentence to hang on to.

The second stage. The epiglottis sealed the airway. The body’s way of protecting the lungs from filling up with water.

She was calm now, and so tired. The water carrying her. It was a relief to stop fighting it, to let her body rest.

She wasn’t cold anymore.

She thought of her dad, dying in his hospital bed, and how in the end, after all those months of fighting, dying had seemed peaceful.

She thought of her mom, and how pissed off she would be by this.

What was the third stage?
Unconsciousness
. It would happen soon, and then she would go into cardiac arrest. Her heart would stop. She would be clinically dead. It wouldn’t hurt. She’d be asleep.

Four minutes.

That’s how long you had between clinical death and biological death. CPR. Defibrillation. You could restart the heart, if you got there in time.

Four minutes. About the length of an average pop song.

That’s how long Archie had to save her.