He didn’t know what was going to happen.
But he knew that he was going to find Jessica. No matter what.
He’d never done something so altruistic in his life.
But it wasn’t just Jessica’s life that was at stake.
It was his. It was Jim’s. It was all of theirs.
If they lost Jessica, they’d be more vulnerable.
Not that this thought was at the forefront of his mind.
All he was focusing on was driving.
The Subaru rocketed out of the driveway onto the road. Rob slammed on the brakes, shifted into first, and he was off, headed down the road in the direction that the motorcycles had disappeared down.
11
Jim
The water felt colder now than it had.
But Jim swam on.
His pants were dragging too much. He wished that he’d taken them off.
But it was too late.
He had to keep going.
Jim hadn’t even paused to look behind him, to see how far he’d come.
He just swam on.
It had been about thirty minutes, and he was already feeling it in his muscles. A burning sensation. A deep one.
He was using muscles he hadn’t used in years. And he was using them in ways that he hadn’t used them in years.
Ten minutes later, Jim was even more tired.
And he was beginning to think it was pointless.
Why did he think he could outswim a boat?
Why had he thought this was a good idea?
With the missing food, he was just wasting energy now. And it was energy that wasn’t going to be replaced easily.
With the supplies missing, they’d have to get creative in order to eat. And getting creative meant expending more energy.
It was just a tremendous spiral of energy loss. Thoughts of the second law of thermodynamics swirled through Jim’s head. Energy is always lost. The physicists called that entropy. Jim had studied it in school, and knew of it from his work with electronics, not that it had ever proved to be that useful, practically speaking.
But they weren’t useful thoughts.
He needed to concentrate.
So far, he hadn’t yet decided to turn back.
So the only option was to continue. Forward.
Just when he thought he couldn’t continue, just when he thought his burning, exhausted muscles might give out and he’d sink to the bottom of the lake, unable to rescue himself, he saw a flash of metal up ahead.
He paused in the water to get a better look. Treading water felt good compared to propelling himself forward constantly at an impossible pace.
This way, too, he could get his head higher out of the water, getting a better look.
Sure enough, there was a boat up ahead. He saw the sun glinting off its metal where the paint had worn off.
The boat was far off.
But not too far.
He could get there.
He just had to keep pushing.
At least the boat wasn’t lost. At least the fake cop hadn’t yet gotten to the shore.
All wasn’t lost.
Instinctively, Jim reached for his revolver in its holster. He didn’t draw it, but just felt the reassuring hardness of its handle as he wrapped his fingers around it.
The gun was his lifeline.
He didn’t waste much time treading water.
He’d been swimming freestyle, and he switched now to breaststroke. His thinking was that breaststroke wouldn’t create as much of a splash.
The competitive version of breaststroke had the swimmer moving up and down in the water quite a bit. The head bobbed up and dove back down again in an almost vicious way.
But Jim, instead, swam the more casual style.
He didn’t want to draw any more attention to himself than he had to.
He couldn’t make out, from where he’d been treading water, what kind of boat it was.
If it was a canoe, the fake cop would be facing forward.
Less chance for him to spot Jim as he approached.
Jim had to assume that he was armed.
If it was a rowboat, then Jim was in trouble. The fake cop would be facing exactly in Jim’s direction.
And it wasn’t like Jim could try to cut him off from the side. It would be too much swimming. Too long a route.
Jim already didn’t know how he’d managed to outpace a boat.
He’d been swimming as hard as he could, sure.
But the fake cop must have been paddling lazily. Either that or he was in terrible shape and had stopped, huffing and puffing, for a few breathers as the boat coasted, unpropelled, as slowly as a turtle for long periods.
It was ten more minutes before Jim was close enough to really see the boat.
It turned out it was two boats, rather than just one.
The fake cop was in a canoe, towing a rowboat.
Maybe that was what had slowed him down somewhat.
Jim’s plan was to get as close as he could, start treading water, and get off a single clean shot. All before the fake cop even spotted him.
It wasn’t exactly an honorable approach. Not like in the old cowboy movies, where the two dueling cowboys always faced each other, even perhaps exchanging pleasantries before the guns were fired.
But the situation was unjust from the start.
There was one way it could be honorable.
As far as Jim was concerned, he was hunting a thief.
Nothing more.
And a thief like that deserved what was coming to him.
Jim swam hard.
And fast.
But not fast enough.
When he was coming up for air, his head rising out of the cold water, he saw Andy in the boat suddenly turn around.
Their eyes met for a split second.
If Jim stopped to tread water now, he didn’t stand a chance in a gunfight.
Not at the distance.
Not without the relatively solid footing of the boat that Andy would have.
And Jim knew that Andy would go right for his gun.
So Jim didn’t wait.
He took a large breath, inhaling deeply and fully.
He dove down, pulling himself through the water.
He went down and down, as if he was trying to reach the bottom of the lake.
Just a few feet below the surface, the water was already getting noticeably colder.
Jim just kept swimming.
The first bullet hit the water.
It was a strange sight.
Jim saw the bullet’s trail, rather than the bullet itself.
The bullet left a wake of bubbles, a line cutting through the water.
Water is denser than air. The bullet slowed down as it drove down. It would reach the bottom of the lake.
And hopefully Jim wouldn’t.
The second bullet cut a path through the water. This time, it was a little closer to Jim.
Jim had two choices. He could resurface and return fire. Or he could dive deeper.
He chose to dive deeper.
A third, fourth, and fifth bullet hit the water.
Jim didn’t know what kind of gun Andy had, or how many rounds it held.
Ideally, he’d wait until Andy emptied his gun, and then resurface.
But that wasn’t likely to happen. Andy was clever. A clever thief.
Jim swam down another two feet.
He was already feeling like he needed to take a breath. He wasn’t used to swimming, let alone holding his breath underwater.
He needed to think fast.
He needed a plan. A better one than just waiting and then resurfacing to get shot.
Jim could see the hull of both boats above him. They weren’t far away.
He didn’t think. He just started swimming. Instead of continuing down, he started cutting across.
If he could make it under the boat, he could resurface on the other side. Maybe take Andy by surprise.
If he was lucky.
He didn’t know how much longer he could last without air. It was getting rough. His head felt light and strange. It wasn’t just another symptom on top of the normal exhaustion. This symptom was impossible to ignore. Impossible to simply push through. This symptom would kill him sooner rather than later.
He swam as fast as he could.
Bullets pounded through the water all around him. There was nothing he could do about them.
He just had to keep going.
Somehow, he got to the other side.
Ideally, he’d have liked to get some distance between himself and the boat.
But he wasn’t going to make it.
His body was screaming for air.
Desperately.
It was all he could do to simply resurface. He didn’t even reach for his Ruger.
His head pierced the surface of the water and he gasped loudly for air, his lungs finally receiving what they’d been screaming for.
He’d barely taken three breaths when the paddle swung through the air towards him.
The wide part of the paddle hit him in the head.
Pain flared through his skull.
His vision blacked out for a moment.
He sunk back down into the water, too filled with pain to move his arms or his legs.
He was sinking.
12
Liam
“They didn’t seem interested,” said Julia, Liam’s longtime partner.
“No,” said Liam, shaking his head, and sitting down on the edge of the bed in their RV.
Liam and Julia were staring at the same thing. On a small built-in coffee table, there was an ornate wooden box with the lid open.
They’d gotten the box on one of their trips to China, during one of their first summers after graduate school, where they’d met.
Inside the box were the last remains of their opiate stash.
They had the good stuff. Pharmaceutical pills. The real ones, right from the factories.
Liam had never messed around with the street stuff. Julia had. Just once. She’d said it had felt dirty. Totally unclean.
They were high-class people. Professors at a good school. And they considered themselves high-class.
Swinging, or whatever you wanted to call it, was just something that the lower classes didn’t understand. It was common at the universities. At least among the more open-minded professors.
They’d pursued their lifestyle all their lives. It was what they’d wanted. Educating and partying.
Sure, educating often had taken a back seat to partying. To having fun. To finding new partners. New excitement.
Opiates were rolled into their lifestyle.
They wouldn’t have been able to untangle one from the other.
They both knew that they couldn’t stop. They didn’t want to.
Before finding opiates, they’d both been depressed. Depressed with that academic spiritual ennui that was almost like a job requirement. For the humanities departments, at least.
The opiates had rescued them from that depression.
They’d allowed them to live.
To pursue their dreams.
To pursue other partners.
To pursue pleasure.
Together.
There wasn’t any turning back now.
The world was over.
And their lives were over.
“We’ve just got to make the best of it,” said Liam, speaking without looking at his longtime partner. “We’ve got to have as much fun as we can, while it lasts.”
“That’s what we’ve been doing.”
Liam reached forward and grabbed the box. He shuffled through the contents.
“There’s not much left,” he said, taking out a bottle and shaking it. “We’ve got a week at most.”
“There’s got to be some other way to get the stuff,” said Julia.
“Another way? Are you crazy?”
“It’s not that crazy. I mean, there’s always a way, right? That’s what we used to say when we were seducing someone together. That there was always a way. And it was usually right. Almost always.”
“We’ve already stopped at all the pharmacies we could find,” said Liam. “Opiates were the first things that were raided. We were weeks late.”
“But…”
“But what?”
“There’s got to be something natural we could try…”
“I think the slight withdrawal you’re experiencing is making you stupid. You know as well as I do where the poppy plant grows and where it doesn’t grow. And it’s not like we can get anywhere, start a crop, cultivate and process it, within time. And especially not with all the violence… I mean, hell, you taught a two-semester course on the opiate trade and its history…. Here, you really need this.”
Liam opened up the pill bottle, shook out a single pill. He tossed it to Julia, who caught it and swallowed it within a second. And without water.
“Feeling better?”
“Give me a moment.”
“I’d better take one too,” said Liam, shaking out another pill. And he shook out a second one, surreptitiously, so that Julia wouldn’t notice. He swallowed them both, throwing them back from the palm of his hand and opening up his throat the way he’d trained himself to.
Ten minutes later, the pills had started to kick in.
They were both feeling better.
“So what’s the plan?” said Julia.
“We’re going to go out with a bang.”
“A bang?”
“Yeah. We don’t have that much longer left. So we’re going to do what we do best.”
“And what’s that?”
“We’re going to have fun.”
“With who? We’ve already been with everyone else here hundreds of times. It’s lost its luster, you know? And no offense, Liam, but there’s nothing new if it’s just the two of us.”
Liam nodded. “Don’t worry, kid. We’re thinking along exactly the same lines.”
“So who is it then?”
“Who? Who better than that attractive pair that visited us earlier today.”
“They didn’t seem interested.”
“We’re going to have to make them interested. After all, it’s a new world. That means new rules.”
13
Jim
It was almost a full minute before Jim got a grip on himself. The pain was still there. Throbbing. But it wasn’t as all-encompassing and overpowering as it had been.
He was still sinking.
The water was cold and dark.
He fought against the pain and moved his left foot first.
Then his right.
Now his arms.
He kicked with his feet and churned with his arms.
He was rising, rising towards the surface of the lake.
The air had been knocked out of his lungs when the paddle had hit him.
But he was going to make it to the surface before he suffocated.
He knew he could do it.
He didn’t know how or why.
Or why he was continuing. It was if there was some resolve burning deep down inside him that couldn’t be snuffed out no matter what his body went through.
Jim felt the burning in his chest. It was intolerably painful.
He knew he didn’t have much longer.
He had to reach the surface soon. His lungs needed air. His body needed oxygen.
Jim had read about what it felt like to drown. They’d been horrible descriptions that were painful to read. But at the time he’d read them, they’d just been mere words on a page. Black and white text. Nothing more. No reality to them.
What he’d read had said that the body knows not to breathe underwater. The reflexes are so strong that a drowning person won’t automatically take a breath until right before they’re about to fall unconscious.
Knowing this, Jim was watchful for his own reflexes.
He felt it starting. He felt the ye
arning in his lungs and his throat and his mouth. He felt his body wanting to open his mouth.
But his mind knew that it was just water he’d be taking in, that he’d just die sooner.
The fact that the yearning was coming on now meant he wasn’t far from drowning.
He was kicking with everything he had. Pulling with his arms.
His muscles burned with an intensity he’d never felt before.
Suddenly, it was over.
All over.
His hand punched through the surface of the water. He felt the air on his hand before his mouth reached it.
His head broke through the surface. His mouth was already opening reflexively, water pouring into it.
He gasped and sputtered.
He tasted the air pouring in.
There wasn’t any time to think about whether he was about to be shot. Whether Andy was there in his boat, waiting for him to reappear.
If he was shot, he was shot. And that was it. His body was on the edge of death.
It wasn’t just that he couldn’t think about getting shot. It was that there was simply nothing that he could do about it.
Jim’s muscles continued to burn. The pain wouldn’t leave them as he tread water.
The seconds passed slowly. They turned into minutes.
Time was moving as slow as molasses.
As the minutes passed, Jim slowly started to feel calmer. His mind was no longer ringing like an alarm, sending him every signal it could to tell him he was almost at the point of death.
His heart rate slowed.
His muscles were still exhausted.
He was freezing cold.
But he was alive.
He could breathe. There was oxygen in his blood and his brain.
And he hadn’t been shot.
Jim had to force himself to take stock of his surroundings, to scan the water around him.
The boat was gone.
And he couldn’t see the shore.
His head still throbbed in pain from the blow.
Jim reached for his Ruger instinctively, checking to see if it was there.
It wasn’t.
But it had to be there.
His holster was a good one.
Jim reached again, felt around, mental alarms going wild.
It was definitely gone, probably resting now on the bottom of the lake. Completely irretrievable.
Surviving: The Complete Series [Books 1-3] Page 23
