His execution was precise. The body on the floor of the elevator, dead or alive, was a loud statement: this was no bullshit. The .38 was pointed at Jared Kingston’s temple, who winced every few seconds, as if Jim was really ramming the barrel into the kid’s flesh.
Minutes later — with a dozen of Burlington’s finest watching from the hoods of their vehicles, guns drawn in a small fleet comprised of Chittenden County Sheriff’s Department, volunteer firemen, and two Feds — Jim marched his three hostages out of Fletcher Allen to his Caprice Classic, his expression incongruously relaxed. He held the boy to his chest and used the other two, Elizabeth and Jared, as human shields. Jared was in front, and the girl behind, towed by her hand. She was able to move, but remained catatonic, the goop covering her eyes as it had Caleb’s.
Jim shoved her and Jared into the back of the car.
The trooper actually paused as he prepared to put Caleb in between them. He looked up at Tom and said, “I forgot to bring a car seat.”
Tom looked into Jim’s bloodshot, sparkling eyes, “We’ll make do.”
Jim handed Jared his department-issue Glock.
“Goddammit,” muttered someone next to Tom, one of Mahoney’s men. The cops held their weapons aimed at Jim Cruickshand, but he never gave them a moment when he wasn’t shielded by a hostage or by his Caprice.
The kid sat with the Glock in his lap, his face blank and tired-looking, the child next to him, and the girl slumped in the seat on the other side.
It made Tom’s chest hurt to see the three of them like that. He tried to make up his mind if the Kingston kid was going along with it because he was just scared, because he was malicious, or because he had been taken over by whatever plague had finally worked its way into the nettles of Jim Cruickshand. Into his muscles and bones, his endocrine system, his mind.
Tom glanced up at the hospital before getting into his car. Dozens of silhouettes were visible in the windows, and he thought of when the boys had appeared on the lawn of the RRMC. Maddy was already pulling her seatbelt across her chest.
“Looks like we’re going back home,” Tom said to her.
She smiled, it had lost some of its usual radiance. “That’s right, babydoll.”
* * *
Cruickshand led the way. Tom followed directly behind in the Blazer, per Jim’s orders. A Burlington cop waved his hand in the air, an indication to the rest of them to pursue, and a caravan of law enforcement left behind the hospital in the wet night.
As they mounted the ramp to highway 81, headed north to the ferry, Maddy said, “I can’t believe this.”
“Yeah,” said Tom. He lit a cigarette. He shook the pack and looked in. There were only three left. The first drag made him cough.
Maddy scowled and batted away the smoke. “You’re crazy. Put that out.”
Tom cracked the window. The wipers slapped back and forth, sloughing off the fat drops of rain.
She redirected her ire, “A hundred fucking cops and we just let him put the kids in the car and drive off?”
Tom looked over at her. It was maybe only the second time he’d ever heard Maddy Kruger use profanity.
“You had another plan?”
She shifted and looked out the window. He could feel the anger in her rising. It was something new, coming from Maddy. She had always been powerful, but always positive.
“All you boys, all your radios, all your guns, all your strategy. Mahoney and his army of Burlington cops. The Chittenden County Sheriff’s Department. Now FBI, for God’s sake, Tommy. Half of them are behind us. We could get the National Guard in on this and it wouldn’t do a damn thing.”
For some reason, it agitated him. Not because she was coming down on the law, not because she was pointing out their ineptitude, but because she was mad, she was right, and Tom didn’t know how to handle it.
“What would you have us do, Maddy? Huh? What would be your big solution?”
She looked at him, seeing she had gotten under his skin. Her eyes had a wizened, owlish look.
“We need those other boys. The ones from the lawn. The ones who had the coins.”
“They’re gone, Maddy. Their role is over.”
“Role? What role? How do you know?”
Tom was silent. He didn’t know how he knew, or even if he did know. It was ridiculous, all of it. It was lunacy. Was he jealous of some teenagers who could float in the air or some kids who could pull coins out of their butt? He felt laughter welling up within him, and some of it came to the surface in a short bark of laughter, which brought on a coughing fit.
“Good,” said Maddy, with some true spite in her voice this time. “Keep smoking those.”
“Maddy! There is no superman coming to save us. There are no saints swooping down from heaven. Alright? Those boys, whatever they are, their job was to try and pay this thing off. Do you get it? That’s what a ‘wagerer’ is.”
Tom felt certain of his words, as though he were at last articulating the thoughts which had been forming over the past forty-eight hours.
“Jesus Christ. Even in the netherworld there’s fucking capitalism.”
“No, Tom. You’re wrong. When did you get to be so cynical?”
“Me? You’re the one talking about how futile this all is, Maddy. I’m being realistic. They gambled something, a long time ago, and they lost. That’s what I think. They did something bad, Maddy. I don’t know — maybe they betrayed Jesus for thirty pieces of silver, for all I know. Maybe they’re Judas’s descendants. And now they pay down their debt. That’s what they do, they pay down their debt, and they try to block this . . . thing.”
“I don’t agree.”
“Fine. Don’t agree. But whatever has gotten into everything and is screwing everyone up, people like Jim, and this girl, and the little boy, now maybe even you and me. Whatever it is . . .”
He glanced at her in the swirls of color thrown by the police lights surrounding them. He flicked the cigarette out the window.
“. . . we’re on our own.”
He expected her to snap back at him, for the two of them to really have it out. But she didn’t argue this time.
The moment passed, and the road rushed towards them. Jim had them doing seventy-five miles per hour. Behind him, the caravan followed, at least two-dozen vehicles, their sirens silenced, as Jim had instructed. Tom heard the thudding of a helicopter in the distance. He watched the rear of Jim’s Caprice. The car seemed to float on a shifting, lashing cloud of rain.
Tom imagined the backseat: the Kingston boy sitting with the gun in his lap, vapidly watching the wet, black road unspool towards them. The Goldfine girl, sitting up like a dummy, her eyes closed covered with that kind of plastic patina, her mouth slightly open.
He imagined Caleb holding on to her arm, like a person might hold a flag as they went into battle. His other hand closed into a small fist, as if holding something special to him. His feet dangling off of the bench seat.
Tom imagined looking through the darkness at him, and the child smiled back, his red pacifier bobbling in his mouth. His eyes were also glued shut, with what looked to Tom like conjunctivitis, pale-green, suppurated slivers of it bonding his small lids together, but the child didn’t seem to be upset by it. Tom lingered for a moment in this astral space, sure that somehow the baby boy knew he was being watched, and then Caleb took his hand from Elizabeth’s arm, pulled the pacifier from his mouth with a delicate pop sound, and said, “Charlie.”
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
“Jim said something to me earlier, when we were on the phone.”
Maddy raised her eyebrows, listening.
“He said he was doing what he should have done a long time ago,” said Tom. Tom imagined Jim as he sat in behind the steering wheel, gripping it with both hands, his spine curved into the seat, his waxen complexion and the hollowness of his eyes, the stubble along the back of his wide neck.
“At first I thought he meant, I don’t know, take his life, suicide by cop, something
. . .”
Beside Tom, Maddy was nodding.
“What?”
She licked her lips and composed herself. She wasn’t the jovial, can’t-get-me-down Maddy anymore.
“Have you ever noticed, Tom, none of us have families? Not you, not me, not Jimmy. Either we couldn’t work it out, or we weren’t interested to begin with.”
Tom thought of Steph. In his mind, her face was dimmer, now. He thought of her and Brian, pulling out of the driveway in the Acres. Brian, who always reminded Tom of the boy placing that phone call from the convenience store, a kid Tom had never even met but had connected to his would-be stepson, as if they were two versions of the same human being.
“Okay,” said Tom. “So we’re not very compromising people. I like to fart in bed, what of it?”
He smiled and looked at her. She manufactured a small grin.
“Then what? Because none of us are happily married with a bunch of baby mice running around, Jim’s going to put us all out of our misery?”
She turned her head and looked at him. “You think that’s what this is?”
Up ahead, they were getting off 81 to take a lesser route from here to the ferry. Tom glanced in the rearview mirror at the train of police following them, water fanning out to either side of the cars. Civilian vehicles were slowing down and moving over onto the shoulder, slushing more water along. At the bottom of the off ramp, a family in a pulled-over SUV stared at them with slack-jawed expressions as Tom and Maddy drove past.
“No,” Tom said, “I don’t.”
“I think I feel it, I think I feel what Jim means. You know? But I don’t think it’s something you could write down in a report.”
Maddy ran a hand over her face. Tom thought he saw that her hand, wrinkled with age, was trembling. Her bracelets clinked together as they accordioned into one another.
“At some point you awaken the demons, Tom. We could have ended things right there, right then, right at the pond, right when we were kids. I think Jim feels that. I think Jim feels we should have ended something. This,” she waved her arms around in the air, her bracelets clattering some more, “all this that’s going on, Tom, whatever it is, miracles, second coming, I’m not sure, Tommy, but what I am sure is that part of it is not good. Part of it comes from some place very bad, you’re right. But it’s from some very bad thing, Tommy. Something in that pond. Something we have to stop.”
Tom looked out the window, where the dawn’s light was spreading along the blur of trees to the east, small farms, vinyl-sided homes. To the west, the world was all darkness and rain. Lake Champlain, its banks spilling over, lined with the twirling yellow lights of highway department vehicles and volunteer firemen, was just beyond.
“This lake was formed millions of years ago by glaciers,” Tom said. “It used to go all the way to Red Rock.”
Maddy shook her head. “I didn’t know that.”
“I’ve seen a map. Pretty impressive. It was a big, big lake. Left a lot of the ponds and rivers behind. Someday, they’ll be all dried up, too.”
He coughed, tried to stifle it, foolishly.
“Not by the looks of it.”
Tom smiled. “Yeah, right.”
He watched the Caprice ahead of them. Jim swerved a little over the double yellow, fishtailing water, but he had dropped his speed since getting off the freeway. The cops stayed close behind. “I don’t know if we’ve totally lost Jim, or not.”
“What do you mean, honey?”
Tom liked Maddy calling him honey. It meant part of her was returning. Hell, it meant, in its own way, that maybe the world wasn’t ending just yet.
“Because I know what Jim must know,” Tom said.
“And what’s that?”
“That the lake isn’t going to be crossable. The ferry’s not going to be running. The water’s too high, and now there are gas fires spreading over parts of the lake. We’re going to get up there to South Hero, and that’s going to be it, ladies and germs. We got nowhere to go.”
PART VII
TALISMANS
CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE
It happened three months ago. The plumber had shown up while Jared and Liz had still been in bed, sleeping off some Drambuie from the night before.
Noises down in the kitchen. Jared descended the stairs with a rifle in hand.
The plumber’s pink ass was showing where he worked beneath the sink, a tuft of lower back hair glowing in the morning light. He banged his head when Jared racked the slide on the A-bolt.
The plumber scrambled out. He was an older man with droopy eyes and stubble. His mouth worked to form the words. “Hey, I didn’t think anyone was here.”
Jared said, “I don’t know about just coming into my house like that.”
The plumber repeated, looking at the rifle, “I’m sorry, I didn’t know anyone was here.”
Jared had called the plumber a week prior, frustrated after he had tried to fix a sink problem himself. He had only succeeded in making a bigger mess of things by pulling off an elbow joint that had not been easy to get back on, and discovering that there was more to the problem than he could fix.
They argued, but in the end Jared sulked off, and the plumber went about finishing the job.
That was how it had gone, but in this dreamed version as Jared rode in the back of the trooper’s Caprice, he strode across the yellow linoleum to the man, the morning bright white outside with fresh-fallen snow, and wrapped his fingers around his neck and squeezed, watching those droopy eyes light up with panic.
Yet he couldn’t quite strangle the plumber. As Jared buried his fingers deep into the rumpled gooseflesh and unshaven hair of the man’s neck, his fingers only sank deeper, as if the plumber’s body was composed of caulk that had yet to dry. They toppled to the floor where the plumber flopped like a fish now, Jared on top, his entire hands burrowed into the man’s skin, into his body, when the clicking sound came from out on the porch.
Jared lifted his head to look. The kitchen door was left open — the son-of-a-bitching plumber had left it open — and only the screen door remained. A coyote looked in on them. Jared watched it lick its chops. Another one hopped up the three steps to the porch, a bit of snow on its muzzle. They looked in together, the two ragged dogs, waiting for their meal.
One snarled, and Jared saw its teeth and red gums. Just when he thought the mongrel was about to pounce, to tear through the fine, soft mesh of the porch screen, there was another noise, and both dogs jolted, startled, and made room.
There came a rustling sound in the air and then a thump that shook the room, the beating of great wings. Jared watched through the square screen as the dogs slunk off to the side.
First he saw the hooked beak and a flare of slit-like nostrils. Then the eyes, black as coal, yet seeing, spinning, looking in, locking with Jared’s eyes. A huge nectarine-pit of a body with scaled legs beneath, taking steps over the warping porch floorboards.
The thing was prehistoric, a pterodactyl, only red, covered in long, coarse feathers, woven together like the webbing of a bat’s wings. Fibrous, gnarled hairs covered the crenellations and swirls — like knots in a tree — of the basketball-sized body.
Jared looked down. The plumber was gone — all that remained was a pool of viscous water.
And now Jared, too, was evaporating, no longer in the kitchen or even out on the porch, but incorporeal, a spirit hovering around the bird-thing as it morphed, there in front of the screen door.
Its bones cracked and reformed; the squishing sound of churning, recapitulating guts, the rewiring of arterial circuitry. It sprouted copious hair with the sound of rushing hot wind through dried reeds and dead goldenrod, and the thing became a coyote, and turned, and looked at Jared, and in its coal-black eyes Jared saw the pond, and the water in the center of it swirling.
He started to drift towards it, to float into the eyes of the coyote and further and into the pond, to fall into it, still dreaming, hearing the hushed voice, like the wind speak
ing:
“Ven aqui, vacié. Getränk. Lessen Sie mich Sie fullen.”
* * *
The water surged all around him. Christopher found himself floating, tumbling, caught in the thrall of the thing in the pond as it thrashed. The mini-tsunami had swept Christopher off his feet, and its undertow had pulled him into the pond
Now, the thrust of the creature’s tail, back and forth, side to side, like the body of a shark, created even more suction.
Christopher swam away from the darkness, his lungs hot and exploding. He could see the sky above. He kicked and struggled to draw his body back to the air. His lips trembled. His eyes blinked through the thick pond water. For a terrible moment, he thought he would never breathe again.
Then the creature was gone, and the water began to settle, and Christopher, with one last tremendous whipsaw of his body, broke the surface.
He took huge, ragged gulps of air. After he’d floated on his back for a moment, his eyes stinging as he looked up at the baleful, overcast sky, at the rain coming down, he turned himself over to look.
He thought he could see the tops of the trees swaying where something had just brushed its way through. Something from the water which now flowed out of the pond and through the woods towards the river, towards Vermont, melting residual snowpack and gathering more flood power as it went. But it was the storm ruffling the treetops, raking its cold fingers of wind through the forest, and nothing else.
The thing had not escaped yet.
CHAPTER SIXTY
Tom and Maddy sat in the Blazer, staring in disbelief at the moored ferry, bucking and frothing in the water. The vehicles denied boarding were slowly trundling off toward the parking lot. All except for one car — Jim’s Caprice, which sat waiting to drive aboard.
Ferry workers scurried about, directing traffic, along with a mixed crew of municipal and volunteer workers, cops and firemen tending to endless tasks, it seemed. A fire truck sat in water up to its tire wells. The fires over the lake had been mostly put out — only a few flames could be seen licking the sky further out, beyond anyone’s reach.
HIGHWATER: a suspense thriller you won't be able to put down Page 30
