Black Water

by Ninie Hammon

  Bailey looked to her left through a small space in the broken rock outcrop and saw it coming, a dark shadow against the dusky shades of evening, a black hole of nothingness that sucked the world into its gaping maw as it chewed its way down the mountainside.

  That one glance told Bailey she had come too late, was not far enough up the mountainside to avoid being washed away. She’d tempted the gods when she tried to change a destiny already decreed, set down in vivid detail perhaps by the hand of Sophia Watford herself.

  Macy Cosgrove would become the little girl in the painting. When the waters passed and the horrified rescue workers arrived, they would find her face-up in the muck, her hair a tangle of black goo, her hand, stamped with the carnival admission date “July 3,” lying on her chest like she was saluting the flag.

  And Bailey would drown with her, which was destined to be as well. It had been set down half a century ago that she would die with a bullet hole in her head and she had escaped. Now destiny would collect the debt it was owed.

  In moments, she would feel the bite of cold, foul water, stinging her eyes, a shroud blotting out the night with a greater darkness. She would feel her lungs strain for breath, bursting out of her chest until she could stand it no more.

  Then she would give in to her body’s final yearning and breathe deeply.

  She would suck in cold black death and be no more.

  “Bethany,” she whispered.

  The image of Bethany flashed into her consciousness, filled up her whole mind. Just like it had done in that safe house somewhere, she never found out where, that place where she’d demanded they bring her Bethany. And they’d refused.

  Jessie sits bolt upright in bed in the midnight dark, tangled in sweat-damp sheets. She’s had the most horrible nightmare. Her heart is thudding, her vision blurring with each beat, so she can’t seem to shed the gossamer skein of the dream, pull free from the web of it and return to the real world of her bedroom with Bethany asleep in her crib down the hall and Aaron beside her.

  She feels for Aaron on the other side of the bed. The sheets are cold.

  She cries out, must have cried out, because the room suddenly floods with light.

  What room? Where is she? This isn’t her bedroom. Where’s Aaron?

  And then a woman who looks vaguely familiar crosses the room to her and sits on the edge of the bed. Bailey remembers her then. She’s the woman from the police station.

  The room with the table and the three people.

  It’s real. It had happened. It wasn’t a nightmare.

  Bailey bursts into tears, gut-wrenching spasms of grief that wrack her whole body like seizures. The sobbing goes on and on until her chest hurts and the muscles refuse to make her chest move and her voice is gone. But still she cries, silently, tearlessly.

  The woman holds her in her arms, rocks her back and forth, says nothing, just lets her cry.

  When her eyes open again, she knows where she is. She knows what has happened. There is no disorientation now, only the horrible weight of understanding, the rock of cold lead so heavy in her belly the weight of it draws her whole body downward.

  The woman is sitting in a chair on the other side of the room, has been watching her sleep. How had she slept? There’s a bitter taste in her mouth and she recognizes it as some kind of sedative. She hates narcotics. They make her feel hungover the next day and that’s how she feels now.

  “Would you like a cup of coffee?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “Cream and sugar?”

  “No sugar, a bucket of cream.”

  She feels pain so intense in her belly that she looks down expecting to see a blade buried up to the hilt there. Aaron always gives the bucket-of-cream line when he orders coffee for her in a restaurant because waitresses never bring enough of those little thimble-sized containers.

  Aaron.

  Aaron, who is dead.

  Later, seated around the kitchen table, a breakfast of McDonalds McMuffins uneaten on a paper towel in front of her, she listens to the same three people who had spoken to her the night before. But there is a fourth man with them who didn’t speak until near the end. They introduce him as Bernard Jordan, an officer with the U.S. Marshals Service.

  “Mrs. Cunningham, we spoke last night. Do you recall, we told you about—?”

  “The Sergei guy, yes, I remember. You don’t have to go back over it all.”

  The people at the table exchange a glance, but this time it’s a relaxing gesture, tension gone, she has returned to the land of the sane and living and they can talk to her like a normal person.

  “Just don’t do that looking-at-each-other thing again, okay? I’m with you.”

  The woman at least has the decency to look chagrined.

  “Let’s get this over with. I want to go home and see my little girl. My baby.”

  “I’m afraid that won’t be possible.”

  “Not possible!” She is flabbergasted. “You’re the ones who’re crazy. My baby needs her mother.” She almost sobs and she would have sworn that there is not a tear left in her whole body to shed. “And I need her!”

  She turns to the woman.

  “She looks like her daddy. Just like Aaron. Has his eyes.” An aching need to hold Bethany wells up in her chest so powerfully it takes her breath away. “I want my baby!”

  The man who’d said “that won’t be possible” takes his phone out of his pocket and places in on the table in front of him.

  “Remember I told you last night that we had … moles, informants in Mikhailov’s organization? This is a recording one of them made when Mikhailov was grilling a new plebe in the organization.”

  He picks up the phone and touches the screen and a gravelly voice issues from the speaker. The English is heavily accented, but the words are mostly understandable.

  “Cross me and you die. A guarantee, I kill you.” The voice is emotionless, not as if he were making a horrible threat but like he’s telling the speaker box in a drive-through window to super-size his fries. “Any two-bit hood can say that, yes? But does anybody else guarantee to kill those you love, too? No, they do not, but I, Sergei Wassily Mikhailov, make you that promise. You cross Sergei and you die.” He pauses and his voice grows softer, but there still is no threat in it, no emotion of any kind. “And your wife dies, your mother, your brothers and sisters, your children. I will find those you love and I will butcher them, one by one.”

  Bailey feels the voice slither into her ear like a poisonous serpent, coil through her head and down into her belly where a cold lump of fear begins to freeze everything it touches, ice spreading out inside her so fast she can hear the cracking sound it makes.

  “It could take a week, a month, a lifetime. A fall from a high window, yes? A hit-and-run driver. A car explosion. A gunshot from a dark alley. One by one, I will not leave breathing anyone you care about. Even after you are dead, you can look up through the fires of hell and watch me slice the throat of your baby son lying in his soiled diaper in your dead wife’s arms. And then I lick his blood off the dagger.”

  Bailey is unprepared for the nausea. It rises up in the back of her throat so instantly that she only has time to turn her head before she begins to wretch, spewing out coffee and acidic bile all over the floor in the kitchen of the house that could have been anywhere. Anywhere at all.

  She wretches until her stomach is empty, then continues to dry heave until she is breathless, tears running down her face.

  The woman helps her to her feet and leads her to the bathroom, uses a cold washcloth to wash her face, clean her mouth.

  When she returns to the kitchen, someone has cleaned up the mess, though the room still smells vaguely of vomit.

  She sits back down where she had been seated and looks at the table. The cellphone filled with words of unfathomable horror is gone.

  “Sergei Mikhailov is not human,” says the other man at the table, not the one who had turned on the recording from his cellphone. “I’
m serious, I really don’t think there’s a man in there anywhere. He is pure evil, has made his way in life by annihilating the competition and ruthlessly butchering anybody who stands in his way.”

  The woman speaks and her voice is hard-edged, not soothing.

  “You have to understand what you’re dealing with here, Mrs. Cunningham. His whole life is built on intimidation. He keeps the troops in line, and his enemies at bay, because they know he always … always keeps his promises.”

  “If he knew you were alive, he would kill you,” says the man who had played the recording. “And eventually he would kill every member of your family, too.”

  The man from the federal marshal’s office speaks.

  “I work with the Witness Protection Program. It will be our job to keep you safe until we’re ready for you to testify.”

  “Testify? You think I’m going to … you want me to testify?”

  “There is only one way you and your family will ever be safe, and that’s if we put a needle in Sergei Mikhailov’s arm and turn on the poison. We still impose the death penalty in this state.”

  Then he continues to talk. Some portion of Bailey’s brain records and processes what he says, about the absolute anonymity of the program, its record for keeping future witnesses safe. He talks about how she would receive a whole new identity, complete with all the paperwork to back it up, would be placed in a safe environment, would be protected.

  She listens, but feels like she has somehow not quite caught up to what he’s saying. Like his lips are moving, but his words don’t sync up with them. There is some deeper, darker meaning she isn’t getting.

  And then she knows, but it’s more than a sudden understanding. It’s an urgent message lashing in red letters on an LED screen: BETHANY! BETHANY! BETHANY!

  “My baby!” she cries. “When will you bring her to me?”

  But she knows. Even as she asks the question she knows. She just has to hear the words out loud.

  “Mrs. Cunningham, as far as anybody knows, you were killed in a terrible traffic accident with your husband. You can’t let anybody in your family know you’re alive. If you do, you’re not merely putting your own life in danger. You’re signing their death warrants, too.”

  She can’t breathe.

  The other man seems to think she needs further convincing.

  “Mrs. Cunningham, if you get hit by a bus while you’re in the Witness Protection Program, you will be buried anonymously. We will not tell your family. If Mikhailov found out that you’d been in hiding, waiting to testify against him, he’d keep his promise, and without your testimony, we couldn’t lock him up to protect your family.”

  They say they’ll be convening a super-secret grand jury. That it will issue sealed indictments against Mikhailov and the others. That’s the first time they use the word “soon.”

  Soon.

  The word bounces around like a pinball in her mind as she sits at the table in the kitchen of the anonymous house. She never does find out where that place was, had not been aware of her environment enough to notice or care when they picked her up in the nondescript blue Honda Accord and then set out on the road, driving day after day.

  Final stop: Albuquerque.

  Well, the first final stop. The second final stop is Omaha. The third…

  She’s never told the reasons why they suddenly uproot her without warning, federal marshals swooping down on her in the middle of the night and whisking her off into the darkness. They’re always vague, non-committal. They’d felt some danger, some threat. Afraid she might have blown her cover, somehow. It is all very James Bond-esque.

  But before they have a chance to serve the super-secret, hush-hush sealed indictment, Mikhailov slips out of the country and returns to Russia where there is no extradition treaty. After that, they lose track of him. He might have come back to the U.S. Might not. His son was never seen again after that night. Maybe his father turfed him off to some rehab program to dry him out, then to some foreign country for a new start. Maybe he simply killed him. Nobody knew.

  After a while, after the weeks blend into months that blend into years, Bailey’s life becomes a ship adrift on a still sea. No land in sight. No wind to fill her sails. No current to bear her along. Just there. Motionless. Waiting for “soon.”

  Bailey understood that soon would never come now, that she’d never hold her own baby girl in her arms again, cradle her tiny body as she now cradled the squirming baby boy. She fell forward onto the slope on her elbows, shielding baby Jake, wondering how it would feel different to drown for real this time, but in her own body. She felt a small hand grab hers. She grasped it tight, and the little girl snuggled close. Macy snuggled close. The roar struck then, a rumble that ate her breath, a sound assaulting all her senses at once, disorienting and dizzying in its magnitude.

  The sound left no space in her head for memories, for thoughts of any kind. It consumed her.

  Dobbs didn’t even break stride when he saw the old lady in the wheelchair. He merely changed direction, calling out as he ran.

  “I said everybody in the house!”

  The man slowed, looked back toward Dobbs. The woman kept running.

  The back porch was nothing but a slab of three-inch concrete that stretched out in a fifteen-foot square in front of the back door. Dobbs stepped up on it in one stride, grabbed the wheelchair handles and shoved the chair and the woman in it off into the dirt.

  The old woman’s back was bent so badly in a dowager’s hump that she had to lift her chin to see anything but her gnarled hands in her lap. She cried out when Dobbs leapt up onto the porch and ran at her. When he started shoving her, she grabbed hold of the arms of her chair with fingers so bent and twisted with arthritis they looked useless. But she held firm.

  The chair made it about twenty feet on hard packed dirt behind the concrete slab, but when the wheels hit the tangle of weeds beyond it, the chair bogged down and refused to roll.

  “You don’t get paid unless you take everybody!” Dobbs called out.

  Perhaps it was the act of running itself, or maybe the intensity of Dobbs’s manner, but something had ignited a sense of urgency in the others that was beyond their desire for the hundred-dollar bill they had seen and the fifty they hadn’t. The woman kept running, shooing the girl ahead of her, and had made it to the bottom of the incline and started to climb. The man stopped, turned around and ran back to Dobbs.

  “Come on, Ma.” He took her hands and pulled her to a standing position in front of the chair.

  There was a sudden boom, the roar of a thousand MGM lions, from the top of the hollow. The boom resounded down the mountains in a continuous, rumbling cry.

  The man’s head jerked up toward the top of the hollow at the sound, then his wide, terrified eyes locked with Dobbs’s. He started to pull his mother toward the hillside, but Dobbs knew there was no time for that. He leaned over and picked up the old woman — hoped he didn’t hurt her! — and slung her over his shoulder in a fireman carry and lumbered as fast as he could across the weedy yard.

  He imagined he could hear a growing rumble behind him as he started up the incline and realized that even leaning over, he was too top heavy and off balance to climb.

  “Drag her!” the man cried, and pulled his mother off Dobbs’s shoulder to the ground. Taking one of her arms, he started pulling her up the hillside. Dobbs grabbed her other arm and hauled her upward. The hillside was covered in fallen leaves, slick to climb, but a surface over which the two of them could drag a body. Dobbs dug his big feet into the soft leaves, leaned forward and shoved his free hand into the dirt, hauling up the weight between him and the other man as fast as they could.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Brice was flung off his feet by the explosion, flew backward as if he had been slapped by an invisible hand. The roar ate into his head, the sound rebounding inside his skull, echoing and reverberating.

  He hit the dirt on his back and slid another ten feet. The full fo
rce of the blast had been directed outward from the bottom center of the dam, or he’d have been killed. Now, he lay on his back watching huge boulders take flight, rocket up into the sky, up and up, until the energy propelling them was expended. Then the debris seemed to pause in the air, hang suspended there for a heartbeat before it began to drop back to the earth in a rain of rocks and dirt and chunks of coal.

  The rain fell on Brice where he lay stunned, pummeling him. He’d have been crushed if any of the bigger rocks had landed on him. As it was, he was merely cut and bruised by the flying debris. The world was strangely silent after the blast, but for the ringing in Brice’s ears and the thudding and splashing of the rocks crashing back to earth. The universe held its breath for a second. Two. Three.

  He sat up, unable yet to get to his feet, looking at what only moments before had been a solid bulldozed wall of rock, dirt and coal refuse. Now, the wall had a gigantic rip in the middle, through which thick black water had begun to flow. He watched, still in shock, as the water’s flow began to rip out more rock along its edges, dislodging huge hunks, the hole growing ever wider and wider in both directions.

  Then it let go. With a grinding rock-on-rock rumble, the whole dam collapsed and a wave of black water rushed forward and dived off into the hollow. The sound it made as it fell was not a peaceful waterfall sound but a grumbling roar as it ate away everything in its path.

  The people in the hollow … how many? He didn’t know.

  The painting of a little girl drowned in black mud. Macy Cosgrove. It was exactly as Bailey had painted it.

  Bailey.

  He started to stagger to his feet, but the roaring in his ears was disorienting and he lost his balance, sat back down hard on the ground. That’s when he saw it, an object lying in the dirt near him. He reached out and picked it up, a broken yellow hair band with a small plastic minion on it, the one he’d seen Bailey use to pull her hair back into a ponytail that day at the lake. The day they had flown out across clear water together, feeling the wind and spray in their faces.