by Ninie Hammon
He turned the hair band over and over in his hand, as if expecting the piece of yellow plastic to use minion-magic to call forth its owner and Bailey would materialize right there in front of him.
But she wasn’t here at the top of the hollow. She was down there, where the black water was rushing out to eat up the world. She, T.J. and Dobbs had come up here to the dam — he’d seen the Jeep tracks — and then had decided to evacuate the hollow all by themselves. There was no way he could know that to be true, but he was absolutely certain.
What he did not know was if they had made it in time. He leapt to his feet then, staggered, regained his balance and stood for a moment as the black water poured through the breech and down into the hollow. He snatched up his gun and holstered it, turned and ran for all he was worth back down the impossible road to his cruiser.
He keyed the microphone on his shoulder as he ran, blurted out, breathless and staccato.
“Subject is down,” he said. “Repeat, down…”
He leapt over a rock and landed precariously on the rubble below, lost his footing, fell on his side and slid across the gravel, ripping his uniform and scraping the skin off his whole upper arm, shoulder to elbow. He never even stopped moving, just used the fall’s momentum to execute a roll that catapulted him back onto his feet.
“The dam on the impound lake…” Running slower now. He’d be no good to anybody with a broken ankle. “…Osbourne blew it up.” He took a breath. “Copy?” He un-keyed the microphone.
“Copy,” came a voice from the mic. “Subject is down. What about the dam?”
The sheriff arrived at his cruiser and leapt behind the wheel.
“It exploded. The dam’s gone! The whole lake washed down the hollow.” The water was mostly gone by now, had emptied the basin as he ran down the hillside. “Dispatch all available rescue and emergency personnel to…”
It didn’t even have a name. The collection of houses that might be home to half a dozen residents or fifty, was anonymous — as nameless as every other coal camp in the mountains. He knew the Cosgroves lived there. Seth and his wife, two boys, he thought, and a baby. And Macy. That’s who Bailey had come here to save.
Bailey, T.J. and Dobbs were down there.
“…The coal camp down the hollow from the dam.”
He slammed the car into gear and peeled out down the highway.
“Do you copy?”
Bailey felt a spray of cold water douse her, like she’d walked through a door where somebody’d arranged a bucket of water above the jamb as a joke so when they pulled on the string, the whole bucketful would splash down on your head. This was more than a bucketful. She was instantly drenched from head to foot with the spray, lay shivering in the mud as the water poured down on her.
Water that smelled of chemicals, sticky water, splashed down all around her, a spraying waterfall of it. But it was coming down from above her instead of a wave of it washing her away into its depths. It took a moment for her to process that and then she understood. She hadn’t climbed above the high-water mark of the wave of black death plummeting down the hollow. Its top edge had struck the rock outcrop to her left and was splashing up and over it — above Bailey’s head.
But it was also squirting through the small broken place in the ridge Bailey had looked through with the pressure of a firehose and the force of that blast was slowly shoving Bailey sideways away from the rock, scooting her, and she had nothing to grab to hold herself in place and no hand to grab with. She had to remain on her elbows to shield the wiggling baby beneath her, and Macy’s small hand clutched her right hand in an iron grip. Shoved sideways across the slick mud, she would eventually be pushed out of the lee side of the protective rock, would be struck by a hammer blow of the water splashing over it, and washed away.
Macy was on that side of her. She squeezed the child’s hand as tight as she could, knowing that no matter how tightly she clutched the little fingers, when the water struck the child, the force of it would yank her out of Bailey’s grasp and away. Then the sideways movement stopped. Macy had been shoved into a small tree, a sapling, and she had grabbed it, had wrapped her arm around it.
The intensity of the roar continued, on and on. Then slowly, it diminished. The firehose pressure abated. She and Macy were suddenly drenched with water, a hammering waterfall of it that pinned them to the ground, and threatened to suck them downward with its flow. They might have been washed away then if Macy hadn’t clung so tenaciously to the tree. But the waterfall pressure lasted only a short time. With every passing second there was less water. And then none at all fell on them, though they could still hear the sound of it rushing by below them.
The sound dwindled, faded and then died away altogether.
Bailey lifted herself up off the baby. He lay slathered in black mud, head to foot, but he had stopped crying, had been shocked into silence. Then he looked at her, recognition registered in his eyes, and he sucked in a big lungful of air and began to wail.
It was perhaps the sweetest sound Bailey had ever heard.
“Jake! Jakey!” a woman’s voice cried from below her. Bailey looked back over her shoulder to see four people huddled in a cleft of rock thirty feet back down the mountainside. Seth Cosgrove likely knew the side of that mountain like the creases in his hand, and had had the presence of mind to veer off and huddle with his wife and sons in a cleft of rock, carved out of the ridge of rock on Bailey’s left, a small cave Bailey hadn’t known was there when she passed it.
The woman scrambled up the slick mountainside, slipping and sliding, frantically clawing her way up until she reached Bailey, Macy and the baby. When she reached them, she stopped, her eyes devouring her children in awe, before she snatched the crying baby up into her arms and pulled Macy to her side. She was crying, but she probably didn’t know it. Was babbling out unintelligible sounds as she rocked back and forth on her knees.
Then Seth and the two little boys were crouching in the mud beside them and their combined voices sang a song of joy and relief that didn’t need the words they tagged onto the music. Bailey sat back and listened and watched and might even have been crying herself. She didn’t know.
The light had failed altogether … sometime, Bailey wasn’t aware of exactly when. It was a ballet of twilight here. The darkling shadow of the mountain lengthening, melting into evening. Sundown somewhere out there on the flatland was accompanied by the rising of a full moon over the peaks that changed the quality of light, shades of silver instead of dim gray, shadows receding back under the trees in a world aglow in a gossamer light that outlined everything, every shape and form with silver Magic Marker.
Macy’s face glowed in that light like the face of a fairy. Or an angel. Her hair was drenched, but there was only a small smudge of black mud on one cheek. Bailey imagined she could see the freckles she knew decorated the child’s face like a fine dusting of cinnamon, though there was not enough light to see them.
“Who are you?” Macy asked, her voice quiet and serious against the backdrop of excited chatter. “I know you — why?”
What was Bailey to say? Clearly, the little girl recognized her intuitively from a connection Bailey had no words to describe. So she didn’t try, merely looked deeply into Macy’s eyes, squeezed her hand and planted a gentle kiss on her forehead.
“You want to tell me what just happened here?” Seth Cosgrove demanded, and he wouldn’t be dismissed with a hand squeeze and a kiss on the forehead. He had turned away from the family gushing in relief over the still-wailing Jakey, and sat in the mud in front of her, his look and body language impossible to read in the gloom. She had, after all, snatched his baby son and had run off with his little girl. Had, in some sense, kidnapped them right before his eyes. Of course, if she hadn’t…
There was that.
But what was she supposed to say? Well, you see, it’s like this, Mr. Cosgrove. Seth. May I call you Seth? I paint gallbladders, duodenal ulcers, inflamed appendixes and the like, but the
other day I picked up brushes in both hands, closed my eyes and painted a picture of your little girl dead, drowned. So naturally I came rushing up here with—
T.J. and Dobbs.
She looked past Seth Cosgrove to the hollow behind and below him. Even in the moonglow the devastation was a stark black-and-white tableau. No, just black. Where there had been bushes, a backyard with a swing set and an old Johnboat leaned up against a tree, a clothesline with white sheets and a pair of coveralls, a garage, a woodworking shop, a house with a back porch, a road…
It was all gone. Erased. Painted over with a single black stroke. T.J.’s description was chillingly accurate, “like a bulldozer had scraped off everything down to bare rock, then poured motor oil on it.” Everything below the rock outcrop on the hillside had been obliterated. On the other side of the hollow, right before it curved and the rest of the hollow was out of sight, something big lay wedged up against the rock wall there, jammed in somehow. It might have been the blue pickup truck Bailey had seen in the driveway of the Cosgroves’ house when she raced up the sidewalk to the front door — how long ago? She looked at her wrist as if she actually expected to see the watch through the slather of mud.
Dobbs had a watch, the pocket watch with the flip catch he kept tethered to his belt and brought out now and then to look at — a watch that wouldn’t tell him what time it was now, either.
She knew her mind was pinballing, maybe refusing to land on any one thought long enough to think it because thinking it made all this — the black slash of goo before her and the flood and T.J. and Dobbs and everything — real.
T.J. and Dobbs!
Ignoring Seth Cosgrove’s question, without saying anything at all, in fact, not to anyone, not since she’d whispered Bethany in an anguished cry to the universe, Bailey leapt to her feet and started down the hillside, slipping and falling on the slick mud.
“Hey, wait just a minute here!” Seth Cosgrove called after her. “Where do you think you’re going?”
She spoke then for the first time, called out over her shoulder as she reached the bottom of the incline.
“I have to find my friends!”
Yes, friends.
Chapter Thirty
T.J. felt hands grab his wrists, saw one white, the other black, and he felt himself hauled upward, an elevator passing the second floor — sporting goods, casual apparel, children’s clothes and toys — and rising higher.
“Jump, old man!” cried one of the boys.
He scrabbled with his feet, found footing on a solid limb. The water was almost on them when T.J. launched himself upward off the limb with the desperation-fueled velocity of Michael Jordan going up for a slam dunk. The boys grabbed his shirt, hauled him higher. A second later, foul-smelling black water splashed up on his shoes.
The whole tree shuddered and swayed from the initial hammer blow of the brunt of the flood. If the boys hadn’t been holding onto him and to the tree with the strength of two strapping, scared-to-death teenagers, the three of them would have been knocked loose with the first blow. The thirty or so feet of tree trunk that was instantly under water stood firm, but the churning torrent took the higher, smaller limbs and shook them like a dog with a rag, whipping them back and forth as if in an intentional attempt to throw the tree’s occupants into the water.
A large limb just below T.J. began to rip loose from the tree, its smaller limbs clawing at him as they dragged over his body. He heard one of the teenagers cry out a high, keening obscenity reminiscent of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and he joined his voice to the boy’s and then all three of them were shouting, riding the bucking tree like a bronco.
The tree swayed and shook, reeled and pitched, hammered by the roaring water inches below T.J.’s feet.
And then it was over.
That fast.
The angle of the hollow down which the lake of goo plummeted was steep, the speed of the water incalculable. But there was a finite amount of water, and when it was gone, when the lakebed was empty in a minute, two — a lifetime — the water level fell, the speed lessened, the water drained away, minus the slurping sound of water draining out of a bathtub.
“You boys can let go now.” T.J. was surprised that his voice was hoarse — had he yelled that loud for that long? — and trembly. “I got plans for these arms.”
He looked up into their faces, hard to see now in the fading light, but residual terror still dwelt there in their huge, dark eyes. Of course, their eyes were also dilated for another reason altogether.
“You ain’t gonna tell, are you, mister?” said the white kid. “That you caught us doing … you know?”
Ahhh, to be young again, powering through life and circumstance with an unshakable belief in your own immortality. These two boys had come within a hair’s breadth of a brutal death, and their biggest concern was getting caught smoking weed.
He made a zipping motion across his mouth.
“Lips are sealed. They can torture me, pull out my fingernails, make me eat my own eyeballs, but I’ll never tell.”
Their laughter warmed T.J. like Kentucky bourbon, going down smooth and strong. Painted on the black sky above the boys’ heads, T.J. glimpsed through the leaves of the tree sudden splashes of color — red, blue and green, the twinkling explosions of fireworks.
The whole world narrowed down into a stretch of leaf-covered dirt ahead and above him, the damp, mulch smell mingling with the stench of his own fear sweat.
Dobbs grabbed a sapling to his left, hauled himself and the old woman upward with it, praying it wouldn’t break off in his hand because if it did, he would topple backward, and the rampaging elephant was almost on them.
He grunted, pulled, dug his feet in a step higher, pulled.
He could smell it now, the foul chemical stench, its roar eating up the shrieking of the woman above him on the hillside.
Pull.
Pull!
Another step.
One more.
A great cracking, crashing sound erupted to his left and below him as the front waters of the black monster crashed into the hillside trees. He heard them tumbling. He lurched, leapt upward and grabbed hold of the base of a juniper tree, about twelve inches across, wrapped his free arm around, hugged it. Held on.
The cold water slammed into his legs with such force it shoved him sideways, almost yanked free his grip on the old woman, tried to wrench her out of his grasp. But he held onto her skinny arm, looked down at her as the water swelled up around her, saw the terror in her eyes. Her son had made it a step higher and straddled the base of a sugar maple tree, and was leaning over and holding onto his mother’s other arm with both hands.
She was screaming, but the roar of the flood carried the sound away. Or maybe she only had her mouth open and was trying to scream but nothing came out.
The rushing water scrubbed away the dirt beneath them, pulled at them with a strength Dobbs would never have thought possible, rose up briefly higher, past Dobbs’s knees. The old woman was afloat in it, held in place only by the two men grasping her arms, clinging to trees. This far from the dam, at the far end of the hollow, the force of the flood water wasn’t as fierce as it had been higher up. That was all that saved them.
Then the water level began to recede. The rushing water went slowly down past Dobbs’s knees, depositing the top portion of the woman’s body in the mud, but still carried her legs and feet sideways. He could hear the woman in the woods above them screaming, could see the old woman’s mouth still open, but could still hear no sound from her above the rushing water. Maybe she’d screamed herself hoarse or maybe she’d had no air to scream at all.
Then the water was rushing past below Dobbs. The old woman lay slathered in black slime at an angle below him, the water flowing over her bare feet where it had carried her shoes away. He pulled on her arm and she slid easily up the slimy hillside, out of the water, then he leaned against the tree he’d been hugging, unwilling and unable to release his grip on it, tho
ugh there was no longer any force trying to rip him free from it. He bowed his head against the bark, panting — maybe crying, he couldn’t tell.
Then he lifted his head and looked out at the black water, bubbling and boiling past them, carrying debris — a piece of the roof of a house, trees, unrecognizable pieces of whatever, stretching across the narrow valley, making a pulsing lake where once there had been houses, trees and a road.
The water level fell remarkably fast, leaving black slime behind on broken-off tree stumps and muddy dirt. Dobbs looked for the house to emerge above the waters, the roof peeking out of the flow, though the water was low enough he should be able to see it by now. Then he realized there was no house to see. It was gone. The garage was gone. The old car in the driveway and the poverty-debris in the front yard — the washing machine or dryer or whatever it was, the old outhouse that’d leaned precariously out over the creek. Gone.
His Jeep. Gone.
As the raging flood diminished, the water now probably no more than three or four feet deep, it was clear that when it was done, when the fury had completely spent itself, there would be nothing left to mark its passing but a swath of black muck, a slash of slime on bare dirt from the top of the hollow all the way to the meadow, where the water was now spreading out to wash away the daisies and wildflowers, bury them in washed-away debris and coagulated goo that stunk of sulfur and chemicals and death.
The old woman below him spoke for the first time. Her voice wasn’t hoarse, so perhaps she hadn’t been screaming after all.
“Smell that? Some fool done burnt the beans. I swear, if idiots was quarters we could buy ourselves a waffle iron.”
Dobbs realized he was still clutching her arm — a miracle he hadn’t broken it and maybe he had. Surely, the woman had all manner of injuries he couldn’t see and she couldn’t yet feel. But she was alive. She’d survived.
“She’s got the old-timers disease,” her son said, and Dobbs let go of the woman’s arm and turned to look at him. The man continued to hold his mother’s other arm as he spoke. “She ain’t got no idea what just happened.”
