by Ninie Hammon
Sadie was still several feet beyond Grayson’s extended fingers when she lost her grip and fell. She didn’t slide down a smooth rock on her butt this time. She dropped three feet and landed on her knees, then flopped backward and banged her head on the rock.
She lay there, still.
Neither Grayson nor Carter moved. Then she sucked in the air that had been knocked out of her and began to shriek. She sat up—in two inches of black water—and wailed.
Nothing the men said to her could calm her. She got to her feet, and Grayson saw that both knees were bleeding. She was hurt, and there was no way to get past that, to make a two-year-old understand that skinned knees didn’t matter, that she had to stop crying, grab the shirt and hang on.
The men couldn’t even calm her down enough to get her to listen. Helplessly, they watched the black water rise up her calves. She didn’t like that either. The water must have been cold. So she cried even harder.
Grayson shot a glance at the dam. More hunks had washed off the top.
When the water reached Sadie’s knees, it stung where she’d skinned them. She danced up and down and wailed louder. Then she looked up into the faces of her uncle and father and held up her chubby arms.
“Hold you!” she cried. “Unka Cardur! Daddy! Hold you!”
But they couldn’t pick her up. They couldn’t hold her. They couldn’t do anything but watch her drown.
* * *
Piper sucked in a little sob and crossed back to the chair by the bed. She took Marian’s hand, but the old woman seemed not to notice. Just stared, with tears forming in her eyes.
Her breathing had eased completely now. No longer was she hauling in great heaving, rasping breaths and sighing them back out in exhaustion. She was, in fact, hardly breathing at all. Shallow little breaths that barely moved her bony chest.
Marian shifted her gaze to Piper’s face.
“You’re a good girl, Piper.” She took a little sip of a breath. “Grayson’s lucky to have you.” Another little breath, smaller. “Carter’ll get over losing you one day and find himself a good girl, too. You’ll see.”
Piper could only nod. Tears streamed down her face, but she didn’t bother to wipe them away.
“You love your family with a fiercesome strength, best as you can ever’ day… promise.”
Somehow Piper found her voice to answer.
“I promise.”
“Yes.” Marian sighed out the word and closed her eyes.
Piper waited. Held her own breath. Hoped. But the old woman didn’t breathe back in again.
She was gone.
Piper brought Marian’s hand to her lips, kissed it tenderly and then let herself break down in tears.
* * *
Carter lost it. “No, noooo!” he screamed in horror and frustration. He banged his fists on the rock again and again, leaving behind bloody prints.
Grayson had felt this ripped-open, airy sensation in his belly only one other time in his life—when he looked around the edge of a rug hanging over the limb of a tree and saw Becky in the creek. She had drowned with him only a few feet away, too.
He leaned his head back and cried out in anguish, “Saaadie!”
The world dissolved, grayed out. Color slid down reality like a painting splashed with water, leaving everything around him a black-and-white image. A photograph. Then another image began to form on top of it, an image in verdant, green jungle color.
But this flashback—if that’s what it was—was different from the others. Grayson wasn’t imprisoned in the scene, a participant in the madness; he was standing outside it, observing. He could see himself, like watching Charleston Heston come down the mountain holding the Ten Commandment tablets.
A way-too-thin man with hollow, vacant eyes, U.S. Army Chaplain Grayson Addington dropped to his knees and cried out, “Saaadie!”
And Grayson heard now what the dazed chaplain had heard, an echo in his head, another voice crying out at the same time.
A moment had followed then of such profound silence that surely the universe had been holding its breath. Something had happened in that moment. Something fearful and powerful. The chaplain/soldier had sensed it but didn’t have any idea what it was.
Grayson sensed that same power now.
“Gray!” Carter shook his shoulder.
Grayson opened his eyes and looked into the space between the rocks where his brother was pointing. At first, Grayson’s mind wouldn’t process what his eyes saw. Then the impossible image resolved into an equally impossible reality.
Sadie was still crying. But not as hard as before because Maggie was hugging her, soothing her.
On her knees in the narrow space with the bigger rock jutting out above her, Maggie held Sadie in her arms so the child’s skinned knees were up out of the thick black water. Maggie’s cheek below the pale shadow of a shiner was deeply scratched and bleeding. Her arms were scraped raw, her shirt torn. Somehow, she had wormed her way into the enclosure through spaces so small she had barely fit.
“Maggie?” Was all the stunned Carter could say.
“I have to put you down for a second,” she told Sadie, set her down and struggled to her feet. She had to turn sideways in the narrow neck of the wine-bottle-shaped enclosure. Sadie wailed and clawed at Maggie because the cold black water now reached to her waist.
Standing, Maggie was in a space too small to turn and pick Sadie up with both hands, so she reached down and lifted her by the arm as high as she could with her right hand, grunting from the effort. “Up onto my shoulders,” she gasped, “so the water won’t sting. I’ll help you.”
Sadie reached out and grabbed Maggie’s shirt, then one of her braids, wet and slimy with black goo. She pulled herself upward, struggling and wiggling until she was finally standing on Maggie’s shoulders. Then Maggie took hold of Sadie’s ankles, using both hands now, grunted with effort and began to lift her into the narrowing bottleneck space above her head.
“Climb up the rock, Sadie,” she said, breathless. “Climb!”
Sadie pawed at the rock. Carter lay on his left side, his arm stretched out, and jammed his shoulder as far as he could down into the crack to reach farther.
“Push me!” he told Grayson, and his brother leaned with all his weight on Carter’s other shoulder, bounced on it, surely tearing all the skin off Carter’s upper arm.
“That’s right, reach out, come to Uncle Carter…”
Grayson held his breath.
“Good girl! Just a little farther.”
Grayson could barely hear Sadie whimpering through the roar in his ears.
Then Carter grunted, “Gotcha!” as his fingers closed around a little hand.
Now, Grayson pulled on Carter’s right arm to drag him out of the crevice where he’d wedged his shoulder. As soon as Carter’s shoulder was free, he flopped over on his chest, reached his other arm into the crack, took Sadie’s other hand and began to pull her up. It was a tight squeeze. She started to cry again when she scraped her nose against the rock. Grayson reached down to her and turned her head sideways so the fit wasn’t so snug. It helped that she was wet because once her head cleared, the rest of her quickly popped up out of the hole.
Grayson greedily gathered her up in his arms. He didn’t notice that he was crying harder than she was.
There was a rumble as another hunk of the dam washed away. The crack widened, and a huge wave of black water surged out of the hole behind it and rushed down the valley.
“Honey, you have to hurry!” Carter told Maggie, panic edging into his voice. “Turn around and squeeze back out the way—”
“The way I came in is under water now,” she said.
In their single-minded effort to get Sadie to safety, Grayson and Carter hadn’t considered Maggie’s plight. Now the reality of her situation slammed into them like a wrecking ball.
“Then take a big gulp of air and hold your breath,” Carter said, desperate. “You can—”
“I don’t
know how I got here. I just wiggled and wormed through the cracks. I don’t think I could find my way back even if there wasn’t any water.”
Grayson leaned over with Sadie in his arms still whimpering and put his face near the crack.
“Maggie, you have to try! Turn around and—”
“No, Mr. Grayson.” Her bottom lip trembled and tears formed in her eyes. He saw terror wash briefly over her face, then her lips curled in a tiny smile. “It’s done now.”
“Done?”
“The dark’s all out of my head. It’s bright, now, full of light.”
Her smile faded.
“You have to go, Mr. Grayson.”
“Go? And just leave you here?”
“Miss Piper and Nan Marian are down there in the fog. You got to get them before the monster eats them up.” She shivered. “It’s coming.”
“No!” he heard his voice yell at her but didn’t know what he was going to say next until he heard it come out his mouth. “I already left one little girl behind, and I’m not going to leave another.”
He felt his brother’s hand on his shoulder.
“I’m the one who left a little girl behind.” Carter’s voice was a strangled croak. “Gray, that day at the creek…I pushed Becky, shoved her out of my way. I didn’t mean…I…it was my fault, not yours.”
Grayson could only gape at him.
“I’ll stay here with Maggie,” Carter said.
“No!” Maggie cried, every bit as adamant as Grayson had been when he’d shouted the same thing at her moments before.
Both men looked down through the crack at her upturned face, into the full force of her green eyes, the eyes with daisies in them. She offered a shaky half-smile.
“Sadie,” she called out, her voice determinedly cheery, and the toddler leaned out of her father’s arms and looked down at her, sniffling and sucking her thumb.
“Bye-bye, little pretty,” Maggie said, and though the black water had risen only as high as her chest, she began to sink slowly down into it, like she was easing herself into a bathtub.
“Bye-bye, Mabie,” Sadie said and gave her a slow gnat-snatcher wave.
“Maggie, no!” Carter was frantic, almost hysterical. “Don’t—!” Then her head went under, her red hair swirled for a moment, and she was gone.
“Maaaaggie!”
Grayson gritted his teeth and swallowed hard. The cry forming on his own lips died there. Then he took a deep breath and got to his feet.
Doin’ the necessary.
He turned and took a quick survey of dam No.1 to his left, where the water level had risen ten feet in…what? Three minutes…five? If he was going to cross it—and that was his only hope of getting to Piper and his mother in time—he had to go right now.
He turned and shoved Sadie into Carter’s arms. “Get her up to the ridge,” he barked, then turned and leaped from one rock to the next, hopscotching his way to the coal slag dam. When he got there, he stepped gingerly out onto it and began to pick his way across the top, praying it wouldn’t crumble away beneath his feet and dump him and a couple of million gallons of water forty feet to the rocky creek bed below, where the incline was so steep he’d probably roll another hundred yards.
*
Carter stood transfixed, staring at the black water bubbling up toward the top of the crevice at his feet. The precious little red-haired child had vanished—was just gone!
He couldn’t…everything was happening so fast comprehension couldn’t keep up. All at once, Sadie was in his arms, soaked and whimpering. He heard Grayson bark, “Get Sadie up to the ridge!” but the words were meaningless. He turned to ask Grayson what…but his brother was no longer standing beside him. He was headed as fast as he could go toward the dam.
He’s going after Ma and Piper!
Grayson was doing what had to be done; Carter was doing nothing at all.
He found himself running but had no memory of commanding his legs to do so. His long strides cleared the boulders in a series of leaps, then he bolted up the dirt incline, so steep he slipped and had to use his free hand in the dirt to crawl/climb the remaining few feet.
He didn’t know when his mind formed the intent. It was tangled in firing synapses that kept producing the face of a red-haired child superimposed on a dark shadow in tall grass, a man-shaped lump. But he acted on the intent as if he’d thought it through rationally and had come to what he was about to do as the only reasonable course of action under the circumstances.
Edna Turpin stood well back from the edge of the ridge, both hands covering her mouth, staring at the disintegrating dam. Her wide eyes bugged out of their sockets like two hens’ eggs with black dots painted on the ends with a Magic Marker.
Carter ran to her and shoved Sadie into her arms.
“Take her and give me your keys!” he said.
Sadie shrieked and held out her arms to him.
“Unka Cardur, hold you,” she cried, but he ignored her.
“What do you want my—?” Edna began.
Carter made a sweeping gesture that took in all of Sadler Hollow.
“Somebody’s got to warn those people!”
“Keys is in it,” she said. He turned, cleared the distance to the truck in seconds and leaped inside. Edna called after him, “I’ll watch after this little angel, won’t let nothing hap—”
Carter missed the rest of it as he cranked the rumbling engine and threw dirt and rocks out behind the back tires as he spun the truck around and headed back down Strawman Road with his foot on the accelerator mashed all the way to the floor.
Chapter 32
As he reached the Naked Turtle Mountain side of the dam, Grayson chanced a backward glance at the big dam. The gush of water roaring out of the rip in the center was eating away at both sides, forcing the opening wider and wider. Another few feet, and the rising water in the smaller lake below would start to flow over the dam he’d crossed and down the back side into the creek bed. He was astonished the dam still held. But it wouldn’t hold for long.
His glance swept the flat ridge on the other side of the dam where he saw Carter shove Sadie into Edna’s arms and turn toward the pickup truck. He didn’t wait to see where Carter was going. He knew.
Then he leaped down off the end of the dam and began to run down the sharp incline into the woods below Naked Turtle Mountain. The slope was so steep, he was almost airborne with every step, his forward momentum so fast that if he stumbled, tripped or lost his balance, he would sail through the air and crash into the ground, a tree, a stump or a rock outcrop so hard he’d break something. Likely something vital. Perhaps incapacitating. If that happened, he’d be lying injured below the dam he’d just crossed when it crumbled, in the path of the millions of the gallons of black water now held captive behind it. More important, he wouldn’t get to his mother and wife in time.
Then he hit the fog. It was lifting, and on the edges it was a white mist no thicker than steam in the bathroom after a shower. It quickly got thicker, though, and a thin sapling he hadn’t even seen caught his shoulder, knocking him off balance, and he came perilously close to falling. Perhaps he should have run down the dry creek bed. He’d considered it; no trees in the way there. He’d opted instead to barrel down the mountainside through the woods to the road because he’d feared that in the fog he wouldn’t be able to tell where to get out of the creek bed and turn toward the house. Afraid that he wouldn’t recognize the sycamore tree with a clothesline limb where you could hang a rug.
Carter had said he shoved Becky! He was there? How—
Grayson never saw the vine. It grabbed his right foot as securely as a bear trap and sent him flying through a clump of bushes into the trunk of a huge birch tree.
He lay where he had fallen, facedown, not moving. Blood trickled out of his nose and down his forehead from a cut high above his left eye. Then it dripped into a growing puddle in the dirt. The thick mist he had disturbed swirled briefly around him, then formed a solid milk-colored
blanket again that settled over his body like a shroud.
* * *
Carter roared into the fog at fifty miles an hour, betting his life on his childhood recollections of Strawman Road. The dirt track led over Chicken Gizzard Mountain to Cricket Hollow, where there was a little church that was one of the stops on his father’s preaching circuit—third Sunday of every month. Cricket Hollow was where the Campbell clan lived, and Carter hated to go there, had counted the bends in the road like mileposts on his way to the gallows. He counted those bends now as he roared around them, and if his memory served, he’d gone around the last one, and from here it was a straight shot down the mountain to where Strawman crossed Northfield Road.
If his memory didn’t serve, however, he would miss a curve and go flying out into the woods and down a steep incline until he hit something sturdy enough to stop him.
He concentrated on peering squint-eyed through the fog at a road that vanished in swirling mist a few feet in front of the truck. And tried to think how best to pull off this Paul Revere routine.
How did you rouse people inside their houses—likely still asleep—on Sunday morning in a fog and convince them they had minutes to live unless they ran for their lives?
He tested the truck horn. It made a great, coughing, braying sound, loud but not commanding. Well, it was all he had. That and screaming.
What he wouldn’t allow himself to consider was the fact that when the black water came roaring down the hollow, he and his little truck and honking horn would be directly in its path.
A vehicle suddenly appeared out of the fog in front of him, like an apparition in a dream. Not there, then there. Dark blue was all he saw, right in front of him on the narrow road. He veered hard to the right but understood even as he yanked the wheel that he was still going to plow right into it.
* * *
