HIGHWATER: a suspense thriller you won't be able to put down

by T. J. Brearton

  Tom listened, and after a few moments he heard the wheel-squeak of the gurney coming down the hall towards him.

  Soon the detox kid was lying in the room with him. His face was mostly obscured by an oxygen mask. Tom could make out some minor abrasions around his cheek and jaw, as if he’d taken a spill, kissed the asphalt, maybe. Tom had thrown his own oxygen mask aside, even though his chest still felt heavy. He wanted a cigarette.

  “Hi,” Tom said. “I’m a detective. Can I ask you a couple questions?”

  The kid nodded, licked his lips beneath the clear, plastic mask. His head and hair made wicking sounds on the starchy white pillow beneath him as he moved.

  “Good,” Tom said, and started coughing again. He found a smile and said to the kid, “Voice will come back.”

  He was still only able to hoarsely whisper, like he had laryngitis. (Larynginis, Brian had once called it, back when he and Steph were still just dating and the kid was young, and it had made Tom laugh.)

  “What happened to you?” Tom asked.

  Tom caught sight of movement on the left side of his field of vision. Tom looked toward the door, but the effort caused a pain to rip through his neck and torso, like someone had cinched a strap around him tight, and the strip was burning hot. No one was there.

  The kid didn’t look like he knew how to answer. Or want to. There was something familiar about him, Tom thought.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Mark Massey,” came a muffled reply.

  “Mark Massey?”

  The kid nodded.

  Tom squinted to get a better look. “Looks like we’re both lucky to be alive.”

  The kid nodded vigorously, as though he’d been pondering this very fact while studying the ceiling.

  Tom was suddenly thirsty. He thought of Stephanie’s crystal glasses, and wondered if he’d left his lying in the lawn, or if he’d brought it back into the car. He couldn’t remember. Maybe he’d never taken it off the shelf in the first place, because the whole thing had been a hallucination. He’d felt ill in the night, driven himself to the hospital, and ended up face-down outside the emergency room doors.

  “Yeah,” said Mark Massey. “We are lucky.”

  Mark wrinkled his forehead in a way that suggested discomfort. With his right hand, he reached up and pulled away the oxygen mask.

  Tom’s breath caught in his throat. It had been from a distance, but he’d seen this kid before. It wasn’t a resemblance to a childhood friend, either. This kid had been standing on his lawn.

  The memory of the night — something he realized he’d been keeping at bay, almost willfully anesthetizing his recall — came rolling back like the tide. Tom pressured himself to stay in control. He looked intently at the kid, whose eyes rolled about as he tried to settle himself and alleviate his discomfort. The kid didn’t seem to recognize Tom at all.

  “I forgot how shitty this is,” Mark said.

  “What?”

  “Sobriety.”

  The words chilled Tom and sent his mind reeling. Here he’d been feeling something like relief, with Maddy mothering over him, the horrible nightmare had been fading away. Kids burning on his lawn, the fear of going insane, all washing away under the bright hospital lights of consciousness.

  Tom slowly turned his head to watch the door to the hallway. He didn’t know what to do or say, and fresh worry began winding its way through his system. He tried to concentrate his mind elsewhere. He heard Maddy down the hall. Her bouquet of scents lingered in the room.

  Tom asked, “Did you have a problem tonight?”

  The kid whipped around to look at Tom. Anger flashed in his bright eyes. “What do you think?”

  “I think I saw you on my lawn.”

  You burned like an effigy until I doused you with a tiny glass of magic water, he thought, and almost let loose a capricious cackle.

  “I’ve never seen you before.”

  “What did you do tonight?”

  The kid’s eyes grew narrow, bird-like. He studied Tom, thinking.

  “You know what a defective is?”

  “No,” said Tom. He looked away from the kid and up at the ceiling and put his hands, balled into loose fists, to his eyes where he closed them. “No,” he said again. Reality was spilling back into his world, taking over.

  “You start sliding,” said Mark. “First one thing, then another. A defective human machine,” he said.

  “You’re not defective,” said Tom, his voice strengthening. He took his hands away from his eyes, sat up, and cleared his throat. “You weren’t born wrong, okay? Whatever you did, whatever’s wrong with you, there’s a reason for it, and it can be fixed.”

  At the same time, the term, defective, reminded Tom of evading ’Nam, evading the military. How he and Charlie had been so lucky. He thought of the term in the military sense — but that was “defector,” not “defective.” And they hadn’t defected, anyway, they’d just been given the golden pass. Still, the word conjured in Tom the image of a man going over a wall, running through the jungle, sweating, war-painted, getting away.

  Mark was on his back, but his head was swiveled over to look at Tom. The young man’s gaze was penetrating. Tom thought he recognized the look in the kid’s eyes: it was the look of someone who had a terrible burden to bear, knowledge he wished he’d never known.

  Mark remained silent for a little while. Tom’s own thoughts wandered back to the series of events his mind still insisted was a hallucination, or nightmare, he’d had while unconscious. Because that was what it had to be.

  Arriving home in a daze, sitting there on the couch when those four figures had appeared, standing in the dark and snow. It was a dream. One of them, the lookout kid, standing all the way back on the edge of Cherry Road, he’d gone and burst into fucking flames.

  Yet now, here that kid was.

  It was a nightmare which had occurred while Tom’s collapsed body was being brought into the hospital. Maybe some semi-conscious part of him had seen Mark Massey and incorporated him into the fantasy.

  Tom looked toward the door to the room. Maddy or another nurse or doctor would be by any moment. Maybe barrel-bellied Roland with his clicking pen could shed some light on things. Maybe he’d have a smoke to spare.

  Tom’s eyes found his jacket, draped over the uncomfortable-looking chair in the corner.

  Oh for God’s sake, he thought. Groaning with the effort, and pulling the IV along with him, Tom got off of the gurney. He shuffled over to the red checkered jacket, coughing as he did. He reached down and flipped the jacket around so he could determine which pocket was which. Then, wincing, he reached into the right hand side. He thought maybe there were one or two cigarettes left in the pack. He couldn’t remember smoking the last one.

  As he reached in, his fingers bumped something hard and cold. His heart flipped in his chest. He reached for the object and settled his fingers around it. Steph’s good crystal. The kind kept for company. The kind, sometimes, you could use for dousing kids who had spontaneously combusted at the edge of your front yard.

  Tom slid his hand out of the coat. He turned around and shuffled over to the bed again.

  Maybe they would give him something. Maybe he could tell Maddy what was going on with him. She would understand. Maddy always understood.

  He got himself back into the bed. He folded his hands over his stomach. On the other gurney, Mark was staring at the ceiling. That was smart, Tom thought, that was okay. He would look at the ceiling, too. The ceiling was smooth and white. There were no mercurial shapes moving around beneath its latex surface.

  “Did you try to take your own life?” The question slid out of Tom like oil leaking from an engine.

  Mark Massey remained quiet for a moment.

  “I think so,” he said.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  DEC Ranger Andy Gramone — “Dandy” to his friends — worked for the CSI. That was the Criminal Science Investigation arm of the State’s conservation force
. At seven in the morning, he sat along the shoulder of Route 33, looking out over state land, sipping his coffee. His finger throbbed from jamming it against the car door about a half an hour earlier. His head ached from too many whiskey sours the night before. It was that kind of morning.

  NPR was playing on the radio, and he listened as he watched the glades — a little piece of wetland in between two long tracts of evergreen forest. An astrophysics guy (or maybe it was an astronomer, Andy couldn’t remember what they’d said), was chattering on about discoveries in space. Something called “directed panspermia.” It was just dirty-sounding enough and otherwise intriguing to keep Andy sitting with the F150 running.

  There was no hurry to get out there today, either. The ground was soaked, coated with ice in places — treacherous black ice and deep puddles skimmed over to fool you, have you step and plunge in. Snow was falling now, accumulating on the trees, thick and moist. The world was white, and silver, tinged with lavender.

  “All the building blocks of life are in space,” said the scientist guy. “They’re all there in the infinity of space. We think of space as this dark place with rocks floating around but on a molecular level there and a subatomic level is everything required . . . all the ingredients to create the cocktail that is life as we know it.”

  Andy winced at the word “cocktail.” His head felt like it had been wadded with insulation. He flexed his sore finger, looking at it to see if it was sprained and swelling.

  “And that’s how we believe life began. The Earth, for millennia, for millions of years after its initial formation, was barraged by every kind of permutation of the subatomic and molecular elements to finally, you know, the alchemy was right to create the first brimmings of life which began to evolve . . .”

  The female interviewer broke in. Andy thought her name was something odd, like Lakshmi Sing. “Not too long ago,” she said, “the Nogatama observatory in Japan discovered adenosine, which is actually a protein used in the making of DNA and the building of human life. So they’re actually out there floating in space? These life-making proteins?”

  “Oh, absolutely.” He paused. “You know, I don’t know if I can say this . . . Because I realize and respect that many people in the world, you know, their religion has resurrection as a big part of it, bodily resurrection. Or karma, reincarnation, these things. Thing is, from the point of view of thermodynamics, particularly the second law, energy can only move from a usable to an unusable state. An organism dies when it stops taking in new energy.”

  “How does that tie in with the discovery of adenosine in space?”

  “Well . . . all energy is preexisting. What we — the quantum and theoretical physicists call it, is The Field. Within The Field, electrons once in contact with one another can continue to communicate no matter the time or space which separates them. Part of this is what we call background radiation, or black-body radiation. So, you know, from this point of view, we can sort of see how elements that are in us, in our DNA, they’re in communication with the stars.”

  “We go back to the stars?”

  “We come from the same place as stars do.”

  “Can’t a physical body be active again, in use or in motion, once the energy is replenished? Like a spring-driven watch. You simply wind it up again?”

  “Yes, but that implies something else which has usable energy reactivating the watch. A watch is a small thing. A human being is not.”

  “Unless there is something there to re-activate it.”

  “Well,” said the scientist, his aplomb somewhat diminished, a sigh in his voice now, “that means a universal ‘prime mover.’ And we haven’t seen that. The Field does not replenish itself. Entropy wins, every time.”

  They broke for station identification, and Andy shut the radio off.

  It was now or never. All the extra rain was going to make it more challenging to get accurate reads on the water. The CSI was in danger of being pulled by the state (as was anything these days that wasn’t revenue producing; anything long-range that didn’t promise money for the state coffers was at risk, and word was CSI was going to go). At the same time, the hydrofracking byproduct of drilling for natural gas was possibly contaminating the aquifers. They’d been talking about it last night at the bar, at least for a while, before the conversation had descended into other, more carnal things.

  The scare was that the drilling was deep, and in through the shale, which could then be quite possibly contaminating the water. And it could be deadly. “How the state is going to pull something that could be harming our children — maybe fatally, is fucking beyond me,” Dodd Larp had said, belly-up to the coppertop bar at Moh’s. “It’s not even a long-range problem,” he said. “It could be already going on right now.”

  “Yeah but CSI falls under the category of ecological problems, environmental safeguards and concerns — that’s considered long-range,” Gary Skiff had added.

  There wasn’t much else to say. If CSI was folding up their tent, it was going to be hard on a lot of people. None the least of which would be those people who might end up harmed by hydraulic fracturing, by bits of shale in their glasses of water, or flaming tap water spouting from their sinks.

  Did Andy actually believe that? He ran a hand through his hair and winced when his forgotten finger flared in pain. He swore under his breath and took one last sip of his coffee.

  Andy “Dandy” Gramone had come from the private sector, and so he would return to the private sector. The problem with pulling out milfoil from the lakes and ponds wasn’t the early mornings or the heavy Benthic mats, not even pitchforking the stuff — sometimes half a ton of it — out of dinghies and onto the beach. Andy didn’t mind that shit. He was thirty-six years old and in good shape, and even when he had a pressurized head from a night out with the boys, being on the water in a wetsuit still beat being behind a desk in a monkey suit any old day of the week. Who cared if the effing water was fifty-eight degrees some mornings? It sure wiped your head clean.

  But shale in the drinking water? Yeah, maybe. Thing was, after nine years with his own LLC, pulling Eurasian water milfoil out of lakes and ponds, Andy knew a bit about water. He knew about water from the surface down to fifty, sixty feet. It was the aquifers he hadn’t much experience with. There was no telling what was down there in the deep.

  But CSI had taken him on last year anyway. For Andy, it was a way out from under a mountain of paperwork. He never would have thought he’d be here, not after walking away from school with a semester left to go before his bachelor’s in criminal investigations. No. Dandy Gramone had decided he’d work in the summers making the region beautiful and safe, pocket a bunch of dough, and then tele-ski all winter long.

  Only it hadn’t happened that way.

  He got out of the F150 and walked around to the back for his tools. On his way he looked out over the wetland area.

  That shit sure was high.

  He’d been hearing from some of the other guys that the water levels had been above average for the past couple of weeks. The water table for the whole region had risen. It rained a lot in the autumn, more than the spring, but that was the idea. The water was absorbed and stored for the germination of plant life that occurred over winter. Spring showers were what hit a hard, packed earth, but it was the melting snow from the mountains that created all the runoff and flooding. Highwater during the autumn happened from time to time, but wasn’t nearly as common as in the spring. It was Mother Nature, business as usual.

  What was different this year was that the hydrofracking had begun. It was possible that creating those explosions down there in the deep earth had shaken loose freshets which, converging with a heavy, melting snowpack and spring storms, might make for spillway water.

  Who knew what else the fracking released?

  Dandy got his gear, pulled on his hip waders, and headed out to test the water. He was going to test it for toxicity, but he was going to check its depth, too, just the same.

 
CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Tom dozed for a while. When he came to, Mark Massey seemed more alert than before. He started talking when he saw Tom was awake.

  “A defective isn’t someone who is born wrong,” Mark said. “They’re born like anyone else, you’re right about that. But for some reason or another, they can’t get it together. They adapt to the conditions of life. You know what I mean?”

  Tom nodded. No matter what sort of strange ideas the kid had, they might lead to answers. None of it made much sense; that Mark Massey had been on his lawn earlier that night, briefly alight like a roman candle, only to not remember it now. But letting him talk could only reveal more, maybe even something about Christopher and why he’d come to Red Rock. Why any of them had. Tom knew he still hadn’t completely accepted what his mind told him had transpired over the past few hours, but something had to give.

  Mark looked at the ceiling.

  “There are people who overcome it, you know?” Mark tapped his head with a finger. Then he placed that hand over his chest, the IV tube trailing.

  “They maybe get into sports, or become some sort of a success, and they prevail, break a family curse, and everyone says ‘oh, look how he overcame, what a guy.’”

  Tom thought he heard resentment in Mark’s voice.

  He placed one hand over the other on his chest. His posture evoked a body in a casket.

  “But then there are those who don’t. They just . . . they go the other way. They drink or drug themselves down, you know, you see it everywhere.”

  Mark removed both hands from his chest and pushed his body up into a seated position. He swung his legs off the gurney and looked directly at Tom, who sat up too, in spite of the searing ropes of pain that gripped his ribs and lungs from all the coughing.

  “You’re talking about yourself,” Tom said.

  “They end up taking their own life,” Mark went on, his eyes cold and glassy. “Or, they try to.”

  “What did you do?”

  Mark reverted to affecting a casual demeanor and shrugged again. “Same thing I’ve been doing for years. To end it, I guess.”