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

by T. J. Brearton

  He moved through the deer runs, the Mossberg shotgun slung over his back, his hands out to either side of him, palms out and facing forward, splayed fingers knocking softly into stiffened reeds.

  In the middle of the clearing, he stopped, squatted. He thought for a moment, and then pulled down his pants. A black crow high in a tangle of birch called while he moved his bowels. He watched it; it took off from its gnarled perch and flapped heavily across the clearing. After the interruption, utter stillness. He stood, pulled up his pants, and continued on.

  Before long he found what he knew he would find. There, beside one of the deer runs, as though it had been thrown by impact, was a fawn. The small animal was bloody and already hardening. Its head had been mostly severed from its neck, and had been twisted back so that the top of its skull almost touched its spine. The dramatic angle the head had taken reminded him of a cave painting. The animal lay as though it were suspended in flight, as if its head were back so far in order that it might see God; that it reported to the heavens or received messages.

  Verrega, thought Jared, standing over the dead fawn. Vishnu. Parratu. Deigine.

  Jared looked up, sensing movement along the perimeter of the clearing. Slowly, he slid his shotgun round in front of him, dropped the strap from his shoulder, and brought the butt of the gun up to his shoulder. The rifle would have been a better weapon for the hunt, but the shotgun would work too — the Accu-choke allowed for a tight, concentrated dispersal of the shot.

  He saw the back of one animal, moving through the goldenrod, only yards from the fir and balsam and pine evergreens, those romantic, hardy mates in their rows. And there was the haphazard jungle of the deciduous forest: fallen trees covered in moss, erratics, and boulders. The animals moved, faintly snapping through birch branches, over fallen boughs, pine needles.

  Two of them at first, and then a third. Grey ridges, grey backs moving like smooth stones through the arboreal detritus and high, brittle weeds.

  The coyotes.

  * * *

  Elizabeth woke up.

  “Hi there, sweetie,” said a woman. “How are you feeling?”

  “Uh, okay,” said Liz. Her jaw felt rusty, her tongue and mouth were parched. “Can I have something to drink?”

  “I’m sorry honey, no, not now. You won’t get dehydrated though, I promise.”

  “Why can’t I have something to drink?”

  The woman turned from where she was watching the blood pressure monitor and spoke to someone. “Theresa, can we get her some ice chips? That okay, George?”

  Liz looked around. The place was brightly lit, not dark and cozy like her room. There were beeping machines; a general commotion or buzz.

  “Sure, Maddy,” said a man standing there, dressed in blue scrubs, a stethoscope hanging around his neck. The man had tightly curled black hair flecked with grey. His face was as clean-shaven as any she’d ever seen, like he’d drawn the razor across his cheeks only moments before. The one called Theresa left the room, an older woman with grey and ruddy-brown hair piled in a bun on top of her head and a floral shirt on. Who were these people? What were they doing?

  “Where am I?”

  Maddy unwrapped the belt from Liz’s arm with the sound of ripping Velcro. She smiled as she put away the instruments and picked up a clipboard. “Little Rock Hospital. We’re prepping you to take a short drive over to RRMC, in the next town. It’s a bigger hospital.”

  “Why are you moving me to another hospital? I don’t understand.”

  Maddy looked at her.

  “You can help us.”

  “To do what?”

  Maddy hesitated. “First, you have to sign this.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a consent form.”

  Liz looked from Maddy to the guy she’d called George. George had no expression on his face. If anything, he had the air of a man who felt he should be somewhere else.

  “For?”

  “Transplant surgery.”

  “You’re crazy. What are you talking about?”

  “We need you,” said Maddy. “We—”

  “This is a very unusual situation,” said the PA, George, finally speaking up. He took a step towards the bed, towards Liz, and put his hand on the bed railing. Liz noticed the wiry black hairs on his knuckles. She saw the gold wedding band. “It’s really one in a million,” he said.

  “Where’s the police officer, the detective? Mister Milliner?”

  “Why don’t we just show you, babydoll.”

  “Show me what? Where’s the detective?”

  “He’ll be back. Don’t you worry.”

  The two of them unlocked a mechanism so that the bed could roll, and George called out, “Theresa!” who appeared almost simultaneously with a plastic cup of ice chips. She gave George a questioning look as she walked over to Liz and handed her the cup. “There. Go ahead and enjoy those, honey.”

  Liz tipped the cup back. They were good. So cold, and cutting through the cotton mouth.

  People in the hallway moved around them. Liz remembered her horrible dream, a hallway corridor just like this, only empty, except for what waited at the far end. Some misshapen thing, moving around on its hands and feet, anticipating her arrival.

  Liz tensed and drew in a deep breath and steeled herself to escape.

  * * *

  Milliner paced around in the parking lot, waiting for the ambulance to come out from the emergency kiosk. The day had warmed up considerably, but the rain still drizzled down in the gloomy afternoon. He was on his cell phone with Sheriff Johnston.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” said the Sheriff.

  “I’m not,” said Tom. “It’s amazing. One in a million, really. It —”

  “Jesus, Tom,” barked Johnston. “That’s not what I’m talking about and you know it. What in the hell are you doing with a suspected shooter, taking her to the hospital? I don’t care whose blood type matches whose. Tom, I could pull your number on this, and you know it.”

  Tom looked into the misting rain. “Talk to Michelle Branch again,” he said. “There was no body found, no blood, no—”

  “Branch was all hot to come find you! She was following your GPS to the hospital when I called her, how in the hell did you think I knew where you were? I had to turn her right around when she got the news.”

  “What news?” Tom felt something cold shift inside of his gut.

  “The shit the trooper found out there.”

  “Oh,” Tom said, feeling relieved. “There was foul play out there at place, yeah. Damaged doors, windows. The Kingston boy already made repairs. He had some coyotes attack him.”

  “Coyotes?” I don’t know anything about Coyotes. The trooper says bodies, Tom. People. You need to bring her in right now.”

  Tom felt like he’d been punched. He remembered smelling something coming from the shed. He’d assumed it was the dead animals. But, people?

  “Where’s the trooper now?”

  “Cruickshand stayed. Called for backup. Went after the Kingston kid.”

  Tom sighed and closed his eyes. The Sheriff was right, there was no question; he was off the rails. He opened his eyes and looked into the rain again, it was covering the cars in the lot with shining beads. A hazy shape, like a young man, walked behind a row of cars, then disappeared.

  “I will bring her in. I promise. She’ll be in my custody, not going anywhere. She has a chance to save a life here.”

  The Sheriff was silent for a moment, a rare feat for Blake Johnston. “No way,” he said. “We have dead bodies out there. Your suspect called and said she killed somebody. You need to get her here right now, or I’m going to force you to finally retire, Tom.”

  The Sheriff hung up.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  A hand came down on her shoulder. She looked up and saw the detective, Milliner, smiling down at her. He was smiling, though the bags beneath his bloodshot eyes looked big enough to drop dimes in.

  “Here
. I got this for you in the gift shop.” He handed her a book with a glossy cover. It was by Dan Brown, the kind of bestselling writer she didn’t read, but the gesture softened her. Only a little. Her desire to escape swelled in her, rising in her throat and chest. They were loading her into the ambulance.

  “Please,” she said to him. “Let me go. I don’t even know what’s going on. I want out.”

  Tom leaned down over the gurney. The EMTs backed away to give him a moment, sensing the situation.

  “Right now, it’s this, or it’s jail. Just take the ride, kid, okay? You can still decide when you get there.” He searched her eyes. “But I hope you make the right choice.”

  “This is . . . this can’t be legal.”

  “I won’t force you to do anything. I just want you to see. You can make up your own mind.”

  They piled into the ambulance. It was a short ride to Red Rock Falls, only seven miles from Lake Meer. The hospital in Meer, Little Rock, was a single floor. No one really stayed overnight or got admitted to Little Rock, there was no operating theatre. Red Rock Medical Center in the Falls was a three-story facility with an OB-GYN, physical therapy, pediatrician’s office, and all the rest.

  Once around back at the emergency entrance, Elizabeth was wheeled inside. They crowded into an elevator and went up two flights. It was sterile and claustrophobic. Liz thought she might scream. No one spoke on the trip up, except for a PA, talking low on his cell phone, perhaps to his wife.

  The doors opened and Liz saw that everyone on the floor outside of the elevator was watching them. One woman, behind the desk, looked like she was about to cry. Everyone was motionless.

  Then someone began to clap. Then they all started to clap. The woman behind the desk now had tears making bright tracks under the fluorescent lights. Liz was wheeled past. She looked up at Milliner, whose face was inscrutable he walked along beside her.

  “I haven’t signed anything yet,” Liz said. It was a whisper. She didn’t want to upset anyone.

  The clapping tapered off and people starting busying themselves again.

  Maddy said, “Here it is,” and they turned into a new room.

  There was a doctor in the room, and two more nurses.

  Liz was confused. She saw no other patient. There was another bed, and it looked like it had been slept in, with rumpled covers, but no patient lay there.

  And then they wheeled her close, side-by-side with the other bed, and when she looked at their faces, she saw expectation; hope. She didn’t understand. Then Liz heard a noise. It was a tiny voice, and the covers on the bed beside her moved, and a little fist came out, unfurled small pink fingers, and then closed again. Someone, one of the other nurses, delicately pulled back the blanket and a round little blonde head was revealed.

  A child, in the bed next to her, head turned away. Then the head lifted, turned, and resettled; a boy. Sleeping. Maybe two, maybe three years old, she didn’t know. And then he pursed his lips, wrinkling the skin under his button nose, and yawned.

  Liz could not speak, could not move, as she saw the baby boy’s eyes were swollen and stuck shut, a greenish film along the eyelashes of an otherwise perfect porcelain face. His long and full yawn made Liz think, for some reason, of a lion cub. His little mouth snapped shut, and he lifted his head and suddenly started to cry.

  “Okay,” said the doctor, “We don’t have too much time.”

  They all stood around, looking down at Liz.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  “Thomas,” someone said. He thought for a moment it might be his mother.

  Tom Milliner opened his eyes. Maddy was standing there. Kruger, they sometimes still called her, as they had in high school. It wasn’t his mother, no.

  Tom was in a bed in one of the few unoccupied rooms. He looked out the window. The corner of day that he could see was grey, the light failing.

  “How long have I been out?” Tom sat up, rubbing at his temple with the heel of one hand, and waving his other in the air, trying to get his watch to circle back around on his wrist so that it faced up. It was just after four.

  “A couple hours. Not too long,” said Maddy. “I’m sorry to wake you, hon . . .” Maddy looked tired too, but she carried it well. Maybe it was makeup, but Tom didn’t think so. Maddy had some special sort of batteries. Some reserve of energy that came from he didn’t know where. Not coffee — Maddy didn’t drink it. Tom knew this because he’d asked her to join him for a cup on more than one occasion.

  “What? Is everything all right? The baby? Elizabeth? Is she—”

  “The baby is fine. Elizabeth’s fine. They’re about to go into surgery now.”

  “Oh,” he said, swinging his legs off the bed. “Where do I get suited up?”

  “Oh no,” said Maddy. She was acting strange, Tom thought. Her behavior reminded him of when they were young, how she acted when she had a secret.

  “Then what?”

  “You have to look outside,” she said. There was a giddiness to her manner.

  Tom snorted and got to his feet where a coughing fit took him by surprise. Maddy patted his back until it subsided.

  “What’s outside?” he asked, choking a bit.

  “Just go and look.”

  Tom walked toward the window. Maddy stayed where she was. He stopped halfway across the room and looked back at her. She only nodded her head at him, still with that girlishness about her. “I don’t know what it means,” is all she said.

  Across the road from the hospital was Lake Colden. In the marshaling dusk and early spring temperature, the water, only weeks after ice-out, appeared bituminous. The sky above was a skin of grey, blotched and swirled with darker discolorations. The mountains rising beyond the lake were green-black, ragged with trees and garlands of snow.

  Tom’s gaze moved to the parking lot and the lawn between the lot and Route 4, and there he saw them.

  Ten or so kids were standing on the lawn.

  They weren’t in a line, they weren’t in a cluster, but loosely, freely spaced, he thought. Some wore sweatshirts. Some with the hoods up. Most wore black. Some were dressed in cargo pants, he saw, as he squinted, cupping his hands around his eyes, and one or two had pants that were camouflaged. A couple were wearing what looked like peacoats, like sailors ashore, and still a couple here and there had on black winter hats — or “tuques,” as his mother had called them. The group was drably dressed, to say the least.

  He’d seen kids just like these around in town, the ones he called Goth kids and the press called Millennials.

  “What’re they doing?” Maddy asked the question behind him, sounding like she still hadn’t moved. There was still a kind of excitement in her voice.

  “Jesus.” Tom pulled his weapon out and checked it. He turned and started marching away from the window, out of the room.

  “Hey!” called Maddy, stopping him for a second. He heard her clip-clop across the floor to him, and turned back around. She came up next to him, her perfume arriving a second or two after she did. She took him by the arm.

  “Maddy,” he said.

  She led him back across the room, and crowded against him there, by the window. “What do you think they’re doing?” She eyed the young men on the lawn. Tom didn’t look there. Instead he craned his neck, leaning back away from Maddy in order to see her. His eyes were no good up-close, and his glasses were in his hunter’s coat on the chair next to the bed. He hadn’t put them back on after he’d shut his eyes the morning before, but he’d thought to bring them along.

  Maddy massaged her hands on the window sill. It was a nervous thing, Tom thought, but born of nervous excitement, not anxiety. His own heart was pounding. “I think,” she began, “I think maybe they’re here for a reason,” she said. “Anyway, who are you to trample the right to Free Assembly?”

  “Maddy, you have to let me go.” But he couldn’t help but look back down.

  The moment lingered, the two of them standing there watching the twelve young men (Tom
counted them) standing on the front lawn of Red Rock Medical Center.

  At last, Tom turned from the window, walked quickly across the room to the chair by the bed and scooped up his hunting coat. “I’m going out there,” he said, and left the room without looking back.

  * * *

  Tom weaved through the cars, his .38 drawn. He held the firearm with one hand, pointing down, swinging by his thigh.

  The parking lot was six rows of twenty or so spaces apiece. The lot impinged on the hospital length-wise, so it didn’t take him long to cross it and reach the far curb, which bordered the lawn. Right away he notice that there were fewer kids than before. He did a fresh count to confirm it.

  He looked around behind him, in between the cars for movement. Seeing none, he looked beyond the lawn and across the road, along the bank of Lake Colden. There were two picnic tables there on the long, narrow patch of grass abutting the lake, but no people. Tom looked both ways, up and down Route 4. Nothing. No one walking. Only one car — headlights at least a quarter mile away — coming in his direction. He surveyed the parking lot again, listening, watching for a car or truck to pull out of a space, a door to bang open or closed, a dome light to wink out.

  Nothing.

  Red Rock Medical Center was on the edge of town. It wasn’t impossible to walk here, not at all; it might be a fifteen or twenty minute walk from anywhere aside from the neighboring car dealership and lumber yard, but it was doable. Still, Route 4 was a straightaway along the lake here. It had taken Tom no more than a minute to get downstairs and outside. Anyone on foot would still be visible, unless they had gone around to the back of the hospital, and into the tract of woods there.

  With Tom’s next step, he was on the grass, where he stopped again, the .38 still down at his side. He looked at the faces of the young men.