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

by T. J. Brearton

  Each one of them was ostensibly watching the hospital, but each wore the same vacant look as the kids in his driveway the night before. Well, not exactly vacant, Tom thought, something more like contentment was visible on the faces of these young men. A rightfulness to each of them, in their posture, in their countenance, as if each one of them were in the only spot, the exact place they could be, or should be, at the moment. That wasn’t just a feeling, he reasoned, it was an assessment of the evidence before him. There was no skulking here, no air of mischief. They just were there.

  “Hey,” said Tom, and had to clear his throat. “What are you guys doing?”

  As he had expected, none of them replied. And, as he had also anticipated, none of them even acknowledged his presence.

  Tom grinned, just a curl of a smile on his face.

  “You boys come here often?”

  Still none of them said a word. None of them even looked over at the balding investigator who had barely slept in the last twenty-four hours, let alone the last three months. Not an eye twitched in his direction.

  Tom started moving among them. The closest kid was only a couple of yards away, and Tom walked slowly by him, not with any menace, but perhaps to get a scent of something, weed, maybe, or booze. It was the same procedure he’d first gone through with Christopher, and then the boys outside his house in the Acres.

  As he passed the young man, the wind blew off from the lake and in the direction of the hospital, chilling the air as it came. Tom heard breathing — at least he could verify that the kid was alive, he thought. He felt giddy, then, something like how Maddy might have felt; as he walked into the midst of the rest of them he experienced the sense of something in the air. It wasn’t quite electricity — no, but a kind of thinness, like you’d expect at high altitudes. Only in this case, it was simultaneously the opposite, as though there were an abundance of oxygen surrounding the boys on the hospital’s front lawn, instead of the dearth one expects at high climes. It was the extra oxygen, imaginary or real, that might have been making him feel loopy.

  And then, yes, if he stopped moving and listened, there it was. A faint noise in the background, not unpleasant, but like a machine left on somewhere, a child’s toy with its tiny gears whining.

  He reached up and smoothed back the remaining hairs on top of his skull. Just a fresh-air night, a brisk spring night in the mountains, he told himself.

  And then it all passed.

  By the time Tom moved into what could roughly have been called the center of the group, the giddiness was being overtaken by impatience. He may not have been a Gestapo-style cop, but he was human. If this was a prank of some kind, maybe, or if it were some kind of vigil, or a religious thing, or even some absurd protest, Tom was getting edgy for an answer. This was three times in twenty-four hours, for God’s sake, he’d been amid these drones of human beings, and enough was enough. And if you counted the girl, with her slip into some kind of catatonia, then it was even more. Call it the stirring of the sleeping alcoholic, repressed grief over the loss of his would-be wife and surrogate son, call it simple fatigue, Tom Milliner was finally starting to get agitated.

  “Alright, guys, disperse. Let’s get out of here. Go home. Whatever you’ve got going, it’s over. People in there are working, and they don’t need distractions.”

  Tom started swinging his hands out, the .38 gripped in one, the other palm-out, making shooing gestures at the young men like one might make at pigeons or cattle. “Come on. Let’s go. I’m with the Red Rock County Sheriff’s Department and I’m telling you to disperse. You’re causing a scene.”

  Not a single movement. Not a blink. The group of young men, faces calm with that unmistakable rightfulness, their eyes sparkling, some wearing black hats, some with their hoods up, one or two in coats, all in dark jeans or cargo pants, they didn’t budge. Nor did they stand like stones. They stood like ghosts.

  “You don’t get moving and you’re all going to get arrested.” Tom’s voice rose into almost a shout. He plucked his cell phone from the clip on his belt and flipped it open, thumb poised over the buttons. He didn’t want to have to get local Red Rock PD down here, but he didn’t want to call the Sheriff either. Not just yet. Besides, the lights and the commotion would only mean more distraction for those inside. There was a baby boy to consider, his life on the line.

  “Alright, goddammit,” said Tom, and bent his arm and lifted and pointed the .38 at the sky, ready to fire one shot to get them scampering. One loud disruption would be the lesser evil than the prolonged commotion of arresting all the remaining ten of them. His finger was on the trigger, he was seconds away from discharging the firearm when he stopped.

  There were no longer ten of them.

  Tom dropped the .38 down to his side again. He suddenly felt watched, and turned around to see someone in the window on the third floor. Maddy. There were other figures too — nearly half of the windows had curtains back and were occupied with silhouettes. Everyone who could stand had come to see outside.

  The cell phone was still open in his other hand. His thumb hovered again over the numbers on the phone. He looked left, down the road, and then right, and then spun and looked over the cars and trucks and vans in the lot. Then he turned back to the scattered group again, and started to count them to be sure of what he was seeing.

  Tom didn’t finish counting. As he approached eight, the eighth guy disappeared. It was one of the kids with a black tuque on. He was a good-looking kid with dark stubble and shining eyes. He had on dark green or brown cargo pants — it was tough to tell in the dusk. And then he was gone.

  He didn’t run off, he didn’t dive out of sight (there was nowhere to hide, no bushes or shrubbery on the gently sloping swath of lawn) he just disappeared. At the same time Tom realized this, he heard a yell from the hospital behind him, an excited sound, almost like a “whoop!”

  He felt sure it was Maddy.

  Tom stayed where he was, phone forgotten, butt of the .38 and the fingers that wrapped around it pressed to the side of his chest, and looked quickly from kid to kid, reflexively counting yet again. This time he got up to no more than three when three — a kid with long hair in a ponytail, no hood, camouflage pants on — promptly disappeared as well.

  There was no fanfare that came with the disappearing. No “pop” sound, no whoosh of air, no tinkling of bells, no odor, nothing. It was just a goneness. Like the rightfulness, there was now goneness. Tom cocked his head even and listened; if he could hear that high whistling, it was now faint enough to be a mosquito.

  Background radiation, Christopher had said. Leftover from the origin.

  They all started to disappear then, and Tom had to turn to see some of them go. Within moments — seconds, minutes, Tom didn’t know — there was only one left. It happened to be the young man he’d walked by first, and Tom found himself suddenly hurrying to him, wanting to stop him from going anywhere, wanting to ask him questions — more, just wanting him to stay — and as he hobbled over across the lawn he realized that the sense of high altitude was gone, the feeling of excess oxygen no longer there, and then the boy disappeared.

  “No,” Tom shouted. “Wait. You have to—”

  And he didn’t finish his sentence because across the parking lot from him, all the lights in the hospital went out.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Trooper Jim Cruickshand moved quietly through the woods, careful of fallen branches from the previous night’s storm. He was a hunter, and he felt like one now. He followed the Kingston boy’s footprints through the shorter balsam firs and towering pines. He was familiar with this terrain. He realized now that he’d recognized it right off because he’d come here with Tom Milliner and Maddy Kruger when they were kids. He’d stalked off into these very woods by himself that time during the endless summer between their junior and senior years, when they’d “tuned in and dropped out,” as Maddy called it.

  Jim looked up into the trees, remembering. His eyes were good; h
e could see every tendril of the networking oak branches high above. At first he saw nothing. Then, maybe, movement. A jump from one tree to the next, an oak to an evergreen. A few pine needles helicoptered through the air and pattered to the ground.

  And those women he’d seen all those years ago, like bewitching handmaidens, calling him through the woods. Maybe they’d been warning him, he thought, way back then those sirens had been warning him about this very night, about the girls he would find in Jared Kingston’s shed.

  Jim shook off the memories and peered through the bramble of trees and shrubs at ground level, ignoring the high branches now. It didn’t matter, any of it. There was nothing mystical to worry about — just the fleshy cold-bloodedness of those bodies, and the fact of their murderer on the loose. It was, as Maddy Kruger would also say, time to fish or cut bait.

  In the shed were four dead young women. Jim had called in backup and they were en route. The County Sheriff knew he was out here, but the Sheriff didn’t have the girl at the jail. Milliner still had her, apparently. Johnston was giving him a little bit of time, but if Milliner didn’t bring the girl in, they would go after him. Jim was relieved that his old pal Tom had the girl, and not the Sheriff. Once the Goldfine girl went in, she’d get so deep into the system he’d have no access to her. He felt he needed to keep her close. Besides, Jim didn’t think she was a killer, and obviously Tom didn’t either. Any other foul play having to do with this other kid, Christopher, was probably due to Jared Kingston’s actions, too.

  Jim moved like a cat through the trees. Darkness had almost completely draped the woods, and a light rain fell, just spitting, misting, gradually soaking through his clothes as he stalked his prey.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  The power outage had sent them all packing, and Tom and Maddy drove through the night. The windshield wipers whacked back and forth. Tom’s cell phone buzzed in his pocket. He ignored it, coughed, and rolled down the window. He spat out into the rushing black. Fractures of water drops pinged back in at him.

  “Feels like it’s been raining for weeks.” He rolled up the window. He was tired again, after the rush of things was over, the kids on the lawn, the power failure, packing up the little boy and again sticking the Goldfine girl into her own ambulance. Now the long stretch of Route 33 was before them, and he was growing tired once more. The trip to Fletcher Allen Hospital in Vermont would take at least another hour.

  “It has been raining for weeks,” said Maddy.

  “Supposed to rain more in the fall, not the spring.”

  “I thought it was always rainiest in the spring.”

  “No. That’s a myth. April showers, May flowers, yadda yadda. Actual rainfall is always less in the spring.”

  “I don’t mind the rain.”

  Tom glanced at her. “I bet Noah got sick of it. Pissing down on him all day in his ark.”

  Maddy scowled at him. “You know, you could even ruin a cup of Lipton tea.”

  “Tell me: what’s exactly wrong with the baby?”

  She cleared her throat. “It has to do with the prosencephalon. The forebrain.”

  “It’s a brain thing? Shouldn’t this involve a neuroscientist, or a neurologist?”

  “Yes and no. The baby needs a blood transfusion.”

  “Why?”

  Maddy sighed. Tom didn’t think the sigh was directed at his questions, exactly. It felt to him more that Maddy, the female juggernaut of the ER, was finally starting to experience a little fatigue of her own. But Tom needed to know. There had to be some correlation between the kids — the “wagerers,” as he was coming to acknowledge them, in spite of himself — and the child, the transfusion, the possible surgery.

  “He has elevated blood sodium levels.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “Because he has a condition called holoprosencephaly.”

  “Which is?”

  “In the uterus, sometime around week six, when his brain was separating into the two hemispheres—” Tom saw Maddy circling a hand around her own nimbus of permed hair “—there were complications.”

  “Because the mother was a drug addict?”

  “Remember I told you what they tried to do?”

  Tom did. Get rid of it.

  “I don’t want to know what they did.”

  “But listen,” she said, “he’s okay up there. He has MIHV, or, the mildest case of it. He’s a lucky boy that way, fully able, but he needs some fresh blood. And he needs to get rid of some fluid. It’s drained, sort of, up and out from his sutures, and is there under the periosteum. Tom, it’s a miracle the young woman you brought in is a complete match. Are you getting heat for that? You must be.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” He peered at the road through the windshield and with his left hand wiped his eyes. He willed himself to stay sharp. “Were there any other matches?”

  “A young man who came in. He had some detox symptoms. The one you questioned.”

  “He was definitely a little gone. More drugs?”

  She shook her head, “Alcohol. We tested his blood for other substances, but there were none. He was the obvious choice for a donor. But he had too much shit in his system.”

  Tom blinked. He thought it might be the first time he’d ever heard Maddy Kruger use an expletive. Usually, her slang consisted exclusively of affectionate terms like “babydoll” and “sugar.”

  “Why was he the obvious donor?”

  “The baby boy was brought in when he was.”

  Tom looked over, and he must’ve watched Maddy for too long, because he almost drove off the road.

  “Whoa!” said Maddy, “you want me to drive, kiddo?”

  “That was the kid’s father?”

  “He’s in the system. Name is on the paternity papers, the whole bit.”

  “Mark Massey. That was his name.”

  “You didn’t even have to look at your little notepad.”

  He smiled grimly, but inside he was chiding himself for not following up on talking to the ambulance driver, Roland, and the EMT who’d brought Massey in.

  “And guess what,” said Maddy. “Guess what’s strange about this kid.”

  “He’s into black magic?”

  “We knew his toxicity would prevent immediate transfusion, but we tested it anyway. He’s the baby’s biological father, and yet his blood was no good.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me this before? I was in the room with the goddamn kid, Maddy.”

  “It’s because you were in the room with the kid I didn’t tell you. Thought you might take it upon yourself to give the kid a little private instruction, if you know what I mean.” She looked hard at him. “Don’t deny it.”

  He couldn’t believe he’d been in the same room with the child’s father, Massey. If he’d known . . . well, what? The kid had been a father at seventeen. Was only twenty or twenty-one now. Not that age was a good excuse, but still. Who knew where Massey had come from, what he’d had, or hadn’t had, for guidance?

  Still. Tom imagined cornering the kid. Taking off his belt, like Milliner senior had done on a few occasions. Giving him something to remember.

  He felt her watch him as he drove. “What else?”

  “Well, we know about his mother, who was very young. She’s long gone, somewhere in the Midwest. We know he was born by cesarean section.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Liability.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Boy, sweetie, you’re out of touch.”

  Tom smiled in the dark, looking out through the falling mist at the back of the ambulance they were following. “I spend a significant portion of time staring at the wall, yes.”

  “The mother was using. At least during part of the pregnancy. They worried about her condition. Cesareans are now one-in-three births in the US, so, it’s not much of a leap. Obstetrics gets pressure, like everyone else in the medical fields, to use drugs. Pressure from the pharmaceutical companies, from the insurance comp
anies. Use of Pitocin is common practice.”

  “And what is that?”

  “Synthetic oxytocin. Oxytocin is the natural hormone produced by the female in childbirth. Both she and the baby have hormones going on, Tom; it’s a chemical romance. In a vaginal birth, anyway. Pitocin mimics some of the oxytocin, which is to help with contractions, but it doesn’t have the love-effect.”

  “The love-effect,” Tom repeated. He cleared his throat. His chest felt tight. The fingers of his left arm tingled.

  “Pitocin produces longer, stronger contractions to induce labor. The contractions cause pain, and the woman wants an epidural, which slows dilation of the cervix, and so more Pitocin is used. Somebody in Nassau, Bahamas, is getting filthy rich from this vicious cycle. The extra-strength contractions can stress the baby — lower blood pressure, slow heart rate, and then the baby is in danger, so, bing! C-section time.”

  “And that’s bad?”

  “A C-section disrupts everything that is central to parturition. The mother-child bond. A C-section is surgery, not childbirth. Childbirth, real childbirth, is an experience that is essential to all of human kind. Without it, I don’t know where we’re going.”

  Maddy sat back and then her voice took on a musing tone. “It’s like anything and everything possible to keep this little boy from the world has happened to him, or is happening. But we’re going to save him.”

  Tom started coughing. He thought he was just going to clear his chest again, a little more thoroughly, but the coughs tore through his chest like burning ropes pulled taught around his lungs. He leaned forward, racked with the fit, and the car swerved again.

  Maddy reached out and grabbed the wheel. “Honey. Honey.”

  The fit subsided. Tom sat up straight again and gently removed her hand. “I’m okay.”

  “That’s what you keep saying. You’ve been ignoring your phone, too.”

  “I’m alright. If it happens again, I’ll let you drive. Deal?”