The Chill

by Scott Carson

  The blood was pouring out of his foot, splattering the rocks with crimson, and the pressure from his grasp seemed to have no effect at all. The pain rose through his body and into his brain, a high, shrieking chord of agony.

  I bet I severed a nerve, he thought as he rocked back and forth, pressing his hands to the wound. He had nothing to use to staunch the blood flow. Not unless he took his underwear off. His phone was in the truck; his clothes were up the trail. It was going to be a long, painful hobble to get anywhere, and he’d be spurting blood with each step.

  He screamed then, a howl of rage and pain, and the shout was still echoing when he heard another voice chasing on its heels.

  “Who’s down there? Hey! Who is down there?”

  The photographer, Aaron thought. The photographer was still within earshot. Once Aaron had wanted him gone; now he was grateful that the man was still in the woods.

  “Here! I need help!” Aaron tried to stand but fell sideways when the pain lanced through him. With the pressure of his hands removed from the wound, his foot began to leak blood rapidly, coating his toes and heel. He fought upright, all of his weight on his left leg, and then stared in the direction of the voice. It had come from up the trail, and now he could hear footsteps and snapping branches and see the brush shake as someone rushed toward him.

  Lucky, he thought, because you could go a long time down here without encountering a soul, even on a sunny summer day. In the middle of an autumn rain, though? This was fortunate indeed.

  A man broke out of the trees and into view on the rise just above Aaron. It wasn’t the photographer. This was a slender middle-aged man with glasses and a high widow’s peak of receding sandy hair, his hands occupied by an iPad and a notebook. A mechanical pencil was tucked behind his ear. He blinked at Aaron and took a step back, and Aaron realized just how he must look, hobbling around in his underwear in the rain, blood on his hands.

  “I was swimming,” he began, and the stranger blinked again and interrupted before Aaron could get any further.

  “That’s not allowed. No one is allowed here. There’s a fence and signs.” His voice was high and prissy, as if Aaron’s injury was a personal offense to him.

  Aaron gritted his teeth, wiped his bloody palms on his soaking underwear, and said, “The point is I was swimming and I cut my foot.”

  The stranger frowned and said, “I think the sheriff is looking for you.”

  Aaron’s vision seemed to gray around the edges, and for a moment all he could hear was the thunder of the water up at the dam and all he could smell was his own blood.

  “Is that so?” he said.

  “Yes. I believe he is looking for you.”

  So his father had come down here. Maybe old Arthur Brady had called him after all.

  “Well,” Aaron said in a nearly cheerful tone, “the sheriff can go fuck himself.”

  The man shifted uneasily and wet his lips. He had a strange, wandering stare; he was looking at Aaron but seeming unable to focus on him.

  “Can you come down here and give me a hand?” Aaron asked, taking one hobbling step sideways, the pain reaching excruciating levels and bringing dizziness.

  The man looked at him but didn’t move.

  “Come on!” Aaron shouted. His right foot was painted with blood now. “Help me!”

  The man turned away.

  “Don’t leave!” Aaron called, but the man didn’t look back and didn’t respond, just started to pick his way carefully over the wet rocks and back toward the trail.

  Aaron tried to chase after him, but his first awkward step cost him his balance, and then he fell into the rocks on his knees, landing with a jarring pain.

  “Help me, damn you!”

  The man didn’t so much as turn. He was simply going to leave Aaron here in his own blood, was that it?

  Aaron threw the first rock half out of anger and half because he really needed help, he needed this asshole to at least help get the bleeding stopped before he left. The rock sailed high and wide and clattered into the trees, and it didn’t seem the man even noticed. He kept shuffling up the bank toward the trail, moving slowly and awkwardly because of all the crap in his hands.

  The rest happened almost too fast to register.

  Aaron grabbed the neck of the beer bottle simply because it was handy and it was going to make some noise when it broke. He whipped it into the trees in the exact same way he’d thrown the rock, and the rock hadn’t come close. He figured the bottle would bust in the trees high above the stranger’s head and maybe that would finally get his attention.

  It went low, though. It went low and fast, spinning and glittering through the rain, and just as Aaron threw it, the man turned back to him and spoke in a clipped but not unfriendly voice.

  “In my car, I’ve got a first-aid—”

  The neck of the bottle hit him in the face.

  It burst on impact and knocked his glasses half off, turning one side of them upright but leaving the other in place, so that one eye was covered, like he was wearing a monocle. For an instant he stood there with his lips parted and the glasses hanging sideways on his face, and then a red line opened below his left eye socket and blood sheeted down his cheek.

  Only then did he try to move, and when he did, he fell almost immediately, a cloud of papers blowing free from his hands as he went down on the bank, sliding into the shallows before he finally came to a stop.

  He didn’t get back up.

  Aaron looked at him and then down at his own bloody palm and said, “Oh, shit, oh, shit.”

  His voice cracked like a child’s, and he fell silent and looked back up at where the man lay slumped on the rocks. He wasn’t far away, but Aaron still couldn’t tell how bad the bleeding was.

  It was raining too hard to make out anything clearly now.

  Whatever he couldn’t see about the wound was rendered swiftly irrelevant when the man’s body began to shift—and not from his own efforts. The high, swift waters were tugging at him, pulling his body farther down the slick bank.

  It was as if the place was hungry for him.

  Aaron struggled to his feet, pushing through the cloud of pain as hot blood flowed, stumbling toward the injured man. He could make it. Had to make it, because if the man went into the water…

  The current had the man’s legs now, and it spun him sideways and the rain seemed to fall harder as if in assistance, adding a final layer of slickness to the mud and the rocks, and then he was off the bank and into the current, motionless and facedown as he floated by Aaron, swept downstream with astonishing speed.

  Aaron’s first step toward the water cost him his balance again, and he landed hard but kept going. He was on his hands and knees when he reentered the water. He lowered his head and swam hard through the pain, leaving a streamer of blood behind him.

  9

  He’d never saved anyone in the water, and yet he knew that he would. So that others might live, said the rescue swimmer credo, and Aaron had taped that slogan to the mirror on the back of his bedroom door when he was a rail-thin thirteen-year-old. His parents had never taken that old sign down. It was faded and frayed now, but it was still there.

  He was sure that his moment had finally come. There would be plenty of pain waiting behind it—stitches in the hospital, then a return to jail, maybe for a long stay this time—but those things seemed trivial right now. What mattered was destiny, fate, a promise. One he’d made to his mother before her death; one he’d made to himself years ago in this very spot.

  I will save a life. I may give my own, but I will save another’s. Somewhere, on some unknown night in some distant sea, water will threaten a life, and I’ll be in that water. I will make myself whole in that water. So that others might live.

  He was so sure of that. Where and when, those were the only questions. He’d certainly never considered it might be the Chill. Or that he’d cause the threat himself.

  Doesn’t matter, he told himself as he turned his head to the l
eft, sucked in a breath, and swam on. Nothing matters but the water and the task. It’s just you versus the current and the cold, same as you always knew it would be.

  Ahead of him, he saw his victim—who would now become his rescue—float to the surface briefly before being sucked back underneath, pulled down in the stretch where the tailwaters pounded over a ledge and down into a deep pool.

  Aaron would reach him. The man wasn’t far ahead now, Aaron was gaining fast, and his purpose was clear. As clear, in fact, as anything had been for him in a long, long time. The unknowns were answered now—when and who and how—and he no longer felt guilt or even fear. He was himself again.

  This is why I’m here. Why I had to come back. For this moment and this man.

  He saw blood in the water ahead of him. It was boiling along in a cloud of bubbles at the surface, tinging the water red. Somewhere behind them, Aaron’s blood would be doing the same, pouring from his foot. He was only dimly aware of the torture that each kick caused. Adrenaline was sealing the pain away, holding the full flood of agony back just like the dam itself.

  You’ve got to be nearly to him now. Maybe just above him. It’s time to dive, and the water here is dark, so dive left and then swim right, cover ground, scan for him.

  Old lessons coming back under duress. He was pleased by that. In those first months of rescue swimmer training, he’d been so damned happy. Each lesson a new chance to perfect the skills that he’d always known as something more than a passion. It was his identity.

  Prove it, he thought as the water hammered him past a fallen tree whose branches raked his back, drawing fresh blood. Prove the promise.

  The current had slowed, because he was in the stilling basin now, down in the Dead Waters. The current wouldn’t have pulled his man farther downstream. He’d been sinking, and the stilling basin would have caught him.

  Aaron made a head turn, an inhalation, and a dive. Down and to the left, scanning the bottom.

  Nothing. The withered limbs of forgotten trees reached for him, and deeper there was a cluster of weeds, but no sign of the wounded man.

  Pivot then. Dive deeper and keep turning, scan left to right, not too fast, because if you miss him, you’ll miss your chance.

  His lungs were beginning to throb, and the pain from his foot was nearing a crescendo that would drown out the numbing adrenaline, but he fought deeper, closing in on the bottom as he scanned left to right. Stumps. A tire. A beer can, a single tennis shoe, an anchor with the rope still knotted to it. The old stone foundation of some forgotten house. All of these things plainly visible despite his searing eyes, and yet nowhere was his man.

  He reached out and gripped the anchor with his left hand and used it to hold himself in place while he turned his head back and forth and back again, searching, searching, searching.

  Nothing.

  Just stumps, rocks, water, and…

  Got him!

  The human figure was undeniable even in the dark water. A pale form pinned between two withered, rotting birches that had come to rest against the old stone foundation.

  He swam down, deeper, deeper, hands extended, reaching for the first part of the man that he could grasp.

  His hand met something invisible but strong, a thin cord that tangled in his fingers. Fishing line. He tried to brush it away, but when he moved his hand, the man beneath him moved, too, caught in the line.

  Aaron almost parted his lips and breathed in water then.

  The body he’d been intent on pulling to the surface wasn’t the same body he’d been reaching for.

  It was a skeleton. The skull turned toward him. Gleaming bone, blackened eye sockets. The face was all he could see, because the rest of the skull was surrounded by a hood or a shroud. Black cloth, picked to pieces by time and fish and crawdads that darted in and out, seeking whatever flesh had once covered the face.

  His hand was still tangled, and his oxygen almost gone. He brought his hand up to his eyes, looking for a way to untangle the line, and when he did that, the corpse shifted again, sliding down against the birches, into an area lit dimly but brighter than the rest.

  The fishing line was hooked in the tree but seemed secured to the corpse at what should have been the free end. There were multiple lines, too. Aaron looked down in horror, and this time, in the shaft of faint light, he saw the chains.

  They were coiled about ankle bones that rested in boots that were now not much more than rubber soles and metal grommets, the leather or fabric that had once been there eaten away. The chains remained, though. And the padlock.

  Aaron’s vision went gray-black at the edges and he felt his lips start to part against his will. To breathe or to scream, he wasn’t sure. He sealed them tight, knowing that he was about to die down here, joined by a length of fishing line to a corpse who’d come before him.

  Surface. If your fingers tear out of the sockets and stay in that fishing line, that’s fine, but surface now, or you’re never going to draw another breath.

  His upward motion was explosive, driven by panic and survival, his fear of the corpse and desire to live intermingling. Fight and flight.

  The monofilament line bit hard at his fingers, but they passed through it, leaving some skin behind. He made a powerful upward stroke and thought, I will be so close, just before he broke the surface with a gasp that drew in both water and air.

  He choked and sank, then rose and gasped in another breath. Rolled onto his back and leaned his head back, trying to clear his nose and mouth.

  He floated to a downed tree near the shore and managed to grab it with a weak hand. Hung there, so exhausted that the simple act of breathing required all of his focus.

  He looked upstream and down. No sign of anyone on the surface. His victim had vanished, but he’d found another.

  Chains and fishhooks. No accident. And what was that cloth covering the skull?

  The rain fell all around him.

  He was still hanging on the limb, too exhausted to move, when Arthur Brady began hollering his name. Or maybe it wasn’t his name. There was something else in there. Fleming? Yes, he was calling for a man named Fleming.

  That must have been him, Aaron thought, stupefied by fatigue. That must have been the man I killed. Fleming.

  He wanted to call out for Arthur but couldn’t find the strength. He just hung there on the branch, watching the rain hammer off the water’s surface and wondering how he’d been so wrong about so much.

  He was still there when Arthur arrived. Then and only then did he manage to find his voice.

  “Call my father,” he said. He finally forced himself upright, forced his head around so he could look Arthur Brady in the eye. “Mr. Brady? Please.”

  Arthur Brady stared back at him in the rain, blinking in fearful confusion. The rain beaded on his bald head.

  “There was another fella down here,” he said. “I’ve been looking for him.”

  “I know.” Aaron’s vision blurred again, and he squinted to clear his eyes. “I killed him. You can tell my father that, too.”

  10

  When the call came, Steve was in a meeting with a county councilman who was concerned about the department’s lack of aggression in policing the homeless. Two days earlier Steve had met with another councilman who was concerned that the policing was too aggressive.

  This was the fun of being sheriff—you heard out all of the citizens’ concerns and then in your spare time you attempted to see that they were actually being protected and served. Steve’s approach to politicking was straight from his father, which came straight from his grandfather. Listen to everyone, ask good questions, and don’t say anything in private that you wouldn’t want to see quoted in the paper.

  “You shouldn’t have to search for reasons to be an honest man,” his father had once told him, “but I’ll give you one anyhow. When you’re not hiding anything, you’re at a level of peace that most people can’t match. It seems simple until you watch the way other folks go about it. An
honest man is never worried about being trapped by the thing he said yesterday or last week or last year.”

  It wasn’t so damned hard. Just be an honest broker and do what you promised—which meant that you learned fast not to promise too much. That was good. That had gotten Ellsworths elected for many years in Torrance County, and Torrance County was a safer place to live because of them.

  This was the notion in Steve’s head—under-promise, and over-deliver—when a deputy summoned him with the news that Aaron was on the phone and that it was urgent. All thoughts of local politicking vanished then.

  “Apologies,” Steve told the councilman, pushing back from the table. “I’ll need just a moment of privacy and then we’ll be right back to it, sir.”

  Already, though, he was unsure about that. If Aaron was calling with something urgent, then it wouldn’t be a quick fix. What fresh trouble was this? If it was jail, then he’d let Aaron sit there for a week.

  At least a week, he told himself as he picked up the phone and punched the button to accept the call. Maybe a month.

  “Yes, sir?” he said, the way he always answered the phone when his son called. He’d started that back when the boy wasn’t much more than seven or eight and it gave Aaron a thrill to be acknowledged as a man. He’d been worthier of it back then. What in the hell had happened to him?

  “Dad? I need you.”

  His tone gave Steve pause. It wasn’t the insolence he was used to hearing from Aaron of late, and it also wasn’t the wheedling tone, the I got screwed by somebody and now I need help against this big bad world that’s out to get me tone. His voice was calm and collected yet underscored with fear.

  “What’s going on, Aaron? I’m in the middle of a meeting, and—”

  “I’m going to need you to leave it. I’m sorry. But I am going to need you to leave and come get me, please.”

  He’d said sorry and please? It was almost implausible, a prank call.