by Scott Carson
Fleming’s half shout didn’t have the cold caustic bite of his conversation in the parking lot. If anything, he seemed focused up here, a man devoted to his craft. He seemed, finally, like the man everyone had promised Steve he was.
“How’s it an illusion?” Steve said.
“Because those forces don’t truly work together. They only seem to. That’s the great trick of engineering. We take opposing forces and balance them. Things in balance seem to have a nice, peaceful harmony. They seem cooperative. But that’s the illusion. Those forces are always at war. They’re always seeking an advantage. Day by day, minute by minute, drip by drip, forces of nature fight to dominate. And that, Sheriff Ellsworth, is why something as trivial as a tiny bubble in a big body of water can be a very dangerous thing.”
Steve nodded. This much he understood far better than the patronizing engineer would ever know. Lily’s blood clot had started in her thigh, slipped through veins that were slimmer than the finest ultralight fishing line, crept unseen up her torso, through her heart, along her neck, and into her brain.
Steve Ellsworth didn’t need to be told about the importance of keeping a system in balance.
“The problem is down below,” he said. “It’s not about the rain at all.”
“It’s about both. There are problems down below, and the rain is adding problems from up above. That’s how we get to disaster scenarios.”
“So what do we need to do?” Steve said, his voice hoarse and loud and still nearly drowned out by the roar of water thundering over all that old stone. “How do we stop it?”
Mick Fleming’s face sagged as if he was disappointed by the question.
“That’s just the point,” he said. “You don’t stop it. You only delay it.”
Steve sighed and wiped rain out of his eyes. “I grasp the big picture. But how do we delay it? Because when that big old bitch bursts, it’s not going to be on my watch.”
“No, it won’t,” Mick Fleming said, the first agreement he’d offered. He nodded at the gatehouse. “Let me show you how we make sure it’s not on your watch.”
Fleming walked to the door, tugged it open, and held it for Steve, squinting into the wind and rain. Steve crossed the steel-grated catwalk that let water drip into the crushed stone below, ducked through the door, and entered the gatehouse.
Arthur Brady sat in his chair in front of the old computer monitor and beside one of the far older, massive steel valves. The handle of the valve, which resembled a ship’s wheel, was flaked with rust. Arthur was studying the rust.
“Hey, Arthur,” Steve called as the door clanged shut behind him. “I brought company.”
Twin realizations floated toward him then. The valve handle wasn’t flaked with rust; it was flecked with blood. And Arthur wasn’t slumped in his chair; he was dead in it.
Then the third realization: Steve had just made the last mistake of many an old lawman. He had turned his back on someone he didn’t trust.
He got halfway turned around and got his hand on the butt of his duty pistol before the bullet came.
Then he was down on one knee, shot in the back but looking at a bloody hole in his chest. He kept trying to turn. He had to brace his left hand on the floor to do it, but he got around and he saw Mick Fleming. The engineer’s iPad and notebook were on the floor at his feet. The third thing he’d been clutching inside that raincoat—the thing Steve hadn’t considered until too late—was in his hand.
A revolver, short-barreled, smaller caliber. Probably a .38. Cheap pawnshop trade. Saturday night special. Rusty junk with no range.
Still, a killing piece.
The wind rose. Rain hammered the old glass of the arched windows where the gatehouse kept watch on the Chilewaukee Reservoir. Blood dripped out of Steve’s chest and onto the floor. He watched the red drops while he fumbled with his gun. He thought, Aaron was right. My son was right. My son saw it coming. He finally cleared his gun and lifted it to kill Mick Fleming. Then he lost track of Mick Fleming and saw his grandfather instead, saw the old man standing on the front porch of the family farmhouse, watching the rain clouds massing in the west, and Steve thought, Yes, he saw it coming, too.
His grandfather turned to him with a sad smile, and then came a thunderclap, and day went to night.
38
Mick intended to put both bodies in the water, but Anders Wallace stopped him.
“Poor choice,” he said.
Mick stared at him. “I can’t just leave them here.”
“But into the water, sir? Considering all you’ve learned, you still find that wise?”
Mick thought about it. Looked at Anders, and then looked out at the Chilewaukee. Saw his own face reflected in the rain-washed windowpane.
“They don’t belong there?”
“It would be a risk, don’t you think?”
“Yes,” Mick said, but he wasn’t sure why.
“Think of it this way,” Anders said, as if reading Mick’s confusion. “You don’t understand much about Galesburg, but you know it presents options. Are these men”—he nodded at the two corpses—“the type of men you want to have options? After what happened here?”
Anders posed the questions as if they were remedial problems, but they were far too complex for Mick. He was embarrassed by that. All his life, he’d solved the hardest problems, and yet this one was beyond him.
“They’re dead,” he said, his voice soft, almost wheedling. It echoed in the empty room with all its stone and metal, and he hated the sound.
“In another life, weren’t you dead?” Anders asked, leaning against one of the massive iron pipes.
Yes, Mick supposed he had been. But here he was. He understood at least vaguely how that had come to pass, so Anders must, too.
“You’re in charge of that,” Mick said. “You must be.”
Anders gave a rueful laugh. Turned and looked out the arched window at the nickel-colored water beyond. He was utterly unbothered by the blood at his feet, but he seemed perpetually distracted by the rain.
“I’d love for that to be true,” he said. “But I’m afraid it’s not.”
“You must be,” Mick repeated, and this time he didn’t mind the echo of his high, insistent voice. He was right about this—sure of it. The only way his existence here made any sense was if Anders was in charge of the situation. How it all worked, Mick couldn’t say, but it seemed clear that there was a boss to the situation. The man who transcended space and time and place, the one who could appear in Mick’s home in Albany or at his side in Torrance County, the one who could lead him underwater or aboveground—he was surely the boss.
He must be.
“Do you remember what you were explaining to the sheriff about cavitation?” Anders asked him. “About bubbles?”
Mick looked down at the sheriff. His eyes were open but they saw nothing. Blood dripped in twin rivulets off his hips, forming crimson stains on his jeans that looked like holsters.
“Yes, I remember that.”
“Millions of them, you said. Some make it downstream; others burst on the spillway surface. Some ride the current; some die in the current. You want ironclad rules, Mr. Fleming, but you of all people should know they don’t exist.”
“Why not?”
“Answer that yourself.”
“I can’t.”
“Try.” Anders waited expectantly. Mick turned away, and then he was looking at the sheriff’s dead eyes again but seeing the bubbles in the water below the dam. He tried to focus on that problem. To consider the individual bubble, swept along in a strong current among so many others, stone beneath, rain above, limbs and weeds and stumps scattered all about.
“There are too many factors to control,” he said. “Each scenario is different. You can’t control them all.”
“Very good. And so we control what we can, to stay in balance. Am I right?”
Mick nodded again.
“Then I’d hesitate to add these gents to that water, personally,
” Anders said. “Because we know some strange things happen there. Some we can control. Others? Maybe not. You were always en route to Galesburg. You’ve been part of the equation for a long, long time. It was a matter of timing. We had to be patient. The water had to rise. But we knew you’d arrive.”
“You couldn’t have known that.”
Anders smiled.
“I came here for work,” Mick said.
“Of course you did. The dam is yours, after all.”
“That was my grandfather who designed it. He’s dead.”
Still, Anders didn’t speak. Just smiled.
“You couldn’t have known I’d be here,” Mick said again.
“Perhaps not. But you did come, didn’t you? The water rose, and there you were. Drawn back to this special place. Sacred place.”
Mick didn’t say anything. Anders nodded at the corpses and nudged the sheriff’s boot with his foot.
“I’d keep them out of Galesburg today,” Anders said. “Just to remove an unknown. We don’t like those, do we?”
“I never have,” Mick agreed.
“This way, then.” Anders moved toward a catwalk that looked out over the lower floor of the gatehouse, the manual control room for the big gates themselves.
Mick followed, dragging the sheriff’s body over the cold stone floor. Blood trailed behind. Fluorescent overhead lighting jittered and flickered. The light’s ballast was failing. It would need to be replaced or the place would go dark. That annoyed Mick; how long had Arthur Brady ignored that flickering light? The ballasts had a purpose. They burned out slowly for a reason: to give you time. It was just like the noxious smell of eggs that came from a gas leak. The smell wasn’t natural. It was added to the gas, added by humans to save humans. And every year you read about another family who’d died of carbon monoxide poisoning or blown up their home, ignorant of a gas leak, because they’d ignored the smell.
You could only do so much to help humanity. At some point you had to shake them awake.
Yes, Mick thought as he dragged the dead sheriff through the Chilewaukee Dam gatehouse, Anders Wallace was right: you could control only so much.
At the end of the catwalk, iron ladders led down to dark pits. These were access chambers, designed to give workers a view of the massive outlet gates that controlled the flow through the spillway. The outlet pipes were nearly three feet in diameter, and they were protected above and below by steel grates that let water pass through but trapped larger debris.
Here the corpses could wait in the water, but they couldn’t move downstream. They would never reach the Dead Waters. Never see Galesburg.
Mick shoved the sheriff’s head and shoulders between the railing and the floor, then grabbed him by the boots and pushed. It was awkward, because the sheriff’s corpse seemed determined not to cooperate, bending and folding rather than sliding, but Mick finally shoved him through.
There was the whisper of fabric on stone, then a splash and a muffled pop, like the breaking of rotten wood. The sheriff was gone, and darkness hid him.
Mick went back for Arthur Brady. It went faster this time. Arthur was lighter, and his body slipped between the railing and the floor easier. Push, shove, splash.
Bodies gone, blood on the floor.
Mick went in search of a mop.
39
Gillian and Aaron made the walk back from her old house in near silence. The only times either of them spoke it was to offer soft words of guidance: careful; steep here; watch that branch. Gillian was fine with that. She had no desire to talk after opening the floodgates for Aaron back in the terrible schoolhouse room of the home she’d once known as largely a good place—or at least a home place. Even in bad times, children trusted home. It was the den that kept you safe from the world. Never mind if it was filled with wolves.
The wolves hadn’t been all bad, though. Her grandmother had been lovely in so many ways, kind in so many ways… and a complete believer in the terrible story she was teaching.
As Aaron Ellsworth held back a whiplike branch so Gillian could step under it, she thought of her father.
What did he know? He knew something. He hated the school. Wouldn’t talk about it. And the first time you drew anything from the schoolhouse, the look on his face…
Those were the memories, at least. But memory was a shifting thing, fluid and deceptive, and it had a way of carrying facts from one place to another so subtly that you didn’t recognize the redistribution until too late. One summer the sandbar had been over there, and the next summer you were running aground on it over here. That was memory. You navigated with it, but it was shifting all the while.
When she thought of her dad’s face, though—of how he’d looked when he saw her sketches—she was sure that he’d known about the Galesburg School.
Then why didn’t he speak of it?
“No answer?” Aaron Ellsworth said.
“Huh?” She turned to him.
“I said, how long will it take them to identify the body? Like, positive identification. Dental records or whatever.”
She hadn’t even heard the question. Looking at him now, she saw that he needed a rest probably more than he needed an answer. He was leaning against a tree, breathing hard and trying to take all of the weight off his bad foot. What had she been thinking, dragging him all the way out here with that injury?
I had to tell someone. Had to share it with someone.
“I’m not sure,” she said. “This is the first time I’ve had charge of a scene with an unidentified body. Or a body, period.”
“We can talk to my dad about it,” he said between breaths. “Maybe he can help. You know, expedite it.”
“Maybe.”
His broad chest rose and fell as he fought for air, but his eyes were keenly focused on hers.
“You don’t want me to tell him.”
“I don’t care. He’ll find out soon enough. Everyone will.”
“Not her identity. I’m talking about all the rest of it. You’re not ready to tell people about that yet, are you?”
“I don’t know.”
“If you believe in it, though, then shouldn’t you…”
“What? What should I do?”
“I don’t know. Are you kidding me? How would anyone know? But you’ve got to do something, right?”
Yes, Gillian thought, remembering the blackboard in the schoolhouse, the sound of the chalk, the way the white dust rose and hung in the air when her grandmother’s hand picked up speed. I have to leave. That’s what I have to do. Because my family was evil, and the water in Galesburg is not the kind that washes your sins away. It’s the kind that preserves them. And it doesn’t lose track of its debts. Being here is a bad idea.
Yet she was here. She’d come back, when there was absolutely no reason to do so, and every incentive to avoid the place. On the day that the reservoir crested twenty feet, she was on hand.
Just as promised.
“Maybe,” she said, and turned from him again. She pushed through another thicket, thorns tearing at her jacket, branches whipping back. She didn’t pause to hold them as he had for her. She was doing all she could to avoid running. Each step farther from the house helped, but she didn’t feel she was taking them fast enough.
“He’ll listen,” Aaron said behind her.
“Yeah?” She kept walking. Below them, Cresap Creek churned toward Torrance, the water dark with soil. Turbid, that was the official term.
“I’m serious,” Aaron called, falling farther behind. “He’ll remember the old stories. Some of them, at least. He’ll take them seriously. I know that.”
She slowed, then half turned so she could see his face. “Why?”
“Because his family did. His grandmother, his grandfather. I remember that. My mom would just shake her head, because she never liked the…”
Halloween shit, Gillian thought, remembering the phrase he’d used at the overlook.
“Never liked superstitious people,” he said.
“But I know that his grandparents believed in that sort of thing.”
That sort of thing. Murder and blood sacrifice, old debts and new ghosts.
“Your father doesn’t seem like he’s got that kind of patience.”
“I think you’ll be surprised.”
She didn’t answer. Telling Aaron Ellsworth had been hard enough; telling Steve Ellsworth was almost implausible. And yet…
You’ve got to do something.
She moved on, thinking that he had the right idea but the wrong man. They needed to speak to someone’s father, certainly. It just wasn’t his.
DOWNSTREAM
40
When Caleb Stiles asked if Deshawn could pull overtime, it felt inevitable. On this day, when all Deshawn wanted was to get out of the tunnels and back to the waiting city above, back to a place where he had cell phone reception to reach his daughter and where no visions plagued him, the tunnels didn’t seem inclined to give him up so easily.
He suspected there was another reason, too. Caleb was curious after that meltdown with the oncoming railcar, when Deshawn had screamed and then told his foreman that it had been out of concern over a sandwich.
Deshawn wouldn’t have been the first sandhog to crack from claustrophobia, although after all these years that would be rare. Still, he’d shown something today that had unnerved Caleb, and he didn’t blame the man for testing him.
“Second shift’s two men down this week,” Caleb explained. “They need help, and it needs to be a veteran.” He watched Deshawn like a psychiatrist eyeing a patient. “You know, someone experienced. Steady. Someone like you.”
“Whole shift?” Deshawn said.
Caleb nodded.
Eight more hours. It was barely legal, but it was also hardly unheard-of. They were over budget and behind deadline—by years and millions, or decades and billions, depending on whose original estimate you trusted.
“Sure,” Deshawn said. “Double money? I’ll take that any day.”
Caleb watched him for a beat longer before saying, “That’s what I was counting on. Thanks.”