by Scott Carson
They were right. He’d learned that the hardest way. But he wasn’t going to panic again.
His heart pounded in his ears with the steadily increasing drive of a bass drum, faster with each beat. A racing heartbeat, a heartbeat that promised
PANIC.
No. There will be no panic, because you’ve got nothing to lose here, he told himself. It’s just you and the current, Ellsworth, and the current is your friend.
But there was no current. It was dead still, more like pond water than a river, more like the pool where everything had gone wrong, the pool where he had
PANICKED.
His hand touched stone, and then one fin scraped over it, too. The tunnel was closing in on him. The water still all around, no friend at all, no current, a stagnant enemy, a tomb.
He bumped into a wall. Lifted his head and cracked it against the ceiling. Everything tight as a coffin, and waterlogged, too. He closed his eyes, feeling as if the sight of the walls was worse than swimming in blackness. His hand hit rock again, sending a bolt of pain through his wrist. He kept his eyes closed, though. Kicked. Rising through the water. No, rising within the water, joined to it. You didn’t fight it; you joined it. Old lessons and muscle memory. Find the flow state. He would need that now, because there wasn’t another option. There would be no surfacing and admitting defeat, not down here.
Heartbeat louder and faster in his ears, and now a buzz, the sounds combining like a big angry rock band getting ready to play in the back of his skull, tuning up, drums kicking and the amps giving feedback. Was that the whine of an electric guitar behind? A high shriek, like a scream, a scream of
PANIC!!!
He spit the mouth guard out. Water rushed in his lips even as he tried to seal them shut, but that wasn’t bad, because it cleared his head. Cold, dank water on his tongue but not yet filling his throat. Not yet.
The angry heavy metal band was stomping onto the stage now. Drums thumping, guitars humming, all buzzing with the anticipation of the final stroke of the pick, that moment of cacophonous, raging noise that would mark the end for him.
Another sound somewhere in the mix. Something soft as a whisper, but rhythmic. Plinking drops, like rain on a car hood. The first fat drops that fell before a big storm. He thought that those didn’t belong with the rest of the noise. The angry band he understood. He knew what they were waiting on: permission. All he had to do was give them the sign, and then the pick would strike on the guitar strings and the noise would start and Aaron would cease. Panic was permission to die.
His hamstrings began to tremble with the teasing threat of a cramp. That would be the end, too. A cramp would kill him for sure.
So stop. It’s not panic if it’s your choice. Go ahead and stop.
Kick, stroke, kick, stroke. Heartbeat drumming, brain humming. He realized that drowning wasn’t going to be a quiet death. It was going to be loud, at least to him. Somewhere in the distance, that sound of rain. A mocking torment, because there was no rain down here in the depths, there was only rain at the—
Surface, he thought, and suddenly he felt hope. The raindrops were real, and they were calling to him from the surface. He could hear them. Just up ahead. Reach for it. So close now. Two more strokes. Maybe three. It wasn’t impossible. Let the guitar hum and the bass drum thump a little longer. The band didn’t need to play yet. Not just yet. One more stroke. And another. And one more…
He broke out of the water and into the rain.
He opened his eyes a half second after he opened his mouth for air. Black threads danced across his vision. Water filled his mouth. He gagged and spat, tilted his head back, and found air.
His vision cleared slowly, the black threads wiped clear by a gray fog that then dissipated. He was on his back, looking at a cracked rock ceiling. Water dripped down from it, falling in slow, patient drops.
Not rain, after all. Just groundwater, dripping from somewhere high on a mountain above him. Seeping through, finding its impossible way through all that rock.
He floated, breathed, and steadied. As oxygen fed his muscles, the cramps receded. Knots loosening, surrendering.
I made it, he realized with amazement, and then he laughed. The sound echoed in the chamber of dark stone, giving him an audience, an elated crowd.
He’d actually made it. How far, he couldn’t say, but he knew that it had been the longest swim he’d ever made underwater.
He crawled out of the water and onto the dry rock. The tunnel wasn’t as steep here, just a long, rough cylinder, with no light ahead.
He tugged his flippers off. Beneath them he wore thin but rugged neoprene booties, strong enough to keep the rock from piercing through. But when he stood, the pain in his right foot was so bad that the black threads laced through his field of vision once more.
He breathed and waited out the pain. Used his left hand to find the wall and support himself. When his vision had cleared and the pain had subsided, he straightened, keeping as much of his weight as possible on his left side.
Then he limped ahead.
68
There was a moment, just before she looped the handcuff over his right wrist, when Deshawn thought he could have taken the gun from his daughter. She lowered the gun to put the handcuff on him, and by picking his right wrist she was underestimating the strength of his left fist. All those years in the tunnels had sapped some of his speed but not his strength. One piston-fired jab into his daughter’s face and he thought that he could break her nose and take her gun.
That was an impossible ask, though. Even in this moment, with her eyes vacant and a gun in her hand, he couldn’t bring himself to take the idea of harming her seriously. He’d spent too many nights awake worrying about all the things circling out there in the world that might do her harm to become one of them himself.
“Gillian,” he was saying, over and over again, like a man crying out to someone across a great distance, although she was only three feet away. “Gillian, baby, you need to walk away from here.”
Nothing. It was as if a fuse had blown and her emotional circuits were down now.
So hit her. Take the gun. For her own sake.
Yes. He needed to save her, because she was no longer herself, and talk wasn’t enough. She’d seemed to seal him out entirely, as if she wasn’t simply ignoring him but wasn’t hearing him. His daughter, struck deaf and dumb and terrifying, holding a gun on him and handcuffing him to a rusted fence.
Hit her, then. Hit her!
But he couldn’t.
He went on talking, right until the end, right until she snapped the other cuff over an iron stanchion in the fence and stepped back, out of range of the left fist that might have saved him—might have saved both of them.
“Gillian! Leave me, but you need to walk away from here now! Gillian!”
Nothing. Her face, so young and unlined—so misleading about her level of worldly experience, of knowledge and of pain—was absolutely empty when he screamed her name.
She holstered her gun, turned, and studied the hole in the wall.
“Gillian,” Deshawn implored, trying to rise to his knees and face her, which was impossible because of the handcuffs. “You’ve got to listen to me. You’ve got to remember who I am. Remember who you are. This is not your home. These are not your people. Don’t let this place work on you. Gillian, don’t let it win.”
Was he lying to her, though? What did he know of this place? And they certainly were her people. There was no denying that.
“Baby,” he whispered. “Gill. Look at me.”
Another stone cracked and split free from the wall behind her, and her face finally changed. It lit up like the expression of a child who has heard the first test firework before the big Fourth of July show. The May I have your attention, please firecracker that promised the dark sky was soon going to be filled with light and sound.
The gap in the stone face had climbed well above the waterline now. It was about four feet above the water, and nearly t
en feet wide. All Deshawn could see on the other side was darkness.
“What do you see?” he whispered.
Gillian was silent. The sun that had filtered into the valley when they arrived was gone now, concealed by gray clouds, and down here it was very dark. A breeze spun leaves into the water and fanned Gillian’s hair back from her neck and shoulders. She stood at attention, muscles taut, head cocked, as if listening, ready for action.
“You shouldn’t be here,” Deshawn said.
She finally spoke then. Without turning, she said, “No, you should not be here.”
Another stone broke free and splashed into the water below. Gillian nodded, as if that stone had carried some instruction, and then walked away from Deshawn and toward the wall.
“Gillian!”
She didn’t even break stride.
He sagged against the fence post, his right wrist cuffed above his head, and watched her walk the length of the fence, all the way to where it joined the mountain in a slab of crumbling concrete. There she climbed onto it. The old steel slats shivered under her weight, but they held. She moved nimbly, two steps and then over, swinging her legs over the top with the grace of a gymnast, then dropping down onto the lip of stone on the other side.
There she paused. The hole in the wall was at least five feet out across the water, and a few feet lower than where she stood. A long, awkward reach. She peered into the darkness, nodded, paused, nodded again. Then she turned her body at an angle, facing the wall, and spread her feet wider on the ledge. Bobbed up and down, testing her balance.
“Gillian!” Deshawn screamed. “Don’t!”
No reaction. She flexed up and down once more, then crouched, paused… and leaped.
The cry that was in his throat died when she landed. She cleared the distance and then improbably, miraculously, made the landing. Rocked up on her toes, then came back down, arms outstretched for balance. She was standing on a narrow lip of stone at the edge of the widening hole in the wall. Deshawn watched in horrified silence, trying to understand what she was going to do now. Hang on there until another piece of the wall was knocked out and into the water, taking her with it?
He was about to call out to her once more, aware that it was pointless but unable to stop himself, when she bent at the waist and brought her head down to the break in the wall. She held that pose for a moment, then reached inside the wall with her right hand, found a grip, and pulled herself through to the other side.
Then there was nothing left of her at all. It was just Deshawn on this side of the wall now, Gillian and Aaron both on the inside, somewhere under the mountain. He was alone.
That was the thought, at least. When he finally looked away, he saw that he wasn’t alone at all. There was a man coming down the trail. He had dark hair and a dark beard and he was carrying some strange weapon that looked like the reaper’s scythe. Deshawn could have believed it right then. Then the man stepped out of the hemlocks and into plain view and Deshawn realized that the object in his hands wasn’t a weapon at all.
It was a camera on a tripod.
69
The first blasting charges were in place, and the detonators were ready.
The sun had gone again, and the sky above the Chilewaukee Reservoir looked as it had for so many days before: gunmetal gray and with thin white clouds riding a high, hard wind.
Dry, though. No more rain yet.
The mayor seemed pleased about this. Mick nodded in agreement, but it was long past the hour when rain would matter.
Ben Quirk was moving the onlookers back. Quirk and someone with the National Guard. More people kept arriving on the scene. The media was being held at bay, and there’d been a shouting match over allowing helicopters in the airspace above the dam when the blasting began. The crew of a dozen or so who had begun the work that night had swelled to well over one hundred. Mick, once the lone engineer on the scene, was now one of fifteen. Maybe twenty.
That was fine, too. The more the merrier. Let them all remember that they were present when the release tunnels at the Chill finally opened. Let them all tell that story to their children, to their grandchildren.
It was an honor, Mick knew, to be a part of it. He might be the only one who understood that now, but in time he thought there would be others. When the tragedy became the history and the history became the great teacher of the present, he suspected that there would be others who remembered their role in a different light.
“We are ready now,” Quirk shouted beside him. “On your order, sir.”
This was to the military man whose identity Mick had already forgotten in the swirl of new arrivals. He felt more and more like Anders Wallace: a floating presence, unseen and unheard. That was just fine. He’d had his moment of command.
They’d remember him.
The military man—he was a major who’d arrived in one of the morning helicopters—turned to his blasting team, all of them wearing helmets and face shields, and said, “Fire in the hole.”
He said it softly. No John Wayne here—just a man of quiet, commanding presence.
“Fire in the hole!” one of the helmeted men echoed, and then he punched the detonator.
Some people in the crowd turned away. One man lifted his hand as if to shield himself. One woman gave a high, keening laugh.
Mick’s gaze didn’t leave the tunnels.
The concrete blew apart in a cloud of bone-colored fragments. The earth shuddered. Mick could feel it ride up from the soles of his feet and spread through his body like a pulse of voltage. On the bank just above the tunnel, the limbs of trees rattled, shaking their few remaining leaves. The surface of the big lake shivered under the reflected gray sky.
The dam held.
There was a collective exhalation. Some people spoke, someone prayed aloud, and the nervous woman laughed again—laughed against her terror as if it were all a great lark. Mick thought she was the most honest human specimen among them all.
He didn’t turn to look at their faces. Even when someone slapped him on the back, he did not turn. He kept his eyes on the cloud of dissipating smoke and debris.
The old archways were gone, pulverized. The concrete plugs in the tunnels below were scrap heaps of stone fragments. The lake rushed in, eager, hungry.
The lake sloshed back, denied.
Two men in fatigues and helmets descended the slope on rappelling ropes. They studied the damage and spoke into radios.
“About eight feet,” Quirk said. “Maybe ten.”
It took Mick a moment to realize Quirk was speaking to him and was waiting for a response.
“Excellent,” Mick said. “I think we’re only one strike away, then.”
Quirk spoke into the radio. The demolitions team went back to work, setting the next round of charges.
Overhead, the clouding sky spit a few experimental raindrops at the world below.
70
Aaron was making good time for a limping man, grasping the rock with his left hand and keeping his weight on his left leg, when the mountain shook and brought him to his knees.
He landed hard, kneecaps clacking off the stone, and then the shaking ended as swiftly as it had begun, and the world was still again.
What in the hell had that been?
He looked up the tunnel just as a piece of rock about five feet long and a foot wide separated from the ceiling and fell, smashing in front of him, showering him with needle-sharp fragments.
The claustrophobia gripped him then. He’d managed to walk without fear of the tunnel because the tunnel had fresh air; he was out of the water and he could breathe. But he had no idea where he was or whether he walked a path of escape or a path of ruin. Or simply in a circle, as doomed and damned as the ghosts he’d passed at the wall.
Maybe they’re not so doomed. They’re coming out, after all. They’re breaking the wall down and they’re coming out.
He looked up at the ceiling. Painted its undulating gray surface with his headlamp, looking for a
nother possible rock fall. Again he thought of the water. If he was back in the water, it would at least slow the rock. If whatever was happening above him caused this tunnel to collapse, then he’d have a better chance in the water, swimming toward a known destination, than limping ahead in the dark.
Maybe that was the rest of the dam giving way, he thought. Maybe it’s all gone now.
He thought of the tunnel filling with water, a torrent that would splatter him off the rocks and roll on past. After the night of rescue work, he’d seen just how completely water could disregard the will of man.
If the water was coming, though, he couldn’t hear it.
There were only two choices: go back, which was his best shot at survival, or go forward, with no idea what lay ahead.
He stepped over the slab of rock that had fallen from the tunnel roof and limped ahead.
The tunnel itself seemed like an impossibility. Stone had been carved clean and hauled away. The ceiling was high above his head. Nine feet at least. Maybe ten. Water dripped from small creases and cracks, but the tunnel floor was smooth and mostly dry. He wondered how it would be explained if anyone other than him saw it. He doubted that anyone ever would.
Each step brought another throb of pain. His right foot was warm and wet and he knew the wound was open again. If he ever made it out of here and back into the world, that would matter. Down here, though, it didn’t. Or couldn’t.
He counted steps to confirm his forward progress. Counted heartbeats to confirm his existence. His headlamp seemed dimmer now. Less of the tunnel visible now than before. But did it matter? How much of an endless road did you need to see?
He paused when the ache in his foot became an ache behind his eyes. He leaned against the wall, breathed, and waited for the pain to subside.
Can they find me? he wondered. If Gillian and her father go for help, will anyone be able to find me?
He unclipped his radio. Turned it on and searched from band to band. Nothing. He had an EPIRB, an emergency position indicating radio beacon, that would put out a GPS ping for help. It worked well on the open ocean. Under a mountain, it didn’t seem it would work at all. There was no rescue band down here, no 911, no distress signal. Down here, the situation was stripped of any options. He would stay alive and find his way out, or he would not.