Dead Level

by Sarah Graves

  They jounced over a stretch of rough stones washed out by the recent downpours. Sam held on to his coffee and said nothing for fear of biting his tongue on one of the harder bounces.

  “Not,” Wade added, “that I believed what I was seeing. Not really. I figured it was … I don’t know. My subconscious. Or some other mental-hiccup type of thing. But not real real, you know?”

  The dirt road took a left between two huge granite boulders that stood like sentries guarding the way in. Then it ran sharply uphill and to the right, narrowing. “But now …”

  “Yeah,” Sam said again, trying and failing to imagine Wade Sorenson, perhaps the most down-to-earth person that Sam had ever known, sitting in his workshop giving advice to a ghost.

  Wade steered around a huge blown-down pine branch that half blocked the road. “I guess now that I know you saw him, too,” Wade went on, “I’ll have to be more open-minded. Or something,” he added, still clearly not liking the idea.

  They started downhill toward the culvert and the beaver pond on either side of it. A breeze sent yellow birch leaves twirling past the windshield; a rabbit whose fur was already whitening for winter hopped to the middle of the road, froze alertly for an instant at their approach, then hopped back into the safety of a blackberry-bramble thicket.

  Then they heard the boom, a massive thud like a boulder that had fallen from some great height, landing hard very nearby. At the same time they rounded the final curve to where the road went over the culvert.

  Or rather what remained of the road, now a complete washout. What had been a dirt track four feet higher than the water level was a carved-out channel, muck-glistening in the early light, littered with beaver-chewed branches and small wet tree trunks.

  Wade slowed, easing the truck down toward the scene of the catastrophe. Sam stared, dismayed; the road over the culvert had always been drivable.

  Always. Once in a while they’d had to get in there in hip boots to unclog the culvert, working with rakes and axes, because the beavers—their dam and the lodge behind it were only fifty feet upstream—kept stuffing it full of twigs. But this …

  Wade looked downstream, and his face went suddenly ghastly. In the next moment he was out of the truck and running, toward the wreck of a familiar vehicle on its side in the water on the far side of the demolished roadbed.

  Its driver’s-side window was covered completely by debris, and more wet stuff—weeds, branches, thick water plants uprooted by what must’ve been an enormous torrent—half-hid the fender.

  Wade slogged desperately toward the pickup truck. Pumping his arms and hauling his legs up and down in the sucking mire, he reached the vehicle and scrambled onto it.

  “Get my cellphone out of the glove box,” he yelled back at Sam, meanwhile pulling handfuls of slimy material out of the hole in the wrecked truck’s window. “Call Bob Arnold, tell him …”

  Wade crouched on the ruined vehicle, craning his neck to try seeing in through the shattered glass. He dragged more weeds out, pulling hand over hand until the wet mass of leaves and roots came free.

  Somehow, Sam found himself at the edge of the massive mudhole, looking down into the deep, wide channel that some sudden rush of water had cut.

  So how had this happened? Sam flung himself back into Wade’s truck, yanked the glove compartment open, and …

  Nothing. Of course; Wade had given his phone to—Sam put his hands to his jacket pocket for his own cell, didn’t feel it. He clapped the pocket again, then his pants.

  No phone. Suddenly a vivid memory of Carol’s arms around him back in the hospital lobby washed over him, and he realized:

  She’d stolen his phone. Then he was outside again, rushing toward where Wade was pulling his head back out of the shattered windshield.

  “No one,” Wade reported grimly, climbing down with his pants and boots sheathed in a thick coating of mud. He slogged back up onto what remained of the road.

  Sam felt himself sagging with momentary relief; they weren’t dead in there, then, his mother and Ellie. They weren’t—

  Wade leaned forward with his hands on his knees, sucking in big breaths. Around them, the autumn day brightened, the gray sky filling with blue, the stark black trees’ shapes softening to charcoal. High overhead, a plane made its way through the frigid air up there, a glint of sun flaring off its swept-back wing.

  They weren’t dead. Wade took the no-phone news without any comment, straightening.

  Obviously they couldn’t go on in the truck, but the cottage wasn’t much farther. Turning together silently, they headed toward the washout, leapt over it, and continued down the dirt road, deeper into the woods.

  “What do you think that explosion was?” Sam gasped, hurrying to keep up with Wade.

  “No idea.” They sprinted uphill between balsam firs, cedars, and white pine, the trees’ sharp scents mingling with the reek of recently disturbed swamp in the chilly air.

  At last they reached the cottage’s driveway, a narrow cut in among the trees barely visible unless you knew it was there. Sam smelled smoke, but not the familiar woodstove kind; this had a metallic tang that reminded him of the day a bunch of kids in his high school shop class blew up a cylinder of welding gas.…

  Suddenly a man Sam had never seen before stumbled out of the woods at him. He was nearly naked, and his face wore an expression of pain and fear so extreme that he looked like something out of a horror movie.

  Moaning, the man spotted Sam. Lifting first one leg and then the other in a shambling, uncoordinated way, he tried to change course. But the attempt unbalanced him, and as he fell, flailing his arms uselessly, Sam saw the deep, red gash in his scalp.

  “Hey!” The shocked shout erupted from Sam’s mouth. The man hit the ground hard and clambered up again as, ahead, Wade turned questioningly.

  Then Wade’s hands flew up reflexively, his legs went out from under him, and his torso twisted sideways as he, too, fell suddenly and lay motionless.

  An instant later—from which direction, Sam couldn’t tell—came the percussive crack! of a gunshot.

  The blazing match pack had barely left Dewey Hooper’s hand when the boom hit him, warm and massive as a huge wave, lifting him off the ground, through the burning air. When he dared turn, the heat made his eyes feel like poached eggs, his face seared and eyebrows crispy. Still, he saw:

  Flame boiled from the cottage windows, blew the door from its frame, billowed the walls out and sucked them in again. Glass shards whizzed glittering into the trees, clipping branches and slicing pine cones in half; chimney bricks sailed upward as if being juggled by an invisible giant, then fell down through where the roof used to be.

  The blazing roof … he was deaf from the blast, Dewey knew, or he’d be hearing the crackle of flames devouring the structure—and, no doubt, anyone unlucky enough to have been inside.

  Damn, he thought. The explosion had been too big. How the hell would he put a stake through her heart if it was already burnt to a crisp? Unless …

  But there was one way. If he found her before the flames got to her—not at this end of the cabin, even now falling to embers as the fiercest part of the conflagration subsided, but at that end, where the explosion hadn’t been quite so forceful.

  If he could do that, find her and finish her the way he’d planned, he still had a chance to ensure that this was the last time Marianne ever tormented him.

  And that end of the building was where the women had been when the blast happened; he’d seen them there, through the front window. So it was worth a try.

  Wincing, he sat up. The shotgun was underneath him, somehow unruined, and the shells were still in his pockets; rolling over, he knelt on all fours with his head shaking slowly from side to side, like a stunned beast.

  Before his eyes, the cottage went on burning merrily in silence, like a film with the sound turned all the way down, its ferocious glow seeming to fuel the brightening dawn. A birch tree exploded very near the structure, flames licking up it
s papery trunk, and then another.

  Dewey pushed himself off the ground with the butt end of the shotgun. A flap of his scalp slid, sending searing pain through him; gingerly he patted the bleeding skin back into place.

  Onward, he thought determinedly. Because here, right here and now, was where the rubber met the road: here in this bloody, fiery place where he would finish her at last, or die trying.

  One-handed, he jerked the shotgun by its forestock to rack a shell into the chamber; she might still be alive, and there was no sense trying to hit a moving target with a wooden stake.

  But with the shotgun, he could stop it from moving. Then he’d put the body back where the fire could eliminate any clue to the real cause of death. Shakily, but still full of conviction—he’d lived, hadn’t he? He’d lived through that hellacious explosion, and that right there told him he was still on the side of the angels, no matter what anyone said—he approached the burning cottage, its near end already collapsed onto itself. At the other end, though—

  Oh, the other end, he thought with a scorched-feeling smile. That’s where he would find them … find her, and be done with it.

  But then something flickered at the edge of his vision. A movement, brief but worrisome, flittered briefly out there at the far end of the driveway, coming closer through the trees.

  Dewey swung the shotgun around smoothly and fired without even thinking about it, then continued toward the burning house.

  CHAPTER 11

  The boom rocked the house, blew the glass out of the windows, and set the world alight. Everything at the front of the cabin was fire, roaringly hot and brilliant, flames dripping from every surface and crawling across the ceiling, writhing like bright snakes.

  “Ellie …” Dark and light, smoke billows rolling chokingly through the flames blazing hotter and nearer. In the instant I’d seen Hooper and understood what he must be doing, we’d hurled ourselves behind the concrete-block chimney.

  So we’d missed the full force of it; still, the blast had rocked us from where we’d huddled … “Ellie!”

  I spotted her, flung like a doll against the far wall, where the door out onto the deck hung twisted and jammed. Out of here, we had to get—

  “Jake?” Her eyelids flickered.

  There was blood on her shirt. A wooden splinter stuck out of her upper arm, shreds of her torn sleeve flapping around it. “You need to come with me.”

  I tried lifting her as her eyes struggled to focus. “Ellie, come on, we’ve got to get—”

  Out. But I didn’t see any way. The whole front end of the cottage boiled with fire now, the hot wind roaring off it making breath nearly impossible. “We’ve got to get to the back door.”

  Because in the next few moments, the whole place would flash over. But: “No,” she whispered. “He’ll be out there.…”

  She was right. All this had been meant to kill us outright. But if it didn’t, of course we would try to escape.

  And of course he’d be waiting. With that shotgun …

  Suddenly I remembered the hole in the floor. From there, we could get out under the latticed-in deck structure, if only I was able to get Ellie moving at all … and then I saw why she wasn’t.

  “Oh, Ellie.” The sorrow in my voice alerted her somehow, and she looked at me, wide awake and comprehending. But she still couldn’t move, because the splinter in her arm went all the way through, pinning her to the floor.

  “Oh, honey,” I said, feeling the tears stinging my scorched face. And then, God help me, I grabbed the thing and pulled on it hard. Pulled it out, and her scream of anguish felt like that big, sharp wooden dagger had been hammered into my heart.

  But then I was dragging her, comforting her and hauling her at the same time across the floor toward the hole, while the hot, deadly conflagration roared ever nearer, chomping and munching.

  Wanting to munch on us … “Okay, down you go.” I put her legs down into the hole. “Jump, Ellie. Don’t worry, I’m coming, too.”

  I couldn’t remember how high off the ground the floor of the cabin was, how far she would have to fall or what she would land on, whether it was hard or sharp, or—

  A sudden exhalation of fire blew straight at us, a blowtorch igniting everything it touched. A chair exploded in flames, then one of the daybeds, each with a low, bright whuff!

  I shoved her and she fell through, her bloody arm scrabbling for purchase, her hand leaving red fingermarks on the linoleum. A harsh cry of pain from below punched a sob out of me; the silence afterwards was worse.

  A gunshot from outside, a sharp, decisive pow somewhere out beyond the curtains of fire, hardly penetrated my mind, as if whatever happened there was in another world, one that if I didn’t hurry up I wouldn’t be seeing ever again. Pressing my arm up to my face to keep the smoke and heat out as well as I could, I took one more wild glance around the place I’d grown to love so dearly.

  From over my head a burning timber let out a groan, then cracked through and fell. The whole front of the cottage began collapsing as, sobbing with fright, I hurled myself headfirst down the hole and heard something huge thunder down on top of it, slamming me into darkness.

  Above, the crashing and crackling went on, the howling banshee of the fire spiraling through the now-open roof. I could feel the plywood above me getting hotter as the fire advanced across it, sucking air up through the blocked hole. Down here in the dark crawlspace, the breeze it created made the cobwebs all around me shiver and drift against my face.

  “Ellie?” Shuddering, I tried pushing the cobwebs away, but my fingers tangled in more of them. Blinded by the blazingly bright light of the flames still printed on my retinas, I fumbled around helplessly, then realized: the flames were real.

  At the front of the cottage where the blaze had begun, it was burning through the floor, hot orange embers cascading down in an increasing stream like a flow of lava. Rolling into the dust down here, they extinguished themselves, but soon they wouldn’t; soon, there’d be more of them, a hot flood and then an avalanche. We’d be broiled alive.

  “Ellie!” Shrouded in sticky cobwebs, blinking and spitting them out, I crawled through old shingles, shreds of tar paper, big chunks of scrap wood—all the things that had gotten tossed back in here over years of fixing and tinkering.

  Now they were fuel. As I crawled, feeling my knees shredding on bent nails, stones, and who knew what other tetanus-bearing sharp bits of discarded stuff—God, I should be so lucky as to live to get tetanus, I thought irrelevantly—I knew there was a way out of here, I knew one end of this dark place opened out into the space under the new deck.

  I knew it. But I couldn’t find it, as a sudden downdraft sucked thick, black smoke under the house, blinding me. Somehow in the panic of the explosion and the fire I’d gotten turned around. Now I was too blinded by the smoke and the awful heat to be able to see the dim, gray dawn that had to be showing somewhere out there, even through the lattice we’d nailed around the deck.

  Had to be. Only it wasn’t. The smoke kept coming, thickening around me, choking me … and I couldn’t find Ellie. After she’d landed, she must have crawled, then maybe lost consciousness or worse.

  But no. I wasn’t going to think that. I just wasn’t. I sat up, hit my head on a floor joist, saw flocks of stars twinkling in a sky that was sullenly green and purple, the color of an old bruise.

  No, I told myself even as real fright dug its claws into me, she wasn’t dead. She was down here somewhere, and I would find her, and … and she wasn’t.

  Fighting back panic, I sat up again more cautiously, pawing away cascades of more spiderwebs studded thickly with egg cases. The smoke thinned, but now stinging tears poured from my eyes; I knew there was a way out, somewhere, but I couldn’t find it.…

  The dry, sneaky tickle of a centipede skittered across my neck, the boards above me grew steadily warmer with the awful heat of the swiftly advancing fire just over my head, and—

  And then the strong sensation o
f someone else there with me went through me like an icicle dagger.

  Not Ellie. Because Ellie wasn’t dead. She wasn’t.

  But when I turned my head—

  —slowly, not at all wanting to, terrified and with that sharp, shivery-cold icicle’s jab rising up from my heart into my throat—

  Ellie wasn’t dead. But the person hunkering next to me in the dark, smoke-stinking crawlspace, with spiders and centipedes swarming busily over his gleaming jawbone and prowling his empty eye sockets—

  That person most definitely was.

  At the sound of the gunshot, Sam dropped flat onto the wet leaves and matted pine needles of the forest floor. He didn’t know which way it had come from, or if there would be another.

  And he had to reach Wade. Scrambling forward, he peered up and around, spying no one but the man still shambling at him as if nothing had happened.

  That smell, though, getting stronger, fire and smoke from somewhere nearby. Through thick, tangled brush and evergreens, the hot yellow glow intensified as Sam watched with horror.

  The shambling guy had gotten up. He swung nearer, one arm hanging uselessly and the other waving back and forth in front of him like a blind man trying to feel his way. When he got close enough, Sam saw the bruise swelling the man’s left eye shut, the other one wide open, bloodshot and staring wildly.

  “Hey. Hey, get down,” Sam whispered. But before he could do or say anything more, another shot cracked through the billows of smoke now pouring from the clearing around the cabin.

  Rocking on his heels, the man appeared to consider the sound for a moment, a quizzical look coming onto his battered face. Then he dropped once more, first to his knees, finally falling forward, his good hand outflung.

  There was a gun in it. Sam’s heart leapt at the sight. But if he tried to get it … “Oh, God,” he breathed, pinned down as a dozen yards away Wade grunted in pain, then lay still also.

  “Wade?” But there was no reply. Sam scrambled sideways. No shots whizzed over his head, so he scrambled some more, until he reached the stranger. A .22 pistol lay under his limp hand.