Black Water

by Ninie Hammon

  “I told you to—”

  “You don’t want to shoot me, Sheriff. I swear, you surely do not want to do that.”

  He held out his hand then and slowly turned it over. Taped to his palm was a small device that looked like a garage door opener.

  “I squeeze and the whole dam goes up. Might take the whole top of the mountain with it, so if I’s you, I’d get back a ways.”

  The voice of the woman with the startling blue eyes — Hattie, Dobbs had said her name was Hattie — brought Bailey back to the now, but the feeling in her gut changed little. It was a lead ball of fear and dread and she felt as powerless to do anything about it now as she had been eighteen months ago.

  But it wasn’t over yet. Macy Cosgrove was still alive, not flying backward dead onto a wet street. She was right here now, breathing, and Bailey still had a chance to save her.

  “…Asked you what it is you want.”

  “I want … My name is Bailey Donahue and what I’m about to tell you is going to be hard to believe.” She took a deep breath. “That dam at the top of the hollow is about to fail, to collapse, and if you and your family don’t get out of here right now, that water is going to come roaring down the valley … and you’re going to drown. Macy is going to drown. And Jakey, too. All of you.”

  The whole speech had come out of a piece, a torrent of words no less powerful and violent than the flood that any minute was going to wash the world away. But even as she spoke, Bailey could see disbelief, then hostile suspicion growing on the woman’s face.

  “How do you know my Macy?”

  Bailey had no answer for her. Well, she did have an answer, but if she gave it the woman would take her for an even greater raving lunatic than she already did.

  “I’m … I’m a friend of Raymond Dobson’s … Dobbs. He knows your husband, Seth, saw him the other day in the checkout line at Piggly Wiggly.”

  The woman wasn’t buying.

  “I don’t know nobody named Dobbs. How do you know my children? Macy and Jakey. What did you say your name was again?” The woman had been either consciously or subconsciously backing up from Bailey as she spoke. She turned then and cried out, “Seth! Seth, come here. There’s—” Bailey didn’t hear the rest when the woman disappeared into the next room.

  Bailey turned and raced across the porch, down the steps and around the side of the house toward the backyard. That’s where the kids would be, that’s where Macy would be, out in the yard looking up at the fireworks in the sky.

  Just as she was about to clear the corner of the house, she saw Seth turn toward the back door and hurry back into the house. Out at the far end of the backyard, next to the woods and the hillside, stood three stair-stepped children. Two little boys and a little girl. A little girl with braids hanging down her back. In the dusk of early evening, it was impossible to tell the color. But Bailey knew they were red. The girl was the smallest, maybe six or seven. Even so, she had a chubby baby on her hip and was pointing up into the night sky.

  Operating on pure instinct, Bailey raced across the backyard toward the children. She stopped short of bowling into them. Stood for a moment, then said softly, “Macy…”

  The little girl turned and looked up at her, the wash of light from the house illuminating her face, the familiar face, perfect in every detail, the image on the canvas in her living room. Except this little girl’s eyes were open. Even in the dim light, Bailey could see they were the same pale blue as her mother’s.

  “Do I know you?” the little girl asked, and cocked her head to the side quizzically.

  “No…. Yes! Yes, you know me!” Bailey touched the child’s shoulder with a trembling hand.

  “Hey, you, get away from them kids!” It was a man’s voice, angry. Bailey looked back toward the house. Seth was coming out the back door, his wife along the side of the house, obviously searching for Bailey when they couldn’t find her on the front porch.

  Bailey looked back at Macy, who was smiling up at her, displaying a blank space in her mouth where her front teeth had not yet grown.

  “I … do know you…” There was wonder in Macy’s voice, as if she had recognized an old friend.

  Bailey snatched the baby out of the little girl’s arms and the surprised infant burst into frightened tears, holding his chubby arms out to his sister and wiggling to get free.

  “Come with me!” Bailey told Macy. “Now!”

  Macy’s mother screamed when Bailey turned and raced up the hillside with the baby. And with Macy right beside her.

  “Put him down!” Seth Cosgrove roared and came barreling across the yard after her.

  “Macy, stop!” cried his wife, only a step or two behind him. “Maaaaaacy!”

  The boys looked from their parents toward the stranger carrying off their baby brother and little sister, and then took off after her.

  Up the mountainside Bailey went, holding tight to the screaming, wiggling baby in her arms. Macy never left her side, ignoring the cries of her parents and brothers behind her. Bailey ran faster than she ever dreamed she could run, in a steep climb with a baby—

  Harlan Bolyard jumped back from T.J. in shock and alarm.

  “What the—?”

  “Want me to shoot another one?”

  “You’re crazy. What’d you come here for, shooting my chickens like that?”

  T.J. took aim at another chicken and fired the second barrel, sending chicken feathers and guts to splatter on the wall of the house.

  A woman appeared beside Bolyard along with a little girl, maybe ten or eleven.

  “What’s he doin’?” the woman asked. Then she saw the pieces of the dead chickens in the yard, and gave voice to way more squawking than the birds had done when T.J.’d shot them. “Who is this man and why’s he shooting our chickens?”

  T.J. flipped the catch on the shotgun with his thumb, cracked it open, tilted the tip of the barrel up to drop out the spent rounds, then reached into his pocket for two shells, popped one down into each barrel and snapped it shut.

  “Do something, Harlan,” she wailed. “Make him stop!”

  “Mrs. Bolyard” — T.J. tried not to grind his teeth in impatience — “you gotta get out of here. I told your husband the dam’s about to blow.”

  “Are you serious?” wailed the woman.

  “Do I look serious? Ain’t nothing I can do to force you to leave, but if you don’t go right this second — run — across your backyard and up the hill behind the house, as God is my witness I will kill every chicken in this yard!”

  He turned the rifle on another chicken.

  “Alright, alright,” said the man, his hands up, palms out, placating. He had begun to be alarmed by T.J.’s tone, by his determination, maybe had finally decided it’d be a good idea for him to listen.

  “Come on, Mildred.”

  The man, his wife and the little girl stepped out onto the porch and the woman rushed down the front steps, oblivious to the frailty of the wood that looked like it was ready to buckle under her considerable girth.

  That’s when T.J. heard laughter. He turned toward the abandoned shack across the road and saw two teenage boys leaning against the porch railing beneath the half-collapsed roof. They were laughing hysterically.

  “Osbourne, I won’t tell you again. Get your hands in the air.”

  “Are you serious?” The edge of menace and incipient rage in his voice was sharp enough to cut stale bread. He mimicked the sheriff’s voice, “Get your hands in the air! Right. I done everything I done and now I’m gonna roll over like an old dog and give up? Hold out my wrists and say ‘cuff me’ and let you lead me away to spend the rest of my life behind bars?”

  “Behind bars is better than six feet under.”

  “Says who?” The man laughed again. Not like before, though. Not a cynical, resigned, looks-like-you-caught-me laugh. This laugh was high-pitched and maniacal, the laugh of a man strung out on crystal meth, wound as tight as a guitar string. He’d gone from something resemb
ling normal to crazier than a nuclear waste dump rat between one heartbeat and the next. There had seemed to be someone home at first. Now, it was clear that Derrick Osbourne had left the building.

  “You think dying scares me? Do ya? Huh? I ain’t scared of nuthin’. I built me this bomb that coulda blown me apart at any minute, but I done it. Done it ‘cause somebody’s gotta pay.” He might have been looking at Brice as he spoke. It was hard to tell. Then he turned his head away and smiled, as if he were watching a scene Brice couldn’t see.

  “That boy can run faster’n a baby rabbit. Would ya look at that. Whoo-ee doggies! Give him the ball and can’t nobody catch him!” He paused and the animation left his face.

  He did look at Brice then, made eye contact. “His busted legs never did heal back right — was all twisted up. Doctor said they couldn’t fix something that’d been smashed bad as that, said the bone looked like ground glass.”

  His voice lowered to a growl. “Mr. W. Maxwell Crenshaw the third’s gonna pay for that!”

  “How does blowing up this dam make Crenshaw pay?”

  Brice continued to edge closer.

  “It wasn’t my first choice, I’ll grant, but people gonna die either way, and it’ll be his fault just like my brother in a wheelchair is his fault. He don’t care ‘bout the people livin’ below his dam no more’n he cares ‘bout the men workin’ in his dog-hole mines.” A dog-hole mine was just what the name implied — a mine no safer than a hole dug by a dog. “He don’t care what happens to other people so long as he makes a buck. Well, I’ll show him.”

  The tortured logic was no logic at all, merely the mental gymnastics of a man as high as he intended to blow the dam.

  Osbourne realized how close Brice had gotten while he was talking and he cried out, “Stop right there! Come one step closer and … kaboom!”

  The sheriff stopped advancing. He still wasn’t as close as he’d like. He could certainly land a lethal body shot or a simple headshot from this range, but he had to hit the T-zone for an instant kill. The T-zone was an area about an inch wide that stretches across the eyebrow ridge and the bridge of the nose. Though a shot anywhere in the head would be fatal, only a shot to the T-zone would sever the medulla, the lower base of the brainstem, preventing brain signals from reaching the rest of the body. Instant death, not so much as the twitch of a finger to push a button.

  Even with a T-zone shot, Osbourne’s body might fall on the detonator and set off the charge, but there was nothing Brice could do about that.

  As if Osbourne were reading his thoughts, he cried, “Shoot it out of my hand!” He bleated out a peal of high-pitched laughter. “Go on, try.” He waved his arm around to provide a moving target. “The Lone Ranger coulda done it. Course, I just got to barely touch it and…”

  “Do you honestly think you’re going to get away with this?”

  “What makes you think I plan to get away with anything? I’d give my life five times over to make Crenshaw pay.”

  That was it, then. Osbourne didn’t intend to come out of it alive. Brice had to take the shot — now, before the man’s wild arm-waving set off the device. He had stopped with his feet spread wide for stability. Now, he steadied his hands, drew in a breath…

  “There ain’t but one way to get me to put down this detonator.” Brice released the pressure he had begun to apply to the trigger.

  “And that is?”

  “I want Maxwell Crenshaw here. You bring him in one of his fancy helicopters to this very mountaintop. Park him right here in front of—” He gestured emphatically.

  And then the world was all roaring sound.

  “Wait!” the woman who’d been standing behind the man called out to Dobbs as he started down the porch steps. “We’ll take your money!”

  “Now, Marjorie, this fella—”

  “Shut your mouth, Rupert,” she told him. To Dobbs, she said, “Now, what is it we got to do, again?”

  Dobbs whirled back around.

  “You got to drop what you’re doing right now and run fast as you can up the mountain,” he said, breathless, yanking his not-a-stopwatch back out of his pocket and flipping the catch so the lid popped up. “Just like if you’d heard a siren. Everybody in the whole house. Can’t stop to grab nothing, you got to run.” He pretended to push a button on the watch. “Starting right now!”

  The woman never hesitated. She turned instantly around and bolted back through her house. The man gave Dobbs a look of mistrust, then turned, too, and headed out behind her.

  Dobbs took the front steps of the porch two at a time and ran faster than he thought possible around the house to the backyard. He heard the screech of the spring on the screen door pull taut before he made it all the way around the house. Saw the woman moving as fast as she could, her best approximation of a sprint, across the backyard toward the woods as he cleared the building, with the man only a few steps behind her. The screen door they’d pushed open banged shut. The sound caught his attention and he glanced toward the house.

  An old woman in a wheelchair was sitting on the back porch.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  There was a sudden rumbling roar and then T.J. didn’t have to urge the Bolyards to run. They took off toward the hillside like their pants were on fire. At the sound of the boom, the two teenage boys stopped laughing and looked fearfully up toward the top of the hollow.

  One of the boys was white, the other black. But that’s where the resemblance to himself and Dobbs ended. The white kid was tall, almost as skinny as T.J., all long arms and legs, moving like a marionette in the hands of a drunk puppeteer. The other kid was as round and black as a dung beetle. Both looked to be sixteen-ish.

  What were they doing in an abandoned shack in danger of imminent collapse? Duh. Something they didn’t want their parents to see them doing.

  They stood frozen, riveted to the spot, no doubt with slower reflexes than might otherwise have been the case. If T.J. turned and bolted up the mountainside behind the Bolyard house right this instant, he had a chance of making it. The boys? Not so much. They had more ground to cover — across the front yard of the shack, around the enormous tree, across the road and the front and back yards of the Bolyards. They also lacked something much more important — the presence of mind to try.

  There was only one possible way for them to escape.

  Dropping the shotgun in the dirt, T.J. dashed across the road toward them.

  “Ditch that joint and climb!” he cried, and leapt up onto the picnic table below the lowest limb of the gigantic tree, grabbed the first of the handholds worn into it by generations of climbing children and started up it. “Climb!”

  The second grumbling roar was not as loud as the first, not as dramatic, but far more intimidating. It was the scraping rock-against-rock collapse of the dam, which must now have had a hole in it that was, judging from the ferocity of the first explosion, roughly the size of Panama.

  T.J. scrambled up the tree trunk as fast as he could, not looking back to see if the boys had followed. They would come with him or they wouldn’t. He’d done everything he could.

  He heard a sound behind him then and suddenly the white kid was beside him, scaling the tree like a squirrel. Then he was gone, up higher on the trunk, and the black kid took his place, and promptly passed T.J. like he was standing still. Clearly, this wasn’t the first time these boys had climbed this tree.

  In the gloom, T.J. couldn’t see the handholds they’d used. He stuck his foot into an indentation, but it was too shallow and when he put his weight on it, the slick sole of the shoe slipped out and he almost lost his balance and fell. He had no idea how high up the tree they’d have to get to keep from being washed out of its limbs by the coming black water. He also didn’t know if the tree itself would withstand the assault. It was huge, with roots that went down no telling how far. But it was also old and might not be strong enough.

  Well, T.J. was old, too! And he was by golly strong enough to survive this flood and li
ve to tell the tale. Then he heard the sound of oncoming rushing water, looked to his right, and knew he had not climbed high enough into the tree.

  The world erupted in a gigantic roar that shook the ground under their feet. The noise reverberating against the mountainsides, compounding and magnifying until it seemed directionless, coming from everywhere and nowhere at once. Still, all their heads turned in one direction — looking up the mountainside toward the top of the hollow.

  “Run!” yelled Seth Cosgrove, grabbing the arm of his wife who’d been scrambling up the hillside behind him and yanking her forward. “Run!”

  The Cosgroves’ was the first house on the road, the closest to the dam. They had the least time of anyone to get out of the way of the flood. Now the whole family — Bailey in front with the baby and Macy, then the two boys, followed close by their parents — clawed their way frantically up the mountainside behind their house as a grumbling, grinding rumble followed on the heels of the roaring boom.

  That rumble morphed into a horrifying freight-train roar that grew louder and louder until the whole world was nothing but sound, they breathed it and felt it, the rattling, grating, scraping sound of gravel in a blender.

  Bailey strained upward. One more step. One more. A jagged rock outcrop the size of a car jutted out of the mountainside on her left. Shaped like the raised ridge in the middle of a turtle’s shell, it continued in a broken line all the way from the bottom to the top of the mountain. The soil was thinner next to the rock and the fingers of her right hand that she was using to dig her way up the slope, clinging to the baby with her left, clawed at rock only a few inches under the surface, broke her nails and savaged her fingertips.

  A gagging stench wafted in a wave in front of the growing wall of sound, an invisible wind that stank of petroleum, chemicals and sulfur, as if hell had opened up a crack in the world right there in Turkey Neck Hollow and belched out its reek into the world.