So Cold the River

by Michael Koryta

  There you go, Campbell whispered, and Josiah caught a glimpse of his face in the mirror again, shadowed but eyes aglow. He’ll stop for her. He’ll have to.

  Yes, he would. Protect and serve, that was the motto, that was the promise, and the dumb bastard would have to obey the oath, wouldn’t he? He’d have to attempt to protect and serve the dead bitch that Josiah was about to pitch out onto the road.

  He lifted the shotgun clear, steering with his left hand, and set it across his lap, the barrel pointed at Claire Shaw’s terrified face. He grinned as he leaned across her body and fumbled for the door handle.

  “You were going to die sometime today,” he said. “A shame it has to be so early.”

  The Orange County dispatcher had patched Anne through directly to the police officer who’d sighted Josiah Bradford’s truck, a state cop named Roger Brewer. He wanted to confirm that it was the right vehicle and understand the situation from her as best he could, he said.

  She listened as he described the truck and said, “Yes, yes, that’s it,” and then began to warn him, as she’d warned the dispatcher, about the dynamite. She hadn’t gotten ten words out when he cut in and said, “Shit, something’s happening,” and there was a half-second pause before he said “Shit!” again and then Anne heard the scream of tires searching for traction, followed by the muffled sound of impact and a shattering of metal and glass.

  “What happened? What happened?”

  “He threw something out onto the road,” the officer said. “Dispatch, we’re going to need more cars. He just threw… I think he threw a body out into the road.”

  60

  THE DEAD MAN’S CAR started on the third try, groaning to life on the spark of a nearly exhausted battery. Eric, dropping the gearshift into drive, had the sudden, stupid thought: It’s the Fargo car. White Cutlass Ciera. You saw that movie with Claire and predicted it would be nominated for a bunch of Oscars…

  He had to back up to get around the body. He made a wide pass to stay clear of it, and he did not look down. The splash of blood across the white hood trembled against the engine’s vibrations.

  Trees bordered the gravel lane on each side, and only when he came out to the road did he have a clear look at the sky. The black clouds seemed to be drifting away from the center in all directions, isolating a pale circle. The wind that had blown so violently as he’d run through the field just minutes ago had died off completely, and ahead of him the fields looked strangely peaceful.

  It can’t happen again, he thought, staring up at the separating clouds. You can’t have two of them in the same place.

  He swung out into the road, turned left, in the direction Josiah Bradford’s truck had gone, and hit the gas. If another tornado actually did form, it was good that Kellen was still down in the gulf. The gulf had already saved them once.

  He had the car up to fifty and was fumbling for the windshield wipers, wanting the crimson smear of drying blood off the glass, when another vehicle appeared down the road. He didn’t take his foot off the gas right away, but then the distance closed to the point that he could see it clearly: a white Ford Ranger with dents in the hood and a snarl of fence wire mashed into the front grille and dragging along under the car.

  Josiah.

  He was coming back.

  Stop him, he thought, you have to stop him. But the Ranger was flying along, had to be doing seventy at least, and Claire was inside. If Eric swung the car across the road to block the truck and took the impact broadside, they’d probably all be killed. And that was discounting the potential explosion.

  Indecision froze him. He slowed the car down to twenty, then ten, hands tight on the wheel, a hundred potential maneuvers floating through his head, all of them dismissed as too risky. The truck was in motion, and the only way to stop an object that wanted to stay in motion was with impact. Simple rules of physics that would be simple rules of disaster today.

  And so he sat there helplessly, impotently, as the Ranger roared up and then passed him. Eric was staring inside the cab, trying to catch a glimpse of Claire, but what he saw when the truck shot by him made him give a low shout of fear and slam on the brake pedal, bringing the Oldsmobile to a stop in the center of the road.

  Campbell Bradford was driving the truck. Not Josiah, but Campbell, hunched over the wheel in his dark brown suit and bowler hat, his mouth twisted into a grin in the quarter second when Eric had met his eyes.

  Josiah saw the Oldsmobile pull out onto the road and he was so stunned, so momentarily hopeful, that he almost hit the brakes. Danny? But then he got it, understood what must have happened, and tightened his hands on the steering wheel, laid his foot heavier on the gas pedal.

  He ain’t stopping us, boy, Campbell whispered. We’re going home, and that son of a bitch is not strong enough to stop us. He doesn’t have the will for it.

  Indeed, he did not. Josiah kept the speed up and the wheel held dead-on center and clenched his teeth, ready for a collision, but Shaw stayed in his own lane and let the Ranger thunder right by him. Didn’t even try to do anything, just sat there behind the wheel of Danny’s Olds and watched Josiah pass by.

  Told you, boy. Told you. He doesn’t have the will, and neither does anyone else. You think those police can stop us right now? Not a chance. They ain’t strong enough. Ain’t nobody in this valley strong enough.

  There surely was not. Josiah was flying now, open road ahead, the world yielding to him in the way he’d always known it would.

  Dumping the woman in the road had freed him from the first pursuit car, and he’d avoid those that would attempt to join the chase. He’d drive west and take the back roads, a no-brainer as there would be more police near Orleans, and if he drove toward them, he’d make it easier for them. Drive away from them and they’d have to give chase.

  He was back on the road to the gulf now, Wesley Chapel a white speck beneath black sky in the distance. Down to the chapel, then bang another left, and keep pushing west at as fast a speed as he could manage. That was all he had to do.

  Lightning flashed again, and around him the fields shone with the deep, lush green you could only ever see beneath a storm. He couldn’t believe just how green everything looked. Above him, something seemed to be opening in the dark clouds. The storm breaking up, maybe. Yes, even the wind had died off. Everything around him was still. That expected furious storm wasn’t going to come to life after all.

  But something was happening in the sky. He had only a sense of it at first, some swirl of light, and then he blinked and looked up and to the left and saw that something strange was happening in that clear circle that had formed in the center of the clouds. Something was… lowering. Yes, a cloud of pure white was dropping down from the center of the dark swirling ring above it.

  A thin white rope descended almost all the way to the field ahead, then held. Hesitated. The top end of it whipped around a little and the bottom rose with it, and Josiah was sure the thing was about to retreat when it dropped with sudden strength and a spray of brown soil shot into the air. The windows on the truck were vibrating now, and the trees alongside the road were bending with the force of the wind once again. Only they were bending the wrong way, he realized, they were leaning in toward the cloud instead of away from it.

  For a moment he let off the gas. He was beside Wesley Chapel now, where Danny had pulled in and watched a tornado go by, and now Josiah was staring down another one. He’d heard plenty about such storms—they weren’t uncommon in southern Indiana—but he’d never seen one himself. The thing looked nothing like the funnel shape you always heard of. No, it was just a rope. A white rope connecting earth to sky, and moving forward. Moving east. Moving toward him.

  He raised his eyes to the rearview mirror and saw Danny’s car coming on down the road. Shaw had turned around and started in pursuit of him. What in the hell did he think he could do?

  Still, he was catching up. The tornado sat no more than a half mile away now to the west, the direction Josiah ne
eded to go. It was moving but without great speed. Seemed relaxed, almost. Low-key about the way it was tearing through the land. He watched it come up on one lone tree, saw the treetop bend toward it, and then the cloud was over it and the tree disappeared from sight. An instant later it had cleared the tree, and the trunk remained, but almost all of the branches that had made up the top were gone. The cloud chewed back into the farmland.

  It looks like a power washer, Josiah thought, it looks exactly like a damn power-washer jet. A thin white rope with an invisible and incredible chisel at the end of it, blasting that field away like it was so much dirt on a deck board.

  He looked in the rearview again and saw Danny’s car closing in fast.

  Can’t just sit here, boy. Work left to be done, isn’t there? You bold enough to do it? You got the strength, the will?

  Sure he did. Sure. Josiah turned left, away from the chapel, and laid into the Ranger’s accelerator once again. Ahead of him, the tornado was nearing the road. The base of the white rope had turned brown, and Josiah could see an outer ring of debris circling it. Some awful large objects in that outer ring. All around him the air hummed with a mighty locomotive’s roar.

  Danny was right, he thought, damn things really do sound just like a train.

  He could see the spot where the cloud was likely to cross the road, and he knew that if he made it there first, he’d be fine, and Shaw, still trailing behind, would likely be dead. It was a teenage boy’s game, nothing more, a bit of that old chicken run. Wasn’t nobody else had Josiah’s nerves in the game back then, and wasn’t nobody else who had them now. He eyed the likely intersection between storm and road and put the full weight of his right leg into the gas pedal, heard the overextended six-cylinder moaning.

  You make it through, boy, you are home free. That storm will block everybody trying to come at you from the east, don’t you see? The road will be yours. Just got to make it, just got to show the strength and will, keep those hands steady on the wheel and the foot heavy on the gas…

  He was right alongside it now, and when he chanced a final glance up at the rearview, he saw Eric Shaw was falling back. Slowing down, afraid to take this run.

  “We knew that,” he said. “He don’t have the strength of will, does he, Campbell? Man doesn’t have what we have.”

  The truck was at eighty-five now and no more than two hundred feet from clear of the storm. The driver’s window clouded over with brown dust and then the windshield was covered, too, and Josiah couldn’t see a damn thing but that didn’t matter, because he knew the other side would be clear. He let out a howl of pure pleasure and bent over the wheel, knowing that he’d made it. Wasn’t another man alive would have taken this drive, but he’d not only taken it, he’d made it.

  That taste of pure victory was the last thing he knew in the instant before the truck began to slide to the left, and he had time for just one more thought, a final, unspoken question: Why am I moving this way? This isn’t the way I wanted to go…

  This tornado didn’t have the funnel shape of that first one, looked like an angry white whip, and Eric could not believe it when he saw the pickup turn left and head directly toward it.

  “What are you doing?” Eric said. “What are you doing, you crazy bastard?”

  The Ranger was accelerating, speeding into the storm, which was now almost to the road. Eric blew through the stop sign and swung left as well, sped up for a moment, and then saw what would happen and let his foot off the gas pedal, saying, “Don’t let it, no, don’t let it…”

  The cloud crossed the field and met the road and enveloped Josiah Bradford’s truck. For one instant, there was nothing but the cloud, and Eric had time to form a they-can-survive-this hope and then the truck exploded.

  The blast was muted by the roar of the storm, but even so, Eric heard it and felt it. The whole car shook and the pavement vibrated beneath its wheels and a burst of orange flame showed itself in the center of the cloud. The wind took the heat and sucked it upward, the flame climbing the center of the white rope into the sky like it was a fuse dangling from the heavens. Then the cloud was past and the flame within it was gone and Eric could see the truck again.

  It was upside down on the side of the road, at least forty feet from where it had met the funnel cloud. The roof supports had caved in and it rested flat on the ground, the white paint blistered off to reveal charred metal beneath. Flames crackled across the chassis and licked out of the cab.

  Eric couldn’t scream. He stared at the burning wreck and wanted to scream but could not. His jaw worked and his breath came almost against the will of his body, but he was silent. He was hardly aware that his car was being dragged until he felt the right wheels slip off the road, and then he realized the storm had been pulling him toward it. Then it was too far away and its grip loosened and left the car sitting half on the road.

  He fumbled the driver’s door open and got out and ran to the truck. A light rain had started to fall again, a sprinkle that had not the slightest effect on the flames. He got within fifteen feet before the heat drove him back, and he heard himself sobbing now, looking down at the smoldering metal.

  No one could have survived it.

  He stood there for a long time, with his hands held up to shield his face from the heat. The flame roared and crackled and then burned down, and there seemed to be nothing left of the cab at all. He stepped closer and saw a thin rod of white amidst all the black char, knew it was bone, and fell to his knees and vomited in the grass.

  He was down there on his hands and his knees when he heard the voice. Not the scream from Claire that he’d been fearing, but a whisper that now felt familiar.

  You brought me home. Been a long time coming. Too many years I was gone. But you brought me home.

  He jerked up and stared at the smoldering truck and saw nothing inside, just all that ash and heat and thin black smoke, and then his eyes rose and he saw Campbell Bradford standing just beyond, close enough to the truck that he could touch it but unaffected by the flames.

  Think that would kill me? You don’t understand the first thing about me, about what I am. I’m strong here, stronger than you can believe, stronger than you can stop. I don’t die. Not like your wife.

  Eric staggered backward, up to the road. Campbell smiled and ducked his head and then crawled through the burning cab and out onto the other side, following. Eric turned and ran.

  There was another car parked beside the Oldsmobile now. A heavyset guy in an Indianapolis Colts baseball cap was climbing down out of a large Chevy truck.

  “Buddy, you okay? Shit, did that tornado get it? Man, there ain’t nothing left of it, is there. You see what happened? Was anyone inside?”

  Eric stumbled past him and around the open door of Danny Hastings’s Oldsmobile and got into the driver’s seat. The guy was following him, and over his shoulder, Campbell Bradford walked leisurely down the road.

  “Buddy… you need to wait for help. I’ve called the fire department. You can’t drive, man, not after something like this.”

  Eric slammed the door and put the car in reverse and backed up, feeling the jar when the right-side wheels popped back onto the surface of the road. He kept it in reverse as the heavyset guy closed in and Campbell Bradford walked toward them in the middle of the road. The stranger was talking and just a few feet away, but now Eric couldn’t hear his voice. He could only hear Campbell’s.

  She’s dead, and I’m still here. Forever. Thought you could control me, contain me, defeat me? She’s dead and I’m still here.

  Eric backed up all the way to the intersection beside Wesley Chapel. The old white church was still standing, oblivious to the two tornadoes that had snaked through on either side of it today. He cut the wheel then and swung the front of the car around so it was pointing south. He looked in the rearview mirror as he accelerated down the road and saw Campbell just behind, strolling along but somehow keeping pace with the car. Eric dropped his eyes and hit the gas pedal, tore up
the road. Ahead he could see police lights flashing, maybe a half mile away. He ignored them and banged a left turn back into the gravel lane, drove all the way to the end, and parked the car beside its dead owner’s body. He got out and leaned over and placed the keys in the dead man’s hand. This time he did not recoil at the touch or the sight of the wound.

  You’ve left people dead all over today, haven’t you? Campbell said. He was no more than five feet behind Eric now. How many have died today? I can hardly keep the tally. We’ve got this one, Josiah, your wife…

  There were flashing lights through the trees now, back toward the road, and a police car blew past and continued on toward the wrecked Ford Ranger. Eric watched it go, and the lights set off a blinding pain in his skull, a single burst like all of the headaches of the past days combined into one extravagant stroke of agony. He gasped and dropped to his knees in the wet, bloody grass.

  So many dead people, Campbell said. So many. But guess what? You’re still here, and so am I. So am I.

  Eric looked up at him, into the horrible shadowed face beneath the bowler hat, and thought, He is right. The blood is on me, Claire’s is, at least. She came for me, came to help me, to save me, and I left her behind. Went out into the storm in search of that spring and left her behind.

  It was all gone now, everything he’d ever needed and loved was lost because he was too selfish, too stupid, to know what he needed or how to love.

  Only Campbell remained with him now.

  The muscle tremors in his hands had worked into his forearms, and his left eyelid was fluttering constantly. His skull ached as if someone were piping in additional air pressure; it was hard to walk in a straight line once he got back to his feet and pointed toward the trail, Campbell following him with a strange whispering laugh.

  The hell with it—let him follow. All that mattered had been lost; all that was left did not matter.