grateful for the sight of anything, even of trouble serious.
Shivering, she freed herself from the entangling straps of the safety
harness, and touched Hatch again. His face was ghastly in the queer
backsplash of the instrument lights: sunken eyes, waxen skin, color less
lips, blood oozing-but, thank God, not spurting from the gash on the
right side of his head. She shook him gently, then a little harder,
calling his name.
They wouldn't be able to get out of the car easily, if at all, while it
was being borne down the river-specially as it now began to move faster.
But at least they had to be prepared to scramble out if it came up
against a rock or caught for a moment against one of the banks.
The opportunity to escape might be short-lived.
Hatch could not be awakened.
Without warning the car dipped sharply forward. Again icy water gushed
in through the shattered windshield, so cold that it had some of the
effect of an electrical shock, halting Lindsey's heart for a beat or two
and locking the breath in her lungs.
The front of the car did not rise in the currents, as it had done
previously. It was settling deeper than before, so there was less river
under to provide hIt. The water continued to pour in, quickly rising
past Lindsey's ankles to mid-calf. They were sinking.
"Hatch!" She was shouting now, shaking him hard, heedless of his
injuries.
The river gushed inside, rising to seat level, churning up foam that
refracted the amber light from the instrument panel and looked like
garlands of golden Christmas tinsel.
Lindsey pulled her feet out of the water, knelt on her seat, and
splashed Hatch's face, desperately hoping to bring him around. But he
was sunk in deeper levels of unconsciousness than mere concussive sleep,
perhaps in a coma as plumbless as a mid-ocean trench.
Swirling water rose to the bottom of the steering wheel.
Frantically Lindsey ripped at Hatch's safety harness, trying to strip it
away from him, only half aware of the hot flashes of pain when she tore
a couple of fingernails.
"Hatch, damn it!"
The water was halfway up the steering wheel, and the Honda all but
ceased its forward movement. It was too heavy now to be budged by the
persistent pressure of the river behind it.
Hatch was five-feet-ten, a hundred and sixty pounds, only average in
size, but he might as well have been a giant. As dead weight, resistant
to her every effort, he was virtually immovable. Tugging, shoving,
wrenching, clawing, Lindsey struggled to free him, and by the time she
finally managed to disentangle him from the straps, the water had risen
over the top of the dashboard, more than halfway up her chest. It was
even higher on Hatch, just under his chin, because he was slumped in his
seat.
The river was unbelievably icy, and Lindsey felt the warmth pumping out
of her body as if it were blood gushing from a severed artery. As body
heat bled from her, the cold bled in, and her muscles began to ache.
Nevertheless, she welcomed the rising flood because it would make Hatch
buoyant and therefore easier to maneuver out from under the wheel and
through the shattered windshield. That was her theory, anyway, but when
she tugged on him, he seemed heavier than ever, and now the water was at
his lips.
"Come on, come on," she said furiously, "you're gonna drown, damn it!"
2
Finally pulling his beer truck off the road, Bill Cooper broadcast a
Mayday on his CB radio. Another trucker responded and, equipped with a
cellular telephone as well as a CB, promised to call the authorities in
nearby Big Bear.
Bill hung up the citizen's-band handset, took a long-handled six-battery
flashlight from under the driver's seat, and stepped out into the storm.
The frigid wind cut through even his fleece-lined denim jacket, but the
bitterness of the winter night was not half as icy as his stomach, which
ha turned sour and cold as he had watched the Honda spin its luckless
occupants down the highway and over the brink of the chasm.
He hurried across the slippery pavement and along the shoulder to the
missing section of guardrail. He hoped to see the Honda close below,
caught up against the trunk of a tree. But there were no trees on that
slope-just a smooth mantle of snow from previous storms, scarred by the
passage of the car, disappearing beyond the reach of his flashlight
beam.
An almost disabling pang of guilt stabbed through him. He'd been
drinking again. Not much. A few shots out of the flask he carried.
He had been certain he was sober when he'd started up the mountain.
Now he wasn't so sure. He felt... fuzzy. And suddenly it seemed
stupid to have tried to make a delivery with the weather turning ugly so
fast.
Below him, the abyss appeared supernaturally bottomless, and the
apparent extreme depth engendered in Bill the feeling that he was gazing
into the damnation to which he'd be delivered when his own life ended.
He was paralyzed by that sense of futility that sometimes overcame even
the best of men-though usually when they were alone in a bedroom,
staring at the meaningless patterns of shadows on the ceiling at three
o'clock in the morning.
Then the curtains of snow parted for a moment, and he saw the floor of
the ravine about a hundred or a hundred and fifty feet below, not as
deep as he had feared. He stepped through the gap in the guardrail,
intending to crab down the treacherous hillside and assist the survivors
if there were any. Instead he hesitated on the narrow shelf of flat
earth at the brink of the slope because he was whiskey-dizzy but also
because he could not see where the car had come to rest.
A serpentine black band, like satin ribbon, curved through the snow down
there, intersecting the tracks the car had made. Bill blinked at it
uncomprehendingly, as if staring at an abstract painting, until he
remembered that a river lay below.
The car had gone into that ebony ribbon of water.
Following a winter of freakishly heavy snow, the weather had turned
warmer a couple of weeks ago, triggering a premature spring melt. The
runoff continued, for winter had returned too recently to have locked
the river in ice again. The temperature of the water would be only a
few degrees above freezing. Any occupant of the car, having survived
both the wreck and death by drowning, would perish swiftly from
exposure.
If I'd been sober, he thought, I would've turned back in this weather.
I'm a pathetic joke, a tanked-up beer deliveryman who didn't even have
enough loyalty to get plastered on beer. Christ.
A joke, but people were dying because of him. He tasted vomit in the
back of his throat, choked it down.
Frantically he surveyed the murky ravine until he spotted an eerie
radiance, like an otherworldly presence, drifting spectrally with the
river to the right of him. Soft amber, it faded in and out through the
falling snow. He figured it must be the interior lights of the Honda,
Hunched for protection against the biting wind, holding on to the
guardrail in case he slipped and fell over the edge, Bill scuttled along
the top of the slope, in the same direction as the water-swept car
below, trying to keep it in sight. The Honda drifted swiftly at first,
then slower, slower.
Finally it came to a complete halt, perhaps stopped by rocks in the
watercourse or by a projection of the riverbank.
The light was slowly fading, as if the car's battery was running out of
juice.
3
Though Hatch was freed from the safety harness, Lindsey could not budge
him, maybe because his clothes were caught on something she could not
see, maybe because his foot was wedged under the brake pedal or bent
back and trapped under his own seat.
The water rose over Hatch's nose. Lindsey could not hold his head any
higher. He was breathing the river now.
She let go of him because she hoped that the loss of his air supply
would finally bring him around, coughing and spluttering and splashing
up from his seat, but also because she did not have the energy to
continue struggling with him. The intense cold of the water sapped her
strength. With frightening rapidity, her extremities were growing numb.
Her exhaled breath seemed just as cold as every inhalation, as if her
body had no heat left to impart to the used air.
The car had stopped moving. It was resting on the bottom of the river,
completely filled and weighed down with water, except for a bubble of
air under the shallow dome of the roof. Into that space she pressed her
face, gasping for breath.
She was making horrid little sounds of terror, like the bleats of an
animal. She tried to silence herself but could not.
The queer, water-filtered light from the instrument panel began to fade
from amber to muddy yellow.
A dark part of her wanted to give up, let go of this world, and move on
to someplace better. It had a small quiet voice of its own: Don't
fight, there's nothing left to live for anyway, Jimmy has been dead for
so long, so very long, now Hatch is dead or dying, just let go,
surrender, maybe you'll wake up in Heaven with them ... The voice
possessed a lulling, hypnotic appeal.
The remaining air could last only a few minutes, if that long, and she
would die in the car if she did not escape immediately.
Hatch is dead, lungs full of water, only waiting to be fish food, so let
go, surrender, what's the point, Hatch is dead She gulped air that was
swiftly acquiring a tart, metallic taste. She was able to draw only
small breaths, as if her lungs had shriveled.
If any body heat was left in her, she was not aware of it. In reaction
to the cold, her stomach knotted with nausea, and even the vomit that
kept rising into her throat was icy; each time she choked it down, she
felt as if she had swallowed a vile slush of dirty snow.
Hatch is dead Hatch is dead....
"No," she said in a harsh, angry whisper. "No. No." denial raged
through her with the fury of a storm: Hatch could not be dead.
Unthinkable. Not Hatch, who never forgot a birthday or an anniversary,
who bought her flowers for no reason at all, who never lost his temper
and rarely raised his voice. Not Hatch, who always had time to listen
to the troubles of others and sympathize with them, who never failed to
have an open wallet for a friend in need, whose greatest fault was that
he was too damn much of a soft touch. He could not be, must not be,
would not be dead. He ran five miles a day, ate a low-fat diet with
plenty of fruits and vegetables, avoided caffeine and decaffeinated
beverages.
dn't that count for something, damn it? He lathered on sunscreen in the
summer, did not smoke, never drank more than two beers or two glasses of
wine in a single evening, and was too easy-going ever to develop heart
disease due to stress. Didn't self-denial and self-control count for a
Was creation so screwed ere was no justice any more?
Okay, all right, they said the good died young, which sure had been true
of Jimmy, and Hatch was not yet forty, young by any standard, okay,
agreed, but they also said that virtue was its own reward, and there was
plenty of virtue here, damn it, a whole shitload of virtue, which ought
to count for something, unless God wasn't listening, unless He didn't
care, unless the world was an even crueler place than she had believed.
She refused to accept it.
Hatch. Was. Not. Dead.
She drew as deep a breath as she could manage. Just as the last of the
light faded, plunging her into blindness again, she sank into the water,
pushed across the dashboard, and went through the missing windshield
onto the hood of the car.
Now she was not merely blind but deprived of virtually all five senses.
She could hear nothing but the wild thumping of her own heart, for the
water effectively muffled sound. She could smell and speak only at the
penalty of death by drowning. The anesthetizing effect of the glacial
river left her with a fraction of her sense of touch, so she felt as if
she were a disembodied spirit suspended in whatever medium composed
Purgatory, awaiting final judgment.
Assuming that the river was not much deeper than the car and that she
would not need to hold her breath long before she reached the surface,
she made another attempt to free Hatch. Lying on the hood of the car,
holding fast to the edge of the windshield frame with one numb hand,
straining against her body's natural buoyancy, she reached back inside,
groped in the blackness until she located the steering wheel and then
her husband.
Heat rose in her again, at last, but it was not a sustaining warmth.
Her lungs were beginning to burn with the need for air.
Gripping a fistful of Hatch's jacket, she pulled with all her might-and
to her surprise he floated out of his seat, no longer immovable,
suddenly buoyant and unfettered. He caught on the steering wheel, but
only briefly, then bobbled out through the windshield as Lindsey slid
backward across the hood to make way for him.
A hot, pulsing pain filled her chest. The urge to breathe grew
overpowering, but she resisted it.
When Hatch was out of the car, Lindsey embraced him and kicked for the
surface. He was surely drowned, and she was clinging to a corpse, but
she was not repulsed by that macabre thought. If she could get him
ashore, she would be able to administer artificial respiration.
Although the chance of reviving him was slim, at least some hope
remained. He was not truly dead, not really a corpse, until all hope
had been exhausted.
She burst through the surface into a howling wind that made the
marrow-freezing water seem almost warm by comparison. When that air hit
her burning lungs, her heart stuttered, her chest clenched with pain,
and the second breath was harder to draw than the first.
Treading water, holding tight to Hatch, Lindsey swallowed mouthfuls of
the river as it splashed he
r face. Cursing, she spat it out. Nature
seemed alive, like a great hostile beast, and she found herself
irrationally angry with the river and the storm, as if they were
conscious entities willfully aligned against her.
She tried to orient herself, but it was not easy in the darkness and
shrieking wind, without solid ground beneath her. When she saw the
riverbank, vaguely luminous in its coat of snow, she attempted a one-arm
sidestroke toward it with Hatch in tow, but the current was too strong
to be resisted, even if she'd been able to swim with both arms.
She and Hatch were swept downstream, repeatedly dragged beneath the
surface by an undertow, repeatedly thrust back into the wintry air,
battered by fragments of tree branches and chunks of ice that were also
caught up in the current, moving helplessly and inexorably toward
whatever sudden fall or deadly phalanx of rapids marked the river's
descent from the mountains.
4
He had started drinking when Myra left him. He never could handle being
womanless. Yeah, and wouldn't God Almighty treat that excuse with
contempt when it came time for judgment?
Still holding the guardrail, Bill Cooper crouched indecisively on the
brink of the slope and stared intently down at the river. Beyond the
screen of falling snow, the lights of the Honda had gone out.
He didn't dare take his eyes off the obscured scene below to check the
highway for the ambulance. He was afraid that when he looked back into
Koontz, Dean R. - Hideaway Page 2