Wicked River

by Jenny Milchman

  Natalie felt her legs fold as if two strings had been cut. She braced herself, flattening one hand against the stick wall and fighting to stay upright while her shout exploded in the small space. “What did you do to my niece?”

  Instead of answering, Kurt whipped toward the slanting doorway, head tilted.

  Natalie only heard it then, a sound that had been drowned out by the roar of her own scream in her ears.

  She and Kurt raced from the hut in tandem. The machete whistled in the wind as Kurt ran with his hand wrapped around the blade’s handle.

  Outside, they stood with their faces turned in the direction of the lake.

  The noise was unmistakable now.

  The faintly beating rotors of a plane.

  Chapter Seventy-Six

  For the first time, Kurt’s face registered an emotion that didn’t appear scripted, planned, decided on in advance. His features seized with what could only be described as panic as he looked up at the sky. Then he pivoted, turning his back on the lake. Advancing on Natalie, he raised the machete and sliced it down through the air.

  Natalie felt the wind the machete made, caught a glimpse of ragged teeth, before spinning out of the weapon’s reach.

  She had to make it to the lake, where the float plane must be. Help had arrived, if only she could get to it.

  Kurt’s arm shot out, snakebite fast, and pulled her toward him. “Natalie,” he panted into her ear, crooking his arm around her throat. “Didn’t I promise this would be painless? Do you know how much uglier things will get if you persist in darting around?”

  Natalie twisted desperately, fighting to look in the direction of the lake. She opened her mouth to scream, but Kurt’s elbow was constricting her throat, and the sound she forced out was barely audible.

  Kurt switched his grasp to the scruff of Natalie’s shirt, holding her just far enough away to accommodate the swing of the blade. The choke hold of his fingers was too powerful to budge. For a second, Kurt’s body stilled, and his long hair settled on his shoulders. Then he yanked Natalie’s head back, exposing her throat.

  With her face tilted upward, Natalie caught a glimpse of two distant bodies, moving with painstaking deliberation through the woods. Steve and Brad? The policeman? They were too far off to hear Natalie even if she’d been able to shout at top volume, and too far away in any case to make it here in time.

  Kurt thrust his arm upright, like a tower over Natalie’s head. The blade of the machete sparked before the sun was stolen away by a freight train of clouds. It was suddenly as dark as night in the treeless ring that Kurt had cleared. Then a clap of thunder shook the sky, letting loose a drenching fall of rain.

  Kurt stood motionless, not even blinking, beneath the downpour. His hand didn’t so much as quiver, rivulets of rain running down the blade of the machete. Darts and arrows slung from the sky sheeted over Kurt’s body until he looked less like a human being than something that was part of nature itself. A waterfall, a river coursing.

  Suddenly, his body pitched forward and he was thrown horizontally onto the ground. Kurt thrust his arms out in front of him, trying to block his fall, and the machete flew away, splashing into a newly formed pool of water.

  Natalie didn’t take time to try and figure out what accounted for Kurt’s sudden dive. She’d seen a flash of light in the leaden sky, perhaps a lightning strike had been the cause. It didn’t matter. She dove forward, landing beside the machete.

  Natalie dug her fingers into the sloppy earth, wrapping mud-caked fists around the handle of the blade, extending it tremblingly as she rose.

  The scene in front of her came clear, a curtain rising.

  Doug’s arms encased Kurt’s legs. He’d landed on top of him, his weight driving Kurt to the ground. But her husband was so weak that Kurt had only to whip his body around, like an enormous fish on a dock, all thrashing muscle, to throw Doug off.

  Then Kurt was free.

  Natalie leapt forward, the machete held outward.

  Rain continued to plummet, distorting the sight of Kurt in front of her, keeping her from seeing how close he might be. Natalie staggered toward him, blade thrust out. She could hear the suck of Kurt’s heavy boots pulling out of the soil. Not far away then, but not yet within reach of the machete’s probing end.

  The veil of rain parted, and Natalie could make out Kurt, moving nearer to her, until they stood mere inches apart.

  Kurt’s face shone, his eyes were clear. The sky began drying up, and the emerging sun cast his form into sharp relief. “Natalie,” he crooned. “What do you think you’re going to do with that? You’ve never done anything in your life.”

  Doug raised himself into a sitting position. He didn’t waste time struggling to his feet, but torpedoed his body sideways, arms poised to bring Kurt down again.

  Kurt kicked him in the chest, and Doug flopped back onto the ground.

  Natalie skirted her husband’s body, drawing closer to Kurt as he lifted his boot to deliver another monstrous blow.

  Natalie hefted the machete in her hands, folding both fists around the handle and tightening her grip.

  Kurt’s foot struck Doug again, even though he lay unmoving in the dirt.

  Natalie stifled a screech as her husband’s body bucked upon impact.

  For the briefest slash of a second, Kurt paused, then took a step toward her.

  He was close enough now that she could track every movement as he leaned in, focused on her face and nothing else, his nostrils flaring as he inhaled deeply. Kurt’s lips parted, and an unfathomable expression crossed his face. Contentedness. Fulfillment. Joy.

  Natalie wheeled around in his direction, a judo spin of sheer, solid rage.

  “Leave my family alone!” she screamed. The machete formed an extension of her arms, her whole body, as she sank it into Kurt’s immutable form.

  It took seconds, minutes, untold amounts of time, before Natalie’s eyes took in the damage she had wrought. The saw-toothed blade of the machete had landed squarely in Kurt’s throat. The machete had embedded itself so deeply, it seemed fused with his body, part of the man himself, as a branch grows out of a tree.

  A geyser of blood spurted forth in a great, garish red plume and Kurt dropped.

  He reached up, and as he lay there, facedown, panting, it appeared as if he were trying to stanch the flow of blood from his neck, or maybe attempting to extract the machete from it.

  Instead Kurt used both hands to manually rotate his head so that he was able to look in the direction he wanted. He caught Natalie’s gaze and, for the last time, observed the expression on her face, viewed her reaction to his fate.

  She watched Kurt register the blend of horror, and relief, and perhaps a single scant thread of satisfaction as blood jetted out from his body. It formed a penumbra on the ground while life slowly leached from his eyes, until finally they darkened, never to read another person ever again.

  Chapter Seventy-Seven

  Natalie bent down, needing to see that Kurt’s back didn’t rise, the lack of breath in his body. In some ways, she didn’t believe that even death could claim Kurt. But he lay completely still. Even the circle of blood had stopped spreading outward and was slowly seeping into the earth.

  Natalie yanked her gaze away, and ran for Doug.

  Steve and Brad arrived in the clearing, the expressions on their faces as dazed and disjointed as Natalie assumed hers to be. They looked as if they’d been dropped on another planet. But both men leapt into action, Brad checking swiftly for Kurt’s pulse, while Steve unfolded a portable stretcher and strode over to Doug.

  “He’s alive,” Natalie said, the statement emerging on a sob. “He was unconscious before—and might be again—but he’s definitely—”

  “Can you move away for me, ma’am?” Steve asked, getting down on the ground.

  Brad made sure Natalie steer
ed clear, a fleeting look of gladness on his boyish face. Good job, he mouthed, and another sob swelled her throat.

  Then the most improbable sight of all appeared in camp.

  The last time Natalie had glimpsed the man now stumping his way out of the woods, he had been deep in a hole. The police chief kept his gaze pinned to the ground because he didn’t have his hands free to check for traps. The reason he didn’t have use of his hands didn’t compute right away.

  The chief dragged his left leg along behind him, messily splinted with a branch, a dagger of bone protruding from the flesh. Only the chief’s densely muscled physique could’ve accounted for his ability to stay upright; he looked as if he shouldn’t have been able to take a step at all. But he was walking—intently, methodically, placing his good foot down before pulling the bad into place, holding a young girl cradled in his arms.

  “Mia,” Natalie cried, or tried to, though the word came out a whimper.

  The police chief warded her off with a single look, then turned his fierce expression on Steve and Brad, who were already moving toward him.

  “Get that man off the stretcher and stabilize him here,” the police chief barked, his voice so raspy, the command was hard to make out. “Got a teenage girl—started to go into convulsions three and a half minutes ago—probable head injury—”

  Steve and Brad flashed each other looks, a complicated calculus of triage.

  “Only one stretcher—” said Steve.

  “Space in the plane is tight—” Brad said.

  The chief’s legs crimped, and he went down on one knee, although he kept his arms raised and his hold on Mia secure.

  Steve swept Mia out of the police chief’s grasp and carried her away.

  Natalie whirled, caught between the twin magnets of her husband and her niece. If they couldn’t be evacuated at the same time, who should go first?

  Brad began the process of removing Doug from the stretcher and assisting him back into the hut, while Steve laid Mia down and buckled a series of bands across her body. Then Brad ran out again to hoist the stretcher with Steve.

  Just as they reached the path that wound through the woods and led down to the lake, Brad stopped and called to Natalie. “Come on! We have to come back with another stretcher for your husband, but there’s room on the plane if you squeeze.” He gestured to the ground in front of them. “And you can show us the best way to go.”

  • • •

  The float plane took off lopsidedly, rising from the sheer surface of the lake before banking abruptly. Natalie sat with her hand on Mia’s unconscious form as the engine grumbled and the windows rattled and wind swept past the aircraft fast enough to make it sway in the sky.

  Steve and Brad adjusted the oxygen mask on Mia’s face and began another recording of her vitals. The sight of her niece so vulnerable and prone, looking like a small child again, made tears swim in Natalie’s eyes. The lake shattered into a series of prisms, droplets sparkling beneath intermittent bursts of sun glare.

  Natalie stared off at the blurring side of a mountain until her eyes smarted. Another mountainside appeared after that, then another, and another, to form a seemingly endless wall of green, just starting to be spattered here and there with gold.

  But at last small signs began to indicate the approach of change. Blotches of land where no trees grew. Splashes of man-made color, a necklace of buoys floating on a pond. The dark gash of a long, paved road.

  They were back.

  • • •

  Mia went into surgery immediately upon arrival at the hospital. Pressure had built up in her skull, and they were inserting a tube for drainage.

  Jim Huggins, pilot of the plane, executed an immediate turnaround to evacuate Doug and the police chief, but Natalie wasn’t permitted to go along. Instead, she sat through a series of tests, then a barrage of questions, ultimately being offered a consult with a plastic surgeon. He looked at Natalie’s cheek, turning her head this way and that, before pronouncing that he couldn’t have done a better job himself.

  “You can have those stitches removed in a week,” he told her, exiting.

  Someone tapped on the cloth curtain, and Natalie looked up to see her sister.

  Once, not so long ago, Natalie would’ve fallen into Claudia’s embrace, sapped of strength and requiring her sister’s unique ministrations. Claudia would have lent comfort as she always did. But circumstances had thrown both sisters into a centrifuge, spinning their needs and claims and roles around until everything was reversed.

  It was Claudia who dropped into Natalie’s arms, a sagging, boneless weight. She tried to speak, but for once could not.

  Natalie’s hand faltered as she lifted it to stroke Claudia’s hair. “Is she…” Natalie began at a whisper. “Is Mia going to be…”

  Claudia let loose a sob and started to go down. If Natalie hadn’t been there to hold her erect, Claudia would’ve landed on the gleaming tile floor. Her voice when she spoke was shattered, mere fragments of its former strength.

  “I don’t know, Natalie. They said it’s too soon to tell.”

  • • •

  The surgeon who operated on Doug acted as if she saw patients with spikes through their feet every day. She informed Natalie that although her husband would have to stay off his injured foot for twelve weeks, and require rehab after, he was expected to regain complete and unimpeded mobility.

  Natalie fell asleep, curled by Doug’s side on the narrow hospital bed. His leg was raised in a harness, making for a little extra space.

  A policewoman had been stationed outside the room; Natalie supposed she was there to guard them, although she wasn’t sure what she and Doug needed guarding from now that Kurt was dead.

  The police chief arrived the next morning, on crutches, his leg encased in a black ankle-to-hip contraption that scarcely seemed to inhibit his authoritative stride as he entered Doug’s room. He’d come to check on them, he explained somberly, and also because he needed to take a statement from Natalie.

  She felt a chill whistle through her as understanding hit. That policewoman wasn’t there to protect them—she was making sure they didn’t leave.

  Natalie opened her mouth and began to tell the story, as much of it as she knew.

  “So your husband was aware of the drugs in the hull of the canoe?” the chief said, laying his crutches aside once she’d finished. “Although you were not?”

  Natalie stared off at Doug’s sleeping form, tears shimmering on her eyes. “He was trying to help a friend out of a desperate situation.”

  “I understand that,” the police chief said, and wrote a few lines on his pad.

  How foolish Doug had been. Natalie turned back toward the chief. His face wasn’t unkind, just intense, as it had been when he’d limped into camp, and it told her what she should’ve realized already. Even Doug’s not-central role in the transport of the drugs amounted to a crime. Natalie swallowed past thickness in her throat. After all they had been through, all they had survived.

  She forced herself to ask, “Is Doug going to be arrested?”

  The chief began to make his way toward the door. “Once he wakes up and is medically cleared, he’ll be brought in for questioning,” he told her. “We’ll have to take it from there.”

  Natalie stared down at the floor.

  Around noon, Doug finally stirred, and Natalie leapt to his side. She felt as if she hadn’t spoken to her husband for years.

  Doug’s eyes cracked open a millimeter. “Am I dead?” he asked croakily.

  Natalie grabbed a plastic pitcher, filling a cup with a trembling hand.

  “Well, this feels familiar,” Doug said as she dribbled water between his lips. His voice cleared as the liquid hit his throat. “Are we still in the hut?”

  Natalie gave a brief smile, but her husband’s attempt at levity, which should’ve b
een reassuring, only made her feel worse in light of the police chief’s visit.

  “There was a plane…” Doug began. “I remember flying… How on earth did you get us a plane?”

  “I’ll tell you,” she said. “But there’s something we need to deal with first.”

  They were interrupted by a knock on the door.

  Natalie looked up, frowning for a moment before it came to her. “Forrest?”

  The guy who entered the room offered a rueful smile. “Luke.”

  Natalie’s face heated. “Of course. Luke.”

  Doug reached for her hand.

  “You okay, man?” Luke asked. Then his head bowed.

  Doug gestured grandiloquently toward the bottom of the bed. “Aside from this new orifice in my foot, I’m just hunky-dory.”

  Luke flinched. His gaze traveled to Natalie, who moved closer to her husband.

  “Listen, Doug,” Luke said.

  Doug raised his eyebrows, aiming an easy, lazy gaze Luke’s way.

  “I mean it, man. Listen to me.”

  Natalie sat forward, although Doug remained relaxed, leaning back against a stack of thin hospital pillows.

  “The cops are out there,” Luke said. He gestured with a thumb toward the door. “But my lawyer got permission for me to stop by and see you first.”

  Doug didn’t respond, and Luke plowed on. “I’m sorry, man,” he said. “I’m so sorry we dragged you and Mark and Brett into this. And I know—” He broke off, swiping a hand across his face. “I know Craig would be too.”

  Doug watched him without expression.

  “That’s why I came to tell you—” Luke broke off, fisting his eyes again.

  When Doug spoke, he sounded annoyed and a little impatient. “Tell me what?”

  “They’re going to offer you the chance to testify against me,” Luke said. “That’s what my lawyer says. You and Mark and Brett were just accessories. You’ll probably get off with probation.”

  Understanding began to shadow Doug’s face, along with a trace of fear. “Never,” he said. “I wouldn’t do that to you.”