Adrian McKinty - Hidden River

And I knew if I didn’t move I was a dead man.

An M16 threw fire at me from the trees. I struggled to my feet and ran for the fence, ignoring the pain from the pellet above my knee. The rain made it difficult to see, to get purchase on the ground. I slipped and fell between the pillars of a massive tomb. Bullets smashed into the marble, sending chips everywhere. I ran for the fence, dodging between graves, taking cover between granite tombstones. Shots and fire overhead. A man in front of me. I was heading straight for him. His back to me, a big dark shape in the night and rain.

An automatic rifle churned up the mud ahead of me, smacking into granite, tracer bouncing everywhere, like fireworks.

“Frank, stop shooting, you’re going to hit fucking Manny, Frank, cut it out,” a voice yelled.

I ran toward the man.

“Jesus, Frank, didn’t you fucking hear me? Stop shooting.”

The M16 abruptly stopped.

“Manny, Manny, he’s over there, he’s right there.”

The voice was yelling desperately, behind me and over to my left. The big light came full on me again.

“There he is, Manny, turn around.” Another voice.

“Where?”

“Manny, he’s right there, at that big cross behind you.”

Manny, in front of me, turned at last when we were fifteen feet apart. White guy with a beard and a flat cap. Soaked through. Probably waiting here for hours. He began raising his shotgun. He hadn’t kept it leveled because he hadn’t wanted water to get into the barrels.

That’s what killed him.

I straightened my weapon, pulled the trigger. Pat’s big Colt banged. Flame from the heavy barrel. I’d cleaned it, but this weapon hadn’t been fired in combat since the Battle of the Ardennes. I screamed, charged him. Ran into the dark, shooting. Half a clip. Like an insane man. Blinding flashes from the.45. When my eyes cleared, no sign of Manny, he was down.

Yellow fire all around me from the M16s. The Fourth of July and Guy Fawkes night and a riot drill and every other nightmare rolled into one.

I could see gravity in the parabola of the tracer. The bullets smacking into the wire fence around the cemetery. Ringing off the concrete walls, bouncing a thousand feet into the air.

I ran like a shit-kicker now. I sprinted to the cemetery fence. I needed both hands, so I dropped the.45. I climbed over the five-foot wire mesh, fell to the ground, scrambled across the car park on the other side.

More tracer, more bullets. M16s in the middle of the town. But this was Fort Morgan after midnight, during a thunderstorm. Empty.

I kept running. The car park was well lit up. They found me easily in the lights and shot at me but the shots were wild, they rang and screamed off the railings, and the shooters didn’t focus them properly. They were excited, not taking their time.

I saw a Volkswagen camper van parked on an overlook near the river.

I yelled. “Help, is there anyone there? Help.”

I ran to the van and banged on the window. Bullets slammed into the side of the vehicle, puncturing tires and windows. Glass and metal shards smacking into me. A bullet careened off the Kevlar vest, knocking me to my knees.

“Fucker,” one of the men screamed behind me.

I got up and turned to see two men climbing over the cemetery fence. They had shoulder-strapped their rifles. Bearing down. Big men. White guys. Heavy, but tough. Where had they come from? All the trouble they took to silence a simple blackmailer in Denver, and Charles somehow hires three professional killers to shoot me?

I ran past the sugar factory, the Walgreen’s, a video store. The shops all closed. The street deserted.

“Come back, you fucker,” they yelled, shooting pistols now.

A bullet clanged into a stop sign. I ran on, wounded, slowing as they gained.

Only one thing for it now.

Only one way out. The river. I cut across the deserted I-76.

I sprinted to the end of a lane and vaulted over the safety railing that led to the embankment over the South Platte. I stole a final look back. They were still shooting at me as they ran.

I took a breath, jumped.

A moment in the river-cooled air.

I landed in the water.

Sank like a fucking stone….

Coldness.

Smothering, death-bringing cold. Annihilating, electrocuting cold. The air crushed from my lungs.

My body writhes. Shots in my wake. I gasp for breath. I swallow greasy, frigid water and sink and am rocketed downstream. I fall through the poisons and heavy chemicals toward the choked sandy bottom, clutching, screaming, down-down-down.

I touch bottom, I’m dragged along rocks.

My blood freezing, my eyes open.

So this is how it ends.

In this river. With these gray claws and ash tide. The Platte with its hard line and dead current. This river. Like the gun, to the Mississippi, the Gulf of Mexico, the Atlantic. This river. To its black, tenebrous heart. And I go to you and I see you in the dark. I see your traces along the trail that you have beaten to the Great Perhaps. And are you there, Victoria, and are you there, Mum? It’s cold, it hurts. And I smile. This river. This time.

But no.

Not yet.

That will come.

But not yet.

My fingers find the Velcro straps of the Kevlar vest. I pull them, the straps loosen, the Velcro rips, the vest falls off me and I tumble upward to the surface. I suck a desperate breath, float for a minute in the fast-moving water, before smacking into a rock on a sandbank. I lie there for half an hour.

Wade across the shallows to the bank.

Walk.

Shivering, oblivious to the rain, shoulder wound, leg wound. Two miles back to Fort Morgan. Empty streets, neon signs, and not another human soul.

Adrenaline fighting against blood loss and exhaustion.

Three floors to Pat’s apartment. The door.

“Help me,” I manage and Pat turns, horrified, toward me.

And I fall at his feet and slip into that other realm where things made sense and the guilty suffered and equity lived and we all were saved.

Ash on the fire escape. Images. A black cloud. My mother’s hand. Her cold fingers. What will you do, son?

I’ll join the cops, Ma.

No, no, don’t do that, it’ll upset your father, stay at university, it’s for the best.

Ok, I will, Ma. I will….

Them’s brave boys that are out in that, John mutters.

Aye, I say.

We sit and drink and the smoke comes slowly overhead like a continent. Ash from the big wildfire near Greeley. John walks to the rail and is almost lost in the vertical cliff of choking smog that hangs in a blanket above the buildings. A stink of fire. Water-carrying planes flying overhead. I’m waiting with him on the narrow fire escape steps. I’m standing and hugging myself and he is hunched over and spitting down onto the dead potted plants of the floors below.

We both smell of smoke. He passes me the bottle and I take it in my left hand. The American whiskey tastes sour. I gulp down a big swig of it and the fake heat evaporates the cold out of my ears. I give him the bottle back and he swallows down the rest. For a minute I think he’s going to throw it onto the ground and see if it smashes, but instead he sets it carefully on the iron slats of the fire escape.

We can maybe get ten cents back on that bottle, I say.

He turns to look at me and shakes his head, his shaggy hair still as his face moves. It’s a weird effect, not unconnected to the booze. I laugh a little.

I’m drunk and cold, I tell him.

If you’re cold, you can’t be drunk, ya big wean, alcohol numbs the senses, he announces in a tone of pissed authority.

Bollocks, I think. But I don’t want to argue with him. After all, he is dead.