Michael Koryta - So Cold the River

Josiah nodded at the upended Porsche. “Guess you didn’t need to worry ’bout them tires.”

Danny stared back at him blankly.

“How’d you miss it?” Josiah asked.

“Drove away, is how I missed it. I was waiting down here like you said, and then I heard the noise. I mean to tell you it really does sound like a train, just the way you always hear folks say it does. I heard that noise and I saw the sky going black as oil and I said, I got to get away fast. So I drove out of here and had hardly hit the road before I saw it. Big old funnel cloud, all white at first, then turning black. And I just hit the gas on this old car like I never have before in my life. Was up at the church when the tornado came in, and I pulled behind the building and set to prayin’. I’ll tell you, I was prayin’ and cryin’ like a little kid, and I think it was that church that saved me because that thing passed by not a hundred yards from me, but I was safe and-”

“Where are they?” Josiah said.

“Huh?”

“The ones I’m here for, damn it! Where are they?”

Danny blinked, then wiped at his face, leaving a streak of dirt behind.

“I don’t know. They were in the woods. Right there, where it blew through, Josiah. Far as I know, they’re somewhere out there now.” He waved his arm off to the east, in the direction the storm had gone.

“You think they’re dead?” Josiah said, and he felt a cold, seething rage nestle into his belly. That storm better not have taken them. He’d come here to settle up, not to collect bodies.

“I have no idea, Josiah. I just want to get out of here. I’m done, all right? I’m-”

“Shut up,” Josiah said. “I got a piece of work left to do, and ain’t nothing or nobody done until that work’s been completed. You don’t understand the weight of this task, Danny, you don’t understand the heft of it at all. Ain’t a thing done yet.”

“Josiah-”

“Stop using that name.”

“What?”

“You call me Campbell now. Understand? Call me Campbell.”

Danny said, “I think you’re crazy.”

He was staring Josiah in the face, and when he said it, he meant it.

“I don’t know what the hell you’re thinking anymore,” Danny said. “Don’t even seem like yourself, and now you’re calling yourself Campbell… It’s like you’re possessed.”

“What I am,” Josiah said, “is focused.”

He turned away from Danny and walked back to the truck, reached inside the cab and withdrew the shotgun. Then he stood beside the bed and tore the tarps loose and exposed Eric Shaw’s wife.

“Josiah! What in… oh, hell. You are crazy! You’ve lost your ever-lovin’-”

“I’m going to ask one more time for you to keep silent,” Josiah said, and Danny’s eyes registered for the first time that the gun in Josiah’s hand was pointed at him.

“You going to shoot me? Me?”

“Don’t intend to. But I came here to finish a task, and ain’t nobody going to interrupt me. You least of all.”

Danny’s jaw slackened. He didn’t say a word. The wind was starting to gust again, another round of storms ready to chase the one that had just left this place.

“We’re going to find those two,” Josiah said, “whether they’re out in those woods or up in a damn tree somewhere with their necks broken. We’re going to find them.”

“Who is she?” Danny asked, staring at the woman in the bed of the truck.

“Shaw’s wife. Now tell me where they went.”

Danny jabbed a finger into the wind-torn woods. “Down to the gulf. Last time I saw them, they was walking down to the gulf.”

“That’s fine,” Josiah said. “Then we’ll take the same walk. You mind helping our friend here out of the truck? I’d like to keep her at my side.”

Danny hesitated only a moment, but when he did move, it seemed to be more out of something exchanged in his stare with the woman than in direct obedience to Josiah’s instruction. He leaned over the bed wall and tried to gather her up, but he was handling her gently, not getting a thing done.

“Go on and pull her out of there!” Josiah barked. “She ain’t that fragile, boy.”

Danny ignored him and went to the back of the truck and climbed in the bed to help her to her feet. As he did that, he pushed aside another tarp, glanced down to see what it had covered, and froze with his arms extended to the woman.

“Is that… dynamite?”

“Indeed,” Josiah said. “And it would take one squeeze of this trigger to blow the back of that truck into Martin County. Now you want to hurry up?”

Danny got her upright and down out of the truck then, used his pocket knife to cut the tape free from her feet at Josiah’s instructions, and then started down the trail. The woman was unsteady with her hands still bound, and he kept an arm on her to help with balance. They’d gotten well into the trees now, the vehicles out of sight, and were crossing over familiar ground, a path on which Josiah knew every root and stone. Trees were downed in every direction, some snapped in half, others torn free at their bases, leaning crazily against one another, but somehow many had stayed upright and largely intact. Even now they were tossing around in that freshening wind. Josiah couldn’t help but marvel a little as he watched them. Damn things didn’t seem so flexible on a normal day, appeared stiff as the boards they produced, but look at ’em whipping around now. Some would break; some just bend. All depended on the tree and the storm. Some would break and some just bend…

He’d gotten lost in the trees and didn’t see what Danny and the woman saw. Didn’t understand what was happening until the woman dropped to her knees in the middle of the trail, and when he turned to jerk her upright, he saw Danny was pointing ahead. He looked back down the trail.

Eric Shaw was coming up it.

CLAIRE.

Eric saw her before anything else, focused on her so much that for an instant he was unable to see the rest of the frame. The first thing that stood out was the tape: a bright shining silver X across her face. Then she dropped to her knees on the trail and the rest of the pieces clicked into understanding in his brain-Danny Hastings at her side, Josiah Bradford behind them with a gun in his hand. In that first moment, that first blink, they’d been insignificant pieces of scenery around his wife. Now they stepped forward and joined the cast and became significant as hell. Particularly the shotgun.

He’d left Kellen beside the gulf not five minutes earlier and begun the trek back up the hill, thinking that help was a few minutes away. His hands were shaking and his head throbbed but he’d told himself that he needed to think of Kellen, because Kellen needed help of the kind that could be found-normal, human help, different from that required by Eric. So he’d walked up the storm-ravaged slope, intent on finding rescue for Kellen, and now he was staring at his wife bound and gagged.

For a moment nobody moved or spoke. They all just froze there, looking back at one another, and then Eric started forward at a run, and Josiah Bradford’s face split into a grin and he lifted the shotgun and laid the barrel against the crown of Claire’s skull.

Eric stopped running.

“What are you doing?” he shouted. “What do you want?”

“Only what’s owed to me,” Josiah said. His voice didn’t sound anything like it had two days ago. It seemed to have gained a deeper timbre, gained power. It was the voice of an old-time revival preacher, primed to stir the crowds into a frenzy.

“Take that gun away from-”

“You come on up here. Walk slow, but get closer. I don’t want to shout.”

No, Eric thought, I believe we should shout. Because Kellen’s back there and he isn’t going to hear us unless we’re shouting. Don’t know what he could do with a broken ankle anyhow, but it’s something. I left him to get help. Now I need it.