Brian Freeman - Spilled Blood

Only one fragile lifeline kept her sane. Through it all, only one aspect of her life didn’t succumb to the poison. Her work. Her research. Her integrity. Then Florian Steele took that away and left her with nothing.

Florian had found her in Las Vegas; he followed her there. He enabled her like a common drug dealer. He gave her all the money she wanted to get her life back, and all she had to give away was everything. Everything she stood for. Everything to which she had devoted her life. Every value that made her who she was. She had to turn a blind eye to the poison she’d found at Mondamin, the horrific remnants of what Vernon Clay had done to the people of St. Croix. She had to pretend it didn’t exist.

She had to lie. She had to betray families and children. All to save Florian Steele and his legacy of death.

Marco had begged her not to do it. Better to lose everything. Better to lose the house and start over. He knew where it would lead if she crossed that line. He knew that Lucia would never be able to live with what she had done. From that moment forward, every dollar in her grasp, every cell on every slide under her microscope, would be a voice accusing her. Convicting her. Sentencing her.

I had nothing to do with it!

Florian Steele could still stand there and proclaim that he didn’t kill her. He could still protest that his ghost wasn’t in the garage with Lucia as she connected the hose to the tailpipe and drifted out of her pain into a final, blissful unconsciousness. He could pretend that his entire world was not irreparably evil.

It didn’t matter. The choice was made.

‘Marco.’

He heard his name as if through a fog. His chin had fallen against his neck, but he labored to look up. The voice came from down river. He winced, as each breath became thicker, and followed the ribbon of the water, but saw nothing. The voice might as well have come from the clouds.

‘Marco,’ he heard again.

He wasn’t imagining. Florian heard it, too, and hunted in the trees, as if another threat were waiting for him there. Marco saw. Christopher Hawk stood on the plateau of the river bank, two hundred yards away, calling for him. He was shouting, but across the space, his voice was a whisper.

‘ Don’t do this. ’

Marco waved him away with a feeble brush of his hand, but he didn’t know if his friend could see him. In his head, he thought about the distance. Chris was safe from the blast, but not from what came next. He wished he had the strength to shout: Get out of here. Go to your family.

Get to high ground.

Marco watched anxiety bloom in Florian’s face. The man really thought he had won, bringing his gun, firing before Marco could react. He thought it was all over. It had never dawned on him that this meeting was about something else altogether. Seeing Christopher Hawk, listening to the panic in his voice, Florian’s face grew puzzled, trying to understand the urgency in the man’s pleas. Suspicion washed over his features. Then fear.

He stared at Marco, who knelt in his own blood. He stared at the whitewater eddying below him, placidly flowing toward Mondamin and the town of Barron. He gazed across the highway at the giant lake, its water pushed well beyond its banks, swelled by the rapid snow melt and the raging rainfall of the past two weeks. The lake lay there as it did in every season, freezing, thawing, pushing, glistening.

Waiting.

Finally, Florian’s eyes dissolved in terrible understanding. He saw the cargo van parked on the dam. He saw Marco, staring back at him with no fear, and for the first and last time in his miserable life, he knew that punishment was at hand.

Marco uncurled his right fist to show him the trigger. It was such an inconsequential thing, a bit of plastic and wire, barely bigger than a postage stamp, with a white button to complete the circuit. Florian frantically raised the gun to fire again, and Marco squeezed his fingers closed. It was a race now, between the shot into Marco’s brain and the pressure of his hand on that plastic trigger, sending the signal, igniting the bomb. It took only a millisecond for the bullet to roar from the barrel of the gun and end Marco’s life, but a millisecond was excruciatingly slow compared with the speed of light.

Before he could even fall, before he could feel any pain or hear any sound, he and Florian Steele were both atomized.

The detonation lifted Chris off his feet and catapulted him onto the wet ground, as if he’d been slapped down by the hand of God. Lying on his back, he was deaf, dumb, and blind. He heard silence; he saw blackness; and his brain was cleared of everything except a single thought. I’m dead.

He wasn’t.

Debris rained out of the sky, awakening him. The air was burnt, and a wave of heat passed over his skin. He found himself pelted by a spray of concrete shards, sharp as knives, peppering his body with bruises and cuts. A choking mist, sucked into his lungs, made him gag and retch. He squinted as dust assaulted his eyes. The trees above him swirled like a kaleidoscope, broken into colorful fragments. He squeezed his head to make it stop.

Chris pushed himself up on his elbows. He felt alone and adrift, bobbing in an endless sea. The world was oddly silent, except for a rumbling thunder that sounded miles away, like a storm blowing in from the horizon. He shouted a warning. He screamed two names over and over.

‘Hannah! Olivia!’

He didn’t hear his voice. He didn’t know if he was calling for them out loud or in his head. It didn’t matter. They were miles away and couldn’t hear him.

His eyes spun in and out of focus, as if he were drunk. When they finally came to rest, letting him see clearly, the land looked invisible beyond the reach of his arms. There was no river, no dam, no road, no earth, no trees. The universe in front of him was a gray wall of dust and smoke, billowing, expanding, rising into the heavens, towering like a genie released from its bottle. He stood as the cloud enveloped him and coughed as he tried to breathe. His legs bent like rubber, and as he stumbled, he clung to the flaky trunk of a birch tree, cherishing the feel of something real and solid under his hands.

On the ground, his feet became ice. Then his ankles. He looked down and realized he wasn’t standing on the river bank anymore, because there was no river bank. There was only the river. He squinted into the cloud, and as the dust separated, drifting into the air, he could see a stain spreading over and consuming the land.

Water.

Water churned white.

Water leapfrogging itself, erupting through a jagged hundred-foot gap where the dam had pancaked into rubble. The thunder in his head was the near-bottomless reservoir, freed from its prison, cascading into the valley with astonishing speed, pouring out its guts like an open wound and drowning everything in its path.

Chris had only seconds to escape. He was already immersed to his knees. He splashed up the shallow slope toward his Lexus, parked on the shoulder of the highway. The river chased him, rising inch by inch at his heels. As he climbed into the car, fingers of water slithered onto the road like snakes. He fired the engine and roared into a U-turn, trying to stay ahead of the flood as it surged downstream.

He fumbled with his phone, driving one-handed, weaving on the road as his scrambled brain tried to right itself.

First he dialed 911.

Then he dialed Hannah. ‘ You have to get out of St. Croix right now. ’

51

The emergency sirens wailed.

Olivia ran from house to house, pounding on doors in St. Croix, alerting their neighbors to evacuate. In the criss-cross blocks of the town, she could see Johan, her mother, and Glenn Magnus on the same mission of mercy. No one asked questions. Living in a river valley, everyone knew the risks; sooner or later, someone would tell them that the water was coming.