Spilled Blood (41 page)

‘
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.
’

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.

The danger was speed. Most floods rose with the river in a matter of days as the winter snow melted; now, with the dam gone, they had minutes. An hour. Maybe.

She heard car tires slipping and squealing on the roads as families headed east and west to outrun the river. She waited long enough at each house to make sure they took her seriously. No, she wasn’t kidding; yes, they had to leave
now
. Some agonized, hemming and hawing over their possessions. What to take, what to leave. It was hard, knowing there might be nothing left when you came back.

If you came back.

Some put up no fuss at all. She knocked on the door at Loren Werner’s house, and the eighty-six-year-old widower simply told her to calm down and catch her breath and talk slowly. She explained, and he nodded and took his car keys from a bowl near the door and walked with her back to the street. He patted her cheek, climbed into his 1981 Cutlass Supreme and waved as he drove away. That was that. He didn’t look back at the house once.

In half an hour, Olivia raised the warning with more than twenty
houses. She found herself on the eastern edge of the town, across from the corn fields and the water tower, where the railroad tracks paralleled the southbound highway. From her vantage, she saw a speeding stream of traffic escaping from the lowlands of Barron. They’d moved fast. She wondered how many got out and how many were already trapped on their roofs. The lucky ones on the bluff over the town were probably saying prayers of thanks as they stood on the cliff and watched the disaster unfolding below them.

‘Olivia!’

It was her mother on the opposite edge of town, shouting at her, waving her arms. There was a glimmer of panic in her voice. They were running out of time.

Olivia took the river route back home, wanting to see how bad it was. She followed the railroad tracks to the bridge, where she used to meet Johan, and she got her answer. It was bad. The lazy creek had become a torrent. There was no gap anymore to jump from the bridge deck to the water; instead, the current swept an inch below the gray steel. Tree trunks pounded the bridge like missiles, shooting spray and splinters across the tracks. She heard wood crunching and cracking.

She ran along the trail behind the houses, and the ground was already soupy mud. She wasn’t looking down at the water anymore. She looked out across a stretch of brown magma at her feet, rolling into swells. She covered her mouth in horror as she saw the water carrying debris from the town of Barron, hoisted on its shoulders like a trophy. She saw light poles spinning like tiny twigs, suspension cables from the pedestrian bridge, shattered windows like shrapnel, and even a white Toyota Corolla doing somersaults in the current before the current carried it up the bank and dumped it at the fringe of the corn field.

‘Wow,’ she murmured.

Olivia looked down at her feet. The tentacles of the river wormed their way through the mud.

She sprinted away from the trail to their house. She eyed her bedroom window and thought about all the times she’d climbed up and down the drainpipe and knew she’d never do it again. She followed the lawn to the front porch. Her mother carried a box of soup cans to their truck. When her mother saw her, her face dissolved with anger and relief.

‘Olivia, where were you?’

‘I wanted to check out the river. It’s almost over the bank. We better roll.’

‘Run to the church and check on Glenn. I want to know what’s keeping him. Then get back here right now.’

‘Where’s Dad?’

‘He’s five minutes away.
Go.
’

Olivia ran across the street and up the swath of lawn to the church steps. The white steeple towered over her head, with its bird’s-eye view of St. Croix. She didn’t see Glenn Magnus. The town swarmed like a hive as residents frantically loaded their vehicles to join the escape parade. She hunted for the minister among the faces, but she didn’t see him.

She pulled open the church doors. ‘Mr. Magnus!’

There was no answer, and she called again. ‘Mr. Magnus! Hello!

She heard a groan. The oak door to the sanctuary was partially blocked, and when she yanked it open she found Glenn Magnus prone on the floor. He groaned again and pushed himself up to his hands and knees. The back of his skull was matted with blood.

‘Oh my God!’ Olivia clung to the minister’s arm, helping him to his feet. ‘What happened?’

His voice was weak, and he winced as he put a hand tenderly on the back of his head. ‘I came back to retrieve some things from the church. Somehow I hit my head.’

‘We better go,’ Olivia said. ‘Mom can help.’

Magnus slung an arm around her shoulder as she helped him out of the church. Their house was barely fifty yards away, but it
looked far as they took baby steps. She was conscious of the water rising; it wouldn’t be long before their routes out of town were blocked. When they were halfway to the house, her mother jogged to help them, and they made their way inside the house. Her mother settled Glenn into a chair and got a damp towel from the kitchen to dab at the back of his head. Johan appeared from upstairs with a box in his hands, and he quickly put it down as he saw his father in the chair by the door, his eyes closed.

‘Dad!’

The minister gave his son a weak smile. ‘I’m okay.’

‘What happened to you?’

‘I don’t know. One minute I was in the church, and the next thing I knew, Olivia was helping me up. I must have slipped and banged my head.’

Hannah interrupted them. ‘There’s no time. We have to get out of here. Olivia, Johan, get the last boxes in the truck. That’ll give Glenn a minute to rest. If Chris isn’t here by then, I’ll call and tell him we’re leaving, and he can meet us on the bluff.’ She gestured impatiently at the two of them. ‘Hurry, let’s go.’

Johan picked up the box again. Olivia grabbed another box from the kitchen table. They headed for the front porch and across the lawn to the truck. The river was over the banks. They splashed through an inch of water, and it seemed to rise before their eyes. The current was so fast and slippery they could feel it under their shoes, trying to knock them off their feet. She piled the boxes into the back of the SUV and slammed the door shut.

On impulse, she threw her arms around Johan’s neck. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘What for?’

‘For you, for Ashlynn, for everything. I was a jerk.’

‘I’m the one who’s sorry, Olivia. I should have trusted you.’

He knelt into her, and she felt him holding her again, strong and familiar. She lost herself in those blue eyes and felt a surge
of arousal as his face drew close and he kissed her. It started quietly, soft lips on soft lips, but all the months of loss and violence spilled out of them and became passion. Their tongues, their faces, their hands, their bodies, pressed together, until they were molded against each other.

She knew they had no time. She was conscious of the river on her bare ankles. They broke apart, breathless, and before they turned toward the porch, she heard a strange
bang
that bounced around them in an echo.

‘What the hell was that?’

Johan heard it, too. He looked around in confusion. ‘I don’t know.’

It happened again.
Bang
. The noise was everywhere and nowhere. She saw an odd splash inches from her feet, and ripples washed into curves in the rushing water. What was going on? She took a tentative step toward the street, and then, beside her, the windshield of the Explorer shattered.

‘
Olivia
,’ Johan cried. ‘Get down!’

Johan leaped for her, but she still didn’t understand. As his arms reached her, she heard it again –
bang
– and this time Johan screamed, and she saw a red stain bloom on his shoulder. His face contorted in pain, and he clasped his hand to his shirt. Blood oozed between his fingers.

‘Johan, no!’

Someone was shooting at them.

Olivia grabbed him around the waist and guided him toward the porch. He staggered, and red drops sprayed into the water. The bullets followed them, erupting in splashes on either side of them, chasing them back inside the house. Another window shattered as they scrambled through the door and slammed it shut behind them.

They were trapped.

The water kept rising.

*

In the steeple of the church, Lenny Watson stood among the litter of cartridge boxes and spent shell casings. From here, the highest ground, he could see the river coming for them. He didn’t know what had happened, and he didn’t care. He’d heard the explosion, and now, minute by minute, he watched the town of St. Croix sink into the water before his eyes.