Hot Water (25 page)

“Hmm.” Ty took out his cell phone, punched a few buttons. “No answer from your mom. Going straight to voice mail. Maybe the storm knocked service out. Let me try the local police.”

“What can they do? We don’t know his name or what he looks like. Please. We need to go get Mom. Now.” David hated the way his voice cracked, but he couldn’t help it. It was taking everything he had not to cry in front of Ty. Nikki produced a mournful plea in David’s defense. One of the reasons he liked her so much—she always took his side.

“We know what your mom looks like and where she’s at. Let me just find out who’s in charge down there.” He typed some on the laptop mounted on the console between the two front seats. “Looks like it’s a county sheriff’s substation.” He raised his cell phone again. “Busy. The storm.”

“Can’t you use the computer to alert them?”

“I am,” Ty said, resuming his typing. “But if that storm hits sooner than expected they’re going to have their hands full—probably do already if they’re evacuating.”

“So, we need to go ourselves,” David urged. “I googled it. It’s only a seven-hour drive.”

Ty frowned—something he almost never did. But then he turned the key in the ignition and put the car in gear. “I’ll bet I can make it in six.”

I jumped out of the SUV and joined Elise. “What happened?”

She pointed to the river. “Nate, he went to get the truck and the tree blew over, he swerved and went into the water.”

I had to look twice to make out the gray pickup truck obscured behind the swaths of blue nylon tarp caught on tree branches. It was several yards into the water. I couldn’t see the front end of the truck at all, but the way the back end was angled, it looked like it was sinking fast.

“He didn’t come back out,” she continued. “Please, you have to help him.”

“I will. Send the others,” I told her. I sprinted across the road to the riverbank. The wind spun the torn tarp like a banshee, trying to tangle me up in yards of fabric.

Morris joined me, helping to fight through the nylon that blocked our vision. The truck had plowed past the foliage on the bank and was a good ten feet out into the water. The current was dragging it down and rolling it over onto the driver’s side. The cab was already almost totally submerged—only the passenger side of the roof could be seen. “Can you see him? Did he make it out?”

“No.” I’d already made up my mind as to what I needed to do; the problem was convincing my body that it was a good idea. After I nearly drowned after a car accident ten years ago, water and I haven’t exactly been on speaking terms.

I plunged into the mud on the bank, my foot sinking several inches into the slime. I pulled free, leaving one shoe behind, and placed my next step more carefully onto a gnarled tree root. From there I leapt past the mud into the water.

The current immediately grabbed me and tried to haul me down. It was deep enough to swim, so instead of fighting to get my feet under me, I kicked toward the truck.

A splash came from behind me. I glanced over my shoulder, hoping it wasn’t a relative of the rabid alligator I’d encountered earlier. Morris had shucked his messenger bag and waded in. He was also floundering in the uneven current. Wind whipped the rain into a frenzy on the water’s surface, obscuring any object farther away than my fingertips into lumpy shades of gray and brown.

The current rammed me into the back of the pickup. It was canted at a dramatic angle. There would be no way to open the driver’s side door, especially once it came to rest on the mud below.

Sliding one hand along the rim of the truck bed to keep my bearing, I half-swum and was half propelled by the churning water around to the passenger side. The door was still mostly above water, although tilted. I tried to pull it open, but there was nothing to brace against as the truck pitched beneath me.

Morris joined me, and together we were able to leverage the door open. Water poured into the cab.

It was hard to see inside, but I made out Nate’s form crumpled against the steering wheel. He didn’t have his seatbelt on and his body was already consumed by the water. Suddenly the truck lurched, the new water pouring in from the passenger side hastening its downward plunge. Nate’s head was instantly buried in black water.

Nothing to do but go in.

Bile etched the back of my throat as my stomach revolted at the idea. Memories of that night ten years ago blackened my vision. I forced them aside and hauled in my breath.

Morris understood what needed to happen, taking my feet and securing me from the current as I dove headfirst into the water. At first all I could reach was Nate’s hair. I tangled my fingers in it and hauled his head up. Then I pushed my shoulder under his, trying to leverage him up. His face broke through the surface, so at least one of us could breathe.

The water was a murky brown, dark, churning as it tried to suck me down as well. I wanted to vomit and take a breath and push my way back up to the light. Panic overtook me. Flailing for the surface, I kicked free of Morris’s grip.

The current tore at me, gleeful, as if it knew that it’d almost killed me all those years ago and had decided now was a good time to try again. There was nothing I could do except kick and scramble, hitting the dash and steering wheel and seat back.

My chest was about to burst with the need for air. My vision had gone red—not that I could see much anyway—and my head felt light, as if it didn’t matter anymore whether I lived or died.

David’s face floated into my vision. I pushed down the urge to breathe.

Then I wasn’t alone. Morris was there, wedged in beside me, pulling and pushing and straining, tugging at Nate. I fought him, grabbing, clutching as he hauled Nate’s body past me.

I spun blind, my hands sliding along what I thought was the dash until I hit one of the truck pedals. Then came a hard yank on my ankles and I popped free from the truck cab, flying into Morris’s arms.

Choking and sputtering, I grabbed all the air I could. Morris braced me against the hood of the truck with his hip as he wrapped an arm under Nate’s arms. I spat out a stomachful of water and heard his voice over the pounding rain.

“Swim, AJ!” Morris grabbed my wrist and tugged me away from the truck.

The truck bed swung toward us as its nose continued its downward spiral to the bottom of the river. I kicked hard as Morris paddled backward, Nate in his arms.

The wave the truck left in its wake pushed us under for a moment. When we resurfaced, Nate was bobbing between us, linked in our arms, still not moving, but his chest was rising and falling and blood was seeping from a cut on his head, so at least he was alive.

“Kick, kick hard!” Morris shouted.

“Which way?” I shouted, completely disoriented as we treaded water. The waves had grown high enough that I couldn’t see either shore. Then I saw what had gotten him so excited.

A huge whirling mass of wind and water had risen from the center of the river. A waterspout. It sucked up more water, then skipped across the surface like a massive blender looking for something to pulverize.

Headed directly toward us.

TWENTY-SIX

Morris tugged us in a direction perpendicular to the oncoming spout. He was shouting, but I couldn’t hear anything except the roar of the wind and water. It took everything I had to hang onto Nate and keep kicking.

The roar grew deafening and the waves churned so hard that I lost my grasp on Nate. Water sucked me under and I spun around below the surface, trapped.

The forces tearing at my body kicked the air right out of me. My vision turned from gray to black to red and I had no idea where the surface was. All I could do was kick blindly and pray.

I broke through the surface, gasping and crying, my throat raw. Thrashing to keep my head above water, I looked around. The waves were lower now that the spout had dissipated. A glimmer of sun broke through the clouds.

Typical summer storm? I’d stick to my mountains, thank you very much.

Faintly, I heard Morris calling my name. I spotted him—still supporting Nate—and swam toward them. We weren’t far from the shore; I could see the bright blue tarp waving gaily in the wind, beckoning us to safety.

I joined them, took Nate’s other arm, and we kicked toward shore. By the time we reached it there were a dozen people reaching out to help us haul Nate and our own weary, waterlogged bodies over the rocks and tree roots and back onto solid ground. They used a length of tarp as a makeshift stretcher to carry Nate up to Vincent’s SUV.

“We can get him to a hospital faster than it will take an ambulance to reach us,” Morris said as he offered a hand to help me to my feet. Paul was there with Morris’s bag. Morris hugged it to his body like it was a security blanket, reminding me once more of his paradoxical nature: one moment an oblivious genius, the next a warm and sensitive man, and then he’d revert to childlike shyness. It was as if he knew how strange he was and that he didn’t fit in, so he was constantly trying on new personas to see what might work best.

“I’m sorry I panicked,” I told Morris, my throat still raw from choking on the water. “You saved my life. Thank you.”

He pushed his hair out of his eyes and gave me a self-effacing smile. “Are you kidding? I would have never been brave enough to swim out there to rescue Nate if you hadn’t jumped in first.”

The men folded down the rear seats of the Escalade and slid Nate inside. “My fault,” Morris muttered as he watched, his smile vanishing. “I should have sent them home.”

“How could you have known?” I asked. Surely Morris couldn’t blame himself for the local weather patterns.

He glanced at me, his face blanching, and said nothing.

We climbed into the rear of Vincent’s SUV along with Elise, Nate’s wife. Vincent didn’t look very happy about playing ambulance or having his leather seats soaked in mud and water and blood. But with so many people around, there wasn’t a lot he could say other than to direct Paul to drive.

“What’s wrong with him?” Elise asked, holding his hand and rubbing it. “Why won’t he wake up?”

“He must have hit his head pretty hard,” I told her, mopping the blood gushing from Nate’s temple with the hem of my shirt. Morris reached into his bag and took out a large handkerchief, which he handed me.

As I applied pressure, Nate’s eyes wobbled open. “What happened?”

“Oh honey,” Elise cried, hugging him hard.

The roads were clogged with people fleeing the hurricane. Mostly out-of-state plates. Tourists, Morris explained.

Paul turned on the car radio. The announcer was reading a list of closings and updates, detailing evacuation routes and explaining that they still had no mandatory evacuations because they weren’t sure where the storm would hit—its course was too erratic to predict. He did say it was expected to make landfall somewhere along the South Carolina coast by midnight.

We reached the hospital in Beaufort and the rain stopped, replaced by blinding sunshine. The sky quickly cleared except for a faint band of gray in the distance. The hospital was in chaos with hurricane preparation efforts, so everything took longer than expected. By the time we helped get Elise settled, made sure she and Nate were in good hands, and left, the sky had filled with ribbons of red and gold as the sun set.

Paul hadn’t said a word the entire time. I couldn’t help but wonder what was going on behind those blue eyes of his. Probably he was worried about our heathenness rubbing off on him. Yet, he’d been the one to volunteer Vincent’s SUV in the first place.

“We’ll drop you off,” Vincent said when we arrived back at Colleton Landing.

While we were gone the debris had been cleared and the fallen tree moved out of the road. The car it had damaged still sat there, but otherwise it was hard to tell anything had happened here just a few hours ago.

“You’re not staying in your RV during the hurricane, are you? You need to evacuate your people before it hits. How long do we have?” I asked Morris, still hoping to borrow one of Grandel’s cars and head west before the roads got blocked. After seeing the reaction of the folks in Beaufort, I’d decided to take Hermes seriously.

Morris went to consult his Kermit. He rummaged in his bag. “That’s funny. It’s gone.” He glanced out the window toward where we’d gone into the water. “I must have dropped it.”

Paul turned the radio up. “Sounds like they’re still saying sometime around midnight.”

“That gives me a few hours,” Vincent said. “I’ll be back. Tell Grandel to be ready to keep his end of the bargain.”

Somehow he made it sound like a threat.

But what did I care? I was going to be on my way home just as soon as I grabbed my bag.