Deadlocked (3 page)

I reached the last building on the block and stared down. I'd made it to Clarkson Street. Across that was the Everland River. If I could make it there, over the street, I could jump into the water and swim away. It might not be the best plan, but it was a hell of a lot better than taking the streets home.

There was a thick cable stretched out from the corner of my building to a telephone
pole
beside a billboard that stood above the bridge. The cable was used to hang signs over the street to announce various city events. Today it displayed a big black banner for an exhibit at the Arkland Art Museum. I said a quick prayer to a God I didn’t normally have time for and then stepped onto the wire.

I planned to tight rope across, but I gave up on that idea almost instantly. Instead, I got on my hands and knees and gathered my courage to do the most insane thing I'd ever attempted. I crawled out on the wire and let myself dangle upside down over the swirling throng of violence below. I wrapped my legs around the wire and pulled myself along. The steel cable burned the skin on the back of my legs through my pants. I edged my way around the banner and the steel dug into my palms. The cable creaked under my weight and the real possibility of it snapping ran through my head. The sounds of murder below grew into a cacophony that rattled my nerves. If I fell, I would be torn apart, just like poor Barry. I slid steadily forward until I thought I was close enough to jump to the billboard that hung over the river.

I had to dangle from the cable with only my hands and swing over to the billboard's ladder. I swung back and forth to gain momentum and the threaded cable sliced into my palms. I let go and sailed through the air. My body crashed into the ladder and I grasped at the rungs. My chin bounced off one of the steps and I bit into my tongue. My mouth filled with blood and my hands were shredded, but I made it. I climbed up the ladder and moved until I stood above the middle of Everland River.

People swam below and more jumped in every minute. I watched them for a long time, partly because I wanted to see if they attacked each other and partly because I was terrified to jump fifty feet into the water. It looked a hell of a lot farther down now than when I concocted this plan.

None of the people in the water attacked each other and I nearly had myself convinced that a fifty-foot fall wouldn’t hurt. I took my shoes off and tossed them in the river. It would be too hard to s. Iswim if I jumped in with my clothes on. I started to take my pants off when I realized if I threw them away I wouldn’t have any place to carry my wallet, keys, and phone. If I lost my phone I'd be cut off from my family completely.

I called Laura, but couldn’t get through. The lines were busy as thousands of other worried people tried to call their loved ones at the same time. I stared at the picture of my wife and two girls that I'd taken for Laura’s birthday. It was set as Laura’s profile on my phone, and whenever I called her it popped up on the screen. I tried to call her over and over to keep the picture from fading to black. I wondered if I would ever see them again.

I'd spent my life moving from work to bed, or at least it felt that way. I was happy to have a good job that paid enough to allow Laura to stay home with the girls, but I'd sacrificed most of my free time. It was hard to believe five years had passed since our first daughter, Kim, was born. Our second, Annie, had just turned three last month. I loved those girls with every ounce of my being, but I'd be lying if I said I knew them. Most days I left before they woke up and got home with just enough time to read them a story and tuck them in. That didn't leave us much time to get to know one another.

Laura would send me pictures constantly, and I had the weekends with them, but free time was something I wasn't good at managing. It always seemed like there were things to do, places to be, people to have dinner with, family to visit, and a million other excuses to do something that didn’t involve spending time with my kids. There were always more important things to accomplish, or so I thought at the time.

I wasn’t crying out of fear. I'd already accepted I was going to die. I'd been coming to grips with that ever since the doctor called. I cried because it took this moment to make me realize how much I loved my family. It took a worldwide apocalypse and staring down a fifty-foot leap into the frigid water of the Everland River to get my priorities straight. “I love you guys,” I said to my phone. I slipped it back into my pocket and decided to leave my pants on for the swim. I didn’t want to lose my wallet and there was at least a slim chance my phone was partially waterproof. I steadied myself with several deep breaths.

Then I jumped.

I tried to keep my feet straight as I plummeted, but instinct, or panic, took over and I waved my arms and legs around like a cartoon coyote shot out of an Acme cannon. I hit the water ass first and the pain shot up through my spine like a lightning bolt. The strangest tingling sensation rose to the crown of my head as I sank into the water. It was like the pins and needles you feel when your arm falls asleep, but these pins stabbed into me like knives. The fall knocked the sense out of me and I sank into the black depths of the river.

The Everland devoured me and I was complicit. The silence of the water was welcoming compared to the screaming death that waited above. All of the concerns that plagued me before I hit the water were absolved the second it swallowed me. My arms lilted above to the cadence of the current and I smiled as I stared at them.

Another set of arms reached out for me from below. I felt someone’s fingers slide over my waist. They wrapped their arm over my stomach and their fingertips tickled my side as they pulled me cn">loser. The Angels of Everland River welcomed me in.

I opened my eyes to witness the gates of Heaven hidden in the blackness at the bottom of the river. I was ready to be ushered inside.

Gnashing teeth lunged at my face and any sense of comfort I'd experienced evacuated my muddled head. Something, someone, tried to eat me down there!

I struggled and kicked at my submerged attacker, but it held onto my belt and pulled me closer. I swallowed water as I gasped and my terror doubled when I felt myself drowning. Not only was I going to be eaten alive, I was going to drown while it happened.

The jaws snapped at me again and I used my right hand to grab the person’s neck and push them back. I struggled to take off my pants with my left hand, which was a hell of a lot harder than I would've thought. I unbuckled the belt and managed to kick free. My attacker helped as he pulled at the waistband, which allowed me to get free quicker than I could have alone. Once my legs were out, I pushed against the man standing on the bottom of the river and left him behind with my pants, and phone, as a souvenir. He reached out for me again, but I managed to escape. I saw his eerie, bloated face grimacing up at me.

I struggled to the surface, swimming harder than I knew I could. I gasped for air when my head crested the waves. I'd swallowed a big gulp of water down below and was having trouble breathing. I sputtered and choked, but I was alive. Somehow I'd escaped a horrific death.

And then the boat hit me.

What fucking luck. Some jackass motored down the river in his fishing boat, cracking the skulls of anyone in his way as he raced out of the city. I emerged from the water just in time to get smacked back under by the fiberglass bottom. The pain debilitated me and I felt his rear motor whirl above as he passed, inches from my head. My mind spun and it was hard to discern which way was up as I bobbed under the waves. I don’t think I consciously reached the surface, but rather just floated up there to stare at the blue, cloudless sky.

The screaming around me came into focus, then out again, then back as the waves lapped over me. It was like I was falling in and out of a cavern, the echoes of torture and death reverberating through my skull as I fell. I glanced to the side and saw people leap from the concrete bank into the water. Some of them shrieked, some cried, and others chewed on human flesh as they fell in. There was blood everywhere.

The water wasn’t blue anymore. It was viscous crimson. Seeing the blood helped me remember I was trying to survive and bobbing in the waves wasn’t going to keep me alive much longer. I started to swim again and was able to get a better sense of my surroundings once my head was out of the water.

That’s when I heard the pontoon boat coming. There were people at the front who screamed at everyone to move out of the way, but just like the first boat, they didn't stop for anything. It headed my way and punted the other bobbing heads back under water as it came.

I swam to the right and it missed me. I was close enough that I grabbed the side to be carried along, but my fingers slipped off a the edge. I clawed at anything I could as the boat moved away and I managed to pull a life preserver off the side. I looped my arm through it just as the slack of the rope connecting it to the boat tightened. I was pulled along and my head dragged beneath the waves as my grip on the life preserver slipped.

I struggled against the water to pull myself up, but the boat moved too fast. The water pushed against my face and I couldn’t manage to breath in the brief seconds between my continued submersions. I would have to let go to keep from drowning, but I wanted to be ferried along as far as possible.

To my relief, the boat slowed down. As the waves relented and we slowed to a near stop, I was able to pull myself up onto the life preserver and gasp for breath. I had to blink away the blood and water that stung my eyes before I could see again. The first thing I saw was a police officer on the back of the pontoon with a pistol pointed at me.

“Don’t shoot me!” I said.

The cop was startled and raised his gun. “This one’s talking,” he said to someone else on the boat.

“I don’t give a fuck,” said a gruff voice with a southern twang. “Shoot him.”

The black cop lowered his gun at me again.

“What the hell? Don’t shoot me,” I said.

“Are you dead?” he asked.

“What?” The question made no sense to me. “No. I’m alive.”

Another cop, this one carrying a shotgun, appeared beside his fellow officer. He stared down at me, then turned to his friend and said, “He’s dead.”

“I’m not dead!”

“Look at his head. If he ain’t dead, he will be soon,” said the second, white cop. Shots rang out from the front of the boat and the cop with the shotgun walked away to see what had happened. The black cop got down on his knees to talk to me.

“I ain’t gonna pull you up, but if you can hang on we’re heading out to Hailey's End.
That island out there in the bay.
If you can hold on, maybe we'll get the doctors to check you out over there. Can you hold on?"

I bobbed about ten feet behind the boat and had trouble hearing what the officer said above the yelling that came from the streets around us, but I nodded as if I understood everything.

The pontoon started to move again. It chugged slowly at first and I floated through the carnage that littered the Everland River. A couple bodies floated past in the red water and I heard people scream from the concrete shores. They begged us to pick them up. Some people jumped in the water and tried to swim our way, but the pontoon picked up speed to leave them behind.

We passed the boat that had struck me in the head moments before. It was stuck against the concrete basin and people from above leapt into itont. It took on water and the front plunged under the waves. The man that sat at the motor yelled at the people that tried to hijack him, but it was useless. The boat filled with water and sank.

The pontoon moved faster and the waves rose back up, over my head. I had to gasp for a final breath and then hold on for dear life as it raced away from the city. Every second I stayed with them was a second closer to home and I needed to make sure my family was safe.

CHAPTER FOUR – SITTING ON THE DOCK OF THE BAY

I held on for as long as I could, but I would've drowned if I stayed with them much further. When I emerged from their wake I found myself in the middle of Hailey Bay, a hundred yards away from the city’s shore. My house was in a neighborhood on the other side of the bay from the city, which meant I had to swim the rest of the way.

My muscles burned and the wound on my head pulsed. I could feel the warm blood run down my face if I sat above the water for more than a couple seconds. If not for the cleansing waves I would've been more concerned about my wound, but every time I went under it washed away the evidence of my injury and allowed me to forget it was there.

I thought about my family. More specifically, I thought about my oldest daughter, Kim. I thought about the day she was born and the first time she said, “Daddy.” I thought about her smile and the way she hugged me at bedtime. I thought about how she would climb into my bed in the morning and slip between Laura and me. I thought about the way she would kiss my cheek and tell me good morning. I thought about the moments that come and go with little recognized significance at the time but mean everything when you’re afraid you’ll never have them again.

Memories of Kim helped me find the strength to swim.

I kept my eyes on the shore, which didn’t seem to get closer no matter how hard I swam. My legs seized up and the pain from the wound on my head made me dizzy. I tried to keep kicking, but my muscles grew stiff in the chilling water and I began to sink.