Beneath the Lake Page 28

  He can’t breathe. All the air has been stolen from him in the roll. His diaphragm hurts more than any other part of his body. He raises his mouth from the water and crawls, mouth opening and closing in silent, worthless pleas for oxygen. His brain is stuck and his body animates itself, crabbing forward, limbs twitching with their own expectations of survival, leading him one way and then another like a dog whose tail has been chopped off. His hands slip in the wet sand and he falls forward, collapsing onto his chest. The jolt feels like a crowbar behind his heart and something as heavy and hard as a manhole cover pops free.

  Ray sucks air, groaning monstrously and flopping onto his back, breathing, breathing, breathing as his vision darkens and then gradually comes back into focus. He feels the lake’s reluctance, squeezing, pulling at his lungs. But not now, not yet. He is trembling all over but still breathing, and that is enough.

  He pushes himself to his knees, swaying, and looks across the beach. His head pounds magnificently. His vision blurs and sharpens as if his eyes have not stopped shaking. Another hundred feet or more across the sand, the truck is upside down, the tail raised, white smoke funneling from the front end.

  There is no sign of Colette or the driver. What was he going to do? Dig a hole with his shovel and bury us? Where was he going? We could be miles away from camp, Ray realizes. No idea how long I was unconscious, how long he was driving. Could be on the other side of the lake.

  The truck. Start there. The battered green hunk looks like a toy some kid got bored with and tossed aside in his sandbox. Ray gets his feet under him and the chorus of pain throughout his body reminds him he is lucky to be alive. The lake saved him for another day. He limps off toward the wreckage.

  Someone has to confirm what he already knows.

  Survivor

  No matter how he imagines the scenario, Ray can’t reconcile how he wound up in the water while the rest of the mess found its way most of a city block further down the beach. The steaming, twisted, roof-flattened truck indicates several barrel rolls prior to slamming down in its final destructive path. The laws of physics – the same ones that keep children and their parents glued to the walls of a spinning amusement park ride – may have helped the truck hold her fast to its tumbling steel bed for the long five or six seconds that followed Ray’s splashdown.

  It’s possible, he has to admit. Just as it is possible she’s not dead yet, the impact shocked her awake, and adrenaline-wired nerves allowed her to crawl away, delirious with notions of escape.

  But he hopes not. He hopes it’s already too late. He hopes she died before he took the shovel in hand and with it made his gamble.

  Of course it does not matter now.

  Colette Mercer, mother of Sierra, slayer of Simon, is dead. That is the word he puts to it in his mind now, standing over her broken form. Not at rest, or at peace (though, truth be told, she does look more peaceful than he could have imagined, the way her arm lies over her belly, her chin tilted up, her eyes closed to the sun, her expression neither mangled nor frozen in a final portrait of distress).

  Leonard is dead. Mom is dead. And now Colette is dead with them.

  Gone. Forever.

  Warren and Megan and Sierra probably aren’t doing so hot either.

  But Ray is here. Ray is a survivor! And that seems almost funny now, as if the lake is saving him for something special. Tailoring his vacation to suit his place in the fam —

  Pay attention! some voice thunders down, or wells up from inside him. Sounds like Warren, or Gaspar, or some evil hybrid of the two veterans. Ray stops, realizes he has been walking in circles, staggering a groove into the sand, losing his grip on the day, his place in it. He’s not crying, no no. Only breathing raggedly, rubbing the sand from the stinging patches of road burn (beach burn?) along his arms and knees. See, Colt? You were right. I’m the hard one. I shed no tears for any of you. I can’t. I don’t have it in me anymore. I am here because I am here.

  It’s what one does.

  But he has to do something else now. Can’t leave her like this. The thought of picking her up and carrying her back to camp is ludicrous. Ray is not sure he has the strength to walk another hundred yards, let alone carry her. Where is camp? The sun is higher, but not at its zenith. It’s still morning. He believes he is still on the north side of the lake, the same side they are camped on, but he can’t be sure.

  He turns, mouth opening, on the verge of asking Colt what she thinks they should do. And then he sees his sister again.

  Colette. Her face sallow, a little blood on her lower lip. Her hair knotted. Her clothes are dirty, and soaked through with blood. The sand alongside her torso is dark with it, sucking her dry, it seems. The stab wounds are thin but deep.

  Why her first? Why not me? Was he saving me? Maybe it was because she ran away. He lost control, needed to subdue her and in the process wound up sticking the blade in too deep. Like Simon. He tried to subdue her, and failed. Colt made him pay for his violence. Ray knew Simon was dead, poisoned in his sleep, shot in an alley in the city, thrown in front of a subway train, but dead somewhere. And for what? So that she could flee the past, her awful life, and spend a relaxing weekend with her family, catching up on old times? Was this her destiny, the way the lake wanted it? Last night around the campfire, his family members sounded insane. Today…

  Behind him, the cry of a rusted hinge.

  Ray turns and studies the overturned ranger truck. The passenger door is open. Was it before? He can’t remember. Was it… no. The driver is probably not alive, let alone in any kind of condition to crawl from the truck. Eighty years old, at least, small and brittle as a baby bird. No way.

  But.

  Did Ray actually hit him with the shovel? Was aiming for the back of his skull, the neck as a second option. The window went with a beautiful explosion, but maybe only startled him, he saw it coming, ducked, and then swerved, lost control. The shovel felt thrown, not planted, passing through the cab like a sword in one of those magic tricks, missing the lady in the box altogether.

  It is the ranger station all over again. He has to go look, because he has to know. But this wasn’t a dummy, some prank or warning about the bad ranger bogeyman. This was the bad ranger, a sick man, a hunter. If not the tall man I remember from childhood, his brother, his cousin, some other sick fuck from the same bloodline.

  Those thumbs. Genetic connection. Or mutation.

  De-evolution.

  Ray hobbles away from his sister, relieved to have something to distract him from the reality of her death and the decision of what to do with her. He shuffles along, the numbness from the man’s poison dust gone now, replaced by pain, whole-body pain. He is too broken to experience much fear. The little old man will be dead. Or injured badly enough to no longer pose a threat. If the latter, Ray intends to kill him. Finish him without mercy or deliberation. He is too tired for the prolonged theatrics vengeance would demand.

  He walks a little faster, moving wide of the open passenger door. He takes a final survey of the beach, but there is no one out here and no place to hide. The bastard is either inside the cab of the truck, under the truck bed, or vanished like the steam that is no longer hissing from the ruptured radiator. In the morning heat there is the smell of gasoline fumes and something burned, like melted rubber or charred upholstery, but Ray sees no sign of fire. He forces himself to stay alert. Takes half a dozen deep breaths and bends to one knee to peer into the cab.

  The driver is out of his seat, torso draped over the dash, fastened to the steering wheel. Legs bunched above his upper body, suspended like an astronaut. His face is turned away, and Ray wonders if, when he gets to the other side, he will be able to see the tip of the shovel blade protruding from the man’s mouth. It’s buried that deep, the wooden handle extending from the back of the man’s head, through the smashed back of the cab where the window used to be, like a roasting skewer.

  Ray walks around the front end. A weathered red baseball cap sits in the sand. The drive
r’s door is ajar. Ray attempts to open it, but portions of the cab’s frame are bent around it, the top edge lodged in beach. The window was either rolled down or blew out in the crash, and in any case, kneeling again, Ray can see the ranger’s face just fine from here.

  The nose and upper teeth have popped free, the rest of the mouth and jaw a smear of bone and yellow tissue and blood. Much of the side and back of the skull are split open, a hand-sized patch of glistening brain visible between the purple, mouth-shaped wound. The lower eye is shut, the brow dented inward, while the other eye is aimed out the window as if checking the side mirror for traffic.

  The eye is bulging, the lid leaking fluid that is closer to oil than blood. The viscous substance is either deep, deep red or black, and layers of it have spilled and begun to dry to form small waves on what is left of the man’s forehead, over the bald pate. Ray is not a doctor or a forensic specialist, but he is pretty sure blood doesn’t leak or dry this way. Or turn black as it leaves the body.

  Ray doubts that his first and only strike with the shovel could have wrought such damage. He must have punctured the skull enough to lodge the shovel into the head, and then the careening truck and the indifferent beach did the rest. The way the old man has been thrown forward into the dash, combined with the velocity of the speed into a suddenly halted object.

  It is with only a small measure of nausea that Ray realizes he needs the shovel. True, he could dig the hole with his hands. The sand is soft enough, and in some way that would seem a more appropriate form of burial. But he doesn’t have time or physical stamina on his side, and the shovel is his best, perhaps only means of sending Colette off with dignity.

  Ray is gathering his courage to reach in and withdraw the shovel when the top layer of sludge slips from the ranger’s eye like a fallen pirate patch, onto the truck’s roof liner. The bulging but otherwise undamaged eyeball lurking behind it nerve-twitches to one side, then up, pinning him with its awful gaze.

  Ray can’t leap but takes two quick steps back, all his aches and pains flushed away in a literal blink as his adrenal glands prove they’re not empty. He can almost see the man moving, the arms flying into action, shoving its carcass off the steering wheel and then dragging itself from the wreck like a startled crab.

  But none of that happens. The body is still stuck. Not breathing.

  Ray steps closer, bending again, in hopes he was mistaken about the eye, but no. It’s still twitching, this way then that, locking on some new detail for a couple seconds before moving on to another. What does it see? What else is there to see? Sand. But it’s not interested in sand. It’s looking for Ray, the man who did this to him.

  ‘Jesus! Fuck no! Stop!’ he shouts at the grotesque dead man. Except he’s not really talking to the man now. Only to the eye, whatever unholy life gleams within its elderly nerves. ‘Stop! Stop!’ he screams.

  Ray can’t bear looking at it. And he doesn’t dare turn his back on it. Part of the mystery is here, in the glaring eyeball. The blackness. It’s not blood, not real blood. It’s from the lake. Something vile and unnatural is in this man, this ranger, this eighty-five year old lunatic who blew black powder into their faces and – how about this! – found the strength to load them into his truck.

  This is ugly business, Gaspar, my dear old guidance counselor. Did you and the old man ever see one of these back in the day? When you were blitzed on Coors and that cheap seventies weed, dancing on the sand bar after the kids went to sleep? You two ever see this shit in ’Nam, big guy? Ever see this black goo leaking out of the Cong’s eyes, before or after you two hardasses celebrated another ambush with that pure China white? Cause this is something from another level, a nasty –

  ‘Die! Die!’ Ray shouts in idiotic repulsion. ‘Fucking die!’

  The eye blinks, lid and all. Blinks once quickly, and then again very slowly, as if trying to communicate. Impart a final message. Morse code for help or some whacko-hypno shit trying to lull him into mounting a rescue before it slashes him with a knife or one of those demon claws.

  Blink-blink—————blink——blink-blink———BLINK!

  And that is all Ray can handle this morning. He has reached the end of many things, not least of all his patience.

  Ray backs along the side of the truck, ducks under the overturned bed and reaches in to grab the shovel handle. He has to lie down on his side in order to brace himself and get a good grip, at which point he channels his anger and yanks hard. The shovel comes away easily, and maybe that is a relief to the Bad Ranger but it is not to Ray.

  Hop-stepping back to the window, Ray rears back, teeth bared, and this time the truck isn’t moving. The worst has already happened. They crashed, and Colt is dead, and so the target becomes unmissable.

  Especially given that Ray has more than one chance to get it right.

  Quite a bit more, as it turns out.

  A while later, he would not be able to say how much, Ray stands navel-deep in the lake. He is sun-scorched and steaming, the lake shockingly, beautifully cold around his aching lower back, tightening his crotch, soothing his shivering rage.

  He winds up three times, fist tight around the old man’s wadded chambray work shirt, and on the fourth lets go.

  The wind opens the shirt like a sail but the severed and crumbled head continues its flight, neck tendons and the stub of spine flashing white in rotation. Just as rocks never seem to do when hurled over a large body of water, the ranger-head does not travel as far as he had hoped, and splashes down with about as much fanfare as their old red anchor used to make.

  Ray sways, toes sinking into the peanut butter-soft sand, and allows the water to rise over his nipples, his neck, up to his nostrils. He stops there, sitting with his crocodile eyes level to the surface, waiting for the lake to bring his temperature down.

  In the glove box is a small box of Diamond matches, under a pile of AAA roadmaps and a canister of electrical fuses. Ray uses the State of Nebraska 1966 trifold to make another kind of fuse, stuffing it into the fill tube. He has no idea if there is enough left in the tank to do the job, but it’s worth a try.

  He counts his steps as he retreats, one hand shielding his face, and when he reaches eighty-one the truck bed lifts, a beautiful whump flourishes over the beach and a mighty bang follows. The truck bed spins away from the cab before all the other parts and the rest of the ranger inside are consumed in a rolling ball of flame, and this is the most fun Ray has had since their third trip to Blundstone, when his father taught him how to throw ladyfingers at the plastic infantrymen they’d set into the sand cliff face, playing war.

  When the joyous pyrotechnics smoulder down to a mere boiling funnel of black smoke, Ray returns to his sister in repose, the washed shovel in hand. Steps away from her body he is greeted by yet another, but entirely new, sort of awful.

  Colt is covered in sand. Not buried. She is supine on the beach, as he left her, only now there is no portion of her exposed to the sun. Her clothes are covered, her entire form veiled in a skin of fine beige sand, a color that nearly matches her hair, before the sand got that too.

  Ray screams for the tenth or twelfth time today and falls down at her side, frantically dusting her off. The sand isn’t moving except when he brushes at it, yet he can’t shake the feeling it has a mind of its own. The fucking sand is alive. Swallowing her. It is an obscenity and one he cannot escape, for the beach is all around them, miles of it, billions of tons and layers, and how deep does it go? Where does it end? Right now it is something other than sand. It is a cancer of the earth. The cells are eating her. No matter how carefully he plucks the grains from her lashes or how hard he blows air across her lips, he cannot get rid of it. He cannot make her clean.

  It is sand and, out here at Blundstone, there is always more.

  He concentrates on cleaning her face, leaning in so close he can see it in the pores of her nose, between her brows, the dry cracks in her chapped lips. The sand is lodged deep, and it’s too late, the sand is ca
ked on his hands, under his nails, stuck in the whorls of his fingerprints, so that every effort he makes, for every grain he brushes from the groove of her ear or age line in her neck, he only adds another to take its place.

  He plows his hands under her back and thighs, rising, stealing his sister away from this ungodly sand. He hurries across the beach, losing one sneaker, tripping, nearly dumping her to the right, wobbling the two of them forward in six desperate steps that leave him breathless and on the verge of becoming a failed pallbearer. But he finds his balance and goes forth in shorter, cautious steps.