CHAPTER

37

 

In the water, Journey had no concept of time. He’d heard the gunshot just as he slipped from the wooden steps. He felt the rush of air, and he thought the bullet tugged at his shirtsleeve and touched the flesh of his upper arm. His last thought before he fell into the water was that if he hadn’t been off balance, if he’d been standing right where he was a few seconds before, the shot would have hit him squarely in the chest.

As it was, he slipped backwards and rolled onto his side, his ribs coming down hard on the piles of driftwood at the water’s edge. When he moved from his side to his back, it felt as if someone had kicked him from a raft made of logs into the river itself.

With the water level as high as it was, the Ohio was moving swiftly. Journey’s head went under. Water flooded his nose. He waved his arms, trying to turn his body yet again. He slapped the surface of the river. He kicked out with a leg; then his foot caught on something—the tightly packed logs where he’d just been. His foot wedged between two pieces of wood.

He tried to twist his body so that he could get on top of the water. He couldn’t free his foot from the logs, but then the logs themselves were turning, and with a mighty jerk—the rest of his body flopped like a rag doll, now pulled by one foot—the wood broke free of the shallows by the shore and drifted into the river proper.

Journey’s head broke the surface of the water, and he let out a growl, water running out of his nose and mouth. The two logs had some kind of vine wrapped around one end of them, binding them together, and his foot was tangled in the vine. He tried to shake his leg, and the vine loosened only about half an inch.

Now the logs were headed straight out toward the river, where the current was stronger. His head went under again, and he twisted his body in violent motions. He raised his head, slamming his temple into the side of another floating log, and for a couple of seconds, everything was black. He blinked, coughed, raised his head again.

He could see an outcropping of rock where the river bent slightly. Far above the rock was the curving rail of the Falls of the Ohio Interpretive Center’s observation deck. Journey glimpsed it for a couple of seconds before his head went under again.

His foot, dead weight with the log, dragged him relentlessly, but he wasn’t into the swiftest current yet. He had a few seconds before he would be carried into the center of the Ohio.

He hung suspended for a long moment. His neck was sore from lifting his head against the current. The next time he came up, he gulped air, and as soon as he went back down, put every ounce of strength he had into changing his body’s position. His hands worked like a swimmer, cupping the water and displacing it. His body contorted, and for a crazy moment, he was almost upside-down, his foot directly above his head.

He felt his foot slam into the rocks, and for several seconds, nothing happened. Then he felt the vine around his foot loosen and finally break. The logs bounced off the rocks and floated toward the center of the river.

Journey whipped his body around, even as his foot screamed in agony, and he clawed at the rocks. Several fingernails split and began to bleed. A few rocks sloughed away.

This is it, he thought. I don’t have the strength to hold it.…

But he did, and then he wasn’t moving anymore. From the waist down, he was still in the river, but his grip on the rocks held. He heard a child’s voice from above: “Hey! Hey, Mom, there’s a man down there!”

He heard footsteps thumping on the wooden deck, and a woman’s voice: “Oh, Dylan, don’t be silly. There can’t be a … Oh my God!”

The woman was young and had brown hair tied back in a ponytail. The little boy, who looked about six, looked just like the woman.

“I told you,” the boy said, then waved down at Journey. “What are you doing down there?”

Journey laid his head against the rocks and tried to smile in the boy’s direction. “Just waiting for you,” he said.