The killer-turned-kidnapper was silhouetted perfectly, but with an unfamiliar shotgun Mercer couldn’t chance taking direct aim, for fear of hitting Roni. Instead he lowered his right arm and shoulder and raised the shotgun’s barrel, so when he pulled the trigger the gun was mostly pointed at the ceiling over the shooter’s head. A single slug fired at the extreme angle would have missed the gunman’s head by the narrowest of margins. However, the gun had a shortened barrel and improved choke, so the cluster of shot expanded just enough.
For a terrible moment the man’s head contorted like a rubber Halloween mask — and then it came apart and splattered the area where ceiling met wall in an obscene paste of blood and tissue and hair.
The Zodiac’s outboard screamed at full throttle even as the nearly decapitated corpse tumbled through the window and into the turgid water. Mercer sloshed to the window, pumping the slide once again and ramming the shotgun to his shoulder, ready to fire. The inflatable, with its sagging nose, was twenty yards away already, drifting farther by the second in the angry current of muddy water and trash. He could see Roni’s gaily colored blouse; she was huddled on the Zodiac’s floorboards at the feet of the gunman in the black jacket.
Mercer didn’t have a shot from this distance — at least, not with a shotgun. In a fit of rage he pointed the barrel skyward and yanked the trigger, and the gunman looked back at the blast. Mercer could have sworn the man smiled crookedly at him, but through all that rain it was hard to tell.
The view changed as the house spun, and the kitchen window began to face downstream. What Mercer saw chilled him more than the frigid water. Directly ahead lay the iron truss bridge he’d crossed when first leaving town on his search for Roni’s house. Any debris that piled up against it was quickly pulled under by the force of the river and emerged on the far side, where the tree limbs and whole trunks continued on toward the Mississippi. Judging by the height of the river and the amount the house had sunk, it would strike the bridge’s road deck in line with the windows, and the whole place would come apart as if filled with explosives.
Mercer dropped the shotgun and lunged for the pantry. He grabbed the pull string and yanked open the attic crawl space hatch. Dust fell from the dark opening, but there was also some light filtering down from above. He vaguely recalled seeing a gable window on the side of the house.
There was no ladder, so Mercer clambered up the pantry shelves, kicking loose the few items that hadn’t yet fallen to the floor. He levered himself into the crawl space. The roof rafters met over his head, giving him just enough room to stand in a crouch. The ceiling joists were roughhewn into two-by-sixes, but were so old they could barely take Mercer’s weight. Between them, strips of ancient insulation lay tattered and compressed, no thicker than carpet.
There was a small window on each gable end of the house. Mercer raced for the one that would be above Roni’s bedroom, praying that he hadn’t miscalculated the house’s slow rotation. He had to dance from joist to joist while bending low to keep from smacking his head into one of the thick rafters. Through the dusty window he could see nothing but the screaming river. An occasional wave even lapped at the glass.
He yelled, channeling all his energy into those last careful footsteps, knowing that if he missed a joist he would crash through the ceiling and end up being smeared against the bridge when they struck. A flash of green whizzed past the window as the house made its last rotation. Bridge girder.
It was now or never.
Mercer hurled himself at the window headfirst, punching through the pane with clenched fists as if he was a little kid playing Superman. Glass exploded all around him as he flew several feet, passing between two steel support girders. He hit the bridge’s road deck and tumbled into a ball to protect his head, while behind him Roni Butler’s cozy ranch smashed into the bridge with the detonative violence of a chain-reaction crash.
The entire 1,100-square-foot building splintered when it hit the bridge. Rafters, joists, studs, lathe, plaster, clapboard, shingles, and sheathing. It all blew apart in a maelstrom of wrecked furniture, destroyed appliances, and the accumulation of a lifetime of memories. Most of it was sucked under the bridge by the unending current, but some blew across the two-lane span, nearly rolling Mercer over the far rail as he was pummeled with the remains of the house and all its furnishings and fittings. He ended up shielded from some of the deluge when Roni’s vintage claw-foot tub tumbled against him and he was able to hold on to it as though it were a turtle’s protective shell.
It was over in a violent instant. The house was gone, and Mercer was left lying partially in an overturned bathtub on a rain-lashed bridge, with a once tranquil little stream raging less than a foot below the span. Beyond the bridge were islands of civilization sticking up from the floodwater — telephone poles like lonely sentries, buildings with water up to their eaves, and some buried even deeper so all he could see were their triangular roof peaks. Great swaths of the levee that had once protected the town from the Mississippi were missing, and the river was freed once again to flow where it wanted.
Unlike the levee, the bridge was one of the highest vantage points that wasn’t in danger of collapsing. Mercer was safe for the moment but was frozen to the core, so undoing his belt and using it to lash himself to the bridge took all his concentration, and many minutes longer than it should have. Once he was secure he replaced the ball cap from his pocket on his head to prevent a little heat loss, and soon felt his body begin to shut itself down, as he knew it would. He became drowsy, and no amount of anger or need for revenge could prevent his lids from closing and his mind from turning to blackness. Mercer went slack, and would have eventually been washed from the bridge by a surge of water had he not had the foresight to tie himself off.
He woke three hours later, when the rain had finally stopped and the Army National Guard had launched a fleet of search and rescue helicopters. It was nearing four in the afternoon. The sun wasn’t exactly shining, but the day had brightened enough for the pilot of one of the Blackhawks to see a man roped to the bridge truss. He thought it was a corpse until the man raised a hand and started waving. Ten minutes later the rescue jumper came back aboard with the soaking man secured to a harness.
A paramedic guided Mercer to a bench seat in the noisy cabin as the chopper lifted clear to continue the search. The medic tucked a Mylar space blanket around Mercer’s shoulders and said, “Apart from the fact you’re freezing and wearing Iowa State colors, are you all right?”
“Let me guess,” Mercer managed to say with quivering lips and a shuddering jaw. “You’re all U of I fans?”
“Hell no! We’re from the Illinois National Guard. We’re all Fighting Illini.”
They were a more hated rival in the Big Ten for Mercer’s Penn State Nittany Lions than even the Hawkeyes. “Out of the frying pan…”
He did manage to tell his rescuers about Veronica Butler and the one surviving armed man, knowing that making the report would lead to hours of questioning and the need to write up everything in triplicate — but he needed them to be on the lookout for the old woman and wary of the shooter at the same time.
Within an hour, the chopper had picked up a full load of survivors from various roofs and trees and returned to the Illinois side of the river, where Mercer was soon warmed, hydrated, and settled in a National Guard tent. No trace of Roni or the armed man had been found. The gunman Mercer nailed with the shotgun was fished out of the Mississippi four miles downstream when his body had snagged on a channel marker. The injuries to the body were consistent with Mercer’s story, but without corroborating witnesses he was still treated with suspicion. Mercer was not exactly a prisoner in the Guard encampment, but he hadn’t been allowed to leave either.