Tom hooked onto the door post between front and back and reached into the window to grab Caspar’s seat belt, following it underwater to the buckle, doing his best to avoid the other man’s thrashing upper body as he fought his restraints in a burst of fading energy.
The car shuddered again, almost throwing Tom free, but not before he’d slipped the buckle loose and grabbed Caspar’s shirt, pulling him halfway out of the window to where he could breathe.
Caspar coughed and spat and threw his head back, gasping for air, as Tom continued extracting him from the tossing car.
“Oh, my God. Thanks, man. Holy Mother of Mary.”
The two of them were finally thrown free in one final, explosive encounter with a boulder, Tom clinging to his prisoner as to a long-sought-after lover.
Now separated from the vehicle, but weighed down by his gun belt and his manacled companion, Tom slipped an arm around Caspar’s chest in a lifeguard’s grip and struck out in a clumsy stroke for a passing tree, catching one of its limbs like the baton at a relay race.
In itself, it was no solution, but the tree caught something along the edge of the bounding river, and swung them around into a small island of more vegetation, bobbing within the relative calm of a temporary eddy.
Tom clawed them farther into the tangle, away from the water’s grasping embrace, dragging Caspar Luard as if he were a duffle bag filled with rocks. He cursed all the way, as Luard’s clothing and chains got caught in the branches, or as Tom’s feet slipped through holes on the shifting matting beneath them.
“Who’re you yelling at?” Caspar complained. “You got us into this.”
“Shut up,” Tom ordered him. “Or I’ll throw you back. Use your feet.”
Slowly, they worked their way to the top of what appeared to be a makeshift hummock of debris, perhaps crowning firm ground but surrounded by the fast-snaking tendrils of the caramel-colored river they’d just left.
At the far end of it was Al, Tom saw, stretched out like a beached whale, bleeding and torn, but alive enough to offer a feeble wave. Too tired to resent his abandonment of them earlier, Tom merely returned the gesture.
“Hey, Chief?” Caspar’s plaintive voice brought him back.
“What?” he asked almost peevishly.
Caspar jangled his chains. “Do I still have to wear these?”
CHAPTER THREE
Joe rolled to a stop in the middle of the road. Ahead, the Whetstone Brook was arcing over the Route 9 bridge, the railing no longer retaining errant vehicles, but instead acting as a launching ramp for a continuous rooster tail of liquid mud fountaining through the sodden, gray air like a broken water main spewing across the road.
“Gee, boss,” Willy commented. “Not gonna go for it?”
Joe didn’t respond, craning to see to their right through the streaming water on the glass. “The address is over there. We might be able to get closer to the trailer park using the back feeder road, instead of the main entrance.”
“We putting a lot of effort into this?” Lester asked from the back. “I mean, not to be coldhearted…”
Joe held up his hand. “I know, I know. They had no idea what was out here when they assigned us.” He put the car in reverse and began turning around. “Let’s just give it a vague look around. We may not even get out.”
They’d barely engaged the road in question when Sam announced, “There, to the left. Two guys in a tree.”
The rest of them turned to stare.
“Idiots,” Willy said.
Joe cast him a look. “You don’t know that’s them.”
“Yeah I do,” the old sniper assured him. “The one on the upper branch is Zach Neeley. Worthless piece of crap. This is totally his style. I don’t know the other one.”
“Thank God for that,” Sam muttered.
“It’s gotta be one of his new recruits,” Willy finished. “Nobody’s dumb enough to do more than one job with Zach.”
“They look comfortable enough,” Lester said hopefully.
“They look half dead,” Joe stated, reaching for the radio. He gave their location and an update to Dispatch, adding that the priority of the call should be pretty high, as the situation looked “fluid.”
“You did actually say that,” Willy challenged him after he finished.
Joe shook his head and flipped on the car’s blue lights, to indicate their location to responders. This wasn’t going to be easy, he knew. Plucking these two morons from their perch would involve many skilled people trying their best not to get killed in the process.
“Now you did it,” Willy said.
Joe looked back at the men in the distant tree. One of them was pointing and waving at them, attracted by their flashing strobes.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Sammie said, and without further comment, opened her door and stepped out into the storm, Les sliding out right behind her.
Joe immediately followed. The treed men had reacted to the sight of them by jumping into the water in obvious hopes of swimming across.
“That’s about right,” Willy groused, joining them in the downpour. “Trust a moron to think he can walk on water.”
Joe gestured to the rear of the SUV. “Get whatever you can find-ropes, vests, whatever makes sense. Maybe we can snag ’em on the way by.” He began jogging toward where the swollen brook crossed the road ahead, his eye on a long branch he’d spotted lying along the impromptu bank.
To his left, he could barely make out the two bobbing heads amid the trees, building fragments, furniture, and personal belongings, all careening toward him at high speed. With the sound of the water obliterating all chances of being heard, he began waving at them to swim toward his side of the river.
“They might as well be tennis balls,” Willy shouted beside him as Lester and Sam began rigging a coil of rope to the branch Joe had spotted earlier, hoping to extend a hanging lasso to the two men as they swept by.
It didn’t take long, but it only half worked. With the four of them as a counterbalance, they got the branch well in position, but only the man they didn’t know managed to snag the loop. Neeley took a swing at it and missed.
“I knew he wouldn’t let me down,” Willy said as he dropped the branch, took off at a sprint alongside the churning water-trailing a second coil of rope that he’d unobtrusively tied around his waist-and leaped almost on top of the flailing Zach Neeley.
Sam and Joe threw themselves onto the quickly vanishing rope as Lester kept pulling the unnamed man ashore.
“Willy, you son of a bitch,” Joe heard Sammie grunting as she struggled for a foothold against the dead weight of the two in the water. “I will kill you if you survive this.”
* * *
In Waterbury, Bonnie Swift-her ears stuffed with toilet paper against the incessant, malfunctioning fire alarm-finally managed to use a fire extinguisher to smash the handle off the locked door to the Brooks Rehab unit in the basement, only to be pushed back by a four-foot wall of dammed-up water and a stationery store’s worth of papers, files, books, plastic trash cans, and, incongruously, one poster featuring surfing off Hawaii. She stumbled against the stairs behind her, fell on her back, and felt the tidal wave wash over her, smelling of diesel fuel and oil, among other things she didn’t want to know.
Spitting and rubbing her mouth, she staggered back to her feet, swearing and looking into the murky water for the flashlight that she’d dropped. In her search for the wandering Carolyn Barber, she’d found several people feverishly trying to rectify the building’s electrical problems, but no sign of the Governor.
And by now, what little light had been supplied by the heavily masked sun was all but gone, and the normally long summer day was shortened by the weather to resemble its briefest winter kin.
She followed a faint glow to her submerged waterproof flashlight, near the bottom step, and sloshed through the open door ahead, into a maze of shadowy corridors.