So Cold the River(135)

The fastest way out to the gulf was to take US 50, but he’d barely gotten on the highway before he heard police sirens. He turned off onto one of the back roads just as a pair of cruisers shot by with lights going, doing at least eighty. Out on some sort of storm-related call, surely, not looking for his truck, but it was better to avoid the risks when you had a kidnapped woman and a stack of dynamite under tarps in the bed.

This detour north was pulling him far from the hotel, but he knew it was necessary, felt that in his bones. Eric Shaw was a part of this, had been from the start and needed to be at the finish. Campbell had placed the man’s wife in Josiah’s hands just as he had the dynamite, and both would have their role by the day’s end. The course was already charted, and now it was merely a matter of listening to the directions as they were issued.

The route change that was forced by the police sighting would have him approaching the gulf from the south now, which would take him right past his own home. He opened the truck up again, curving along through Pipher Hollow. The storm seemed to have died off a bit now, at least here. Out to the northeast the sky still looked fierce, but here things were settling.

He was on his own road and a half mile from his house when he started to see the damage. The first thing that caught his eye was a great gray gouge ripped through the earth in the fields ahead of him, and then he saw downed power lines sparking on the side of the road and a steel farm gate that had been torn loose and bent as easily as if it had been made out of aluminum foil.

He let off the gas and stared around himself as the truck coasted. The row of trees that had grown here was gone, obliterated, the trunks split and the bases pulled from the ground, their mud-covered roots pointing at the sky. He looked past the grove and up toward his home and then he took his foot off the gas completely and put it on the brake.

His house was gone. Any sense that it had been a house was gone, at least. The foundation and portions of two of the walls lingered but the rest was scattered in chunks across his yard and the field beyond. Pieces of his roof littered the yard. His couch was some eighty feet from the foundation, upside down, rain drumming down onto it. The old aerial antenna, no longer functional but never removed, was lodged in the upper branches of a tree in the backyard. The rest of the tree was adorned with pink bits of insulation. Amidst the litter of debris across the yard he saw flashes of bright, stark white. Pieces of the porch railing he’d painted.

He sat there in the middle of the road and stared at it. Couldn’t find a thought, really, couldn’t do anything but look. This place shouldn’t matter—he’d already known he could never return to it—but still, it had been home. It had been his home.

The sirens finally broke him out of it. They were wailing behind him, to the south, coming this way. Somebody coming to see if anyone needed rescuing.

He punched the accelerator and the truck fishtailed on the wet pavement and then found purchase and sped on. He swerved around one downed limb in the road and drove right over the top of another and on toward the gulf. He gave the house one last look in the rearview. It was the only thing out there, the only physical structure in most of a mile in any direction, and it had been destroyed. In the distance, the Amish farm looked solid, everything still standing. Something like that, it seemed almost personal. Seemed like the damn storm had been hunting him.

“Well, guess what?” he said aloud. “I wasn’t home. And tell you something else? I am the storm.”

There you go, boy. There you go.

The voice floated out of the air beside him and Josiah looked to the right and saw Campbell Bradford in the passenger seat, just as he had been at the timber camp. Campbell gave a tight-lipped smile and tipped his hat. His suit looked soaked, clinging to his shoulders as if he’d just climbed out of a swimming pool.

That ain’t home, he said. That place ain’t even close to home for you, Josiah, never was. You deserved better, boy, deserved a piece of what I’d carved out for you. I was building a kingdom down here, and you’re my rightful heir. It was taken right from your hands. Time to take it back. They’ll come to know your name, boy. They’ll know it.

“The work will be done,” Josiah told him. “You can count on that.”

I know it. I’m stronger than ever now, boy, and it’s thanks to you. Stronger than I’ve been in a long time, at least. And that’s all I needed—was for you to listen, and let me get my strength back. It’s coming now, son. Yes, sir, it is.

“I should have started with the hotel,” Josiah said.

No. We’ll go back for it, but we have to start with Shaw. You see that, don’t you? He’s the one who brought me back, then thought he could control me, hold power over me. With water, can you believe it? With water. It’s time he sees who’s won. Ain’t a force in this valley like me, and he’ll know it. He’ll be the one to tell the others.