So Cold the River(137)
* * *
The wind was freshening again as Josiah neared the gulf, and here there were so many trees down that the road was nearly impassable. If he’d given the slightest damn about his truck he would have stopped, but at this point the Ranger meant about as much to him as the heap that had once been his house, so he plowed ahead, driving over limbs and fence posts and one snarl of barbed wire wrapped around a stump. All of it deposited in the middle of the road, left behind by a cloud, of all damn things. It was hard to believe.
Up ahead the old white chapel was still standing and seemed little worse for wear; the storm must have passed just south of it. He saw the blinking lights of a rescue truck out across the fields, a volunteer fire department outfit, but they had pulled into one of the farm driveways and were paying him no mind. The gravel track into the gulf was empty, and he drove onto it and through the brush and saw two vehicles parked at the end of the lane: Danny’s Olds and a black Porsche Cayenne that was sitting upside down. The roof was caved in and glass lay all around it. Pointing skyward were four flat tires. That got Josiah laughing as he stopped the truck and got out to see Danny emerge from the bushes behind the cars, his ruddy, freckled face drained of color, his red hair dripping wet.
“You see it?” he said, walking toward Josiah. “You see it? Oh, shit, I never seen anything like it. Damn it all, I never even imagined seeing anything like that.”
Josiah nodded at the upended Porsche. “Guess you didn’t need to worry ’bout them tires.”
Danny stared back at him blankly.
“How’d you miss it?” Josiah asked.
“Drove away, is how I missed it. I was waiting down here like you said, and then I heard the noise. I mean to tell you it really does sound like a train, just the way you always hear folks say it does. I heard that noise and I saw the sky going black as oil and I said, I got to get away fast. So I drove out of here and had hardly hit the road before I saw it. Big old funnel cloud, all white at first, then turning black. And I just hit the gas on this old car like I never have before in my life. Was up at the church when the tornado came in, and I pulled behind the building and set to prayin’. I’ll tell you, I was prayin’ and cryin’ like a little kid, and I think it was that church that saved me because that thing passed by not a hundred yards from me, but I was safe and—”
“Where are they?” Josiah said.
“Huh?”
“The ones I’m here for, damn it! Where are they?”
Danny blinked, then wiped at his face, leaving a streak of dirt behind.
“I don’t know. They were in the woods. Right there, where it blew through, Josiah. Far as I know, they’re somewhere out there now.” He waved his arm off to the east, in the direction the storm had gone.
“You think they’re dead?” Josiah said, and he felt a cold, seething rage nestle into his belly. That storm better not have taken them. He’d come here to settle up, not to collect bodies.
“I have no idea, Josiah. I just want to get out of here. I’m done, all right? I’m—”
“Shut up,” Josiah said. “I got a piece of work left to do, and ain’t nothing or nobody done until that work’s been completed. You don’t understand the weight of this task, Danny, you don’t understand the heft of it at all. Ain’t a thing done yet.”
“Josiah—”
“Stop using that name.”
“What?”
“You call me Campbell now. Understand? Call me Campbell.”
Danny said, “I think you’re crazy.”
He was staring Josiah in the face, and when he said it, he meant it.
“I don’t know what the hell you’re thinking anymore,” Danny said. “Don’t even seem like yourself, and now you’re calling yourself Campbell…. It’s like you’re possessed.”
“What I am,” Josiah said, “is focused.”
He turned away from Danny and walked back to the truck, reached inside the cab and withdrew the shotgun. Then he stood beside the bed and tore the tarps loose and exposed Eric Shaw’s wife.
“Josiah! What in… oh, hell. You are crazy! You’ve lost your ever-lovin’—”
“I’m going to ask one more time for you to keep silent,” Josiah said, and Danny’s eyes registered for the first time that the gun in Josiah’s hand was pointed at him.
“You going to shoot me? Me?”
“Don’t intend to. But I came here to finish a task, and ain’t nobody going to interrupt me. You least of all.”
Danny’s jaw slackened. He didn’t say a word. The wind was starting to gust again, another round of storms ready to chase the one that had just left this place.