Bitter Falls (Stillhouse Lake)(101)

“Can’t tell,” he says. “They’re—” He leans forward a little. “Fuck. They’re wrapping a chain around him. Kez!”

She takes a knee and looks through the scope of her rifle. It’s a pretty long shot, and Sam’s in the middle of it. I hold my breath.

The snap of the rifle shot hangs in the air, and I don’t need to have the field glasses to see that one of the men crouching over Sam goes down. She racks and takes aim, but the second man grabs Sam, pulls him up, and hides behind him.

“Gwen!” Javier snaps. “In the water. Now. Now.” He’s putting on his tank. Kez puts down her rifle and helps me snap mine on too. I test my regulator, drawing in a shaking breath. It’s working.

We stand up and run for the shoreline.

“Sam!” I shout, and I hear my voice echoing across the water. I think I see him react.

But then he’s pushed forward into the water, a human shield for the man holding on to him.

“The saints will rise!” I hear the shout echoing across the lake toward us this time. That’s the cultist holding Sam. “This is the day of reckoning! God be praised!”

Sam’s shoved forward again. He’s struggling to stand up now.

Javier and I are wading in, up to our thighs. Our waists.

Across from us, Sam vanishes with barely a ripple. The chains around him are dragging him down. The other man begins to wade back to shore.

I want to scream, but I save my breath as I pull down the mask and jam the regulator in my mouth, and then I’m under the water.

I can feel the bone-freezing chill of it through the suit, but I quickly adjust. Panic is beating inside me like a thousand moths. I just want to get to Sam; every second it takes to reach him is another second he’s dying down there, alone in the dark.

One step, two, and suddenly it drops off into an abyss; the waterfall has worn this hole deep over thousands of years. My exposed skin burns with the sudden cold, and I’m sinking faster than I intend to, but I don’t care. Sam’s down there. He’s down there.

He doesn’t have long.

It’s hard to be calm right now, and using scuba gear requires focus and a clear head; I have to fight through my instincts to slow down my actions. The lake is like an ink bottle, but when Javier turns on his dive light it cuts through like a sword, turning black water to murky green. I turn mine on too. He swims forward, and I follow close enough to touch his dive shoe. I can’t afford to lose sight of him. Not here. Five feet away might as well be five hundred.

We keep going down, but I can’t see Sam, I can’t see him. How long has it been? Thirty seconds. At least.

We swim, and swim, and I want to scream out my agony at how long it takes. Not seconds. A minute. More. I don’t know. We go deeper. My ears ache with the pressure, and I work to regulate. Javier starts changing his angle slightly. Our lights illuminate a sheer granite wall up ahead.

That’s the drop-off on the other side of the lake. But I can’t see Sam. No, please . . .

I look down, and a pallid face looms out of the murk, hair drifting like a dark cloud. It doesn’t have eyes. The skin is wrinkled and bloated and swollen, but it’s held down by a heavy chain around it, and round weights.

I want to scream, but I can’t. I feel pressure in my head. We’re pretty deep now, but not to the bottom yet.

And I don’t see Sam. My heart is racing so fast it hurts with every pulse, like my whole body is cramping with it. My head is splitting from the pressure. I breathe faster, trying to get air, and realize I’m making myself worse. I try to slow down. No, I can’t. I can’t. Sam’s here.

Our lights sweep over more decaying bodies. Some are just bones scattered white across the heavy black silt. Some are held together with sinew and awful twists of muscle.

Some are intact, and the suffocating horror makes me feel the need to get out of here, just go. But not without Sam. I’m not going.

I mistake him for one of the dead at first because he isn’t moving.

But he is bleeding. There’s a misty cloud of red around him, coming from the soaked bandage around his waist. He’s just floating there, held down by another padlocked chain and what looks like a small boat anchor.

His eyes are shut.

My whole body explodes with the impact of that last burn of adrenaline, of despair, of desperation. I have to save him. I have to.

I lunge forward and touch him, and his eyes open. He starts violently struggling. He’s about to breathe in water; I see it from the blind panic in his face. I grab his nose and squeeze it closed. I take in a deep breath and thrust my regulator in his mouth. Breathe, I beg him. My God, please breathe, baby, please. For a torturous second it doesn’t seem he can, he’s trying to bat my grip away on his nose, and then I see the relief spread over his body. He’s breathing in. I let go of his nose. He cups both hands over the regulator and sucks in air, breathes out bubbles.

He’s alive. He’s okay. No, he’s not, he’s bleeding and it’s cold and he’s shirtless, pallid, terribly equipped for this. Hypothermia will kill him fast. Blood loss too. We need to get him out.

I fumble at the chain, and realize that it’s locked tightly into place. We don’t have anything with us that can remove it.

My lungs are aching and trembling with the need to breathe. Javier signals me, but I don’t know what he means until he takes another regulator from his belt—something designed to share with another diver in trouble, I guess. At his signal, I take my regulator back, and Javier expertly swaps with me. I can’t tell if it’s working, or if Sam’s breathing.