wanted command like he wanted a third tit or a removable skull-cap. Maybe not even that much. Because with command came responsibility and he was not very good with that. At 21 years of age, Hopper had lost no less than three jobs in the last year and a half because he’d forgot to set his alarm. His mother still had to remind him to wear clean socks and if it hadn’t been for his sometimes girlfriend, Cathy Jo, he would no doubt never clean his apartment or even remember to get some food in his belly on a regular basis. He would have happily zoned out playing Cellcom or Grand Theft Auto on his X-Box, screw reality.
But now he was in charge.
And he wanted it even less than he’d ever suspected. Because there was shit coming down in this city that he did not like. There were dead people in the water, only they were moving and seriously pissed at the living. Yeah, it almost sounded like a video game, when you thought about it. And Hopper loved video games almost as much as he loved Cathy Jo giving him a blowjob…but he sure as hell did not want to live in one.
As they trudged through the flooded streets, rifles in hand, the stink of the water up their noses, he kept telling himself that they were alive and they were armed and that was the important thing. He was glad for that. Or almost. He honestly wouldn’t have minded if Liss had bought it when the boat flipped, because he was just psycho and things were bad enough without a guy like that around.
Right then, Liss was saying, “I should call my mom, you guys. She gets really mad when I’m late. I don’t want to get grounded again. God, last time I couldn’t even watch TV. She had me doing laundry. You believe that? I had to do laundry. Your moms ever make you do laundry?”
“Can’t you shut him up?” Torrio said.
“No, I can’t,” Hopper said.
Jesus, he felt sorry for the guy. Almost. Maybe a combination of pity and contempt, you came right down to it. Liss had been funny ever since he’d opened fire in that ballpark, said he’d seen someone, and Oates had jumped up and down on his ass like it was a trampoline. He’d snapped or something. Had some kind of breakdown. Ever since then he’d just been out of it. Hopper kind of felt sorry for him. At any other time he would have really felt sorry for him. But they were in a bind here. They were in a potentially dangerous situation and the last thing he needed on his first run with command was guy who’d lost it.
Liss kept talking about shit that made no sense and Torrio kept bitching about it and there was Hopper, right in the middle, trying to keep things level. Was this why Oates was so belligerent all the time? Because he was playing babysitter for a bunch of wanna-be soldiers and the irony of the situation made him run down himself, them, and the Army in general?
And all this time I thought he was just an asshole, Hopper thought.
The rain picked up a bit, stippling the stagnant water around them, beading their faces. Hopper was miserable and he figured that went for the other two as well…Torrio anyway, Liss probably thought he was at a Cub Scout meeting or something.
“So what’s our plan here?” Torrio said.
Hopper scanned the silent, sunken streets with his flashlight. Nothing but rain falling and debris floating, empty buildings to either side flowing with shadow. There were things in the water and they could have been just about anywhere. Waiting in the flooded darkness, ready to leap out at them with gnarled white fingers. Christ, it was ugly, it was tense. He figured maybe this is what it felt like being in a real war, people out there wanting to kill you. Or maybe being the survivor of a shipwreck and waiting for the sharks to show. He supposed the latter was more applicable.
“I said, what’s our plan here?” Torrio said again, raising his voice. It echoed off the silent buildings around them and that was more than a little disturbing.
Hopper sighed. Goddamn Torrio asked the same question every ten minutes or so. “Our plan is the same as it’s been since we went overboard, dumbass. We keep moving. We keep moving until we get to some dry ground. Until the water goes down.”
“Shit,” Torrio said. “I don’t know this city and neither do you. How the hell do we even know where we’re going?”
“I thought you said you knew Witcham?”
“I know the clubs by the University, dude. I never been way out here before.”
“Well, we just keep going. As long as the water doesn’t get deeper, we’re going in the right direction. It’s up to our waists, right? It starts going down, we’re getting there.”
“It’s been up to our waists for two hours.”
“Oh, quit whining.”
“Who’s whining?”
“You are.”
“Shit.”
Liss said, “This is like that time at Bear Lake. Remember that? It kept raining and raining and the river kept getting deeper and my dad said, it’s gonna flood, it’s gonna flood. God, we barely got out of there. Water was right up to the bottom of the bridge. It washed out an hour after we crossed it.”
“Oh, shut up,” Torrio said.
“Just ignore him already,” Hopper told him. “He’ll snap out of it. Right, Liss? You’ll snap out of it, won’t you?”
Liss nodded happily. “Yeah, sure I will. I’ll snap out of it.” He stopped, shrugged. “Snap out of what?”
Hopper almost started laughing. Again, if it hadn’t have been so unbearably tragic, it would have been funny. But there was nothing funny about where they were and what was waiting in the water for them.
26
“Something brushed my leg,” Torrio said about fifteen minutes later. And the way he said it, you could be pretty sure it wasn’t a stick. “You hear me? Something brushed my fucking leg!”
Liss, who had lost his rifle somewhere now, just stood there with that glazed look in his eyes, perhaps trying to recall a similar experience at Bear Lake.
“So you bumped into something,” Hopper said. “What of it?”
That’s what he said, trying to be very cool and breezy about it all, but deep inside something turned over in his guts and went belly up. He’d been waiting for something to happen, something bad, and he wondered if this was it. Because this was how it would start, he knew, with a suggestion of something.
“Don’t give me that,” Torrio said, scanning the stinking, oily water with his flashlight. “I didn’t bump into it, it bumped into me.”
Hopper sighed. He scanned the water with his light, too. A stick passed by in the turgid, almost nonexistent current. A few leaves. Then a fairly large dead bass from the river itself.
“One time at Bear Lake,” Liss said, “a painted turtle brushed against my sister’s leg when she was swimming and she screamed.”
This time it was Hopper’s turn: “Shut the fuck up.”
They stood there, watching that water like maybe they were expecting to see a dorsal fin emerge. The surface was greasy-looking and steaming like the seam of fat over a kettle of chicken soup. The lights would not penetrate it anymore than five or six inches. It was just a drainage of dirty water, sewage, debris, and numerous dead things. That was offensive enough on its own, but there were other things in it and they all knew it.
“I’m not seeing anything,” Hopper said, whispered actually, like something down there might hear him and decide to prove him wrong.
The lights moved about, the beams filled with an opaque mist, reflecting off that oily surface. Each of them was feeling something now. Not just the possibility that something was near, but the certainty of it. Hopper himself was feeling like every muscle in his body was tensing, every nerve end jangling with a sudden eruption of electricity. He was pretty much numb from the waist down from being in that cold water, but he felt suddenly warm all over. The rain fell on his beret, dripped off the rim and ran down his face like tears. But even with that, he could feel himself begin to sweat.
“Maybe we should get out of the water for a bit,” he said. “Take a break.”
