“What?” Scott said, scooting beside the man and reaching his hand into the vehicle to disengage the latch on the seat belt.
The man grabbed him by the jacket and pulled him closer so that their faces were only inches apart. He was older, perhaps in his forties, his hair only slightly graying. His eyes were wide and wild, unblinking. Fear wore through his face, his hands trembling as he clutched Scott’s jacket.
“Below us…” the man said, pausing momentarily to catch his breath. “We’re on a lake.”
There was another crack and the ground gave another quarter inch.
Scott’s eyes locked on the man’s, a sudden sense of awareness washing over him. Determination rose in his veins. He broke free of the man’s grip and lay on his belly, reaching up into the car. Sliding further, he craned his head sideways, slipping it into the car. Reaching up with his left arm, he unfastened the seat belt. Matt fell straight down on him, pinning him against the roof of the car beneath his weight.
The ground beneath them cracked again, this time fragmenting beneath the weight of the car. Scott wrenched his back trying to move out from beneath Matt in an attempt to regain the use of his arms. Through the crack in the metal where the driver’s side window had been, Scott could see the frigid, black waters rising over the roof of the car, spilling directly toward him.
The sound of a barking dog filled the night.
Scott felt pressure on his ankles, yanking him backward out of the car. Matt fell off of him, landing on his side with a splash into the rapidly rising water, his body lying limply with the black fluid swelling around him.
Scott’s grabbed at Matt, trying to latch onto anything. Finally, his fingers slipped through the belt loop of his jeans, closing tightly around the thin, denim strap.
The man still had him by the legs and was pulling him backward, out of the car, the metal from the car digging painfully into his lower back. The freezing water soaked through the arms of his jacket, rising nearly to his face as the car slipped further beneath the surface of the ice.
The flashing lights on the dashboard reflected from flat surface of the water, filling the interior of the car with light, but only for a moment as the circuits shorted out with a crackle, leaving them in complete darkness. The tugging on his legs was growing more frantic with each passing second and it was all Scott could do to cling to Matt’s pants.
The water nipped at his chin now, biting through the exposed flesh and into the solid bone beneath. Craning his neck back, he spat furiously as the water rose up over his lips, threatening to fill his lungs.
Fighting for every inhalation, he coughed out a thin spray of water, yanking as hard as he possibly could on Matt’s jeans, knowing that if they weren’t both out of there really soon that it was going to be all over.
Taking one last, enormous breath, Scott staved off panic a moment longer while the water rose past his nostrils. The ice-cold water stung his lower eyelid, forcing his to close his eyes. The last thing he could see burned into the back of his mind: it was Matt, his head slumped forward into his lap, the water only inches from swallowing him.
Scott felt enormous pressure on his ankles, this time ripping him backwards, the metal from the crumpled window shredding through his jacket and into his skin as he careened backward, his head slamming on the metal rim of the window. He barely held onto Matt’s jeans by one outstretched finger, which stung painfully, threatening to pop clean out of the socket.
The water stung his eyes and he could barely see anything in the dark, frozen water, only the vague outline of Matt’s unconscious body, and the hole from the window beyond. Leaning his head to the side, he slipped through the opening of the window, his eyes fixed intently on Matt who slowly moved toward the doorway along with him.
The water rose with each passing second, nearly past the center of the steering wheel, splashing across the bottom of Matt’s chin.
Scott could feel the man’s hands shuffling for a new grip, preparing for another tug. The water stung his flesh. His head began to throb, and it was all he could do to concentrate on holding onto Matt while the freezing water attempted to shut his body down.
The tug came as he had expected, yanking him backward through the water. Everything moved in slow motion. He could feel the belt loop on Matt’s pants snap even before he saw it, falling rapidly away from his stretching fingers as he was yanked through the rising water. Matt’s body slumped further into the depths, covering his face as it now filled the car.
Scott watched in horror, helpless. Matt began to thrash frantically, his eyes popping wide open in terror. His mouth parted to scream, only to be filled with the slushy water. Closing his mouth as quickly as he could, his eyes darted all about the inside of the vehicle, finally latching on Scott’s as he was yanked through the window and out onto the crumbling ice.
Scott gave one last glance through the crumpled window. He could see Matt reaching for him, his hands trembling, his eyes so wide that it looked as though they might roll out. He was calling to him, his mouth moving as it formed words he couldn’t understand.
And then the car was gone.
The tires were the last to sink beneath the flaccid, barely bubbling black surface, leaving only the lightest stir in the water.
Scott lunged, trying to dive beneath the frozen lake, but the man yanked him one final time by the legs, pulling him away from the slowly expanding hole in the ice.
He buried in the snow, tears bursting from the corners of his eyes and screamed into the frozen ground. The image of his drowning friend, pleading with him for help in the dark waters, forever burned into the scars in his mind.
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THE BLOODSPAWN
Michael McBride
© 2004 Michael McBride. All rights reserved.
PART FOUR
PRESENT DAY
IV
Sunday, November 13th
5 a.m.
Scott stared at the ceiling, watching the last of the dim moonlight slipping through between the horizontal blinds, filtering through the blue valance, making thin lines of yellow light across the gently spinning ceiling fan. He glanced at the clock for the thousandth time.
5:02.
Two minutes had passed since the last time he had looked, each of them feeling like an hour. Flopping over, he pulled the pillow over his head, grimacing against the headache that stung through his skull, resonating like a gong within his brain. A dull ache throbbed at the base of his spine, the tight muscles burning and cramping as he rolled over once again, this time into a ball.
“One week,” he said aloud, wincing as a solid ache crumpled his stomach.
He hadn’t slept a wink last night. He’d barely slept at all in the last month for that matter. The project he had started at work—meant to be his coup de grace, the peacock feather in his professional cap—seemed as though it would never be anything remotely resembling on schedule.
He had inherited his father’s construction company, Premier Construction, when he was twenty-two, fresh out of college. He had never intended to get into his father’s business, especially after securing a degree in psychology. His plan was to finish his masters, which he had only barely begun, and then follow through with a doctorate, becoming a full-fledged psychiatrist. But things changed in a hurry.
It had been Thanksgiving break, 1994. The four-day vacation had begun on Thursday. The drive down from the University of Colorado medical School in Denver had been tedious at best. The traffic had been stop and go from
