Final Panic

11

The water felt colder now than it had.

But Jim swam on.

His pants were dragging too much. He wished that he’d taken them off.

But it was too late.

He had to keep going.

Jim hadn’t even paused to look behind him, to see how far he’d come.

He just swam on.

It had been about thirty minutes, and he was already feeling it in his muscles. A burning sensation. A deep one.

He was using muscles he hadn’t used in years. And he was using them in ways that he hadn’t used them in years.

Ten minutes later, Jim was even more tired.

And he was beginning to think it was pointless.

Why did he think he could outswim a boat?

Why had he thought this was a good idea?

With the missing food, he was just wasting energy now. And it was energy that wasn’t going to be replaced easily.

With the supplies missing, they’d have to get creative in order to eat. And getting creative meant expending more energy.

It was just a tremendous spiral of energy loss. Thoughts of the second law of thermodynamics swirled through Jim’s head. Energy is always lost. The physicists called that entropy. Jim had studied it in school, and knew of it from his work with electronics, not that it had ever proved to be that useful, practically speaking.

But they weren’t useful thoughts.

He needed to concentrate.

So far, he hadn’t yet decided to turn back.

So the only option was to continue. Forward.

Just when he thought he couldn’t continue, just when he thought his burning, exhausted muscles might give out and he’d sink to the bottom of the lake, unable to rescue himself, he saw a flash of metal up ahead.

He paused in the water to get a better look. Treading water felt good compared to propelling himself forward constantly at an impossible pace.

This way, too, he could get his head higher out of the water, getting a better look.

Sure enough, there was a boat up ahead. He saw the sun glinting off its metal where the paint had worn off.

The boat was far off.

But not too far.

He could get there.

He just had to keep pushing.

At least the boat wasn’t lost. At least the fake cop hadn’t yet gotten to the shore.

All wasn’t lost.

Instinctively, Jim reached for his revolver in its holster. He didn’t draw it, but just felt the reassuring hardness of its handle as he wrapped his fingers around it.

The gun was his lifeline.

He didn’t waste much time treading water.

He’d been swimming freestyle, and he switched now to breaststroke. His thinking was that breaststroke wouldn’t create as much of a splash.

The competitive version of breaststroke had the swimmer moving up and down in the water quite a bit. The head bobbed up and dove back down again in an almost vicious way.

But Jim, instead, swam the more casual style.

He didn’t want to draw any more attention to himself than he had to.

He couldn’t make out, from where he’d been treading water, what kind of boat it was.

If it was a canoe, the fake cop would be facing forward.

Less chance for him to spot Jim as he approached.

Jim had to assume that he was armed.

If it was a rowboat, then Jim was in trouble. The fake cop would be facing exactly in Jim’s direction.

And it wasn’t like Jim could try to cut him off from the side. It would be too much swimming. Too long a route.

Jim already didn’t know how he’d managed to outpace a boat.

He’d been swimming as hard as he could, sure.

But the fake cop must have been paddling lazily. Either that or he was in terrible shape and had stopped, huffing and puffing, for a few breathers as the boat coasted, unpropelled, as slowly as a turtle for long periods.

It was ten more minutes before Jim was close enough to really see the boat.

It turned out it was two boats, rather than just one.

The fake cop was in a canoe, towing a rowboat.

Maybe that was what had slowed him down somewhat.

Jim’s plan was to get as close as he could, start treading water, and get off a single clean shot. All before the fake cop even spotted him.

It wasn’t exactly an honorable approach. Not like in the old cowboy movies, where the two dueling cowboys always faced each other, even perhaps exchanging pleasantries before the guns were fired.

But the situation was unjust from the start.

There was one way it could be honorable.

As far as Jim was concerned, he was hunting a thief.

Nothing more.

And a thief like that deserved what was coming to him.

Jim swam hard.

And fast.

But not fast enough.

When he was coming up for air, his head rising out of the cold water, he saw Andy in the boat suddenly turn around.

Their eyes met for a split second.

If Jim stopped to tread water now, he didn’t stand a chance in a gunfight.

Not at the distance.

Not without the relatively solid footing of the boat that Andy would have.

And Jim knew that Andy would go right for his gun.

So Jim didn’t wait.

He took a large breath, inhaling deeply and fully.

He dove down, pulling himself through the water.

He went down and down, as if he was trying to reach the bottom of the lake.

Just a few feet below the surface, the water was already getting noticeably colder.

Jim just kept swimming.

The first bullet hit the water.

It was a strange sight.

Jim saw the bullet’s trail, rather than the bullet itself.

The bullet left a wake of bubbles, a line cutting through the water.

Water is denser than air. The bullet slowed down as it drove down. It would reach the bottom of the lake.

And hopefully Jim wouldn’t.

The second bullet cut a path through the water. This time, it was a little closer to Jim.

Jim had two choices. He could resurface and return fire. Or he could dive deeper.

He chose to dive deeper.

A third, fourth, and fifth bullet hit the water.

Jim didn’t know what kind of gun Andy had, or how many rounds it held.

Ideally, he’d wait until Andy emptied his gun, and then resurface.

But that wasn’t likely to happen. Andy was clever. A clever thief.

Jim swam down another two feet.

He was already feeling like he needed to take a breath. He wasn’t used to swimming, let alone holding his breath underwater.

He needed to think fast.

He needed a plan. A better one than just waiting and then resurfacing to get shot.

Jim could see the hull of both boats above him. They weren’t far away.

He didn’t think. He just started swimming. Instead of continuing down, he started cutting across.

If he could make it under the boat, he could resurface on the other side. Maybe take Andy by surprise.

If he was lucky.

He didn’t know how much longer he could last without air. It was getting rough. His head felt light and strange. It wasn’t just another symptom on top of the normal exhaustion. This symptom was impossible to ignore. Impossible to simply push through. This symptom would kill him sooner rather than later.

He swam as fast as he could.

Bullets pounded through the water all around him. There was nothing he could do about them.

He just had to keep going.

Somehow, he got to the other side.

Ideally, he’d have liked to get some distance between himself and the boat.

But he wasn’t going to make it.

His body was screaming for air.

Desperately.

It was all he could do to simply resurface. He didn’t even reach for his Ruger.

His head pierced the surface of the water and he gasped loudly for air, his lungs finally receiving what they’d been screaming for.

He’d barely taken three breaths when the paddle swung through the air towards him.

The wide part of the paddle hit him in the head.

Pain flared through his skull.

His vision blacked out for a moment.

He sunk back down into the water, too filled with pain to move his arms or his legs.

He was sinking.