The Lightning Stones

18

In the next moment, Mercer’s world went from bad to worse.

A piercing alarm blared from the radio. It was the nerve-jangling sound of the emergency response system, that annoying tone most people switched away from when listening to the radio or watching television. But in parts of the country where residents understood that nature had not yet been tamed, they heeded these signals as life-or-death alerts.

When the awful honking ended, a mechanical voice replaced it and started rattling off county names. They meant nothing to Mercer until Roni Butler suddenly tensed. Whatever was happening was happening here.

The voice then said, “It has been reported that Army Corps engineers have initiated an emergency release of water from the Wilbur Berry dam reservoir on the upper reaches of Blair Creek. Anyone who has not followed the evacuation order and lives in the Blair Creek watershed, the creek is estimated to crest a further five feet above its current level.”

Mercer didn’t need to hear the rest. “Let’s go!”

Naked fear made Roni suddenly look her age. Mercer took her hand and pulled her in his wake as he rushed for the front room. He wouldn’t have bothered with his coat, but the SUV keys were in its pocket. He tossed Roni her bright yellow rain slicker and slipped into his bomber. He opened the door and drew her outside. Water cascaded off the eaves but through it Mercer spotted the big bulbous-tired four-by-four with its Zodiac in tow approaching the house. It was the rescue team he’d seen earlier in town, and he was suddenly grateful for its presence. Doubtless the men were locals and knew the best way to avoid the impending catastrophe.

It was only after the truck came to a stop shy of the driveway entrance that an animal instinct struck Mercer. It dawned on him that the red strobe light affixed to the truck’s roof was off, and so were the banks of high-intensity lamps running the width of its grille. If they had come to rescue Roni Butler despite her protests, they would have arrived with horns blaring and lights flashing. They wouldn’t have crawled up the road in stealth mode.

The passenger threw open his door and jumped out into the rain. Mercer could see just his indistinct outline in the murky light, but he could tell by the way he moved that something was desperately wrong. He couldn’t be sure, but it appeared the man carried a pistol in his right hand.

Mercer didn’t wait for the driver to exit the tall pickup. He drew Roni back into her house and closed and locked the front door. He was pretty sure they hadn’t seen him. He rushed through to the kitchen and snatched the shotgun from where she’d left it.

“Rack it,” she said.

He looked at her questioningly.

“You think I greet people with a loaded shotgun?” Roni asked him. “The chamber’s empty.”

Mercer shook his head at the absurdity of it all and pumped a shell into the short-barreled Mossberg’s chamber. “Slugs or shot?”

“Double-ought buck.” She gave him a handful of extra shells she’d taken from a kitchen drawer.

“That’ll do. Stay down next to the stove.” It was an ancient beast of an appliance made out of much thicker steel than a modern range, and it offered her good protection.

He crossed back to the front window. He didn’t see the first guy, but the second was now out of the truck and crossing the lawn.

Mercer’s heart tripped inside his chest when he got a clear look at him, and an extra dose of adrenaline raced through his veins. It was him. The leader, the top dog, whom Mercer had first spied coming out of the mine chamber following Abe’s cold-blooded murder. He moved like a jungle cat, smooth, sure, deadly. He and his partner must have hijacked the rescue team’s vehicle.

Mercer brought the shotgun up to his shoulder but held his fire. Without a full choke, the range was just too far for the nine-pellet shell, so he lowered the weapon again, breathing slow and even, trying not to let his emotions cloud his tactical awareness.

“Who are they?” Roni asked in a rasping whisper.

“Killers.”

“No shit,” she snapped back. “Who? Why?”

“They’re after the mother lode of Sample 681, same as me. I just don’t know how they found you.”

Just then her phone rang. It was a wall phone with a long coiled cord, the kind Mercer hadn’t seen in years. She slid up just enough to knock the handset loose into her palm, and went back to cowering behind the stove with the phone clamped to her head.

Mercer heard her talking but paid no attention as he went from room to room checking for targets outside the simple clapboard house. The lawn was a quagmire as treacherous as the no-man’s-land between World War I trenches. He spotted one of the men watching the house from behind a tree.

“Mr. Mercer?” Roni called out. He was in her bedroom. Satisfied he had a few more minutes while the pair reconnoitered the house, he moved well back from the window so as not to give himself away and then tracked back to the kitchen.

“That was Sherman Smithson,” Roni said. “He called to warn me these guys were coming. They hit his house a few hours ago and left him tied up in a closet. They tortured my name out of him.”

Mercer expected they would have just killed him and been done with it. He wondered if their leniency had any meaning, then recalled the wounds in Abe’s chest and decided it didn’t.

The old woman continued, “He says he only escaped because his girlfriend got over her fear of the storm and drove out to West Branch to surprise him. He says he only saw the two of them and doesn’t know if there are more.”

Mercer’s opinion of Smithson went up a few notches. For an archivist, he seemed to have a pretty good grasp of what was important at a time like this.

“How far upstream is that dam mentioned on the radio?”

“About ten miles.”

Mercer estimated the time since the report and the speed of the oncoming deluge and knew they had to chance it. He held out his hand to take her back toward the front door. “We have to make a break for it, Roni, otherwise we’ll be trapped in here when the wall of water hits. Can you run?”

“Not as fast as I used to, but just you try and stop me.”

“Okay, I am going to open this door and step out onto the porch. One of them is behind a tree about to the right.”

“The one outside my bedroom?”

“Yes. As soon as I’m outside I want you to get up a good head of steam and start running for my SUV. The doors aren’t locked, so just jump in the backseat and stay down. I’m going to keep them pinned with the shotgun.”

She looked uncertain.

“We can do this, Roni. It’s not even twenty feet to my truck, and a shotgun blast will keep anyone’s head down long enough for us to make it.”

This time she nodded, tightening her mouth in a grim line of determination.

Mercer opened the door and was about to step out when the sound of gunfire exploded from his left. The second shooter was at the other side of the house, and had just been about to vault the railing to gain access to the porch. Mercer stepped back, switching the shotgun to his left hand, and swung its barrel blindly around the jam. He fired. The blast nearly ripped the weapon from his grasp, but he was able to use the recoil to seat the gun so his right hand was on the slide, ready to ram another three-inch shell into the chamber. He fired again, and chanced a look outside. The second shooter was gone. He could have taken a full blast to the chest and been lying in the grass dead, but most likely he had dropped back before the shotgun fired.

He looked the other way and spotted the leader running diagonally from his post behind the tree, heading for the road. He appeared to be in headlong flight, his feet gliding over the muddy earth and his arms pumping with the smooth stroke of an Olympian. Mercer turned back the other way again and saw the shooter, too, was running for their stolen pickup like the hounds of hell were at his heels.

He got it. He understood what they’d seen that had frightened them so.

Mercer slammed the door a second time and looked at Roni. When he spoke he couldn’t keep the fearful edge from his voice. “Is there an attic or crawl space?”

“Yes. What’s happening?”

“The water from that reservoir is coming a lot sooner than we figured. Where’s the access?”

“Pantry behind the kitchen.”

This time she led the way. Mercer looked out the back window and saw the creek had consumed the last of the back lawn and was washing along the building’s exterior. He moved closer still and saw it was actually up almost halfway to the window itself. Once it reached that height, the old single pane would implode from the pressure against it — or if by some miracle it held, it would shatter when struck by any of the debris borne along the runaway torrent.

He strained his eyes to look upstream and saw a wall of water stretching the full width of the valley, its head a foaming crest that curled but never collapsed. For as much danger as Mercer had faced in his life, he had never felt more certain that he was going to die.

“Roni!” he shouted as she was reaching for a pull string attached to a hatch in her pantry ceiling. “Brace yourself!”

The surge struck the house, rising up so that it covered the windows and plunged the kitchen into near-total darkness. Mercer expected the glass to explode and took a deep breath on the off chance he survived the initial blast of water. Instead, the entire house lurched drunkenly, knocking him off his feet. Something tore under the building, where the floor joists met the stone-and-mortar foundation. It had been built to withstand the screaming fury of a tornado, but it couldn’t hope to fight the remorseless onslaught of water.

Mercer clutched at the heavy stove as Roni Butler’s house was torn off its foundation. He smelled a brief blast of propane from the ruptured line feeding the stove, and heard over the roar of water the metallic sheering of pipes and ducts that rose up through the floor from the basement. It grew suddenly lighter in the kitchen as the wooden house reacted to its positive buoyancy and bobbed up from the depths to begin floating downstream in the somewhat calmer waters behind the initial swell. It spun and weaved and rocked like a piece of cork, but the building had found a way to survive.

But it wouldn’t last. Already water was sloshing in from the living room, where it came gushing in from under the front door and bubbled up through the air vents recessed in the floor.

Mercer scrambled to his feet, still reeling from being alive. He had to hold on to the walls to keep his balance as the house lazily pirouetted amid all the other trash picked up in the flood.

“Roni?” he called. “Roni.”

“I’m in here.” Her muffled answer came from the adjoining pantry. As if he were aboard a ship in the middle of a typhoon, Mercer staggered to her. Roni was on the floor, covered in flour from a sack that had fallen from a shelf and burst when it struck her. Around her prone form were cans and boxes and other detritus that had been dislodged when the house tore free. He helped her to her feet. She was unsteady but appeared unhurt.

He shook some flour from her hair. “You know, it looks pretty good white, should you ever want to go that route.”

She was so far beyond the scope of her experience that she glommed on to Mercer’s weak joke as an anchor point and gave a hearty belly laugh. “But I bet your friend Harry prefers redheads,” she quickly replied.

Mercer looked back through the large kitchen window. The world spun by in a kaleidoscope of water and land and rain as the house weaved its way toward the Mississippi.

The water inside had climbed to their ankles.

“We need to get out of here,” he said, bracing her in the pantry and sloshing over to the front of the house. The window suddenly disintegrated as a pair of pistols were unleashed in a fusillade that came with unimaginable savagery.

Mercer had forgotten all about the gunmen. They had avoided the onrush of water by retreating to the Zodiac, and now they were pacing the floating house in the rubber inflatable just waiting for their opportunity. He cursed his stupidity. The shotgun was in the kitchen.

The boat was just a few yards off the front porch, and the only thing stopping one of them from jumping over was that the house still rotated on its axis. On this pass the stoop remained out of reach, but on the next rotation the driver would have a better fix on his angle of attack. Mercer ran back for the gun, sliding across the linoleum floor like a base runner going for home. He snatched up the weapon and rolled in the water to regain his feet. Around him the house spun dizzily, but he was just quick enough so that when the Zodiac was positioned outside the rear-facing kitchen window he was on his feet and ready. The Mossberg roared, and the front of the twelve-foot inflatable erupted in a fluttering burst of shredded rubber when several air cells exploded.

Mercer couldn’t tell if he’d hit either of the gunmen but doubted he’d been that lucky. The boat wasn’t in any danger of sinking because its hull was compartmentalized, but the driver was going to have a hell of a time controlling it.

He tore back across the house. This time the icy water had risen up to his knees, and he had to bull his way to get to the front parlor. Some furniture had begun to float. Rain blew in through the glassless window frame. He took up a position next to it and peered out. The Zodiac should have reappeared as the house rotated yet again, but he couldn’t see it. He saw whole trees blown into the river by the storm, and the pink bodies of several drowned pigs, but no white inflatable boat.

Water climbed up to midthigh while he waited. Roni’s house was sinking fast, and he still had no plan to get them out of there. He didn’t think he’d be able to lure the Zodiac close enough to steal, so his next option was finding something in the house he and Roni could use as a raft. Mattresses seemed the best idea, and he had seen a queen-size bed in the master that he might be able to wrestle out the front door. Mercer slung the shotgun onto his shoulder and waded down the hallway heading for the bedroom. The gunmen must have peeled off, because he didn’t see them out the bedroom window either. He quickly stripped off the hand-sewn quilt and the blankets so they wouldn’t become tangled, and wrestled the mattress onto its side. It was bulky and unwieldy, and grew heavy as it absorbed water while he was trying to guide it back down the hall.

Suddenly, Roni Butler screamed. Mercer tried to abandon his makeshift raft but was momentarily pinned against the wall by the sagging Posturepedic. He swore and pushed at the thing before getting free. The river was gushing in through the front window, and the house had begun to fill unevenly and tilt even more wildly.

Mercer fought his way to the kitchen just in time to see Roni being hoisted through the back window by one of the shooters. He must have leapt through the shattered kitchen window and grabbed her from where Mercer had left her cowering in the pantry.

The killer-turned-kidnapper was silhouetted perfectly, but with an unfamiliar shotgun Mercer couldn’t chance taking direct aim, for fear of hitting Roni. Instead he lowered his right arm and shoulder and raised the shotgun’s barrel, so when he pulled the trigger the gun was mostly pointed at the ceiling over the shooter’s head. A single slug fired at the extreme angle would have missed the gunman’s head by the narrowest of margins. However, the gun had a shortened barrel and improved choke, so the cluster of shot expanded just enough.

For a terrible moment the man’s head contorted like a rubber Halloween mask — and then it came apart and splattered the area where ceiling met wall in an obscene paste of blood and tissue and hair.

The Zodiac’s outboard screamed at full throttle even as the nearly decapitated corpse tumbled through the window and into the turgid water. Mercer sloshed to the window, pumping the slide once again and ramming the shotgun to his shoulder, ready to fire. The inflatable, with its sagging nose, was twenty yards away already, drifting farther by the second in the angry current of muddy water and trash. He could see Roni’s gaily colored blouse; she was huddled on the Zodiac’s floorboards at the feet of the gunman in the black jacket.

Mercer didn’t have a shot from this distance — at least, not with a shotgun. In a fit of rage he pointed the barrel skyward and yanked the trigger, and the gunman looked back at the blast. Mercer could have sworn the man smiled crookedly at him, but through all that rain it was hard to tell.

The view changed as the house spun, and the kitchen window began to face downstream. What Mercer saw chilled him more than the frigid water. Directly ahead lay the iron truss bridge he’d crossed when first leaving town on his search for Roni’s house. Any debris that piled up against it was quickly pulled under by the force of the river and emerged on the far side, where the tree limbs and whole trunks continued on toward the Mississippi. Judging by the height of the river and the amount the house had sunk, it would strike the bridge’s road deck in line with the windows, and the whole place would come apart as if filled with explosives.

Mercer dropped the shotgun and lunged for the pantry. He grabbed the pull string and yanked open the attic crawl space hatch. Dust fell from the dark opening, but there was also some light filtering down from above. He vaguely recalled seeing a gable window on the side of the house.

There was no ladder, so Mercer clambered up the pantry shelves, kicking loose the few items that hadn’t yet fallen to the floor. He levered himself into the crawl space. The roof rafters met over his head, giving him just enough room to stand in a crouch. The ceiling joists were roughhewn into two-by-sixes, but were so old they could barely take Mercer’s weight. Between them, strips of ancient insulation lay tattered and compressed, no thicker than carpet.

There was a small window on each gable end of the house. Mercer raced for the one that would be above Roni’s bedroom, praying that he hadn’t miscalculated the house’s slow rotation. He had to dance from joist to joist while bending low to keep from smacking his head into one of the thick rafters. Through the dusty window he could see nothing but the screaming river. An occasional wave even lapped at the glass.

He yelled, channeling all his energy into those last careful footsteps, knowing that if he missed a joist he would crash through the ceiling and end up being smeared against the bridge when they struck. A flash of green whizzed past the window as the house made its last rotation. Bridge girder.

It was now or never.

Mercer hurled himself at the window headfirst, punching through the pane with clenched fists as if he was a little kid playing Superman. Glass exploded all around him as he flew several feet, passing between two steel support girders. He hit the bridge’s road deck and tumbled into a ball to protect his head, while behind him Roni Butler’s cozy ranch smashed into the bridge with the detonative violence of a chain-reaction crash.

The entire 1,100-square-foot building splintered when it hit the bridge. Rafters, joists, studs, lathe, plaster, clapboard, shingles, and sheathing. It all blew apart in a maelstrom of wrecked furniture, destroyed appliances, and the accumulation of a lifetime of memories. Most of it was sucked under the bridge by the unending current, but some blew across the two-lane span, nearly rolling Mercer over the far rail as he was pummeled with the remains of the house and all its furnishings and fittings. He ended up shielded from some of the deluge when Roni’s vintage claw-foot tub tumbled against him and he was able to hold on to it as though it were a turtle’s protective shell.

It was over in a violent instant. The house was gone, and Mercer was left lying partially in an overturned bathtub on a rain-lashed bridge, with a once tranquil little stream raging less than a foot below the span. Beyond the bridge were islands of civilization sticking up from the floodwater — telephone poles like lonely sentries, buildings with water up to their eaves, and some buried even deeper so all he could see were their triangular roof peaks. Great swaths of the levee that had once protected the town from the Mississippi were missing, and the river was freed once again to flow where it wanted.

Unlike the levee, the bridge was one of the highest vantage points that wasn’t in danger of collapsing. Mercer was safe for the moment but was frozen to the core, so undoing his belt and using it to lash himself to the bridge took all his concentration, and many minutes longer than it should have. Once he was secure he replaced the ball cap from his pocket on his head to prevent a little heat loss, and soon felt his body begin to shut itself down, as he knew it would. He became drowsy, and no amount of anger or need for revenge could prevent his lids from closing and his mind from turning to blackness. Mercer went slack, and would have eventually been washed from the bridge by a surge of water had he not had the foresight to tie himself off.

He woke three hours later, when the rain had finally stopped and the Army National Guard had launched a fleet of search and rescue helicopters. It was nearing four in the afternoon. The sun wasn’t exactly shining, but the day had brightened enough for the pilot of one of the Blackhawks to see a man roped to the bridge truss. He thought it was a corpse until the man raised a hand and started waving. Ten minutes later the rescue jumper came back aboard with the soaking man secured to a harness.

A paramedic guided Mercer to a bench seat in the noisy cabin as the chopper lifted clear to continue the search. The medic tucked a Mylar space blanket around Mercer’s shoulders and said, “Apart from the fact you’re freezing and wearing Iowa State colors, are you all right?”

“Let me guess,” Mercer managed to say with quivering lips and a shuddering jaw. “You’re all U of I fans?”

“Hell no! We’re from the Illinois National Guard. We’re all Fighting Illini.”

They were a more hated rival in the Big Ten for Mercer’s Penn State Nittany Lions than even the Hawkeyes. “Out of the frying pan…”

He did manage to tell his rescuers about Veronica Butler and the one surviving armed man, knowing that making the report would lead to hours of questioning and the need to write up everything in triplicate — but he needed them to be on the lookout for the old woman and wary of the shooter at the same time.

Within an hour, the chopper had picked up a full load of survivors from various roofs and trees and returned to the Illinois side of the river, where Mercer was soon warmed, hydrated, and settled in a National Guard tent. No trace of Roni or the armed man had been found. The gunman Mercer nailed with the shotgun was fished out of the Mississippi four miles downstream when his body had snagged on a channel marker. The injuries to the body were consistent with Mercer’s story, but without corroborating witnesses he was still treated with suspicion. Mercer was not exactly a prisoner in the Guard encampment, but he hadn’t been allowed to leave either.

It wasn’t until a few hours later that his name was noticed by someone in the D.C. FBI office, and a call was made. A corporal walked into the tent with a cell phone and handed it over.

“What’s this?” Mercer asked.

“Get-out-of-jail-free card. My CO says you can now leave anytime.”

He took the phone. “This is Mercer.”

“Is there always so much death and destruction in your wake?” Special Agent Kelly Hepburn asked.

Mercer grinned, tired and thankful, and said, “Yeah, on most days there is.”