Chapter 6 - The Drowned Road to North Ridge
The two-lane blacktop ended four miles past the old railway crossing, dissolving into a rutted path of packed red clay and crushed limestone.
The rain fell so violently it turned the dirt into a slick slurry of mud that dragged against the front tires of my pickup.
Water was already spilling over the drainage ditches on both sides of the road, carving deep trenches through the gravel.
My headlights cut through the driving downpour, catching the twisted skeletons of dead cedar trees that lined the ridge.
Every bump in the road sent a sharp, white flash of pain through my cracked cheekbone down into the base of my neck.
My split lip had swollen to the point where I could taste fresh blood every time I swallowed.
I kept one hand hard on the steering wheel while my other hand rested over the cold steel of the twenty-four-inch tire iron on the passenger seat.
The quarry had been abandoned since the gravel firm declared bankruptcy six years ago, leaving behind rusted conveyor belts and flooded pits.
The old municipal pump house sat at the lowest contour of the quarry basin, right where the overflow canal connected with the north fork of the river.
If the creek water backed up another eighteen inches, the lower pump chambers would fill like a submarine with an open hatch.
I shifted the truck into four-wheel drive as the grade dropped steeply into the basin.
The mud churned under the treads, throwing clumps of red clay against the undercarriage with heavy, rhythmic thuds.
Halfway down the slope, my headlights swept across a pair of fresh tire tracks cut deep into the mud ahead of me.
The tread pattern was wide and aggressive—it belonged to Mark’s beat-up dual-axle flatbed.
He had driven down this grade less than an hour ago, his heavy truck sliding along the switchbacks before bottoming out near the concrete culvert.
I turned off my headlights, dropping the entire world into complete, roaring blackness.
The only illumination came from the faint green glow of my instrument cluster and the occasional crack of lightning splitting the storm clouds over the river.
I let the truck roll the remaining two hundred yards in neutral, steering by memory and the pale gray reflection of the standing water.
I pulled off the path into a thicket of scrub pine and elderberry bushes that concealed the truck from the lower access road.
I cut the engine.
The sudden silence inside the cab was deafening, broken only by the relentless drumming of rain on the steel roof.
I picked up the three-cell flashlight, clicked the tire iron into the loop of my work belt, and opened the driver’s door into the cold gale.
The freezing mud came halfway up the laces of my leather work boots.
The air smelled of stagnant river mud, rotting wet leaves, and the sharp, chemical tang of old diesel fuel.
Down in the hollow, eighty yards ahead, sat the concrete pump house.
It was a squat, rectangular bunker built in the nineteen-fifties, its concrete walls stained black with streaks of damp mold and mineral runoff.
A single yellow bulb burned behind the rusted wire-mesh glass of the ground-floor doorway.
Mark’s flatbed was parked nose-first against the concrete ramp, its tailgate down and a heavy chain dangling into the mud.
I kept low, moving along the drainage ditch where the water rushed past my shins in a freezing torrent.
My bruised hip protested with every lurching step, but the adrenaline running through my veins completely burned away the exhaustion.
When I reached the rear corner of the pump house, I stopped and pressed my back flat against the wet, cold masonry.
Through the narrow vent near the roofline, I could hear a heavy metal door groaning on rusted hinges.
Then came Mark’s voice, rough, panting, and thick with desperation.
“You just had to sign the third schedule, Dave,” Mark yelled, the echo bouncing off the interior concrete walls.
“One signature on the third page and you would have been sitting on an express coach out to Omaha with ten thousand dollars cash in your coat.”
“Now Arthur says the deal is compromised because your miserable father-in-law walked through the living room door.”
I crept along the wall toward the lower basement window, keeping below the rusty sill.
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Inside, thirty feet below ground level in the lower mechanical pit, water was already swirling around the base of the iron turbine casings.
And strapped to a rusted vertical support column, with his arms pulled back behind his shoulder blades, was David.
