Chapter 9
NINE
Will regrets his decision to leave the market more or less immediately.
The wind, first of all, has grown stronger in the last half an hour or so.
It throws raindrops directly into Will’s face with sharp, stinging strength, each splash just this side of a pinprick.
He can hardly keep his eyes open against the onslaught, and he holds an arm up over his face so he can keep track of Casey, in order to chase him.
Will curses the man for pulling on dark jeans and a black-and-gray flannel the last time he’d changed out of wet clothes—it’s an upsettingly good look for him, obviously, but it does make him harder to track against the current landscape of bruise-like navies and threatening grays.
Will himself, in candy-apple red, is the easier of the two of them to keep an eye on.
Still, he manages to follow Casey back to the staff garage without losing him, falling on his face, getting struck by lightning, or otherwise humiliating himself. He’s pretty pleased with his efforts, until he swings his way up into the passenger side of the pickup and sees Casey jump .
“Jesus!” Casey snaps, visibly unsettled. “How did you… Oh, never mind, there isn’t time. Get out of the cab!”
“No,” Will says calmly, shutting the door and buckling his seatbelt.
He should probably feel a sense of dread, the gut-clenching fear of conflict that always seems to rise any time someone is displeased with him; he finds, instead, that the deep annoyance on Casey’s face is funny.
“That was Mere Gunderson, wasn’t it? She’s a friend of mine.
I was hanging out with her and her kids a few hours ago—and something’s happened to one of them, right?
So, I’m coming. You never know; I might be helpful.
” Casey is staring at him, mouth open, so Will, to prove his final point, adds, “For example, you might want to start driving now.”
“You—oh, God, right,” Casey says, seeming to jerk back to himself.
He turns the key over in the ignition with more force than necessary, the engine whining at him a little as it rolls to life.
He throws the shifter too hard and puts the truck into neutral instead of reverse, and has to correct before he can back up and pull out of the garage.
Raising his voice a little to be heard over the abrupt din of rain against roof as he whips across the parking lot, he adds, “ How did you know it was one of Mere’s kids? ”
“Noel,” Will says back, shaking his head.
“They asked about Walter Gramlich.” At Casey’s split-second glance of confusion, he clarifies: “There was a kid by that name who died here, when I was ten or eleven. A teenager more than a kid, really, I guess. There was some stupid tradition about jumping off the Glen River Bridge… God, you’d have to ask someone else for the details.
All I know is, you got more points—or ‘street cred,’ if you want to call it that—the worse the weather was, or the higher the waterline?—”
Will stops, drawn to an urgent halt by the vision growing nearer by the second through the windshield.
The glorious red oak that they’d watched the lightning strike—it’s coming up alongside them on the right, directly next to Will’s spot in the passenger seat.
The damage had looked plenty bad from back in the market, but from up close like this, in these more intense winds, the left and right sides of the trees look to be held together by hope more than anything else.
Will could swear, as they barrel towards it at a speed he himself would not attempt in this weather, that he hears the wood let out a long, sickening creak.
Will is suddenly intensely aware of several things.
These things include, but are not limited to: the inescapability of gravity; the rapidly decreasing distance between his body and the barely standing tree, which is nearly next to them now; the relative difference in size between a person and a centuries-old oak.
The bulk of his awareness, however, is occupied by the undeniable fact that his body, like all human bodies, is basically a flesh bag of highly temperamental organic machines that don’t tend to continue functioning after being smashed, crushed, pulped, or otherwise reduced to smithereens.
“Casey,” he says, his tone threaded with barely contained panic, “I think maybe we should?—”
“Yep,” Casey says, grim, and guns it.
The car lurches forward—they’re so nearly at the tree as to be basically upon it—and then, all at once, they’re next to it.
And while they should, within the space of a few seconds, be safely past it and on the other side, Will can tell it’s going to go wrong an instant before it does.
As he feels, from the passenger seat, the tire treads losing their grip on the slick surface of the road, he hears more than sees the tree give way.
The sound is enormous , a sharp crack that seems to splinter through the air itself, and activates some scrabbling, primordial survival instinct in the back of Will’s mind.
Then it’s all happening too quickly to keep track of.
The car is spinning—Will can see half the tree falling, in little glimpses at the peak of every turn, like a terrifying flip-book—the tree is landing, knocking off one of Casey’s mirrors but otherwise missing the car—the car is still spinning and—no, wait, it’s…
not. Casey is hooting and hollering in delight and cutting the wheel and?—
“Oh my God, did you spin out on purpose ,” Will demands, all one gasping breath. “You bastard , I thought we were going to die ?—”
“Eh,” Casey says, the smallest edge of a smile stealing onto his face.
“Nah. From that thing?” He shakes his head, and says again: “Nah. Couple broken bones, maybe, or neck injury if you’re very unlucky, but you’d probably live.
” When Will makes an outraged little noise in reply, Casey smirks and adds, “Anyway, I wasn’t spinning out; I was just spinning.
Quicker to get out of the trajectory, in the circumstances.
It’s only spinning out if you’re not in control. ”
Will decides to ignore this and cranes around in his seat to look at the damage behind them.
Whistling, and then remembering his father used to do that and wishing he could wind the sound back into his mouth like fishing wire, he says, “Not going to be pretty getting back in, is it? Whole road’s blocked off. ”
Casey looks in the rearview mirror as Will settles back into his seat, and swears. Then, tightly: “God. Well. Problem for later me, I guess.” Pulling an unhappy face, and clearly mostly to himself, he mutters, “Really piling them up for that guy today, aren’t I? Let’s all spare a thought for him.”
As Casey blows out a breath, and then throws the shifter back into gear and starts peeling down the road, Will does his best to regulate his breathing and heart rate.
In fairness, it’s a bit hard to tell the difference between his own pulse thudding in his ears and the rain still lashing down around them, or to hear the raggedness of his own breathing over the howling of the wind outside.
It’s possible that Will’s doing a great job of regulating his response to that particular near-death experience.
Perhaps he is completely calm, and simply can’t tell.
I think being completely calm isn’t usually a mystery to the self , says the cool, rational, Selma-esque voice in the back of Will’s mind. Also, critical note for you: He’s driving very fast again, but you still don’t know where you’re going , or what on earth has even happened, so …
“Look,” Will says, a sense of dread stealing over him as he remembers what little he knows about what drove them out here in the first place, then deepening as he clocks how quickly the nearby fenceposts are starting to whip past. “I know we don’t, uh…
get along, or whatever, but can you please tell me what the hell is happening?
Meredith and I grew up together, and I literally met all of her kids like three hours ago, and Walter Gramlich did very much die , so.
If it has to be a no-questions-asked thing, then fine, happy to help, whatever it is, but if not… what is it? ”
Casey sucks in a harsh breath. “Yeah. So—Todd? You met Todd?”
“God,” Will says, swallowing hard against a sudden wave of nauseousness. “Yes, I met Todd. I liked Todd. He jumped?”
“Not exactly,” Casey says, in a growl. “I guess he and some of his friends were out there daring each other to jump, but they all told her they didn’t mean it, that it was just messing around, being stupid.
But something happened, I guess part of the bridge collapsed or something, and the rest of them got clear in time but Todd didn’t.
Swept into the river.” Casey glances at the clock, gnawing on his lower lip, and swears again, low, under his breath.
“Jesus,” Will says, swallowing hard.
“Yeah,” Casey says, shaking his head. “His friends couldn’t quite agree, but one of them insisted he saw Todd trying to swim against the current; said he tried to grab for him, and missed.
Mere tried 911, but EMS can’t get over the bridge because it isn’t there .
So she tried me because Todd has GPS tracking on his phone that shows up on hers, one of those family monitoring things, you know, and a few months ago I got him this waterproof phone case because?—”
“He kept breaking them,” Will says, nodding along, too concerned about Todd to remember to be self-conscious about having already discussed Casey with other people in the roughly twenty-four hours since meeting him. “He told me you did, yeah.”