Chapter 9 #2
“Thank God, right?” Casey says, with a slightly shaky laugh.
For a second, he looks almost green in the dim light of the cab, but it might be a reflection from the lighting; when he speaks again, his voice is steadier.
“Anyway, the phone is pinging somewhere on the perimeter of the property line—Meredith says it bounced around for a while, and now it looks like it’s stopped right at the edge of the river.
She hopes it’s the edge of the river, anyway.
She sounded pretty…” He trails off without finishing the sentence, but Will can imagine; no parent is going to sound anything but gut-wrenchingly frantic in that situation.
Casey leans forward a little, obviously urging the car to pick up yet another few miles per hour of speed, as he says, “This is just the fastest route. She’s on her way, but with the weather this crazy she’s not sure how long?—”
“No, of course,” Will says, shaking his head, sick with worry for her, for Todd. “Someone had to go, in case—sometimes it just comes down to timing, right, and—you couldn’t—of course you had to go.”
“Yeah,” Casey says, after a long, slow beat. “That’s right.”
Silence blooms out between them, yawning into the heart of the car even as they hurtle down the rain-slick road, barely able to see more than a few feet in front of them through the thick curtain of the downpour.
Will tries not to let his newly acquired fear of hydroplaning to his quick and painful death show in his face or body language, contains himself to shifting a little against the worn leather seat covers when he notices the speedometer climbing into territory he wouldn’t take it on a sunny day.
Still, it’s not an uncomfortable silence, except in all the ways that it is, because it’s a fraught, uncertain moment, and those are always uncomfortable.
But between them, in some little way, something that was tight and tense seems to uncurl a little, in spite of the circumstances—soothed like a panicky animal by the urgency of the task, or the hum of the motor.
It’s a stolen moment of peace, though, too much to face to allow them much more than a breath or two of pause, and after a second, Will finally remembers to say: “Oh! Where are we going? You said edge of the property line, but I’m pretty sure—” He peers out into the wet, angry blackness that was once a familiar thoroughfare, trying to orient himself, then continues: “Yeah, I thought so—look, if we keep going this way we’re going to hit that stupid forest, and unless things have changed a lot since I was a kid, the owners aren’t going to let us cut through?—”
“Oh, no, definitely not,” Casey agrees, sounding sour. “ Not a friendly bunch; I’m not interested in tangling with them today. Doubt they’d help us even for a kid’s life, to be honest. But it’s not going to be an issue—I know a shortcut.”
“A shortcut?” Will pulls up his mental map of the farm, trying to think of how this could possibly be so.
They pulled out of the market parking lot and turned left on the main road; Robertson property is passing them quickly by on the right.
They’re already beyond the outbuildings, the first orchard, and the cornfield, the final fence marking the property line wicking by, and all that’s left between here and the forest is?—
“Oh my God,” Will says, as he sees Casey flip his turn signal and start twisting the wheel, “are you going to use the private road? It’s blocked off, man!
Look!” He gestures at the length of metal chain, fitted in the middle with a Private road: no access sign, which is hanging from two posts on either side of the road.
“Oh no,” Casey says sarcastically, rolling his eyes even as he guns the engine.
“A single length of rusty chain! However will I defeat that with only the power of my enormous truck ,” and then he’s driving through it as though it’s nothing, the Private road sign banging as it hits the ground behind them.
“That…did not occur to me as an option,” Will admits, impressed in spite of himself. There’s something oddly attractive about the man’s sheer audacity, his willingness to do things that Will would never even consider trying himself.
“Shouldn’t be private, anyway,” Casey mutters. “It’s not like it’s somebody’s driveway. Road’s a road. Sometimes there’s an emergency .”
Will swallows, his thoughts sliding, the way he’s been willing them not to, to what might be happening to Todd right now. Casey’s must, too, because they fall into a tense, anxious silence, which lasts for the last few minutes of their breathtakingly fast drive.
Abruptly, Casey whips the wheel to the right, and they’re barreling through a tight gap in the fence line that Will never would have seen, let alone cleared, in time.
It puts them back on Robertson land, as close to the river as even the farm’s dirt roads get, and Will expects Casey to stop the car.
Instead, he continues to drive, urging the truck off the dirt road and through an already winterized planting field, directly towards a line of thin, scraggly maple trees, unhappy in their placements at the edge of an eroding slope.
Will knows those trees were put there to denote the end of the plantable ground, and that beyond them sits a long, low incline down to the riverbank, and thus the water .
If someone were to drive directly through one of the gaps between those trees, as Will is half-convinced Casey intends to do, then that person and any unfortunate passenger who happened to be with them would briefly fly through the air before crashing into the water. Will takes deep breath in and…
…releases it in one shocked, punched-out exhale when Casey throws the emergency brake, sends the car spinning sideways through the mud before it skids to a perfect stop mere inches from the tree line.
“Wow,” Will breathes, not meaning to, so surprised to be alive that he can’t help it. The skill it must take to drive a car so dangerously without crashing it?—
But Casey’s already out of the car, calling, “Are you coming or not?” over his shoulder, running towards the river.
Will jolts back to himself and, hurrying to catch up, doesn’t bother to close the passenger-side door.
Casey didn’t shut his door, either, or cut the ignition, so this leaves the car still on, engine humming, both doors wide.
Backlit by the latest flash of lightning, it’s like a still from a horror movie, as though someone has just finished abducting them.
Part of Will—a young part, and, in another way, an old part—wants to hurry back and close things up before he can get in trouble for whatever mess is left, but he pushes that down, ignores it.
The interiors will get a little wet, probably; it’s not as though it matters.
It’s not as though it’s really important.
Will dashes forward, working hard to make good time through the thick, sinking soup the storm’s made of the ground, until he finally catches up with Casey, who, still running and annoyingly much less out of breath than Will, says, “I thought about calling out to him, but if he’s in the water, is there any point? ”
“He might not be,” Will points out, even though he thinks his out-of-shape lungs might blow up like a pufferfish and kill him if he tries to scream Todd’s name, just to put themselves out of their misery. “Maybe he pulled himself out. Can’t hurt to try.”
“Christ. Yeah, you’re right,” Casey says, his footfalls hard, his neck telescoping left and right as he runs, seemingly quite easily , at a speed that for Will is an all-out sprint.
They both scream out Todd’s name several times, Will’s lungs sending him a series of increasingly upset memos about it, but then Casey’s voice cracks and he snaps, “I’m too close to this to think clearly.
I keep cycling back to statistics about—” He whips his head around to give Will a desperate look.
“I understand that you don’t like me, and that’s fine, I can’t say I like you so much, either.
But if you help me get Todd out safe, I’ll—oh, I don’t know.
Clear out of the damn house, if that’s what you want, or?—”
“Oh my God, do I look evil to you? Did I grow some little goatee overnight I’m not aware of?
I don’t need an incentive for keeping teenagers from dying!
Why do you think I got in the truck in the first place?
” Will snaps, trying to rein in the part of himself that he knows is veering towards absurdity and hysteria because it doesn’t want to face the sobering realities of the present.
Giving himself a little internal slap, he says, “Look, I’m happy to help, but where are we running to?
Did Mere give you coordinates? Or just?—”
“She said back half of the property, across from that little picnic area on the other bank of the river.” Casey reaches the edge of the river as he says this, the closest he can get to it without actively wading in, and doesn’t exactly stop running; instead, he switches to jogging in place, whipping his head around to try to see as far as he can in either direction, as though afraid to waste a single moment being still.
Will, a few steps behind him, thinks that’s fair, but he does have to pause briefly and gasp for breath as he, too, looks around to orient himself.
Casey sounds like he’s starting to really panic, a thread of terror in his voice Will wouldn’t necessarily have expected from him, as he says, “She sent me a screenshot, but it’s just a radius, and I’ve never spent that much time back here, except dealing with the corn, and?— ”