A moment later the line jerked hard, then went completely slack.
The rope had snapped. Sam and Chrissie had been swept down into the tunnel.
The gurgle-slosh-slap of gushing water echoed off the walls, and echoes of the echoes overlaid previous echoes, and Tessa’s heart was pounding so loud she could hear it, but still she should have heard their cries, too, as they were carried away. Yet for one awful moment they were silent.
Then Chrissie coughed again. Only a few feet away.
A flashlight snapped on. Sam was hooding most of the lens with his hand.
Chrissie was sideways in the passage, pressed up out of the worst of the flow, her back and the palms of both hands braced against the side of the tunnel.
Sam stood with his feet planted wide part. Water churned and foamed around his legs. He had gotten turned around. He was facing uphill now.
The rope hadn’t snapped, after all; the tension had been released because both Sam and Chrissie had regained their equilibrium.
“You all right?” Sam whispered to the girl.
She nodded, still gagging on the dirty water she had swallowed. She wrinkled her face in distaste, spat once, twice, and said, “Yuch.”
Looking at Tessa, Sam said, “Okay?”
She couldn’t speak. A rock-hard lump had formed in her throat. She swallowed a few times, blinked. A delayed wave of relief passed through her, reducing the almost unbearable pressure in her chest, and at last she said, “Okay. Yeah. Okay.”
6
Sam was relieved when they got to the end of the culvert without another fall. He stood for a moment, just outside the lower mouth of the drain, happily looking up at the sky. Because of the thick fog, he couldn’t actually see the sky, but that was a technicality; he still felt relieved to be out in the open air again, if still knee-deep in muddy water.
They were virtually in a river now. Either the rain was falling harder in the hills, at the far east end of town, or some breakwater in the system had collapsed. The level had swiftly risen well past midthigh on Sam and nearly to Chrissie’s waist, and the deluge poured from the conduit at their back with impressive power. Keeping their footing in those cataracts was getting more difficult by the second.
He turned, reached for the girl, drew her close, and said, “I’m going to hold tight to your arm from here on.”
She nodded.
The night was grave-deep, and even inches from her face, he could see only a shadowy impression of her features. When he looked up at Tessa, who stood a few feet behind the girl, she was little more than a black shape and might not have been Tessa at all.
Holding fast to the girl, he turned and looked again at the way ahead.
The tunnel had extended for two blocks before pouring the flood forth into another one-block length of open drainage channel, just as Harry had remembered from the days when he had been a kid and, against every admonition of his parents, had played in the drainage system. Thank God for disobedient children.
One block ahead of them, this new section of stone watercourse fed into another concrete culvert. That pipe, according to Harry, terminated at the mouth of the long vertical drain at the west end of town. Supposedly, in the last ten feet of the main sloping line, a row of sturdy, vertical iron bars was set twelve inches apart and extended floor to ceiling, creating a barrier through which only water and smaller objects could pass. There was virtually no chance of being carried all the way into that two-hundred-foot drop.
But Sam didn’t want to risk it. There must be no more falls. After being washed to the end and crashing against the safety barrier, if they were not suffering from myriad broken bones, if they were able to get to their feet and move, climbing back up that long culvert, on a steep slope, against the onrushing force of the water, was not an ordeal he was willing to contemplate, let alone endure.
All of his life he had felt he’d failed people. Though he had been only seven when his mother had died in the accident, he’d always been eaten by guilt related to her death, as if he ought to have been able to save her in spite of his tender age and in spite of having been pinned in the wreckage of the car with her. Later, Sam had never been able to please his drunken, mean, sorry son-of-a-bitch of a father—and had suffered grievously for that failure. Like Harry, he felt that he had failed the people of Vietnam, though the decision to abandon them had been made by authorities who far outranked him and with whom he could have had no influence. Neither of the Bureau agents who had died with him had died because of him, yet he felt he had failed them too. He had failed Karen, somehow, though people told him he was mad to think that he had any responsibility for her cancer; it was just that he couldn’t help thinking that if he had loved her more, loved her harder, she would have found the strength and will to pull through. God knew, he had failed his own son, Scott.