splashed Hatch’s face, desperately hoping to bring him around. But he
was sunk in deeper levels of unconsciousness than mere concussive sleep,
perhaps in a coma as plumbless as a mid-ocean trench.
Swirling water rose to the bottom of the steering wheel.
Frantically Lindsey ripped at Hatch’s safety harness, trying to strip it
away from him, only half aware of the hot flashes of pain when she tore
a couple of fingernails.
“Hatch, damn it!”
The water was halfway up the steering wheel, and the Honda all but
ceased its forward movement. It was too heavy now to be budged by the
persistent pressure of the river behind it.
Hatch was five-feet-ten, a hundred and sixty pounds, only average in
size, but he might as well have been a giant. As dead weight, resistant
to her every effort, he was virtually immovable. Tugging, shoving,
wrenching, clawing, Lindsey struggled to free him, and by the time she
finally managed to disentangle him from the straps, the water had risen
over the top of the dashboard, more than halfway up her chest. It was
even higher on Hatch, just under his chin, because he was slumped in his
seat.
The river was unbelievably icy, and Lindsey felt the warmth pumping out
of her body as if it were blood gushing from a severed artery. As body
heat bled from her, the cold bled in, and her muscles began to ache.
Nevertheless, she welcomed the rising flood because it would make Hatch
buoyant and therefore easier to maneuver out from under the wheel and
through the shattered windshield. That was her theory, anyway, but when
she tugged on him, he seemed heavier than ever, and now the water was at
his lips.
“Come on, come on,” she said furiously, “you’re gonna drown, damn it!”
2
Finally pulling his beer truck off the road, Bill Cooper broadcast a
Mayday on his CB radio. Another trucker responded and, equipped with a
cellular telephone as well as a CB, promised to call the authorities in
nearby Big Bear.
Bill hung up the citizen’s-band handset, took a long-handled six-battery
flashlight from under the driver’s seat, and stepped out into the storm.
The frigid wind cut through even his fleece-lined denim jacket, but the
bitterness of the winter night was not half as icy as his stomach, which
ha turned sour and cold as he had watched the Honda spin its luckless
occupants down the highway and over the brink of the chasm.
He hurried across the slippery pavement and along the shoulder to the
missing section of guardrail. He hoped to see the Honda close below,
caught up against the trunk of a tree. But there were no trees on that
slope-just a smooth mantle of snow from previous storms, scarred by the
passage of the car, disappearing beyond the reach of his flashlight
beam.
An almost disabling pang of guilt stabbed through him. He’d been
drinking again. Not much. A few shots out of the flask he carried.
He had been certain he was sober when he’d started up the mountain.
Now he wasn’t so sure. He felt… fuzzy. And suddenly it seemed
stupid to have tried to make a delivery with the weather turning ugly so
fast.
Below him, the abyss appeared supernaturally bottomless, and the
apparent extreme depth engendered in Bill the feeling that he was gazing
into the damnation to which he’d be delivered when his own life ended.
He was paralyzed by that sense of futility that sometimes overcame even
the best of men-though usually when they were alone in a bedroom,
staring at the meaningless patterns of shadows on the ceiling at three
o’clock in the morning.
Then the curtains of snow parted for a moment, and he saw the floor of
the ravine about a hundred or a hundred and fifty feet below, not as
deep as he had feared. He stepped through the gap in the guardrail,
intending to crab down the treacherous hillside and assist the survivors
if there were any. Instead he hesitated on the narrow shelf of flat
earth at the brink of the slope because he was whiskey-dizzy but also
because he could not see where the car had come to rest.