Swollen Spring Rivers

The mud beside Gage’s boot exploded.

There was no cinematic crack of a rifle, no whistle of a bullet. Just the wet, heavy thud of lead hitting wet dirt, followed by the terrifying realization that someone was actively trying to end his life.

"Move!" Gage yelled.

He grabbed Sarah by the collar of her waterproof jacket and yanked her backward. She stumbled over a tree root, her hands flying out to catch her balance. Her palms hit the gravel hard. Blood welled up instantly, mixing with the dirt, but there was no time to look at it.

"Get in the boat," Gage said. His voice was flat. The panic hadn't reached his throat yet. It was still sitting in his stomach, cold and heavy.

Sarah didn't argue. She scrambled on all fours toward the yellow inflatable raft tied to the alder tree. Another bullet hit the aluminum frame of their camp stove. The stove spun into the bushes, hissing propane.

Gage drew his knife. A worn, carbon-steel blade with a duct-taped handle. He didn't waste time untying the mooring line. He slashed through the nylon rope in one violent downward motion. The river, bloated and furious with spring melt, caught the raft instantly. The boat jerked sideways, slamming against the rocky bank.

"Gage!" Sarah screamed.

He threw himself into the back of the raft just as the nose swung out into the main current. He landed hard on the rubber floor, his ribs catching the edge of a plastic cooler. The pain was sharp, electric. He grunted, rolling over and scrambling onto the rower’s seat.

He grabbed the oars. The heavy composite grips felt familiar. They felt like survival.

He pushed off the bank with the left oar, pivoting the raft forward. The river grabbed them. It didn't care about the bullets. It didn't care about the propane stove. It was just gravity and thousands of gallons of snowmelt moving downhill at twenty miles an hour.

Gage looked back at the treeline. The gray morning light was terrible, but he could see three figures moving through the wet ferns. They wore dark tactical gear. One of them stepped out onto the gravel bar, raised a long rifle, and fired again.

The bullet punched through the upper left pontoon of the raft. A sharp hiss of escaping air cut through the roar of the water.

"We're hit!" Sarah yelled. She was curled into a tight ball in the front compartment, her hands over her ears.

"It's a multi-chamber boat," Gage shouted back, leaning his entire body weight into the oars. "It won't sink. Bail the water, Sarah. Stop looking at me and bail."

He dug the blades deep into the muddy water. The river was running high. Trees that normally stood on dry banks were submerged up to their lower branches, creating deadly traps called sweepers. If the raft got pushed into one of those, the current would flip them, pin them against the branches, and drown them in about sixty seconds.

Gage forced his breathing to slow down. One. Two. Pull. The muscles in his shoulders burned.

Then, the itch started.

It wasn't a physical itch on his skin. It was inside his skull. Right behind his eyes. It was the familiar, desperate scratching of his own brain demanding a chemical off-ramp.

Ninety days. He had been clean for ninety days. No pills. No powders. Nothing that made the world soft. But right now, with his heart hammering against his ribs and the adrenaline flooding his system, his body remembered the ultimate panic button. He could almost taste the chalky, bitter residue on the back of his tongue. His hands shook, and it wasn't just the cold spring air.

He bit down on the inside of his cheek. Hard. He tasted copper. The sharp physical pain cut through the cognitive static.

Focus on the water, he told himself. Read the water.

They rounded a sharp bend in the canyon. The sound of the gunfire faded, replaced entirely by the deafening roar of the river. The canyon walls rose up on either side, sheer black rock slick with rain and moss. There was no bank here. No place to pull over. They were committed.

"Are they following us?" Sarah asked. She was using a cut-off milk jug to scoop water out of the bottom of the raft, throwing it over the side in frantic, jagged motions. Her dark hair was plastered to her forehead. The screen of the phone sticking out of her chest pocket was spiderwebbed with cracks.

"They have a zodiac," Gage said, his eyes scanning the rapids ahead. "Motorized. They'll be on us in ten minutes."

"Can we outrun them?"

"In this?" Gage let out a short, humorless laugh. "No. We're in a rubber balloon. They have a thirty-horsepower outboard motor."

"So what do we do?"

"We survive the next mile. Then we find your brother."

Gage shifted his grip on the oars. The river was dropping faster now. The surface was a chaotic mess of standing waves and deep, swirling eddies. The water was the color of weak coffee, churning with dirt and debris.

He thought back to the diner three days ago. Sarah had looked totally out of place sitting in the vinyl booth. She wore a wool trench coat that cost more than Gage's truck. She had ordered a black coffee and didn't touch it.

"I need someone who knows the Upper Cascade run," she had said, sliding a manila envelope across the table. "My brother is out there. He's hiding."

"I don't guide anymore," Gage had replied, pushing the envelope back.

"He stole data from the company we work for. Evidence of illegal chemical dumping into the municipal watershed. They sent people after him. Professionals. If you don't take me up there, they're going to kill him, and they're going to bury the drive."

"Sounds like a police problem."

"The police are funded by the company's municipal grants, Gage. I have ten thousand dollars in cash in my car right now. Another ten when we get him out."

Ten thousand dollars. It was enough to pay off the clinic debt. Enough to get his truck fixed. Enough to keep him fed and distracted for six months. He had looked at her hands. She had been picking at her cuticles so badly they were bleeding. She was terrified.

Now, hitting a massive standing wave that sent a wall of freezing water crashing over the bow of the raft, Gage wondered if twenty grand was enough to cover a closed-casket funeral.

The cold water hit him like a physical blow. It sucked the air out of his lungs. His rain jacket was old, the waterproofing worn off years ago. The chill soaked straight through to his base layer.

"Bail faster!" Gage yelled over the roar.

Sarah was shivering violently, but she kept scooping. She was tough. He gave her that. She hadn't complained once about the cold, the freeze-dried food, or the fact that they were sleeping in the mud.

Behind them, over the sound of the crashing water, Gage heard it.

A high-pitched whine. The sound of a two-stroke outboard engine being pushed to its absolute limit.

He glanced over his shoulder. A quarter-mile back, cutting through the chop, was a black zodiac. There were two men in it. The one in the back was steering, reading the water with terrifying precision. That was Mercer. Gage had recognized him at the camp. Mercer was an ex-military contractor who now handled "corporate security" for the pharmaceutical giant. He was cold, efficient, and didn't care about the collateral damage.

"They're here," Gage said.

Sarah stopped bailing and looked back. Her face went entirely pale. "Gage..."

"Hold on. Seriously. Get down in the floor and hold onto the D-rings."

Gage looked ahead. The canyon narrowed into a choke point. The river funneled between two massive granite boulders, dropping ten feet in a violent, churning waterfall known as 'The Grinder'. In normal summer flows, it was a fun, splashy class-four rapid. Right now, at flood stage, it was a class-five nightmare.

The water poured over the drop, curling back on itself in a massive hydraulic jump—a "hole." If a boat got stuck in a hole that big, the recirculating water would hold it there, spinning it like laundry in a washing machine until the boat flipped or the people inside drowned.

"We're going left!" Gage shouted.

He pulled hard on the right oar, pushing with the left. The raft spun laterally across the current. He had to hit the lip of the drop at the exact right angle, aiming for the "tongue" of smooth water that bypassed the worst of the hole.

His muscles screamed. The craving flared up again, a sharp ache in his joints. His brain whispered, Just let go. It's too hard. Let the river take it.

"Shut up," he muttered through gritted teeth.

He dug the oars in. The raft hit the lip.

For a second, there was weightlessness. The bottom dropped out. The raft fell through the air, crashing into the trough below. The impact was brutal. Gage's teeth slammed together, jarring his skull. A wall of brown water crashed over them, burying the raft completely.

For three seconds, Gage was underwater. It was freezing, chaotic, and dark. The river pulled at his clothes, trying to rip him out of the seat. He held onto the oars with a death grip.

Then, the buoyancy of the raft fought back. They breached the surface, gasping for air. The raft was completely swamped, sluggish and heavy, but they had punched through the hole.

"Sarah!" Gage yelled, coughing up river water.

She was still in the front, coughing, clinging to the straps. "I'm here!"

"Look for the waterfall! On the right bank!"

Gage checked over his shoulder. The black zodiac hit The Grinder. Mercer was a good driver. He didn't avoid the hole; he hit it dead center, using the massive horsepower of the outboard motor to punch straight through the recirculating water. The zodiac launched into the air and crashed down, recovering instantly.

Mercer was gaining.

"There!" Sarah pointed.

Through the mist and rain, Gage saw it. A side stream pouring off the steep canyon wall, creating a fifty-foot waterfall that crashed directly into the river. Behind the veil of falling water was an old, forgotten logging cave from the 1920s. It was the rendezvous point.

Gage leaned into the oars, ferrying the heavy, water-logged raft across the current toward the right bank. The river fought him, pushing them downstream. Every stroke was a negotiation with physics.

He caught the eddy—a pocket of calm, upstream-flowing water directly behind a boulder near the waterfall. The raft spun into the slack water and bumped against the rocky shore.

"Get out!" Gage grabbed the mooring line and vaulted over the side. The water was waist-deep and so cold it felt like fire. He dragged the raft up onto the rocks.

Sarah scrambled out, slipping on the wet stones. They pushed through the thick ferns and ducked behind the curtain of the waterfall.

The noise here was absolute. The crashing water created a wall of sound and spray. The cave entrance was narrow, blocked by fallen timber.

Gage clicked on his headlamp. The beam cut through the dark, illuminating wet stone and old, rotting support beams. It smelled like pine needles and decay.

"David!" Sarah yelled, her voice echoing off the walls.

Nothing.

Gage moved forward, keeping one hand on the cold stone wall. "David. It's Sarah. We're here."

A shadow moved in the back of the cave. The beam of the headlamp caught a figure sitting on a moldy sleeping pad.

It was David. He looked awful. His clothes were soaked, his lips were a bruised shade of blue, and he was shaking so hard his teeth were visibly chattering. Hypothermia. Stage two, at least.

"Sarah?" David's voice was thin, reedy.

Sarah ran to him, dropping to her knees and wrapping her arms around him. "I'm here. I got you. We're getting you out."

"I have it," David whispered. He reached into his jacket with trembling, clumsy fingers. He pulled out a generic, sandwich-sized ziplock bag. Inside was a black USB drive. It looked cheap. It looked like nothing.

"This is everything," David said. "The soil samples, the internal emails. It proves they knew the runoff was highly toxic, and they dumped it anyway to save on disposal costs."

Sarah took the bag and shoved it deep into her chest pocket, zipping it shut. "Okay. We have it. Let's go."

Gage stepped back toward the entrance of the cave, peering through the curtain of the waterfall.

The black zodiac had pulled into the eddy next to their raft. Mercer stepped out. He was holding a suppressed rifle. The other man stayed in the boat, keeping the engine idling.

"They're here," Gage said. The cold in his stomach vanished, replaced by a sudden, intense heat. It was anger. Not at Mercer, but at the situation. At the fact that he was stuck in a wet cave with a freezing kid, fighting a war for a company he didn't care about, all because he needed money to fix a life he had broken himself.

He wasn't going to die here. Not for this.

"Sarah, get your brother up. Move to the back of the cave. There's an old ventilation shaft that leads up to the logging road. It's a tight squeeze, but you can fit."

"What about you?" she asked, pulling David to his feet.

"I'm going to buy you time."

"Gage, he has a gun."

"I have the river."

Gage clicked off his headlamp. He slipped through the gap in the fallen timber, moving silently through the shadows behind the waterfall.

Mercer was standing by the yellow raft, inspecting the cut rope. He was methodical. Calm.

Gage picked up a heavy, smooth river rock. He didn't aim for Mercer. He aimed for the water next to the zodiac. He threw it hard.

The rock hit the water with a loud thunk.

Mercer snapped his rifle toward the sound. The driver in the zodiac turned his head.

In that split second, Gage broke cover. He didn't run at Mercer; he ran at the zodiac. He hit the water sprinting, his boots splashing loudly.

Mercer swung the rifle back, but Gage was already moving. He dove forward, grabbing the mooring line of the zodiac. With one massive heave, utilizing every ounce of leverage his body had left, Gage yanked the line and kicked off the boulder.

The zodiac, idling in the eddy, was suddenly pulled out into the main current.

"Hey!" the driver yelled, grabbing the throttle.

Mercer fired. The bullet skipped off the water inches from Gage's face. The sound of the suppression was like a heavy staple gun.

But the river already had the boat. The current grabbed the heavy black rubber and ripped it downstream. The driver panicked, gunning the engine to fight the flow.

That was his mistake.

Gage knew this section of the river intimately. Just below the eddy was a massive, submerged cedar tree. A strainer. In low water, it was visible. At flood stage, it was completely hidden just beneath the surface, identifiable only by the strange, boiling texture of the water above it.

The driver didn't know how to read the water. He drove straight toward the boil, trying to turn the boat around.

"Cut the engine!" Mercer yelled from the bank, realizing what was happening.

It was too late. The heavy motorized zodiac slammed into the submerged cedar trunk. The sheer force of the current pinned the boat against the wood. The water piled up against the upstream side of the pontoon. In less than two seconds, the river grabbed the edge of the boat and flipped it violently.

The driver was thrown into the freezing, chaotic water, instantly swept under the branches. The outboard motor hit the rocks with a sickening crunch, and the boat folded in half, trapped forever by the immense pressure of the river.

Mercer stood on the bank, watching his exit strategy get swallowed by the water. He slowly lowered his rifle. He turned back toward the waterfall, scanning the rocks.

Gage was gone. He was already halfway up the mud-slicked trail leading to the ventilation shaft, his lungs burning, his hands bleeding, and his mind entirely clear.

He didn't want a pill. He didn't want to check out. The cold, the pain, the dirt beneath his fingernails—it was real. It was sharp. It meant he was alive.

He reached the top of the shaft, pulling himself out into the gray, rainy woods. Sarah and David were huddled under a massive fir tree. David was shivering, but he was holding a space blanket tight around his shoulders.

"He's trapped down there," Gage said, leaning against the bark of the tree, catching his breath. "No boat. No radio signal in the canyon. It's a ten-mile hike out through thick brush."

Sarah let out a ragged sigh, leaning her head back against the trunk. "We did it."

Gage looked down at his trembling hands. The withdrawal itch was gone, replaced by the deep, heavy exhaustion of survival. He looked out through the trees, past the canyon edge.

The rain was letting up. The forest was quiet, save for the distant, muffled roar of the river below.

Gage turned to check the trail ahead, planning their route back to the highway. As he scanned the canopy, his eyes caught something unnatural.

Hovering silently in the upper branches of a dead hemlock tree, fifty yards away, was a small, matte-black quadcopter drone. Its camera lens was pointed directly at them. Underneath the chassis, a tiny red light blinked slowly, rhythmically.

The water washed over the rocks down below, cold and indifferent, but the red blinking light in the treeline meant the river was the least of their problems.