The Child Fixer

By Martin Beaulieu

John Voorman, guilty of vehicular homicide, makes a deal with the devil to atone for his crime. In exchange for the ability to cure fatal diseases in children, he agrees to give up his mortal soul. But, as they say, the devil is in the details. John discovers that a demonic, parasitic slug inserted into his body will perform the cures. As John soon learns, its benign healing powers are paired with an even greater desire to kill.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Apr 3, 2019
• ISBN: 9780228805748

Book preview

Prologue

The bicycle hit the grill, flew off at a tangent, hit a utility pole, and bounced back onto the road; the boy’s momentum carried him forward, into the windshield. The windshield held fast, but the boy’s head did not. His nose broke first, venting blood that smeared the glass like road slush sprayed from a passing SUV. The boy’s head was spared for the millisecond it took for the nose to collapse, then fracture like a cracked egg. Under the continuing stress of his forward motion, the boy’s neck snapped backward and broke. One eye was jolted out of its socket and briefly hung from the eye cavity like a tetherball on a string. As the boy slid off the hood, the dangling eye, still partially attached by a shred of muscle, traced a small stream of clear fluid as it slithered through the blood that stained the windshield and obscured the driver’s sight.

Not that he could see clearly anyway. The alcohol content in his blood had transformed his vision into a trancelike gaze that placed him well beyond the ability to react to any road emergency. His first awareness came when the boy crashed into his windshield, and even that solid contact had been distorted. He first thought someone had thrown a watermelon at the car, for the impact had a made a gourd-like sound – hollow, resonant, and somehow invasive, as if the boy’s catapult into his windshield had been deliberate. Then as he veered and rode over the bicycle, which was already damaged beyond repair, he thought he had perhaps struck someone’s trash container. People were always putting their garbage cans on the street, forcing drivers to steer around them.

Muttering a curse aimed at such thoughtless people, he fumbled for the wiper button on his steering column and turned his washers on. The car’s right wheel rolled onto the curb while the washer fluid smeared, then, cleared the blood, but he was able to guide it back onto the road without mishap. He was, after all, a pretty good driver.

It was only when the police arrived the next day to arrest him that he learned of the boy’s death.

Chapter One

The Westmorland Institution, located in Dorchester, New Brunswick, is a minimum-security prison reserved for inmates serving sentences of less than two years. It is where men who kill boys with their cars are sent. John Voorman, convicted child killer, haunted by dreams of soaring, bursting children, lay on his cot, as he did nearly every tortured night, and waited for the deliverance of daybreak. It rarely arrived quickly, providing him ample time to reflect upon his great sin.

Children were not supposed to die. They were supposed to grow up and eventually become old men. But the child he had killed hadn’t grown into an old man. His life had ended quickly and explosively, between heartbeats, never knowing what struck him. He had died for no sane reason that he could discern. Yes, the boy had perished because he had been drinking – been drunk – and had unknowingly run him down with his car. That was an indisputable fact, unarguable in a court of law. But that only explained the mechanics of the event. It didn’t explain the why of it; it didn’t explain the arcane forces that had converged to drive the boy into the oblivion of death.

Why does a child die?

That was the question that plagued him now. Was it a pre-ordained thing, set in the cosmos through some complex, unchangeable formula? Or was it some chance occurrence dictated solely by the laws of time and space?

The boy – his name had been Klaus White – had cycled into the killing place at precisely the same time his car had driven through it. But Klaus hadn’t chosen the place, he recalled. At age nine, when he should have been getting ready for bed, his mother had sent him to the convenience store for a pack of cigarettes. As for the time, an interval of ten seconds either way – a moment of coasting, or acceleration, perhaps – would have placed him on a different street, safe from a drunken driver who had no reason whatsoever to be drunk other than it was an acceptable thing to do.

His drunkenness had killed a boy. What were the odds that two people unknown to each other would meet in such a violent manner at such an improbable juxtaposition of place and time? According to his statistics professor in college, the chances of sequential lottery numbers winning the big prize were as good as the hodgepodge selections that normally won. Yet, he had never heard of it happening.

Spaces were unique, recognized by scientific law as inviolate. Objects could enter a space, but could never share it. Time was measured in intervals, and its intersection with space was what caused the occurrence of events, or at least, their convergence. These intersections also appeared to have no set pattern. They happened when they happened. As a result, two unrelated forces, both moving randomly and without pre-meditation, had sent Klaus to oblivion, and him to prison for two years, less a day.

Had the boy’s death been pre-ordained? If so, when? When his mother had sent him into the night to buy cigarettes, even though the purchase of cigarettes by a minor was illegal? When the convenience store clerk had sold him the cigarettes, also against the law? When God decided? Or when he himself had chosen to go behind the wheel in a drunken state? Voorman’s lawyer had argued that all had a hand in it; and though it had been his wheel, his car, his deed, his sentence had been reduced to acknowledge the additional culpability of the mother, and of the convenience store owner who had paid a fine and had been banned from selling cigarettes for two months. God’s culpability, if any, had not been addressed.

***

His daily routine was constant. Except when the rains came, John spent his days in the fields pulling weeds. Evenings, he prayed and thought about the boy. His late nights were reserved for nightmares – very bad ones. They were the kind that kept other inmates from sleeping.

He had never met Klaus, of course, but he had seen a photograph. Nine years old – small for his age, according to the news article – blond-haired, green-eyed, with dimpled cheeks. In the photograph, the boy had appeared immortal. What child didn’t?

He had said all the right words at the trial. I’m so very sorry. If I could change what happened, I would. I’d bring him back to life, if it were possible. Mr. and Mrs. White didn’t care about words, nor did they care that his anguish was indelibly etched on his features like burn scars from a fire. They had their own pain to deal with and had no time for his.

That was only right.

They had sent him a priest. Oddly, the priest had not spoken of forgiveness. Instead, he had spoken about feelings – of guilt, of anger, of self-loathing – all of which would fade once his debt to society had been paid. But Voorman’s debt wasn’t to society; it was to a boy who was forever beyond help.

***

Mornings, John took breakfast with Neil Buttery. Neil was in for taking a baseball bat to his girlfriend’s car, and for taking a fist to her face. The fist part, he had explained to the judge, had been accidental. He had only meant to thump it against the sheetrock behind her, as sort of a punctuation mark for his anger, which had been directed mostly at himself for smashing the car’s windshield. The judge had wryly noted that Buttery’s girlfriend seemed to have run into more than one of Buttery’s punctuation marks, and had sentenced him to fourteen months.

You need to work out your issues, man, Buttery said, splattering porridge with his spoon. You howled half the night through.

I killed a boy, John replied.

Yeah, yeah. Cry me a river. The kid rolled snake eyes and crapped out. Get over it.

How do I do that? John asked bitterly.

When I have it out with my woman, I apologize after. Works every time. It makes for great sex afterwards, too.

How do you apologize once she’s dead?

Shit, she ain’t never gonna die. At least not before me. Woman’s got a heart like vulcanized rubber.

Buttery pointed his spoon at John. "But suppose she does. Suppose she gets run over by a Mac truck, or a piano falls out a window and lands on her head. Wham! She gets flattened, and her old man plants her. So now she’s on the other side of Purley’s gates. Can’t see her, can’t touch her. But man, nobody ever said them gates was soundproof! That’s your problem, man. You’ve got voices in your head."

You think if I go to his grave, Klaus will forgive me?

Buttery swallowed coffee. Who’s Klaus?

The boy I killed.

He might.

What about God?

What about Him?

Will He forgive me?

Shit, God don’t care about no snot nosed kid dumb enough to get himself splattered all over a windshield like a mosquito. He’s too busy sortin’ out dead Jews and Arabs.

You’re an insensitive prick, you know that?

My mama’s fault, she had me circumcised when I was born. Haw, haw, haw!

Three days later, John was still brooding over Buttery’s words. For certain, Neil Buttery was no shrink. His solutions, such as they were, tended to be more misdirected than direct, but he had been right about one thing: crassly expressed or not, God wasn’t listening.

Chapter Two

Kenny Drummond was stoned – high as a kite. Or, as he liked to put it, high as a kike on a cross. He had once dated a university professor who taught a class in semantics. She was hot, but she couldn’t confine her teaching to the classroom. She told him that the word kike took its roots from Ellis Island and had nothing to do with the crucifixion of Jesus. It came from the word kikel, Yiddish for circle. Illiterate Jewish immigrants, she had explained patiently, had viewed the customary X mark requested on immigration entry documents for unlettered applicants as an evil sign, and instead had signed their forms with a circle. Kenny had listened patiently through her lesson, then, had made her high as a kike on a cross by spiking her drink. When she had become sufficiently groggy, he had sodomized the semantics out of her, an act that had soured their relationship from that day forward. That bad experience had left him with the life-long conviction that women were hard to figure out.

Take his new girlfriend, for example. She liked to dance naked in front of men, and did it so well that she was paid for it. But when her fifteen-year-old son had gotten his hands on a fake Id and caught her act at the Harvest Club, she had freaked out. So now the kid was grounded, and so was he.

Why should I be grounded too? Kenny had protested. I didn’t give him the damn Id.

You’re not grounded, you’re babysitting.

Great. I’m baby-sitting a fifteen-year-old kid bigger than Arnold Schwarzenegger. I might not be grounded, but it sure feels like it.

You let him go out on a school night. Call it being grounded… call it babysitting… I don’t care.

Last time I checked, I wasn’t the kid’s old man.

You live here, don’t you?

That was true enough. He’d been shacked up with Leona for about two months, but in his view, that didn’t constitute a commitment to fatherhood. Hell, he was more apt to bugger the little prick than befriend him.

He was only kidding about the buggering part, of course, because that was a fag thing to do and as far as he knew, neither he nor the kid, were bent in that direction. But he wasn’t a damn babysitter, either; a fact that he repeated several times in the hope that Leona would get it.

I told you when you moved in that it was going to be a package deal. Spend some time bonding, for Christ’s sake.

That was true too – Leona had told him that, he recalled. The problem was, he wasn’t into bonding. Why couldn’t he just bang her without having to play substitute daddy seven days a week? Hell, the kid didn’t even like hockey.

Right now, the giant was laid out in his bedroom, comfortably numb, with a little extra dose to keep him that way. The kid’s girlfriend, seated next to him, was not only comfortably numb, but comfortably naked as well. Maybe she was a little too comfortable, he reflected, because she seemed more zoned out than zoned in. His pecker was rock-hard and ready for a riot, but his girlfriend’s kid’s girlfriend didn’t seem to be aware that the family jewels were primed and ready for a good airing.

Restaurant’s open for business, honey, he coaxed. And I’m lettin’ you know right now, this ain’t no appetizer, it’s the friggin’ main course.

The kid’s girlfriend’s head tipped sideways and she stared at him through glassy eyes. A bit of drool trickled out of the corner of her mouth. Yep, too numb, Kenny decided. But what the hell, numb worked okay for him.

Undaunted by her lassitude, he took her hand and placed it firmly around his member. He didn’t require one hundred percent cooperation, but he did appreciate a little tug of affection now and then.

He got it. Unexpectedly, the girl squeezed his penis, choking it hard enough to deflate it. Kenny’s mouth popped open in surprise at how quickly it had happened. Damn, the bitch had turned his tube into a flat tire! Then her arm jerked sideways. The pain of having his penis stretched almost to the point of ripping penetrated into his drug haze, causing him to howl with pain.

Ow, you bitch!

He grabbed her hand and pried her fingers loose. She clenched her empty fist, and her entire body began jerking. When she bit off the tip of her tongue and blood began spurting through her teeth, Kenny realized the girl was having convulsions.

That was bad.

She can’t really be doing this to me, he reasoned. He was trying to be analytical about the matter, and managed it well enough to dampen the tiny twinge of apprehension coaxed into wakefulness by her spasm.

It was a drowsy drug. It shouldn’t be causing her body to do the Shimmy, Shimmy, Ko-ko-bop. If anything it should put her to sleep. Like her boyfriend Jethro in the back room. The boyfriend was big as a moose, and Kenny had given him a moose-sized shot to keep him down. Had he geared back for the girlfriend? He couldn’t remember, and anyway, there was no point in second guessing himself – the situation was what it was.

He thought he should do something about the severed tongue. Maybe pry her mouth open to keep her from swallowing what was left of it. Christ no! He could lose a finger doing that. A bitch that could bite her own tongue in two had genuine alligator jaws. Definitely not a safe place for dick or digit.

The girl’s leg suddenly thrashed out and Kenny vacated the couch to give her room, letting her do the jiggy-boo while he tried to fathom his next move. Before he could decide, the girlfriend’s eyes suddenly rolled back into her head and her body became still. Out like a light, Kenny guessed, with a modicum of relief. He returned to the sofa and lifted a breast to feel her pump.

There was no heartbeat.

Not out like a light, but out for good. Tits still felt nice, though.

That however, wasn’t much consolation. He didn’t need to be at his best to realize that this little development was a disaster in the making.

He left the girl in the living room and went to the kitchen to pour a drink. He needed something to clear his spinning head. He sloshed his girlfriend’s cheap whiskey all over the countertop, but managed to get enough in a glass to suit him. Throwing his head back to line up his throat for a straight run into his stomach, Kenny tossed the drink down. The raw liquor caused his head to spin the wrong way, and he had to brace himself against the countertop to keep from falling on his ass.

His ass.

Yeah, that was a good place to start – get his ass covered. He pushed away from the counter and wobbled on shaky legs back into the living room. His clothes were piled helter-skelter on the floor, and he struggled into them. Having exhausted his energy for the moment, he sat down to try to think what else to do. What was the plan? Oh, yeah. He was going to screw the broad and hope she wouldn’t remember. Failing that, he hoped she would think the boyfriend had done it. Good plan, even if it hadn’t worked.

He didn’t really have a plan B, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t think one up. In fact, he already had – it was time to take the girl on a little road trip. He didn’t think he was up to carrying her but he probably could drag her – they didn’t have far to go.

Taking hold of the girlfriend’s ankles, Kenny pulled and hauled her off the couch. Her head thumped on the hardwood floor, causing him to curse softly.

Don’t damage her, you ass. Those CSI dicks loved bruises the way he loved pussy. They jumped all over mistakes like that.

He managed to thread her around the furniture and around corners without bumping her again; first the corner from the living room to the hallway, then around the last corner into the sleeping stud’s bedroom. Once by the bed, Kenny dropped her ankles, exchanging them for her armpits. He then hoisted her onto the bed next to the moose. Lifting her was hot work. As he paused to catch his wind, Kenny decided it was true what they said about dead weight.

What next?

Oh yeah. Strip the stud – which was easier said than done. The young fool had fallen asleep face down, and it was all Kenny could manage to undo his jeans and get them off. Removing the kid’s t-shirt wasn’t any easier. Kenny had to actually climb on the bed and kneel by the headboard so that he could work the shirt off the kid’s torso.

There. Naked as a jaybird. Nakeder, since a jaybird had feathers.

Kenny crawled over the sleeping teen’s back and rolled off the bed. He was lathered with sweat. One benefit, though, was that the workout had helped him to clear his head a bit, a belief that was illusory. His efforts had only served to speed the ecstasy more quickly through his body.

The next step was obvious – get some juice into the girl. That too, was easier said than done. Jethro was lost in dreamland and Kenny doubted he’d be up for it, figuratively speaking. Literally speaking too, come to think of it. Well, he could always go for the old hand in the cookie jar trick.

He grabbed the kid’s hand and straightened the middle finger. He couldn’t exactly remember the boy’s name, which, in the grand scheme of things, seemed like a small detail. But given their sudden intimacy, he felt bad that he couldn’t.

Not intimacy, bonding.

Kenny suppressed a giggle. Son of a gun, he was doing it; he was bonding! He almost wished Leona were here to see it, unbeliever that she was. Oh well, she’d see soon enough.

You are the glue, I am the gun, he twittered to the unconscious teen.

Okay, enough bonding. Back to work.

He placed the boy’s hand, with its extended finger, between the girlfriend’s legs and pushed. The hand was as limp as a rubber duck, causing Kenny to wonder if the stud might have croaked too. Naw, he decided. It would take a kilo to put that moose down for good.

He stood back to admire his work. The kid would never win an Oscar for acting, but the girlfriend was a natural. At least she wasn’t complaining. He wondered what Leona would say when she came into the bedroom and caught her son diddling a dead girl with half a tongue. He thought about that for a moment because it sounded a bit off. Diddling with a finger. Jethro had the finger… the girl had the half tongue thingy. Half tongue in her thingy? Man his brain was really fucked up! No matter. He didn’t plan to stick around, so no need to do the math on what was what. It was time to do the Scooby-Doo out the door.

***

He was halfway through the living room when the apartment door suddenly burst open and Leona walked in. Kenny stared at her blankly for a moment before finding his voice.

Leona, you’re home early. His voice sounded a mite squeaky – actually, more than a mite squeaky – but Leona didn’t notice.

Got a bitching headache, she snapped with her customary impatient tone as she breezed through the living room, headed for the kitchen.

Kenny scuttled to the sofa and kicked the girl’s clothes out of sight. Where the fuck was the tongue? In her thingy? No, on the floor somewhere. Or in the couch. He decided it didn’t matter. If he couldn’t see it, chances were Leona wouldn’t either.

Where’s the Tylenol? Kenny heard the sound of running water.

In the spice cabinet, next to the chili powder where you left it. It pleased Kenny that he could remember that. His wits were returning to form.

Christ, now I’m cooking with damn pills for seasoning.

Kenny entered the kitchen in time to see her shake four pills into her hand. She popped them in her mouth and washed them down with water.

Where’s Danny?

The kid’s name is Danny. How about that?

Danny’s in the bedroom doing his homework. He said he didn’t want anybody bothering him.

Uh-uh. Danny doesn’t do homework without music.

Kenny thought furiously. He needed more than a ten second head start if he expected to vacate without complications. I’ve got a headache myself. I told him to turn it off.

Bullshit. The day Danny turns off his tunes on your say so is the day I fart in Technicolor. Leona put her glass down and headed for the bedroom.

Kenny decided it was past time to pull a Chuck Berry and motor-vate over the hill. He didn’t bother with his things. He reached the door, fumbled with the latch a bit before it released, but the amount of lost time was minimal, thankfully. Then he was in the hallway. He had forgotten which way to turn to reach the elevator. He guessed left and found the stairs instead, taking them three at a time. Leona and her damn headaches. He couldn’t help but think about them as he ran. It was Leona’s fault that he was so horny all the time. If it wasn’t her headaches, it was her time of month. If it wasn’t her time, it was because she didn’t want Danny to hear, or some other lame excuse. He had hooked up with her in the belief that a stripper would put out now and again. That hadn’t been the case with Leona. She put out about as often as she put out the cat, which wasn’t often, since she didn’t own one.

Wimmen. He hadn’t even buggered her.

The unfairness of it all caused him to miss a step, with the result that he turned an ankle and hurtled down the last flight headfirst. He threw out his arm to fend off collision with the end wall and took the main force of the fall on his shoulder. He heard his collar bone snap, but felt no pain. Ecstasy must be yab-a-dab-a-doing through my nerve endings, he thought with mild satisfaction. Gotta try that stuff on my hemorrhoids some day. No more today, though. Not the best time for a freak-out episode.

He lay there for a moment, reconfiguring his senses. His head was spinning – or the stairs were – all three flights, as if mounted on a gyroscope. He extended his arm and swept it in an arc, counterclockwise to the whirling stairwell. He heard a clink as his ring clashed against the railing. Okay, it was close enough to grab.

Using his good arm, he seized the rail and pulled himself up. The stairwell stopped spinning, and he filed the information for later use – long views made you dizzy, short views allowed you to focus. He took a step and felt a sharp pain in his ankle. Then the pain from his shoulder kicked in, causing him to suck in his breath with an audible gasp. He could hear screaming: not him, Leona. He took the shrieking as a sign that he was running out of minutes, which meant that he couldn’t afford to baby his injuries. He needed to get out of the building ASAP, before Leona called the cops.

Pushing the panic bar on the exit door, Kenny hobbled into the hallway before realizing he had taken another wrong turn. He heard the door snick shut behind him, and cursed. A right turn at the stairwell would have taken him to the garage where Leona always parked the car. Instead of turning right, he had veered left, into the hallway. He would need a key card to get back through.

He groped for his wallet, but couldn’t find it. Must have left it back at the apartment. It was not a welcome thought. No wallet meant no pass card, and no money. If he ever got out of the building, he’d have to steal his way to safety.

Left without a choice, he shambled awkwardly down the hall to the front entrance. His shoulder was aching horribly now and his ankle hurt like hell, but Kenny knew he couldn’t stop. Leona could move fast when it suited her, and tonight he had provided her with all the motivation in the world to shake a leg. Why the hell couldn’t she have stayed at work, prancing her ass off for drunken college kids?

After what seemed an endless, pain-filled walk down the corridor, Kenny finally reached the front entrance. He pushed open the main door with his good hand and staggered out onto York street. For a moment, he just stood, trying to reclaim his sense of direction from his drugged brain. A fragment from an old song came to him. East is East and West is West. And something about babies in Mecca. Not much help there, he decided. He could hear sirens now, so Leona must have sounded the alarm. Where the hell was he? He wasn’t far from an intersection, so he limped to the stoplight and read the street sign.

York Street.

York. Leona lived on York, but he was trying to get away from her, not find her. For all the good it did him, he might as well have been on Dork street. No matter. He decided to move away from the sirens. Crossing against the light, he headed north, wishing he hadn’t lost his wallet. His wallet held an emergency tab of the good stuff, and he could use a hit right about now.

York was an up and down street, meaning that it either led up the hill to Priestman, or down the hill, to the river. It suddenly occurred to Kenny that he wanted to find the Westmoreland Bridge. Crossing the river would give him both distance and a destination. He needed to get as far away as possible from Leona’s long and vengeful arm, but mostly, he wanted a bag of the good stuff to kill the raging nerves in his shoulder and ankle. Jimmy Tessio lived across the river in Nashwaaksis. Kenny wasn’t exactly sure where in Nashwaaksis Jimmy lived, but if you needed a fix, Jimmy wasn’t a hard guy to find.

Unfortunately, the Westmoreland Bridge itself suddenly became a bugger to locate. A fog had rolled into town, shrouding the river with an impenetrable mist – the kind you find in a Sherlock Holmes movie, he thought. He remembered watching a Jack The Ripper flick, where whores were being slashed left and right in a fog so thick that Jack was having trouble slicing through it with his knife.

Kenny’s shoulder was throbbing too much for him to be thinking about whores. He needed to concentrate on finding the bridge. He tried to recall where York street was in relation to the bridge, but couldn’t. The good stuff pretty much sucked away your mind when it wore off, making it damn hard to think clearly. Coherent thoughts were like turds swirling in a toilet before slipping down the drain into the sewers below the streets. In fact, while you were coming down, your entire life pretty much became a turd. Yep, that was pretty much true. That pretty much summed it up.

Kenny realized his mind had wandered, and reeled himself back to the moment. Where was that damned Westmoreland Bridge? Was it on York Street, or Westmoreland Street? The shitty thing of it was, he couldn’t remember. Westmoreland Street had a ring to it, but who in their right mind would name a bridge after a street? Not him, that was for sure. He might name one after a whore, though, if her access ramp was wide enough, ha ha. But which whore? Hell, all of them! Whores’ Bridge!

Where was that whore’s bridge, anyway? Kenny decided the best thing was to find the river. Once he found the river, he wouldn’t need to think, he could guess: the bridge would either be on his left or on his right. Hell, with a good guess, he’d be home free, and fuck the Westmoreland Whore Bridge.

He continued to stagger forward, which led to his stumbling directly into the river. As he lurched onto the muddy bank, his sore right ankle gave out completely and he pitched headlong into the water. He tried to extend his arms to break his fall, but his shoulder screamed in protest, and he instinctively grabbed the arm attached to the sore shoulder, and tucked it against his chest. His momentum, meanwhile, carried him downward, to the bottom of the river. His head sank into the sludgy riverbed, filling his mouth with mud. For Kenny, it was officially time to panic.

Using his good arm he pushed forward and managed to flip onto his back. Coughing and spitting mud, he managed, aided by a buoyant current, to get his head above water. Beneath him, the water gurgled, giving Kenny the sense that he was in pretty deep water – not a good thing. Worse, the river seemed intent on taking him into the channel, which was even deeper and even less of a good thing.

Flailing with his good arm, Kenny tried to force the river to relent and ease him back toward shore. He quickly discovered that winging his good arm hurt like a bugger, and he fell back, swallowing more water. This time, the river didn’t spit him back to the surface.

Ignoring his pain, Kenny struggled, frantically windmilling with his good arm. He succeeded only in fueling the panic that had firmly overtaken him. The river had him now, and it wasn’t letting go. It didn’t care that his lungs threatened to collapse like a bellows, squeezed shut; or that his heart was about to burst like a ripe tomato thrown from a fruit truck. Rivers were heartless, uncaring, liquid fucks.

Kenny’s mind was now clear of the good stuff, of Jimmy Tessio, and of whores with wide access ramps. It was clear of everything but the need to breathe. But breathing was the one thing he couldn’t do. Not while he was still submerged. If he expected to live much longer, he’d have to hold his breath. His body, however, couldn’t see the logic, and continued to scream for air. The river itself, felt no compassion. It simply held what it had been given.

Finally, Kenny’s body took over his mind and he gave in. Opening his mouth, he sucked in what felt like a bushel of clear, clean air.

Damn! He was above water!

Immensely relieved at somehow having reached the surface again, Kenny continued to haul in air until his body admitted satisfaction, at least in the matter of oxygen. His shoulder was still killing him and that was probably the literal truth. He still needed to stroke himself out of the current, and given his crippled condition, that wasn’t about to happen any time soon.

But he was no longer drowning, which was a big improvement.

Kenny’s eyes fluttered open, and he saw a man sitting in a flat-bottomed boat with a fistful of his shirt in his hands, holding his head out of the water.

Got a little wet, didn’t you? the man asked amiably.

Kenny’s head suddenly dipped under the water. He grasped the man’s arm and pulled, sputtering and spitting as his head again broke the surface. Help me, he pleaded, on the verge of another panic attack.

"You fell in just south of the Nashwaak. That’s a Maliseet word, or nearly so. The name is a corruption of the word that loosely translated, means slow current. Nothing slow about this current, though is there? At least, not at this time of year."

Haul me into the boat, Kenny begged. His panic level had jacked to another notch; he felt as if he had suddenly jerked a car into the left lane into the path of an eighteen-wheeler. His rescuer wasn’t helping his nerves any by sitting there yakking. What sane person gave a history lesson in the middle of a rescue operation?

Why don’t I call 911 instead?

No, just help me into the boat!

Stop thrashing. I don’t like getting wet.

The man pushed him away from the boat while still retaining a grip on his shirt, and Kenny was left with the mad impression that his rescuer’s arm had grown a foot longer. Using his free hand, the man flipped open a cell phone and stabbed its call pad three times with his thumb.

911. Please state your emergency.

Despite the distance, Kenny could hear the agent clearly.

Hello. I’m calling to report an accident.

What is your name, sir?

My name? The man smiled. My name is Legion.

"What’s your first name, Mr.