CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

Consciousness seeped back into Frank Hollister"s brain like water through cracked concrete. Slow. Inexorable. Bringing with it a tidal wave of confusion and pain that threatened to drag him back under.

His head throbbed with the fury of a thousand hangovers. Each heartbeat was a sledgehammer to his temples. He tried to open his eyes, but his lids felt welded shut, gummed up with what felt like a mixture of salt and sand.

Where the hell was he?

The last clear memory he had was standing at the control panel of the Bristol Dam, same as he"d done nearly every day for the past year. Adjusting flow rates, monitoring pressure gauges, keeping the lifeblood of the region flowing smooth as silk. It was a job he took pride in, even if most folks didn"t give a damn about the man behind the faucet.

Now – this?

Slowly, agonizingly, his senses began to tune in. Cold. So damn cold it felt like his bones were made of ice. And wet. Not the clean, crisp wetness of fresh snowmelt, but something fouler. Stagnant. Like he"d been dumped in a swamp and left to pickle.

The smell hit him next. Chlorine, burning his nostrils. But underneath that chemical tang lurked something worse. The reek of standing water gone bad, of algae and rot and things best left undisturbed.

Frank"s stomach roiled. He swallowed hard, fighting the urge to vomit. Bad enough to be... wherever the hell this was. Puking would only make it worse.

He forced his eyes open, blinking away the crust of unconsciousness. At first, all he saw was darkness. But as his vision adjusted, shapes began to emerge from the gloom. Curved walls. A dim, watery light filtering from somewhere above.

‘What the f...?' The words came out as a croak, his throat raw as if he"d been gargling gravel.

Frank had worked in water control for a quarter century. He knew water like some men knew their wives. Knew its moods, its temperament, the way it could be both life-giver and destroyer. And right now, every instinct honed over those long years was screaming that something was very, very wrong.

He tried to move, to walk, but his legs wouldn"t cooperate. It was like they were encased in lead, dead weight dragging him down.

Then he looked down and saw it beneath the pool of water at his knees.

Concrete. Solid blocks of it, encasing his feet and ankles like some twisted parody of oversized shoes. He reached down, fingers scrabbling at the rough surface, but it was no use. Whatever bound the concrete to his legs was tight as a noose.

‘Hello?' His voice came out as a croak. Marcus cleared his throat and tried again. ‘Is anyone there? What the hell is going on?'

Only silence answered him. Well, silence and the steady drip, drip, drip of water from somewhere above.

As his eyes continued to adjust, Marcus began to make out more details of his prison. It was like no place he"d ever seen before, and yet there was something maddeningly familiar about it. The curved walls, the way the water flowed. The walls were featureless – except for one thing.

Numbers.

Etched into the wall before him like some kind of measuring stick. One through twelve, as regular as the face of a clock. His head was level with the eight. Above, more numbers stretching upward into darkness.

This wasn't just a well or a pool or a vat of water.

It was an execution chamber.

This was real. Too real. The kind of nightmare you can"t wake up from because you"re already awake and living it. The icy water lapped at his thighs, each ripple a caress from death itself. The concrete blocks gripped his legs like the hands of corpses, dragging him down into a watery grave.

‘Help! For the love of God, somebody help me!'

His cries bounced back at him, mocking, distorted. A chorus of the damned in this chamber of horrors. No one was coming. No one could hear him in this drowning machine, this monument to some psychopath"s twisted imagination.

Frank"s eyes bulged, darting wildly like those of a trapped animal. The walls seemed to pulse and writhe in the dim light, alive with shadows that danced and leered. Faces formed in the patterns of damp stone – sneering, laughing, reveling in his terror. He knew they weren"t real, couldn"t be real, but that knowledge did nothing to quell the primal fear that gripped him.

He thrashed against his bonds, heedless of the way the concrete tore at his flesh. Blood clouded the water around his legs, and some dark part of his mind whispered that he was just making it easier for whatever might be lurking in the depths. Sharks. Piranhas. Monsters with too many teeth and an appetite for fear.

‘Why?' he screamed. ‘What do you want from me?'

Silence answered him. Just the steady drip, drip, drip of water from above. Chinese water torture with a drowning chaser. Each drop was a ticking clock, counting down the seconds until the water closed over his head and the world went dark.

Who could have built this nightmare? It was like no water system he"d ever encountered, and he"d seen them all. Reservoirs, dams, underground cisterns – none of them came close to this hellish contraption.

The dam. The thought hit him like a sledgehammer to the sternum, driving what little air remained from his lungs. This had to be connected to the deaths he'd read about. Toledo. Ayers. Now him. Both of them worked on the dam project, both of them.

‘Oh, Jesus,' he wheezed. ‘This is about the dam. The drought.'

He tried to focus, to think logically about his predicament, but terror clouded his mind like murky water. This couldn"t be happening. Things like this didn"t happen in real life. They happened in movies, in nightmares, not to middle-aged dam operators from Bristol.

And yet, here he was.

Frank thought of his family. His wife, Sarah, probably wondering why he was late for dinner. His daughter, excited about her upcoming college graduation. Would they ever know what happened to him? Or would he simply disappear, another missing person file gathering dust in some police station?

The idea of never seeing them again, of leaving them with nothing but questions and grief, was almost worse than the prospect of drowning. Almost.

‘I"m sorry,' he whispered, though he knew they couldn"t hear him. ‘I"m so damn sorry.'

But sorry wouldn"t save him now. Not from the water slowly creeping up his neck. Not from the fate that had been sealed the moment he"d taken that job at the dam.

Frank Hollister, dam operator, husband, father, began to weep. And still, the water rose.