find them, or I’ll die trying.
Oh, God. What if there were kids in there?
I was going in.
I got the boots off, grabbed the torch, left the door of the ute open for extra light, and ran. Only a few steps to the bank, and I was sweeping the light over the black, rippling water the entire way, looking for bubbles. Looking for anything.
The river was slow here, and I’d seen the car go in close to the bank. Right about … here. I’d fixed the image in my brain, and my brain knew how to read the space, even with a migraine. Spatial awareness had been my life forever.
I was going to find them, and I was going to get them out.
There were no bubbles.
It had been minutes since they’d gone in. Even if they were holding their breath … most people couldn’t hold it that long.
I knew I wouldn’t be in time. I was doing it anyway.
I’d taken the first few steps when I thought I saw something. Heard something. A shape, maybe. Something different, downstream.
Downstream, where they’d be. If they’d got out. How could they have got out?
There it was again, though. Something, in the fog. A flash, or maybe that was the migraine.
I yelled. “Oi! Here!” A sweep of the torch, and I saw it again. I couldn’t tell what it was.
I was running along the bank when I picked it out, far ahead of me in the water, barely visible in the light of the torch. Two heads. An arm, moving. A mother, pulling a kid with her? I was in the river, wading fast, feeling the cold and forgetting it, shouting all the while. “Hold on! I’m coming! Hold on!”
The heads turned toward me as my light found them. It shone straight at them for an instant before I jerked it upward so as not to blind them. Three or four more mighty, heaving steps through water to my waist, and I had them.
One of them, anyway. The other one was a dog.
A big retriever of some kind, the human’s shirt sleeve in its mouth, swimming for its life. And hers, because the person was a girl. I’d seen that in the flash of light. White face, streaming dark seaweed of hair around it. I grabbed her under the arms, told the dog, “I’ve got her. Let’s go,” and started pulling her to shore. The dog resisted a moment, then let go and swam beside us until its paws touched the muddy bottom, when it struggled up to dry land, then dropped to the ground, panting hard.
I barely noticed. I had the girl, who was small and light enough that she must be a teenager. A teenager, and she’d got herself and the dog out of a submerged car? How? The thought flashed and was gone as she stumbled onto shore beside me, all of her shaking, all of her freezing.
It would be shock, now. Hypothermia.
“Anybody else in there?” I asked, then asked it again. Urgently. She shook her head, but couldn’t get the words out. I said, “Come on,” took her hand, and headed up to the highway. When she stumbled again, I picked her up in my arms and ran toward the truck, its headlights still on, the open driver’s door spilling light onto the ground. There were two other cars there, their hazard lights flashing, and a couple men running toward me, shouting questions.
“Her car went in,” I said. “Nobody else out there.” My teeth were chattering so hard, I could barely speak.
“Bloody hell, mate,” one of the fellas said. “You were lucky to get her out.”
I wasn’t listening. I was setting the girl down on the driver’s seat, reaching into the back for the grotty old blanket I carried, then yanking her shirt up and over her head.
“Got another blanket?” I asked the fellas. “Shirt? Towel? Anything?”
“I do,” the older one said. “Dog blanket. But here.” He pulled off his jacket. “Have this.”
I was already unhooking the girl’s bra. She was slim and small-boned, but she had some muscle to her, which explained that swim. She was also shaking all the way now, but she still made a protesting noise as I pulled the bra off. She tried to grab for it, in fact. I told her, “I’ve got to get you dry. Hold this around you,” and wrapped the jacket around her, not bothering with the sleeves, then pulled off her shoes and socks and started wrestling with her jeans.
She