Diablo Creek
Chapter 1
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Jerrod and I were on this piddly piece of a gravel road, surrounded by swirling muddy water. We’d just managed to wade through this bitchin’, waist-high torrent that’d cut through the roadway and temporarily stranded us. I’m not the bravest guy in the world, far from it, but sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. As the adrenaline drained away, my breathing slowed and I started to relax. Then I caught this flash of blue and white in the sea of brown. The current had pushed a tangled pile of trash up against the submerged roadbed we’d just forded. It was made up of these jagged tree limbs and pieces of boards sticking up every which way, with smaller branches and dead brush holding the whole mess together. I shielded my eyes from the morning sun so I could see what looked like clothing mixed in with the trash. Probably just some laundry washed off some poor bastard’s clothesline a hundred miles upriver. Jerrod waded back into the water. “What the hell you doing?” I yelled. “Why are you going back?” “Just a ways,” he said. “I wanta see what that is.” “Are you nuts?” “Could be. But I’m curious.” “What is it?” “Don’t know. Shut up and let me look.” By now, part of the trash pile had pushed right up onto the road. Jerrod kept slip-slipping his way toward it with me on his tail. Every time he stopped to shift his weight to the other foot, I bumped into his rear end. “I know we’re friends,” he said, “but not that good.” He reached back, grabbed my arm and pulled me around beside him. “Is that what I think it is?” I tried to answer, but couldn’t. It felt like a tennis ball had lodged in my throat. There was no doubt about what we were seeing. The blue and white were a pair of jeans and a dirty, torn tee-shirt. What really got me, though, was what I could see between the jeans and the shirt – a glistening strip of brown skin. And one of the limbs I’d thought was part of a tree was actually a human arm. A real human arm, twisted around a two-by-four, jutting out of the pile at a crazy angle.
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