Free Pale Horse Coming by Stephen Hunter

home, home, home.
    Home, he thought.
    Home, home, home. Then he saw the body.
    He happened to be looking down, in the black water, and the shock was such that perhaps it was an apparition, something that his momentarily deranged mind had conjured. But he knew in the next second that no, this was reality, no haunt, no ghost, nothing from the subconscious. It was a Negro boy, a few inches under the surface, bled white by immersion, his features puffy, his body in the cruciform as if inflated, his fingers abulge, his eyes wide and empty, his mouth open black and empty, his clothes in tatters, gliding by. Then he was gone.
    Sam blinked, stunned.
    He saw something just ahead, floating, its low silhouette just breaking the surface, and as Lazear’s old craft fled by, he made this victim out to be a girl child, also Negro, but facedown to spare him those open eyes staring into nothingness.
    He looked: on the surface of the water appeared to be the remnants of a massacre by drowning; bodies floated everywhere, as if a vessel had capsized and all perished. There had to be at least ten, drifting, riding the currents, bobbing this way and that.
    “ Stop the boat! Goddamn you, stop the boat! ” he screamed, over the beating of the engine.
    Lazear looked up, surprised, yanked from whatever crude reverie had occupied him.
    “ Stop the boat, you idiot! ” Sam cried, and rushed back. Lazear didn’t stop it, but reined in the throttle so that the boat merely idled, drifting.
    “What you say?”
    “There’re people in the water! Look, look around, people. A Negro family, all gone, all lost, stop the boat.”
    Lazear just shook his head.
    “Sir, I done tol’ you. In de river, de currents is ugly and mean. Suck people down all de time. Send ’em back bloated and dead. Nothing we can do but press on. Can’t do them no good. Make a report when you gets back to civilization if it makes you feel good. I can’t be wastin’ no time on this.”
    And with that he bent forward and readjusted the throttle to a steady roar and the boat lurched back into—
    But Sam took him in two strong hands, shook him once malevolently, then almost quite literally threw him into the rear of the boat.
    The old man raised a hand in fear as Sam advanced upon him.
    “Don’t hit me, sir! I didn’t do nothing to them people, I swear. They’s fleeing the Store, they got in trouble, and the river done et ’em up, is all.”
    Sam declared, in the full stentorian powers of his voice, “You slimy little maggot, you turn this boat around and we will recover those that we can. Then we will head back to Thebes and we will get that good-for-nothing sheriff off his fat ass and all his deputies and we will come back here with full lights running. There may be a child out here, clinging to a branch or ashore in the weeds. We will save that child, or by God, we will die trying, and that is the way it’ll be.”
    Now he bent, and with one hand pulled Lazear up, and propelled him toward the boat’s cockpit, and the old man hit it, and sank to the deck.
    “Get your ass up, and get going, sir, or I will make you wish you had never ever been born.”
    “Yes sir, yes sir,” said Lazear, pale with terror.
     
     
    A S it turned out, Sam quickly realized there was no point in recovering any bodies. It would take too much time, and it was a job for professionals with the right equipment. He realized those bodies therefore might never be recovered.
    Thus, as newly proclaimed captain of Lazear’s vessel by right of mutiny, he determined that the correct course of action was to return to the Thebes dock as swiftly as possible. He gave these directions to Lazear.
    “And if de motor burn out, what then?”
    “Then I will whip your scrawny ass until it bleeds. You just get us there faster than you got us here, you wretched old fool.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “What did you mean when you said ‘fleeing the Store.’ What was the meaning of that comment?”
    “Sir, I don’t