Free Blood Zero Sky by J. Gates

Fields, you can do anything.”
    He sips his brandy.
    “Help!” I scream. “I can’t—” Another swell slaps me in the mouth, choking me.
    “May,” he says, and looks down at me with a slow, warm smile. “You can.”
    Something in his tone, his face, his demeanor, relaxes me and suddenly, as if purely by will—not mine, his—I’m actually doing it. I’m treading water. I’m swimming!
    For a second, I smile in spite of myself.
    “See,” Dad says. He smiles and ashes his cigar. That’s when I get angry.
    “I almost drowned! Are you happy?” I shout.
    “Yes,” he says. “I am.”
    Just then, his cell phone rings. He answers it.
    “This is Fields. . . . Dammit, I’m trying to teach May how to swim here! . . . How should I know what the stock price is, I’m on a goddamned sailboat!”
    “Dad!” I call. “Dad!”
    He glances down at me, then back out to sea as he listens to his caller.
    “Pull me up!” I yell. Even in the cold water, I can feel my face going red and hot with rage. I paddle to the edge of the boat, reach up my hands. But instead of reaching down for me, he turns away for a second.
    I hear him say, “Pushed her in. She’s gotta learn sometime, right?
. . . Well what the hell do you know about parenting? You can’t even handle a tiny goddamned acquisition without me there to hold your hand.”
    “DAD!” I scream.
    “I’ll call you back in ten,” he says, and I hear the slap of his boat shoes as he crosses the deck and comes back toward me. I reach up again, groping for rescue. But instead of my father’s hands reaching down for me, a rope ladder slaps down the side of the hull.
    Now I’m trembling with anger, with emotion, with the remnants of terror. I grab the ladder and start pulling myself up, rung by rung.
    Dad smiles at me as my head rises over the deck. He puffs on his cigar. “You want to get to the top,” he tells me with a wink, “you gotta learn to climb.”
    ~~~
    “You’re going to be okay. We’re gonna take care of you. Everything’s going to be fine.”
    In all my life, I never believed words like those when I heard them used. Now, here, baptized in this polluted, desecrated tributary with my body broken and my mind scrambled, somehow Clair’s promise inspires faith.
    Above, five black helicopters bellow past. In the streets and in my heart, sirens scream, and I already know nothing will ever be the same again.
    “Stay with me. Stay awake.” Clair’s words are furtive, desperate whispers, barely audible over the splash of the poisoned water and the howl of the sirens, hardly registering in the drift and spin of my mind.
    As my head lolls back I see the bleak, gray concrete wall, cracked and sheer. A rusted metal ladder affixed to it leads up to a lip over which the pallid sun peers down at us. The corroding iron rungs paint two streaks the color of dried blood all the way down to the black, lapping waterline.
    Clair still has one arm wrapped firmly around my chest. With the other hand, she tries to grip the ladder and pull us both up out of the river, but it’s impossible.
    “I can do it myself,” I mumble.
    “You sure?”
    I’m not sure, but I pull away from her anyway.
    “You go up first,” she says. “If you start to fall, I can catch you.”
    The controls of my body are foreign to me; I feel like a marionette with tangled strings. Gripping one slippery rung and finding another one with my foot, I pull myself slowly, tremblingly upward. My head throbs. I can’t feel my feet, and my hands are shaking. I look down at myself as I climb. My shirt is dyed with what can only be my own blood, but on this subject my brain can form no opinion—this is all too unreal, too much like a video game or a movie, too unlike my life. So I disbelieve it, and I climb on.
    From below, Clair whispers, “Hurry. They’re close.”
    And indeed, I realize, the sirens are screeching at us now from both sides of this sad river, their volume increasing as more and more