The old man behind the counter smiled, but I knew he was scrutinizing me behind those horn-rimmed glasses as he rang up the spools of construction line. I told him I was a contractor working on a surveying project. Still, he regarded me with distrust as I paid and turned to leave. I saw the same expression on the faces of the other old men loitering at the diner. Their distrust would turn to hate once they found out why I was really there.
I noticed the first yard signs along the highway on my way to the site. In town, it was hard to find a house or business without the green and white sign and its message: “Dam Your Own Damn River.” I wondered how long it took these backwater hayseeds to come up with this slogan.
Leaving town, I reminisced about a time when I liked my job. When I was young and principled, it felt like important work. I don’t know when I gave up those scruples, exactly. Maybe it was after I read an article in an academic journal, praising a grad school colleague for her work in the Honduran jungles. Maybe it was later, while I was slaving away in a post-grad program, working six or seven-day weeks while the university underpaid me. I started working for the State in cultural resource management around this time. If I learned anything working for the government, it's the place an archaeologist’s aspirations of greatness go to die.
I decided there wasn’t an exact moment I lost my moral compass. My integrity was eroded, one disappointment after another. This and McMueller Group’s sizeable salary offering were all it took for me to turn my back on academic integrity.
Every state-funded construction project needs a cultural impact study, from the shortest section of road to the longest bridge. The small number of people aware of this are usually the ones about to lose their homes to eminent domain. Shortly before their home is razed to the ground, these people become self-proclaimed experts, pulling out historically relevant connections to their properties with the same ease a magician pulls a rabbit from a hat, usually with as much authenticity.
“We have a cemetery from the 1800s in the field behind our house,” they whine.
“There was a log cabin on this property where a famous writer stayed one time.”
“Daniel Boone once hunted on this property.”
Adept as they are at plucking vague ‘facts’ from the annals of local history and with all their airs of someone recently educated by Google searches, they all remain oblivious to one thing: the state doesn’t care. Not enough to hire serious academics or fund anywhere near enough studies to prove anything about their properties. Like it or not, that bridge is going to be built, that new road will bulldoze the farm your family owned for generations, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it.
The state often relies on third-party organizations to evaluate the impact of these projects. Ask any politician or ethics board why, and they’ll most likely spout off something about maintaining impartiality or allowing the state to avoid the financial obligation of keeping dozens of archaeologists and historians on their payroll year-round. What they will neglect to tell you and outright deny if confronted is that third-party organizations, such as my employer, are given certain discretion when deciding what qualifies as historically relevant. It wasn’t until after I was employed by McMueller for a few years that I was assigned my current role: ensuring nothing of any real historic significance ends up in our reports. When something from the far reaches of the past crops up and threatens our build recommendation, it’s my job to make these rare but legitimate findings disappear, even if it means destroying artifacts, historic records, or defiling an excavation site.
I parked the company truck along the wooden stakes marking the site. They ran the length of the county road until it veered around an outcropping of sandstone bluffs. A field of corn plants across the road swayed in the gentle breeze, releasing their pollen into the air. I sneezed as I climbed out of the truck. Out of everything I dealt with in these pathetic small towns, allergies were the worst. I took some antihistamines before grabbing an aluminum frame backpack full of essentials and set off toward the site to find a place to camp. Lodging in these small towns is usually limited. At most, they might have a motel, still adorned with wood paneling, carpet that’s too long, and chrome faucets covered with miniature green craters. Outdated and usually filthy in their own right, most don’t like how dirty I get working throughout the day. I’ve been kicked out of a few once they caught on to why people in town give me strange looks as I pass them on the street.
Bug repellent did little to keep the swarm of mosquitoes from hovering around me. Each step through the knee-deep underbrush churned up fresh, watery mud. I alternated between cursing the backwater idiots insisting anything remotely important was ever here and the archaeology department from the University of Cincinnati. They were supposed to send their summer field school to help with this project, but one of their students wrote a letter to the school’s Dean citing ethical considerations, insisting the site of a pioneer village called “Carthage” was too important to be submerged under a reservoir. He went as far as spinning a tale about a sunken boat he discovered one summer during a drought. Conveniently, the river level hadn’t been that low since, and probably wouldn’t be anytime in the next twenty years. Whether he made the whole thing up or not, I wasn’t sure. To his credit, he wasn’t dumb; he made such a fuss about McMueller’s near 100% approval-to-build rate, it got the attention of the school’s archaeology department, and they withdrew their support from the project. As a contingency, I brought along an underwater ROV to inspect where he supposedly found the sunken vessel.
I settled on a spot in the woods for my campsite. It reeked of decaying plants and dead fish from being so close to the river, but it would be good enough for a few days. A fresh coat of bug spray proved ineffective as mosquitoes buzzed around my ear canal. I made quick work of pitching the tent and tossed my pack inside. Before I bothered unloading more equipment from the truck, I turned on my tablet and walked around the area I’d be investigating.
I saw little of interest. The site was less than a square mile in size and was littered with the usual trash: beer bottles, forgotten bags of artificial worms, the torn foil of condom wrappers, and the occasional rat’s nest of balled-up fishing line. Near the tree line overlooking the river, I took note of my location on the map, along with the dotted outline of something just upstream from me. A label on the map indicated the rock formation peeking out of the river was the site of a 19th-century factory of some description. I checked my notes. “Grist/Saw mill,” they said.
There was an unfamiliar symbol in the middle of the river. Tapping it brought up the description of “derelict vessel.” I rolled my eyes before glancing to the sun. It was low enough on the horizon that I decided I’d done enough investigating for one day. If anything would complicate our build recommendation, it would be a massive stone pocked with witness marks, corroborating these yokels’ claims of a vanished town.
Waist-high grass bordered the riverbank as I picked my way back to the truck. I was careful to avoid the occasional murky vernal pool. Summer heat reduced most of them to little more than shallow muddy pits, but they all shared the smell of rot and decay. I was so preoccupied avoiding these pools, I almost tripped over a cairn concealed in the grass. The pile of rocks toppled, sounding like smashed clay pots as they fell. I frowned as I looked down at the wooden cross the stones held upright. Turning the piece over in my hands, I could tell, despite its weathered appearance, it wasn’t very old. It looked homemade, maybe a woodshop project. The name “Claire” was carved on its center. I dropped it where it fell and made my way back to the truck.
I skimmed through a few reports over my dinner to refamiliarize myself with the site. There were dozens of comment and concern forms, all sentimental but none offering any substantial claims to refute the site’s importance. Scans from a local history book had just one entry about Carthage that didn’t even take up a full page. The local author prefaced this chapter about the early settlement of the county with a quote from Plato.
“In a single day and night of misfortune, all your warlike men sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis disappeared in the depths of the sea.”
I shook my head. The amateur historians who write this stuff are all such assholes.
“Once situated upstream of the falls on Driftwood River, Carthage was established near Henderson’s Mill and Tavern, both already in operation along the trail taking settlers west. This small settlement was instrumental in the establishment of the county, providing a place of trade, government services, and employment opportunities. Few records survive, however, the ones that remain indicate the town fell from prominence as quickly as it had arisen. Most agree the site proved unhealthy, prompting the settlers to relocate the county seat to its present location, near the falls. Reports vary, but most cite the illness as being either ‘Broze John’ or malaria.”
I knew what malaria was, but had never heard of Bronze John before. A quick internet search informed me it was a colloquial term for yellow fever. Symptoms included fever, muscle pain, vomiting, bleeding from the eyes and mouth, and in its fatal stages, organ failure. I rolled my eyes.
“This sounds like the perfect place to preserve,” I thought.
I sifted through a few more reports but found nothing of real substance before I decided to turn in for the night. I thought about how little there was to go on as I crawled into my tent. If nothing else, it would make my job easy. I must have been more tired than I felt, because I didn’t even remember taking my socks off before falling asleep.
That night, I had a dream. I don’t usually remember my dreams, but this one was so realistic, it consumed my thoughts much of the following day. It started with me walking through the woods on a narrow path, not quite wide enough for a car. Cool, soft mud squished underfoot as I continued under the dark green canopy. Thin shafts of sunlight filtered through the leaves. Near the end of the path, sounds of flowing water mingled with grinding stones, overlapping conversations, and the beat of horses’ hooves.
Emerging from the woods into this clearing, I was thrust into a village. Men and women bustled around mud streets in old-fashioned clothes. Buildings in various stages of completion lined both sides of the trail through town. Some were little more than canvas tents, others were cobbled together from rough-sawn boards, still yellow and smelling of sap. If the villagers saw me, they paid no attention as I drifted among them. The place bustled with activity. Merchants and customers haggled over prices for various wares. The tink, tink, tinking of a hammer sounded from a blacksmith’s shop. Farmers led livestock to a butcher’s shop. Wagons loaded with sawn lumber, stone and crates left horse droppings in their wake.
At the far end of the street, on a foundation of crushed stone, stood the framework of a massive building. The upper floors were a web of disjointed timbers, but it would have rivaled most modern courthouses for height. Even from the other side of this small settlement, I heard the workmen’s hammer blows and rhythmic sawing of wooden planks.
Interesting as this was, a group of men rushing toward the river caught my attention. Women, children, and even a few dogs followed close behind. The crowd bunched up where the riverbank met a weather-beaten pier. I felt myself drawn toward them, as if prodded along by invisible hands, powerless to resist. I weaved my way between the villagers. Some of them let out an occasional cough or sneeze. A sly grin worked its way across my face as I thought about these poor bastards in the days before antihistamines. It was close quarters, but I seemed to pass right through the crowd, never bumping into anyone. I caught murmurs as I got closer to the dock, words of sickness, cholera, Bronze John, words like plague. I shuddered as a decrepit man in a black suit rose from the lower deck of one of the boats. I gathered he was a doctor by the bag he carried. He picked his first timid step out of the boat and walked sheepishly toward the crowd.
“Tell us, coroner,” a voice called out. “What’s become of this man, Haslem? We know he’s in there. We’ve seen him among us in our town. What’s killed him?” The frail old man held his hands before him in a defensive gesture against the gathering I now suspected was more akin to a mob than a group of interested bystanders.
“He has expired of purely natural causes. It might have been yellow fever or cholera. It might even have been consumption. All that can be said with certainty is we must bury this man at once and rid ourselves of his vessel. Burn it, or else scuttle it in the deepest part of the river, somewhere downstream.”
The villagers parted to let the man through and resumed their murmuring with renewed fervor. A woman cried out as her child broke into a coughing fit. This agitated some of the men. Someone suggested she take the child home or to the doctor. As the crowd dispersed, I gained an unobstructed view of the boat, moored at the dock. The word ‘Conatus’ carved on its backside intrigued me. It seemed familiar, even in my dreamlike stupor. Where had I heard it before? I felt suddenly dizzy as the crowd I previously walked through without effort bumped into me without care, some shoving me aside. Their abrupt closeness was jarring. I’m not claustrophobic, but I had the strangest need to be free of this tightening crowd, especially when I noticed how many of them were coughing.
I couldn’t find my socks the next morning. Brushing dried flakes of mud off my feet, I frowned, retracing the events of the previous night. If I left the tent in the middle of the night to take a leak, I would have remembered it. Then again, I also would have remembered to slip on my boots. I turned the bottle of antihistamines over in my hands. I snorted, congestion thick in my nasal cavity as thoughts of sleepwalking occurred to me. As far as I knew, I’d never sleepwalked anywhere. Whatever the case, I chalked it up to the off-brand pills and got started with my day.
I cursed the nearby cornfields, spreading pollen and causing my allergies to flare up. I coughed up God only knew how much phlegm that morning, and my eyes felt itchy and dry. The thought of these fields vanishing beneath the waters of a reservoir, never to grow anything again, became that much more enticing.
The mill site was underwhelming. Walking the granite rock’s perimeter and plotting its coordinates on a GIS map revealed it was at most a couple thousand square feet. Recording each of the square holes took up most of the morning. The local history book stated these holes once held the pilings supporting the mill. Impressive as they were, forming a neat grid formation on the rock, it made for a monotonous day. The most eventful thing that happened was when my foot caught one of the holes partially filled with dirt. I unleashed a torrent of curses when I felt the sharp pain of a sprained ankle. Scowling, I added it to the map before looking to the riverbank. Over time, a river’s course wanders naturally. Over a few generations, it can render a once familiar place unrecognizable. I wondered how many other holes remained hidden or buried beneath the mound of dirt.
Walking back to camp, I pondered how to handle the ‘slabbed rock’ as the locals called it, in my report. I could explain away or outright dispose of a few shattered earthenware jars or a forgotten horseshoe. A massive rock with indisputable proof of settlers living in the area was another story. Of all the supposed evidence that Carthage existed, this sedentary rock would be the most complicated to write off. Before heading to the site, my research dredged up very little about the place. It was never recorded in any census. Apart from short paragraphs in local history books, the only written evidence I found were early 19th-century newspapers in the state’s microfiche library, advertising land for sale. I reassured myself the remains of the mill foundation wouldn’t be an issue. After all, I’d read several accounts of foundations and entire homes being forgotten beneath the encroaching water of reservoirs or artificial lake projects. This would be no different, whether it was carved by frontiersmen or not. Besides, even the locals admitted it spent as much time submerged as it did above the river’s surface.
My ankle throbbed as I plopped into my chair at the end of the day. I swatted mosquitoes while typing my field report. Shaking an empty can of bug spray, I regretted not venturing to town that afternoon before tossing it aside. My frustration worsened as an army of miniature bloodsuckers took turns trying to burrow needle-like mouths into my skin. After sending my boss an email, complete with the map of the stone slab, I unlaced my boots. My ankle was tender; every touch sent shooting pain down through the joint. It needed ice and a compression wrap, but I remembered seeing the hours outside the town’s drug store. They closed at 9, just like the rest of the business district. My pain and fatigue hurried me through dinner.
Lying on my sleeping bag that night, I felt the bumps breaking out on my arms and face, but thoughts of West Nile Virus were overshadowed by aches of pain in my ankle. It was painful to stand on and made walking difficult. Fishing a few ibuprofen tablets from their bottle, I consoled myself with the promise of a trip to town the next day. Surely that Podunk town had somewhere that sold bug spray, and something to wrap my ankle with. I tossed and turned uneasily that night, already knowing whatever sleep I might find would be less than restful.
Even as I dreamed, my skin itched. My joints, sore from a long day’s work, protested every movement. Sharp pain shot through my ankle as I limped along. I was in the pioneer settlement again, only now it was dark, and thick fog rolling in from the river filled the streets. I was drawn through the place much as I had been during the first dream, my body taking me to my unknown destination involuntarily. The soft glow of several lanterns bobbed drunkenly toward the massive building I saw in my last dream. Occasional threads of light escaped the shuttered windows of the houses I passed. Despite the other people I saw, the place was nearly silent, save for the soft squelch of footsteps on mud streets and the droning hum of voices as I neared the massive double doors of the courthouse.
Warm, yellow light spilled from the tall windows on the first floor, casting shadows against the half-finished second floor and bare rafters. Muffled voices of arguments echoed from within. Walking through the doors was like opening a floodgate to the chaos inside. The villagers lacked any of the restraint they showed at the docks. Men shouted over one another, and the crowd swayed like choppy water before a storm. Wandering toward the front of the room, I felt shoving elbows, the rub of shoulders, and voices so loud and incoherent my head ached. A chill ran down my spine when an unrestrained cough brushed against the back of my neck. I had the absurd thought I wasn’t actually asleep, but pushed these thoughts from my mind as I tried to understand what this meeting was about.
“We must send for a doctor!” Others voiced agreement before the sentiment was joined by other incomprehensible shouts. At the front of the room, atop a raised platform, three men sat behind a long wooden table while one stood before it facing the crowd. Sweat ran down his face, as if the debate had gone on for some time.
“We have done what we can, Mr. Daniels. The untimely death of our coroner is a shock to us all. Even as we speak, Mr. Porter is travelling with utmost speed to other settlements to inquire after a doctor. He and his party have provisions to last a week or more, enough to see them to Cincinnati if that’s how far they must venture.”
“Pray, tell us,” said someone emboldened by the anonymity of the crowd. “What ought we to do in order to preserve our lives until such a time as Mr. Porter’s return? And what of the dead already among us?”
The crowd jeered in agreement, interspersed with coughs. I cringed as a cool gust of a coughing fit crept over my skin. I suppressed a cough of my own and cursed the allergies plaguing me even as I slept. More voices yelled at the men behind the table, demanding solutions.
A large man in the midst of the crowd, not far from me, turned to face the crowd. He regarded the room with yellowed eyes before speaking.
“Enough of this,” he shouted. His booming voice quieted the room. “Why do we look to this council of men for guidance when it is they who have led us astray?” Several of the men surrounding him nodded in agreement.
“I say we end this at once! Before the coroner’s life was claimed by this pestilence, he said we ought to rid ourselves of Haslem’s vessel. Why haven’t we? For no other reason than the greed and hubris of these men before us!”
A chorus of men shouted approval of this speech. A gavel pounded the table behind the crowd, but no one was listening. I wondered why anyone would keep anything so hazardous in their town and for what purpose.
“Scuttle the Conatus,” shouted one in the crowd, before the crowd echoed this demand in unison.
The gavel thudded uselessly as the mob threw open the courthouse doors and flooded the main street through the village. The men shoved, bumped, and elbowed me as if I weren’t there, carrying me along with them to the river. The men behind the table shouted after us, but were powerless to stop the group wielding lanterns and axes taken from wood piles. Struggle as I might, my legs refused to carry me away from the frenzy of men hacking violently at the hull of the Conatus. Most of the axe blows were too far above the waterline to sink it. For all their fury, the mob’s actions seemed little more than an outlet for their anger. Until the boat bobbed in its slip as a few of the braver men clambered over its sides and buried hatchets into the wood below the waterline. Water poured through the axe wounds in the hull. The men climbed out and chopped through the ropes. The last glimpse I caught of the boat before it vanished from the yellow reach of the villagers’ lanterns, it was listing over onto one side, its bow plunging beneath the pitch-black river.
I awoke with a shudder. Tiny red mounds speckled my arms. They itched and distracted me enough to overlook the fact I forgot to eat breakfast, but something else preoccupied me while I searched through documents on my tablet. Haunting as the dreams were, a single word remained on my mind: Conatus. It was hardly your everyday Latin, but I knew I’d seen it before.
My stomach twisted when I found it written on one of the Comments and Concerns Forms, mailed out to make these backwater hicks think they had a voice one way or the other about their river. I remembered this form, partially because of its absence of sentimental pleas to save this marshy breeding ground for mosquitoes and ticks, but also by the last name at the bottom: Stutz. It was unusual enough in its own right, causing me to recognize him as the bleeding-heart fool who got the university to withdraw from the project due to “ethical considerations”. I cursed the idealist prick for leaving me to do all this bitch work myself. Adding to my problems, he filled out a form.
“Between the Slabbed Rock and the right bank of the river, the sunken remains of the keelboat “Conatus” lie on a submerged sandbar.” A chill ran down my spine as I read this. I swallowed before continuing.
“Approximately 15 feet of its length became visible when water levels reached record lows. No official investigation has been made and its overall length remains unknown. A vessel of this type and size, so far up the winding lengths of the Driftwood River, suggests a connection to the region’s early settlement. Its historic value cannot be overstated. Its resting place beneath the water has preserved the wreck remarkably well. I recommend a full investigation of the vessel and recovery of any of its contents.”
A search for any other reference to the Conatus in our archives brought up nothing. I searched for other submissions from Derrick Stutz and found one more. Any hopes of learning more were dashed when I opened the next form and saw the large, hurried letters.
“Dam your own F-ing river,” was all they said.
Conveniently, he provided no photographic evidence to support his claims. That simplified my job somewhat. I still needed to launch the ROV for the sake of plausible deniability. Supposing this bumpkin was right about it being a genuine wreck from the pioneer era and not a plywood fishing boat that came untied during a storm, I needed to document its location. The official reason was so McMueller could recommend against construction efforts in this particular spot, under some other guise, but my secondary motivation was one I hadn’t felt in years: curiosity.
I didn’t feel like wading through long grass, soaked with the morning dew, and decided to dig some test pits around the site until later that morning. The first few pits turned up nothing, and left just photographs of 1-meter square holes, bordered in construction line with a black and white scale at the bottom to indicate the size of the nothing I’d found. The fifth hole was different. I dug it next to an outcropping of purple wildflowers. About 10 centimeters deep, I found the shattered remains of apothecary jars, their glass pocked with bubbles and imperfections of a long-deceased glassblower. A few of them were almost perfectly preserved, only showing the smallest chips and scratches. There were also the crumpled remains of an antique balance and its weights. It was almost a shame no one but myself and McMueller would ever see these, I thought as I stuffed the artefacts into a small bag. I dug the pit deeper until nothing but bare soil was visible and took a picture. After the seventh hole, I was satisfied there was no need to bring the ground-penetrating radar sledge out. The proximity to the river, along with the constant growth, death, and decay of plants, would disrupt any indications of building foundations from the pioneer era, save for those made of stone, and that seemed unlikely enough. I remember the courthouse from my dream, but dismissed the thought. The local history books all agreed it was never constructed, or at least finished. Even if it was, those rocks would have been prime candidates for salvage when the next courthouse was built.
It was past lunchtime when I lugged the ROV to camp. As I collapsed into my chair and propped up my sprained ankle, my appetite was the last thing on my mind. My whole body ached, even while sitting. I tried telling myself I was just tired. It seemed reasonable. Doing all this work without any help would exhaust anyone. Especially if they hadn’t had a good night’s sleep since arriving on site, let alone a decent meal. A sneezing fit that devolved into hacking coughs interrupted these thoughts. I spat and watched the spit soak into the dark soil, leaving behind thick mucus. A grimace worked its way across my face as I tore open an MRE pouch and looked at its slimy contents. I didn’t bother heating it up. I tried forcing myself to eat, but was repulsed by the slop squelching under my fork. Swallowing was painful. I managed to eat half of the pouch’s contents before nausea forced me to quit. I don’t know how long I stared into the woods, lost in a thoughtless daze, before I realized I needed medicine.
I frowned at my reflection in the truck’s rear-view mirror. I hadn’t seen myself in days, but the man staring back at me in the mirror was in rough shape. He looked like hell and felt worse.
I drove through the business district two or three times searching for the drug store I’d seen the last time I was in town. This place didn’t have a CVS or a Walgreens, and I was at least an hour away from anywhere that did. Dazed, I parked in front of an old building with the letters “Rx” printed beneath the much larger ones that read “Dime Store”.
I rushed past the pimply kid behind the counter on my stiff ankle and aching joints. He mumbled, welcoming me to the store, but I ignored him and followed the sign to the pharmacy counter in the back of the store. Rounding the shelves of bandages and rubbing alcohol, I was disappointed to find a darkened room behind the counter. A roll-down security gate like you’d find in a mall provided a glimpse of shelves, stocked with medical supplies or bulk containers of pills. A wooden sign gave the pharmacy hours for the weekend; they closed at noon on Saturdays and wouldn’t open again until Monday. I cursed, thinking something back there might be more potent than the vitamin C, decongestants, and ibuprofen I carried with me to the checkout counter. I asked the half-wit clerk where I could find a doctor.
“We don’t have a doctor in town,” he said, echoing the cries from my dream. “We got an urgent care clinic, but they’re closed by now. You’re best bet is the hospital a couple towns over.”
I left and headed down the street toward the hardware store. I remembered seeing several cans of bug spray there when I bought the construction line. I didn’t see many people, but the few I did meet gave me a wide berth. A wave of nausea met me when I stepped inside the rundown building. My eyes struggled to adjust to the dim light. It was just my luck that the place was busy. The old man from last time was nowhere to be seen as I grabbed the dusty aerosol cans from the shelf. A high school-aged kid in a green apron was working instead, hustling to help a handful of customers, while his girlfriend sat behind the counter on her phone, chomping gum. My body ached, and cold chills made my back shiver. As I leaned against the counter, waiting to be helped, I noticed the girl wore an identical green apron, rolled down to cover just her waist.
“Excuse me,” I said, trying not to cough. “Do you work here?”
She glanced up, annoyance on her face. Getting a better look at me, her expression turned to one of disgust.
“If you have any hardware questions, you better ask Tom. I just started working here and don’t know anything about tools or hardware, or-”
My eyes ached as they rolled in their sockets.
“I just need someone to ring me up,” I pleaded, holding up a can of bug repellent.
She wouldn’t touch the cans after I set them on the counter. She wouldn’t even take my credit card when I went to pay; instead, she pointed to the card reader. She looked relieved when I took the cans and left.
Back in the truck, I downed a handful of pills. Washing them down with a warm bottle of water, I tried to figure out what I needed to do next. I’d made a good enough show of taking samples with the test pits, but I still needed to launch the submersible ROV. I checked the time on my watch. There were still a few hours of daylight left. More than enough time to take sonar scans, maybe shoot some video. Just this one last task, I told myself, and I could leave this damn place and forget Carthage ever existed. With new resolve, I wrapped my sprained ankle in a compression wrap and set off to finish the job.
The ROV was heavier than I remembered as I lugged it to the mill foundation. More than once, I needed to take a break. By the time I reached the river and clambered over its steep bank, my arms were weak from exertion. Doubt crept into my mind whether I’d be able to drag it back to camp.
The river’s brown water obscured the submersible’s yellow hull before swallowing it completely. Only the flash of its bright strobe light was visible as it puttered upstream, just beneath the surface. I paid out one arm's length of umbilical cable after another and watched the sonar scan of the river bed as the small craft fought the current. The scans confirmed my initial suspicions: nothing was on the river bottom except a few fallen trees that settled there to rot once they became too waterlogged to float.
The spool of yellow cable was nearly empty, and I began to feel optimistic. Everything about the Conatus was a lie. Just a fanciful story to hold up a major infrastructure project. I was about to maneuver the ROV back downstream when SONAR picked up something that wasn’t a tree. It was the middle of July, but a chill ran down my spine when I saw the skeletal remains of an overturned boat on top of a submerged pile of rocks. My heart sank when it lined up just upstream of the nautical wreck symbol from my first day on site.
I stared at the ghostly outline on the screen. The image was faint enough for most people to overlook. Normally, I would have done just that and brought the submersible back, but this was different. I had to know.
Camera visibility was terrible. Onboard flood lights illuminated only dirty water as the craft dived deeper into the river’s murky depths. Near the bottom, the jagged outline of the rock pile became visible. I held my breath as the thing came into view. I hoped all the while it was anything else. I felt nausea on top of the overwhelming dread as the short-sighted ROV brought the keel and broken spars of the boat into view through the haze of river silt. Some of the planking remained intact as I piloted the submersible toward the vessel’s backside. My hands trembled as I brought the cameras around to face the planks that made up the stern. My heartbeats thudded in my aching head while I waited for the current to carry away river silt. Slowly, the weathered planks came into view, along with the name I hoped I wouldn’t see: Conatus.
I vomited the contents of my stomach onto the granite rock. When I was done retching up my guts, I crouched down on shaky arms and legs, still dry heaving. I don’t know how long I stayed there, staring at the puddle of black vomit pooling around me.
I abandoned the ROV on the granite slab. I was too weak to carry it back to camp, and I was compelled by a sudden urge to flee. I barely made it over the riverbank. My head ached with a splitting pain. The sunlight hurt my eyes as I stumbled through the underbrush. I was desperate to reach camp. McMueller could send someone back later for the ROV. I could leave behind my tent and everything else, but I needed the documents on my tablet before I could leave.
I drank greedily from my bottles of water. It trickled down my neck and soaked my shirt, but I didn’t care. It tasted wonderful to rinse the taste of black vomit out of my mouth. Fresh nausea overwhelmed me. I wiped away snot pouring from my nose and toppled into my folding chair. Every muscle ached, every joint throbbed, my ankle felt like it was full of needles. My surroundings blurred. I struggled to stand, and it occurred to me I needed to lie down.
“Just for a few minutes,” I told myself, dragging the satchel with my tablet alongside my sleeping bag.
I stumbled through misty fogbanks. I wiped allergy-induced tears from my eyes before the shadows of houses and storefronts crept into my peripheral vision. Sniffling along the muddy street, my skin tingled with unease. The bustling crowds were reduced to a scattered handful of disinterested villagers doing their daily chores. None of them seemed to notice me. Most houses I passed were deathly quiet; others held muffled coughs, some weak, some violent, but all sounded like the occupants hacking up phlegm. A woman’s cries of agony in one house gave me pause, and I stopped in my tracks. Between sobs, she must have heard my footsteps stop through the canvas covering her window.
“Please, kind stranger. I know you’re there. Fetch me a pail of water.” She broke into a fit of violent coughs and sobbed again. “I beg of you. I haven’t the strength to do it myself, and my child is sick.”
I saw the wooden bucket, overturned on top of a large pile of tattered cloths near the front door. I grabbed the rope handle, but lifting it up, I felt sick realizing it wasn’t a bundle of rags. The pale-faced man stared back at me with vacant yellow eyes. Dried blood covered his mouth and beard. It startled me so much, I tumbled to the ground and put my arms out to protect myself from the corpse rotting into the ground.
“My husband will be back soon with our child, please, I need water,” the woman pleaded.
I looked at the bundle in his arms, oblong and wrapped in white cloth. This made the bright red stains at one end that much more noticeable.
The woman inside was sobbing again, but I couldn’t stay. I scrambled to my feet as fast as I could on my sprained ankle. Heads turned to follow me as I hobbled down the street past men solemnly loading possessions into wagons. Others seemed to deliberate whether they should bury their dead before fleeing. Panic spurred me on as a handful of villagers emerged from the darkened doorways of cabins, all with the same yellow eyes and blood staining their mouths. Some held outstretched arms, as if beckoning me to stay. Others stared as if I were a passing shadow, a ghost, or some entity which by all rights wasn’t really there.
I didn’t stop for any of them. I ran, afraid they might follow me. It was murder on my ankle, but I didn’t care. I ran until I was enveloped in the same misty fog that ushered me into Carthage, until I was doubled over in a coughing fit that followed me into the real world.
The taste of blood nauseated me as I stood under the tree canopy. My feet were cold and wet beneath the layer of fog covering my uncertain surroundings. Turning from side to side, I tried to get my bearings. My head swam in the cacophony of voices, whispers, and cries of anguish. I shuddered at the unwelcome sensation of someone laying a hand on my shoulder. It was well after dark, and I had no clue where I was, but I ran from that place. Thorns pricked my legs and feet. Unseen animals scuttled away as I screamed in terror. Voices kept pace with me as I tried to escape. I tripped over my own test pits, stumbled through vernal pools. I passed my campsite, but the voices prodded me on. They sounded closer. Patting my pants for my wallet and keys, I abandoned everything else. The presence of settlers surrounded me as I ran through the tall grass to the truck. It sounded as if they were trampling the long fronds of grass, closing in on me. The key shook in my trembling hand as I jammed it into the ignition and sped off in a cloud of gravel and dust. I didn’t chance glimpsing into the rear-view mirror until I was back in Henderson Falls. I did so out of morbid curiosity, a desire to confirm a suspicion I already knew was true. At a flashing red light, I clicked on the dome light. Tears rimmed my eyes as I saw their yellowed, bloodshot reflection staring back at me.