So Cold the River (2010) by Michael Koryta Page B

reached out and touched the bottle, he found it even colder than before. How was that possible? And while on that
     topic, how was it possible for the thing to be so wet, like a frosted mug of beer sitting in the sun? Could it be leaking?
     He ran his finger up the outside, collecting the moisture, then lifted his finger first to his nose and then to his lips and
     dabbed it against them. There was the same faint sweetness, almost like honey. Nothing close to the terrible foulness that
     had put him on his knees a few days earlier.
    That had been the booze, though. Right? Wasn’t that what he’d told himself? He loosened the old cap again, took a sniff and,
     yes, there was a touch of honey. It didn’t smell anything like what he’d remembered.
    “Don’t even think about it,” he said aloud, looking at the liquid inside. He’d read enough about the mineral water to understand
     that it was potent stuff, but nothing he’d read explained its behavior, particularly how it managed to stay so cold, let alone
     its shifting smells and flavors.
    There was still a Pluto Water plant in town, directly across from the French Lick Springs Resort. Tomorrow he’d have to drop
     in and ask them for some details. That would be the second order of business if the visions kept up, though. If they did,
     a call to the doctor would come first.
    The black kid had given Josiah something to remember him by, a left eye that was already going purple by the time he got home
     and studied himself in the mirror, holding a cold can of Keystone to his eye socket and burning with anger and shame.
    He’d taken the only visible damage from the encounter, and that was as bullshit as bullshit got. He was supposed to put that
     guy on his big black ass. Instead, he hadn’t even landed a real punch. Josiah had lost a fight or two along the way, but he’d
     never failed to do some damage.
    Shit, he hadn’t even gotten in the better insult. The black kid’s line about Josiah’s pecker was better than that dumb nigger
     joke. Funny thing was, Josiah wasn’t even racist. Oh, he supposed he could be considered so, but he could be considered anything
     that was accompanied by a bad attitude and a chip on the shoulder. Didn’t matter if you were white or black or Mexican or
     whatever. It was a disrespectful world, he’d seen that clear enough since he was a kid, and wasn’t nobody disrespected the
     world better than Josiah Bradford.
    He used to have some patience. He’d done a good job of waiting, went through each day knowing he’d leave his markand trying to wait on the right opportunity. Today, though, the patience had slipped away, pulled from his soul by some unseen
     force the way the moon ebbed the tides back from the beach. It had started with the heat and been furthered by Amos before
     draining away altogether when Danny Dumb-shit Hastings hit a twenty-five-hundred-dollar jackpot and took to squealing and
     hollering and drawing a crowd of people who stared at his fat ass like he was somebody special.
    No, Josiah Bradford didn’t have any patience left. And something told him, something in the humid, black night, that it wasn’t
     going to be coming back anytime soon either.
    He still had the white guy’s blood on his hand, he realized, as he went for another beer. A long streak of it, dried to a
     rust color. He went to the sink and ran warm water, scrubbed his hand with a bar of soap, and put it under the water to rinse
     it clean.
    Strangest damn thing happened then—the water went cold. As the blood rinsed off his hand, the warm water went cold, then drove
     the blood down the drain in a pink-tinged swirl. Soon as the last trace of blood was gone, the water was warm again. It had
     been a quick thing, an instantaneous shift.
    “Old pipes,” Josiah muttered. Made sense that the plumbing, like everything else in this house, was turning to shit.
    He went ahead and washed his hand a second time.
    Anne McKinney woke just after two