She can’t have her, she thought. I won’t let her. Her keys. All she had was her keys....
“Is that your car?”
“Yup,” Simone said. “Okay, well, it’s time. Thanks for driving.” She laughed at this, a high, thin, strained kind of sound.
Charlie turned off the ignition and switched the keys to her left hand. “Simone—” She slipped the different keys between her fingers like intermittent claws.
“Don’t talk,” Simone said, raising the gun to Charlie’s head. “It’s easier if you don’t talk.”
“At least let me say good-bye to my baby,” Charlie said. Her voice shook. Her hands did, too. She had one chance to get it right, and was relying on instinct, the new solid block in her gut, to guide her.
“Stop saying that. She’s not yours. She’s mine! Jilly is mine!” Simone growled, shoving the gun at her.
“Okay. Okay. She’s yours. I’m sorry.” Charlie forced her voice to steady itself. She spoke in soft, calming tones. This was it. How she played this would make all the difference. “I love her, too. I just want her to be happy and healthy and safe, just like you. I want her to have a good life.”
“She will,” Simone said, the storm beneath her skin spreading to her eyes and mouth. “I told you. I took care of everything.” She raised the gun to Charlie’s face.
Charlie tensed, her breath rough and cold in her lungs, her heart pounding. “Can’t I look at her one more time? Before she’s taken away from me? You can understand that, can’t you? Wanting to say good-bye before she’s taken away for good?”
The clouds behind Simone’s face broke for a minute, and a placid emptiness seemed to take their place, starting at her head and moving down into her arms, sinking them, and the gun, to her lap.
“Go ahead. Say good-bye.” Simone stared at her with a dead-weight kind of emptiness. The stirring of what might have been empathy in her eyes faded. She looked like a kitchen appliance that had come unplugged, an electronic device powered down.
Charlie smiled, but it was all a trick of the mouth. In her eyes, every fear this woman had brought to life, every second of helplessness and terror coalesced into hard pits of hatred. Had she looked at her own face in the mirror, she would have seen eyes very much like Simone’s.
In her mind, she pictured grabbing for a branch, and prayed she wouldn’t miss. Prayed she wouldn’t fall.
Then she swung her arm and raked the keys across Simone’s face, burying one of them as deep as she could into her right eye.
Simone screamed, fumbling for the car door, and tumbled outside. The gun fell out onto the ground after her. Haley in her car seat screamed, too, and for a moment, Charlie faltered, wanting to go back to her, to make it okay. There had been so many times where no one had made it okay for her, and she’d never wanted Haley to feel that kind of aloneness. But she wasn’t done. She could drive away, forget about killing the bitch, just get her and Haley to safety. She turned, her hands shaking as she looked for the right key to stick in the ignition. The driver-side door opened suddenly, and a ghost face half-streaked with blood, its eyes crazed with hate, swam up to her. One clawlike hand clutched her hair and dragged her out, throwing her down onto the hard-packed ground. In her mind, she was falling out of the tree, landing on branches, hard and sharp.
The skies broke open and the rain fell hard. Looking up, Charlie could see the mottled gray sky pelting Simone’s head and shoulders as she raised the gun, using both hands to steady it. She roared half words, half cries of animal anger and pain, her messy blonde hair pink now and plastered to the side of her face to frame her ruined eye.
Charlie scuttled backward, her legs kicking out splashes of mud and twigs. Her hands scraped against rough rocks and broken branches, slippery with rain that felt like blood. She glanced to her side and saw a long, multi-pronged limb, and her hand closed around it.
“You fucking bitch!” Simone spit a wad of blood near Charlie’s shoe. She clicked off the safety on the gun.
Charlie swung the branch, intending to hit her in the face, like in the movies. But it didn’t work that way. The branch was too short and her aim too wild. She did, however, connect with Simone’s wrist. She heard a sharp, satisfying crack and Simone screamed again. The gun went off. The bullet hit the ground beside Charlie’s shoulder, sending up a small tuft of dirt. The gun dropped from Simone’s hand and skittered away. Charlie lunged for it but Simone was on her back, those bony fingers in her hair, slamming her head into dirt, onto small rocks. Her eyes burned as the rain pulled strands of her hair, dirt, and sweat into them. The throbbing exploded against the side of her head again, setting off a small daisy chain of painful sparks all over her skull. She scrabbled forward, her nails breaking as she clawed the dirt in front of her, trying to get to the gun.
Simone screamed at her, the words mostly lost between her breathing and grunting, but Charlie could make out the sentiment. Charlie could, in fact, return the sentiment. Each woman wanted the other dead.
Simone leaped off her back, going for the gun, and Charlie’s fist closed around a rock. Simone fired one shot that skimmed Charlie’s shoulder before she brought that rock crashing down on Simone’s hand. Dragging herself forward, refusing to acknowledge the fire that burned across her shoulder deep into the meat of her arm, she raised the rock again and brought it down on Simone’s cheek. Then she raised it and brought it down on Simone’s temple. Raised it. Brought it down on her cheekbone. Raised it. Her hand shook. Simone spit more blood onto the ground beside her. Charlie dropped the rock and grabbed the gun.
From the car, she could hear Haley crying. She would go to her. She would make it better. She—
Simone grabbed her sleeve, widening the tear the bullet had made, her fingernails grasping for the wound and finding only material. Her other hand brought white-hot pain to Charlie’s side. She looked down, and saw a sharp stick embedded in her side, just deep enough to graze a rib. The pain was enormous, and Charlie jerked away from her. She tried to pull the stick out, but the liquid agony of it sliding against her rib was too much for her. She winced, making small panic sounds in her throat. She was falling, falling…
Simone got to her knees. From beneath the fringe of her dirty hair, malice engulfed her eyes. The two women eyed each other like two predators circling, looking for a soft throat, an injured leg to capitalize on. The rain fell on them, streaking the grime that clung to them.
“I’m taking the baby, now. My Jilly. I’m taking her back.” Then she seemed to catch notes of the baby crying and it made her twitch. “She won’t,” Simone whispered. “She won’t cry with me.”
“No,” Charlie said. “She won’t.” She raised the gun and pulled the trigger.
For a moment, Simone just hung there, suspended against a metal-gray sky, the raindrops bouncing off her wide eyes and slack jaw. The bullet hole, a lucky shot and Charlie knew it, seemed so small, just a tiny, perfectly round red mark above her right eye. The trickle of blood it produced was a stream of pink, diluted by the rain. Then she crumpled into a heap, a little bag of bones and blonde hair, its fury spent, its realities and delusions mixing and swirling, then fading with her breath into the ground below her.
Charlie pulled herself to her feet and forced herself to shuffle over to the body. She took one deep, shuddery breath and then another until she could feel her limbs and focus around the pain. She had done it. By luck or instinct or just sheer maternal protectiveness, she had done it. She had reached for a branch and held on, for her and for her baby. This time, she hadn’t fallen.
She sank to her knees, letting the rain mix the blood and mud into little dirty streams that slid away from her cheeks, her brow, her chin, and into her ears. It felt good. The tiny droplets jolted her with their coolness, rinsing the film of horror from the real world. If tears fell as well—and that was very likely—she didn’t notice and didn’t care.
Cupping the rain in her hands, she watched as the blood was diluted and then ran clean of her. T
rembling fingers found their way to her tangled mess of sopping hair. She smoothed a lock up and out of her eye gently, needing to find in the act a sense of self-soothing, a comfort and strength of her own. Her chest continued to pound, her breath ragged and sharp in her throat. She spit rain and blood from her mouth.
Charlie looked down once at the unmoving figure at her knees, the rainwater pooling in its vacant, staring eyes, even emptier now, and the slightly gaping mouth. Where the blood had washed away, the raw scratches and wounds of their struggle glared pink, also gaping, also filling with water. Her hatred of that figure, of what it had been, washed away, too. She’d half expected that, and further, supposed it would be replaced by some sense of compassion or empathy. She was surprised to find she felt neither. In fact, for the moment, she felt nothing.
Charlie looked around the clearing, sizing up the spot where she had traded her death for Simone’s. The trees surrounding her seemed to crowd in toward the clearing, like excited spectators whose blood-lust had been whipped into a frenzy by the women’s grisly fight. Now, acknowledging her as victor, Charlie couldn’t help but feel that they wanted more. It was silly, feeling that way about trees—she knew that in her head, but in the place where animal instinct had taken over, she couldn’t quite dismiss it. The bend of the limbs, the incidental shapes of shadows cast by them and the way the wind rustled them so that it sounded like voices whispering about her, all supported the feeling. And the rain and blood in her eyes seemed to cause, just for a few seconds, the surrounding foliage to look faded, drained of the colors that meant life and health and safety…
She rose unsteadily and staggered back to the car, her fingers shaking as she undid the clasps that held Haley in the baby seat, and lifted the child into her arms. Haley had cried herself nearly to sleep and now began to whimper. Charley made soothing sh-sh-shhh sounds, as much for herself as for her daughter.
“It’s okay now,” she whispered. “It’s okay. Sh-sh-shhh. It’s okay. Mommy’s got you, baby. Mommy’s got you.”
The baby gurgled, secure in her safety with her mommy. Her tiny fingers clutched Charlie’s torn top, and she buried her face in Charlie’s shoulder against the rain.
About the Author
Mary SanGiovanni is the author of a number of books including the Hollower Trilogy, Thrall, Chaos, and the novellas For Emmy and Possessing Amy. Her short fiction has appeared in periodicals, anthologies, and chapbooks for over a decade. She has a master’s degree in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University, Pittsburgh. She is currently a member of The Authors Guild, The International Thriller Writers, and Penn Writers, and was previously an active member in the Horror Writers Association. She lives in New Jersey with her son and her cat.
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Table of Contents
About the Author
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The Fading Place Page 5
