by Tim Kizer
“Idiot!" Norris shouted. “You’re going to kill both of us!”
He seized Richard's right elbow and started punching him in the face with his fist. After four blows Richard managed to free his right hand. Then he caught Norris's fist and clipped him on the cheek. Grunting furiously, Norris bent over the back of the pilot’s seat, grabbed Richard by the shoulders. Richard jerked back, taking Norris with him. They fell on the floor, Norris put his arms around Richard and pressed him to himself. Richard jabbed him in the sides a few times, trying to break his embrace, and then climbed upon the seat. Norris was still holding him in his arms, his eyes bloodshot. He yanked Richard up from the seat, turned to face the door, and began pushing him forward. It was obvious that Norris intended to throw him out of the helicopter.
Out the windshield, Richard saw a group of tall thick trees about two hundred feet ahead of the helicopter. Richard bit Norris on the nose, then pushed him off and dashed to the door. He could taste Norris’s blood in his mouth. The trees were a hundred feet ahead. Looking out the window, Richard realized that the chopper was losing altitude.
The helicopter shook, then tilted to the left, and a second later, when he saw the tops of trees below, Richard leapt out of the cabin, screaming like a banshee. As he dropped through the air, the helicopter started to spin around. When the tail rotor hit a tree, the chopper plunged toward the ground and crashed seconds later. Then the fuel tanks exploded with a deafening roar.
7.
MARY
It suddenly occurred to her that she would never have found herself in a situation like this if she had chosen a career as a crime boss. Did they call female crime lords godmothers?
If you thought that powerful female crime bosses existed only in movies and books, you were wrong. Mary had once read about Ching Shih, a Chinese woman who had been the leader of a pirate fleet consisting of six hundred ships. With forty thousand pirates under her command, she had terrorized the South Chinese Sea in the early nineteenth century. Vito Corleone couldn’t hold a candle to this gal.
What would Mary have looked like if she had become a head or organized crime? She would wear gorgeous designer dresses that cost as much as a car, designer shoes, diamond necklaces, and diamond rings. She would travel in limousines and have bestselling artists sing at her birthday parties.
It would be nice if Jennifer Lopez sang for me on my birthday, Mary thought as she jumped out of the Range Rover, which she had found near the entrance to the temple.
The helicopter had exploded, Richard was probably dead. She had killed two people for him, and now he was dead.
Mary shut the door and sprinted toward the crash site. She stopped about sixty yards from the wreckage. She was panting, sweat streaming down her face. She didn't dare to come near the remains of the helicopter. A chopper was a complex machine, which had many parts that were capable of exploding. She had no desire to be incinerated by a blast of fire or smashed by a piece of the fuselage. She was perfectly satisfied with what she could see from here.
And then she lifted her eyes. As she ran here, she had noticed something strange about one of the trees nearby. Only now did she realize what she had seen. It was a man. There was a man hanging on a branch at the top of that tree. And it could be only one person—Richard.
8.
RICHARD
There was blood flowing from a wound on his left hand. It ran down his arm, crossed his armpit, then continued down his side, and finished its journey at the waistband of his underpants. It felt as though a little child was passing his pinkie over his body.
His teeth clenched, mentally telling his hands not to relax, Richard brought his feet up and hooked his legs around the limb. He drew a deep breath. He was ecstatic he was still alive.
His best guess was that the tree he had landed in was a poplar.
Tears of pain and weariness were running down his face. He would have climbed onto the top of the limb if it were not for the twigs and branches that grew on it.
"Jesus Christ," Richard whispered, a grimace of pain on his face, sweat rolling down his forehead and temples. "Oh God!"
“Richard, is that you?” said a voice from below. It was Mary.
“Yes, yes, it’s me.”
If he could get on top of the limb, he could relax a little a bit and get some rest.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah, sorta. How did you get here?”
“I drove. I’m so glad you’re alive.”
“Me, too.”
Richard tried to break off one of the branches that prevented him from climbing on top of the limb, but soon stopped the attempt, for fear of slipping off. He probably looked comical in his current position, but no one was going to laugh, including Mary.
“Hang on there, Richard. I’ll go get the car.”
“Okay. Call 911.”
Suddenly, he felt very tired. He didn’t think he could last more than half an hour up here.
Thank God, Mary was helping him. Good thing she couldn't see his terrified face.
Why was she doing this? Why was she helping the man who had buried her in the woods?
There were going to be bruises all over his body. He didn’t mind bruises as long as he came out of this alive.
He issued a sigh of relief. Then he tightened his hold on the branch.
When he had fallen into the tree and managed to grab hold of a limb, he had thought that God must love him. Richard wished God were a little gentler with him, though.
He loved being alive; therefore, he had to figure out a way to get down to the ground without getting killed.
He wiped the sweat from his forehead with his right forearm. Then he heard the limb crackle. He broke into a sweat when he realized that the branch might snap off the tree any minute.
The safest course of action was to climb down the trunk of the tree. Could he get to the trunk? He was not sure about it. If the limb were firmly attached to the tree, he would have probably been able to do that. In its current condition, even a slight disturbance might cause the limb to break off.
Another option was to jump from one branch to another until he got to the lowest one. He rejected it right away. He was an athletic person, but he was not Tarzan.
He could simply let himself drop to the ground.
He had read about a skydiver who had survived a ten-thousand-foot fall after his parachute had failed to open, but he did not want to push his luck. According to his estimates, he was about sixty feet from the ground. He would almost certainly die if he landed on bare earth. And even if he lived, he would break half the bones in his body and become paralyzed for life.
However, he would consider dropping to the ground if there was something to soften the fall. It didn’t have to be a pile of mattresses. It could be a car. Chances were high that he would survive the fall if he landed on the roof of the Range Rover Mary had arrived in.
He decided to let go of the limb. Yes, he might fracture a few bones, but he would probably survive without losing the use of his body.
9.
"Faster, faster!” Richard shouted. His hands were not burning with pain, they were melting with it now. He felt his hands disintegrating into a million pieces.
When he had described his plan to Mary, she hadn’t tried to dissuade him. In fact, she had said it was a good idea.
Mary opened the door, stuck her head out, and looked up to make sure that the car was parked directly under Richard.
"Are you ready?" She got out of the Range Rover. Her heart twisted at the thought of Richard dying from the fall.
The limb crackled again, and Richard dropped a few inches lower. He turned his head as far back as it was humanly possible and saw the Range Rover in his peripheral vision. It was hard to tell if he was going to land on it.
“Is it okay to let go?” he asked.
“Yes, yes.”
“I’m not going to miss the car, am I?”
The limb made another snapping sound.
“No
, you’re not. You’re good to go.”
Well, there was only one way to find out of if Mary was right.
"I'm letting go!" he screamed. "I'm letting go!"
He unlocked his legs and hung by his hands alone. Searing pain enveloped his hands and forearms. The branch groaned. It sounded as if it was about to break off.
Okay, let’s do it.
He loosened his grip and let the branch slip from his arms.
10.
Richard survived the fall. He broke his left forearm, left tibia, and four ribs. He considered it to be a great outcome. He ruined the roof of the Range Rover and shattered every window in it. As he fell down, he had been sure he was going to miss the damn car.
They took him to Tacoma General Hospital, where he spent two weeks. Mary came to visit him almost every day.
Both Mary and Richard kept silent about Steven Norris’s cult mainly because they didn’t think anyone would believe them. According to the story they told to the police, the helicopter crash had been just an unfortunate accident.
After Kathy told Detective Pryor that she had seen part of the attacker’s face and that Richard was not the attacker, Richard was cleared of suspicion. The case remains unsolved to this day.
Mary and Richard did not get divorced. They finally realized that they were soulmates. They moved to San Diego three weeks after Richard was discharged from the hospital—just in case.
THE END.
DAYS OF VENGEANCE
Description
First, he murdered his wife.
Then he lost his memory.
Now he has to remember where he buried the body or his in-laws will kill him.
"Dear Frank, I know you killed your wife, and I can prove it..."
After receiving this note, Frank Fowler, a man suffering from amnesia, begins to suspect he may have murdered his wife Kelly, who vanished three days before he lost his memory. The bad news is Kelly's family has the same suspicions and will stop at nothing to make him remember what he has done to their beloved sister and where he buried her body.
Frank's search for answers becomes a fight for survival after he recalls that his wife's relatives are a clique of ruthless serial kidnappers serving a mysterious one-legged man. His chances are slim: one of the in-laws is a cop and another is a multimillionaire.
However, the question still remains: Why did he kill his wife?
Frank's options are limited: he either finds his wife's body or dies. In his race against time Frank has all the clues to the puzzle, he just needs to remember them before it's too late.
Chapter 1.
DREAM
1.
The note read: “Dear Frank, I know you killed your wife, and I can prove it. You are a reasonable person. I’m sure you don’t want to go to prison. All I need is a $20,000 loan. Please think about my request very carefully.”
But before this, the last six years of his life had been wiped from his memory.
Then there were darkness and dreams...
2.
Owl. Owl. Owl? This word flickered at the edge of his mind for a few seconds and then vanished. Frank somehow knew that it was not the word he’d been trying to recall. His very life depended upon this important word buried deep inside his memory, and he had to fish it out as soon as possible if he didn’t want the one-legged man and his people to cut his throat. He had no idea who the one-legged man was. Sometimes he doubted this man actually existed.
The word sounded similar to ‘owl.’
He would give it another shot later. Right now, he would like to focus on something else. Those dreams. Yeah, on those amazingly vivid dreams.
Frank had been having bizarre dreams while he was in a coma. When he regained his consciousness, he did not remember their contents. As a matter of fact, he was not even sure he’d had any dreams at all.
Very hard. Really damn hard! It was so hard to open his eyes. To unglue his eyelids, which, as he had begun to suspect, must have been sewn together, otherwise how could one explain the fact that he had been trying to put them in motion for ten minutes now (or maybe ten days), and they had not budged one bit?
Then two flashes of recollection lit up his mind. First, Frank remembered that there was a steel-plated safe holding a body the one-legged man’s people would love to get back. He had no clue where he’d hidden it. Within seconds, this memory disappeared into the ether.
The second flash was one of those strange dreams.
Frank remembered seeing a man who stood by the bathroom door, collecting his thoughts. The man clasped a nine-inch long knife in his right hand, but Frank knew he was nursing a hope that he would not have to use it. Strangle... He would prefer to strangle her.
Frank could also see a woman in the bathroom. She was in the shower cabin, carefully rubbing soap on her shoulders, forearms, and breasts, firm jets of hot water massaging her back, her hands sliding smoothly on the soft lather. The man wrapped his fingers around the knob, turned and pulled it, swore at himself—this door opens inward, idiot!—and then began pushing the door slowly until the gap became wide enough for him to see the woman.
The woman’s progress was easy to observe since the bathroom fans had been doing a great job of venting most of the steam out. The man asked himself if he should wait until she finished showering. The answer was no.
The woman turned around towards the showerhead and remained in this position for a while as the water rinsed the front of her body. Then she grabbed the shampoo bottle and squeezed some of its contents into her palm. She seemed preoccupied with the task at hand and would have hardly noticed if someone had sneaked into the room, especially with all that mist on the shower door. After gently lathering the top of her hair, the woman poured more shampoo into her palm and applied it to her hair in the back.
The man gathered his courage and finally stepped over the threshold. He quickly shut the door behind him so as to prevent the draft of cold air from breaking into the bathroom and thus alerting the woman. Frank still couldn’t discern both the man’s and the woman’s faces—they were the only blurry spots in this vivid dream—but at the same time he had a feeling he knew these people very well. The man stood mere feet away from the shower cabin, watching his target massage the shampoo into her scalp. He was excited she didn’t see him enter the room. Lucky for him, the woman usually closed her eyes when lathering up her hair, which meant he had the surprise factor on his side, just like he’d hoped. Now there was a chance he wouldn’t have to hear her ear-piercing scream after all.
With a pleased smile, the woman breathed in the hot steam, letting it warm up her nasal passage and lungs, as her hands slowly moved from her forehead to the back of her head, her fingers digging into the shampoo foam in circular motions. She obviously enjoyed taking shower.
Hiding the knife behind his back, the man made the first step towards the cabin. Through the water jet noise, he heard the woman start humming some tune, and he froze for a second to shake off the momentary doubt that he would be unable to yank that bitch out and accomplish what he had planned. She’d better shut up and quit distracting him! He inhaled through his nose and exhaled through his mouth and quickly calmed down.
The tune reproduced by the woman was Dancing Queen by ABBA. Like millions of other people, the woman loved singing in the shower, where there were no critics or gawkers.
With her eyes still shut, the woman stepped closer to the showerhead, allowing the water to rinse her hair. As the shampoo lather streamed down her naked body, she kept humming Dancing Queen, while running her fingers through her locks. She was enveloped in puffs of steam, the water noise drowned every other sound in the bathroom; oblivious to the world outside the foggy shower door, she didn’t see the man approach the cabin.
3.
The memory expired as abruptly as it had come to his mind. A few seconds later, he only had a vague idea of what the dream had been about. And the memory of the one-legged man had vanished completely.
So, one, tw
o, three. He was summoning his strength. Summoning his strength. He had to open his eyes. And here was the light. His eyelids finally opened. Focusing, and...
A woman's face. Perhaps he should go to the bathroom and wash his face and brush his teeth. He also did not want to be late for work. By the way, where did he work?
“Mister Fowler,” the woman said in a low voice, putting her warm palm on his hand.
Lying in bed was pleasant. The woman’s palm was very warm, as if it had rested on a hot towel for a while before landing on his hand. He had no desire to get up. It felt as though he had grown into the bed, become part of it. The woman was apparently kind. Kind as a mother.
He moved his lips apart and forgot to register how difficult this action was because all of his attention was drawn to the face of the kind woman clasping his hand. His right hand. Or was it his left hand? Damn, which hand was she holding?
“Mister Fowler, if you can hear me, move your right thumb.” A pause. “Move any finger if you can hear me, Mister Fowler. Hang on a second. I'm going to get the doctor.”
Yes, sure, he could hear her. He moved (or so it seemed to him) his right index finger. Yes, it was the index finger on the hand the woman was squeezing. He wagged it with sufficient amplitude so that the woman would easily notice the movement.
“Hang—” the woman fell silent after seeing his finger twitch, which meant he had actually moved it. “Very good, Mister Fowler. I'll get the doctor.”
As she rose from the chair, she poured a pleasant sweet smell over him—everything coming from this woman was pleasant. Then she left the room, her heels knocking softly on the floor. Or maybe it wasn’t her heels. Now he wasn’t even sure he had heard the knocking.
Knocking? And what about breakfast? Or was it time for lunch?
