by Aaron Dries
The woman’s mouth now stretched from ear to ear, a jack-o’-lantern’s grin casting blood down the front of her body. A red petticoat. Her eyes were small and focused, darker. The irises had absorbed all else.
Amity made to move again. Wasn’t quick enough.
That grin of blood and grass descended on her. Fast. The jaws latched on to the flesh of her right forearm and scissored through the meat until glimmering points struck bone.
The lead bitch had her by the leg and shook its head back and forth, swinging her this way and that. Little fingers lashing out. Thumping against fur.
Amity didn’t feel a thing. She had stepped outside of herself, disconnected and removed. It occurred to her that no, that couldn’t be her arm with the elastic, fatty skin tearing open like rubber. What she was seeing was some gory special effect.
Totally gross, really.
Because there was no pain and because it all looked so damned stupid, she pulled her arm away from the woman—and in doing so snapped glass shards from the woman’s gums. That jack-o’-lantern smile was ruined now. She’d also inadvertently dug away a handful of real teeth in the process. They were sailing through the air on a blood bubble, leaving behind dark, empty spaces in an already darkened hole.
That hole was open. Growing. It was like Amity was falling into it. Those remaining glass teeth were shooting close to her with the intent of slitting her open rea-aaaallll good. So Amity did what felt logical to her. She shot her hands up in front of her and watched as her fingers slid inside the woman’s cheeks, peeling back the flesh. It was warm under the woman’s face.
4
The grass was long. Whipped Amity’s shins. A chaotic beat against dimming nerves. Wet rot and brine in the air. She tumbled along, slower now than she’d been before. Face throbbed. The pain was vast. Branches scratched at her wounds.
Amity knew the madwoman was still behind her. She’d caught glimpses of her through the trees, glimpses of that impossible, inhuman force. And yet her disbelief was idiotic; there was nothing that had happened to her over the past twenty-four hours that belonged in a rational, fair world.
The impossible was not just possible anymore. It was happening. It was now. It was right behind her. Slippery thoughts.
There was no direction. Aimless. Drawn into a game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey—spun around, blindfolded and set free. It was a game she’d always hated playing after losing her hearing, the dark of not being able to see combined with the darkness of deafness was too much to handle.
The ground ran beneath her in a staccato of textures—long grass, rocks, sand, rocks, bamboo shoots, rocks. There was no rhythm to be found and yet she somehow didn’t miss a beat. Her aching feet, bleeding into her sandals, always landed right—until the ground conspired against her.
A hideous image sketched in her vision: a tablecloth yanked out from beneath a setting of fine china, followed by the inevitable cleanup that failure brings to those who second-guess themselves at the last moment.
If Amity hadn’t been running, she would have dropped into the canyon, but due to her speed, inertia cradled her through the air. This saved her life. Her stomach lifted into her throat, that dropping-elevator feeling that always curled her toes and made her wince.
She crashed onto a bamboo bridge. Her ankle twisted again. There were flashes of makeshift bindings and hinges. The force of landing drove all oxygen from her system. Unconsciousness beat its great wings again, churning its siren breeze. She resisted. It was then she felt the entire foundation she’d landed upon shifting beneath her.
Amity rolled. Her eyes scoured the landscape like someone doing a grave rubbing, the charcoal revealing the fate beneath the paper.
It was a small canyon, though certainly wide enough for someone to fall into and die horribly on the rocks below. There, they would become food for the animals that always waited in the wings. The scavengers. The dogs. On the opposite side of the canyon, the landscape continued.
Amity’s hands grabbed at the planks. She was on one of many interconnecting bridges that spanned the distance between each ledge. Only this was unlike any bridge she’d ever crossed before. The entire scaffolding looked as though crafted by unstable minds and hands, a life-size, giant game of Snakes and Ladders with bridges upon bridges, ladders leading to nowhere. It was all built upon stilts that kept the whole infrastructure suspended in air.
Her ledge slid to the left again and then swung on a massive hinge bound together by ancient vine. She gripped the bamboo rungs, watched them fracturing under her grip. It was like being swallowed by a skeleton. Amity rolled and snapped against ribs, rolled again and hit the spinal cord.
Everything skidded, snapped into place, deposited her on another bridge, and this one extended out over the canyon. Her scream must have carried into the turbulent air; there was no way it couldn’t have.
Huffing for breath, Amity reached up to grab an overhead rafter. Her injured arm was exposed to her in full daylight, and for the first time, she understood that it was not a special effect. It belonged to her. It was her pain, this distant burning. Mottled flesh dripped blood. Mosquitos layered the scab.
One of her mother’s old expressions popped into her head.
It has to hurt if it’s going to heal.
Scraped knees, broken toes, a father who had been shot in the head and buried beneath the ground… After all of this—and more—Amity wondered if healing was fucking worth it.
She hefted herself up onto the next bridge as the wind swept around her, battering her with dirt and leaves. This didn’t stop her. Amity rolled onto the next level and crawled along its length.
I can do this. I can do this. It’s just like being on one of the old jungle gyms back at Saint Catherine’s—
Everything trembled. She glanced up through the crisscrossing bamboo rafters and saw the madwoman strung between them like a spider in its web. The bitch had jumped, only from the looks of it her landing had not been as neat as her own.
There were old birds’ nests perched among the architecture, and they fell apart with all the commotion, raining down over them. Branches strung across the ladders from past storms came loose. Some snagged between rib cages on their way down, others pinwheeled into open air. Amity watched them shrink, shrink, shrink and explode against the rocks.
That horrible shaking again. The woman was on the move.
Amity dragged herself onto her haunches and quickly mapped out a route that would lead her to the opposite side of the canyon. She dug blood from her eyes and studied.
If I go along this footbridge and climb up that ladder, it’ll take me to that other one, and if I follow it I’ll get to that bamboo tunnel over there…
It was adrenaline alone that gave her the confidence to start. She knew that the young woman she’d been two days before would have clammed up with stage fright. There was no time to feel proud. The whole structure was growing more and more unstable by the second, and now with two considerable weights pulling and tugging at its bindings, things were literally starting to fall apart at the seams.
The bridge she was climbing across began to give way. Two wooden planks snapped inward and her leg tumbled through the gap. Amity scrambled. Her fingers latched on to whatever they could find, which wasn’t a hell of a lot, just a tumbleweed snagged between two crossbeams.
A part of her was dangling over the canyon, swaying through the air. The sense of weightlessness sent her into tingles.
Hold on…
Bamboo fragments shrank down to nothing below, shattering into pieces.
Sweat dripped into her eyes. Teeth ground together. Every muscle had to work overtime. Gravity was ripping at her skin with its tenterhook hold. Come on, little girl, it seemed to snigger at her. Let me work my magic on you. Just let go and I’ll take care of the rest.
Whaddaya say?
That thicket of tumbleweeds was strong enough to lend her some counterweight—though only just. As soon Amity hefted herself back onto the track, the tumbl
eweed crumbled. She could already feel more planks beginning to buckle. A splinter shot up, twirled and landed on her chest.
A quick look behind her. The woman’s great white and red arms were spanned out on either side, hugging the view, trying to draw her into a bloodied hug.
Christ almighty, what will make you stop?
I can’t beat you.
The revelation was eventual. She was going to die; the woman was going to kill her. Perhaps it was better to let gravity have its way, and let it drag her down. If the monster got her hands on her, God only knew what kind of pain she’d endure before all of her questions about whether or not there was really anyone “up there” were answered.
I’m not ready. I’m not strong enough. It’s just too scary.
Hold on, girl. Hold it. Hold it tight.
Amity’s groan vibrated back into the bridge, and she propelled herself onward. Every stretch of her arm made that burning sensation grow stronger in her wounds—there were so many of them! But now was not the right time to let her beaten body win. The flesh would just have to wait. She stretched again, groaned.
Sorry, you psycho-cunt. You’ve caught me in a surviving kind of mood.
More sand and dust blasted. It was in her mouth, pelting through her tightly closed eyelids. And as quickly as it had come, it was gone again. The wind dropped. It was as though the twister she’d so feared as a child had finally caught up with her, the one from the movie she’d seen.
The father had been sucked up out of his storm shelter in front of his screaming children.
This kindergarten fear stoked in her again; it had been lurking there all through the years, waiting for the right moment to surface and undo her for good. She forced it back, a storm of her own. Amity coughed and continued to climb, determined not to let everything that was against her claim victory.
The skeleton rattled again.
Amity hefted herself up a five-foot-tall ladder that was angled in the right direction: toward the other side of the canyon. She was close.
I’m doing it. I’m fucking doing it!
All around her there were slivers of sky—brilliant and blue—and sunlight booming through what little fog remained. In front of all this, the barrier of interconnecting hinges and poles and directionless bridges built up and over one another. Vertigo swooned. Her depth perception was shifting.
She watched her hands reach and grab, reach and grab, as if they were somebody else’s hands reaching and grabbing, reaching and grabbing. Every so often her vision would blur as grit and blood slid across her corneas. That same hand rose into air, lingered, and then came thumping down.
Something crushed beneath her palms, something wet and thick as syrup.
Twigs and dead grass catapulted into her face, landing on her lips. Amity shook her head from side to side, trying to shake it loose, but between the blood and grime her face was flypaper-sticky.
A speckled blue egg rolled across the footbridge and came to a stop between the two planks in front of her. It sat there, rocking back and forth as the small crack across its surface widened.
Amity was transfixed.
All of her focus contracted in on it.
An iris drawing down into a tight circle, and at the very end of it, nothing but the egg she’d thrashed from a nest. Her mouth was open, breath probing the shell as it split in two.
The two halves broke away like a cartoon heart, and deposited the almost-fully formed bird on the bamboo. It sat there, kicking in shock, covered in slime.
Of all the horrible things Amity had seen since the moment everything went to hell, this was the one that undid her the most. The rope frayed a little. The bird spoke to some deep, primal part of her being. She, too, was ripped open and was exposed.
The eyes were welts against featherless skin; they weren’t even formed yet. Just a blood bubble under all that pink. The beak parted with a cry and she heard it screech the growls of wild dogs.
Amity reached out for it, not knowing what she would do once she had it in her fingers. But she wasn’t quick enough. The bird slipped between the crack in the footbridge and vanished.
It was as though she were falling with it. Helpless. Confused. Suspended in a horrible nowhere between not quite born and not being aware enough to know that it would soon be dead.
This all had a color and the color was RED.
Hot, wet liquid splattered across the back of Amity’s neck. It dribbled around into her collarbone—it was like a slithering tongue. She flipped over. The woman was on the footbridge above, reaching down through the gap. Her long white arm, with its broken and bleeding fingernails, was inches from her face. Swiping. Swiping. Amity saw a mouth full of messy flesh strands, strips of gum and glass fragments, and beyond all that, a throbbing throat constricting and releasing.
That hand slithered farther and reached Amity’s hair. The fingers curled upward and heaved. Instant heat shattered through Amity’s scalp; her skin went taut.
The woman continued to pull as she allowed herself to spill through the gap, bones popping of joint and spine arching. Human origami.
A lifeless arm slapped against Amity’s head. The dark mouth widened. Blood rained over Amity’s face, ricocheted into her nose. It glooped onto her tongue, but she was too preoccupied to vomit—which wasn’t to say she didn’t want to.
Having just a small part of that woman inside her violated Amity deeply. She was sure those little warm drops were changing, mutating. Sprouting legs and running around like the crabs in the ancient man’s cancers. And these blood critters would feed on her; they would rape her until she bled and died, corrupting everything they touched…
(Slippery. So slippery.)
She could already feel them. They were there with that other pain in her abdomen. That sense of being filled and torn. The blood critters were there in the deep.
Amity had no idea where the shadows came from.
They came out of the fog, took aim and dived.
White wings fluttered around her. Scratched. Amity thought there were three birds in total, though she might have been wrong. She watched one of their yellow beaks razor through the crazy woman’s nose, watched as one of her Raggedy Ann eyes burst open.
And yet Amity didn’t really see any of this.
All of her focus was on those loose feathers twirling on the air in gentle, soothing contrast to the carnage above.
It was time to keep moving. Time to cling to the rope and live.
5
The game of Snakes and Ladders resolved itself in a single stretch of bridgework, only it didn’t really look like a bridge to Amity. It bore a closer resemblance to railroad tracks, and stretched directly to the lip of land on the other side of the canyon.
Seaweed and vine dangled from the beams in between, fluttering in the wind. Dust flared again, fell. Amity crawled on, watched the semaphore peekaboo of the canyon floor between the planks. Each time she saw those rocks staring up at her, there was pain between her legs.
All of those little vibrations. She didn’t dare look behind her. Not yet.
Keep going. You’re almost there.
The bamboo knot swayed on its stilts. The railroad shuddered. She winced.
Amity extended her arm and watched her shadow spill over the outcropping. It was only now, just as she was about to crawl back onto land, that she almost gave in to her fear. A weaker person would have given in and stalled. And it was so tempting too.
Amity didn’t give in.
She kept on going and dragged herself across the threshold, felt the bamboo rafters scrape against her knees for the last time. Grass brushed her cheek. Soil had never smelled so rich.
A hand grabbed her ankle.
Amity couldn’t believe the strength still in it. Yet she had to believe. The madwoman whom Amity had never wronged—never offended or picked a fight with—was right there, continuing her senseless, blind chase.
If only she could rationalize it, Amity thought she might be able to defeat
it.
There were no answers here, only evils so pure they burned like the sun.
The face—split in two by its impossible smile—was covered in mottled feathers. Her one remaining eye did not blink. A severed bird’s head rested on her tongue.
The woman came at her fast.
Amity pulled away with such ferocity that urine flooded her pants. The hand slid away, fingernails scraping divots through her sweat.
Running. Lungs filled. Emptied. Filled. Emptied.
(The little bird’s beak. Opening. Closing. Opening. Closing.)
The stink of salt was stronger on the opposite side of the canyon, which meant she was getting closer to the beach. There was safety in numbers. She believed that her brother would be there, waiting for her with the others, and that he would protect and shield her from the horror, just as he’d always done. Caleb Collins was the answer to it all.
He was the rope.
6
The shark watched the light in the girl. Its rays made crystals of the air, frozen bubbles of refracted color. She followed it all, oblivious to the reality of her body’s shutdown. The light bore heat and that heat was marvelous.
She trolled like she’d never trolled before, down a tunnel that was closing in with every lurch. And lurching was exactly what she was doing. Her meat was going slack; even the bones themselves were splintering. Food was the only solution. Food.
Half of the landscape was gone. She had to shift her whole head to see anything right of her nose. It was ocean black, which was why she wasn’t afraid of it.
The island continued its insults. Every animal in its trees stopped to scold her with high-pitched squawks. Even the wind sucked. Leaves exploded like pom-poms, reminding her of a place where children went to learn, of people who were there to teach.
Lost places. Nowhere lives.
Shit cascaded down her legs, leaving a winding trail behind her. This was her ground now; she could mark it as she saw fit. Blood spluttered from her mouth with each exhalation, none of which came easily. But this was the cost of trolling. Of making it last re-aaaaaaallll good, though the shark didn’t really understand the meaning of that. Not anymore.
