The Torment of Rachel Ames

by Jeff Gunhus

  She spins around and chokes back a sob when she sees the passenger in the backseat. It’s the boy from the woods. The boy from her writing that morning. The perfect little three-year-old that was once her son.

  He’s blond and tan from a summer playing outside chasing frogs, swimming in the pool, catching fireflies and riding his tricycle. His lips are turned up into a perpetual smile, like he already has life figured out. He looks right at her with his father’s blue eyes and she raises her hand to say hello.

  “Can you see me, Charlie?” she says. “It’s momma. I’m here. Right here with you.”

  But Charlie can’t see her and she knows it. He looks through her and out the window, his eyes tracking the rows of pine trees flashing past them. She turns to the version of herself driving the car, so clear and clean of sin, so unburdened by any real weight. She remembers the stresses of that day: the news of her lower-than-expected offer from her publisher for her next book, the worry whether they were overreaching on the brick two-story they were buying, the last conversation with her husband that had ended testy and short. All of it seemed so important that day, but none of it mattered. Not really. All of it was just the normal tugs and pushes of human existence, so transitory and meaningless that she wants to reach out and slap the furrowed brow of the woman driving the car and wake her up to the last few minutes of near perfection she would ever enjoy in her life.

  “Are there gonna be other kids there?” Charlie asks.

  “Probably,” her other self says. Rachel hates how distracted her voice sounds, barely paying attention.

  “I hope there’s boys,” Charlie says. “Boys are more fun.”

  “Hey, I’m fun,” driving-Rachel says, giving him a little more attention.

  “You’re the funnest.”

  “Dad’s pretty fun.”

  “Dad’s the coolest. You’re the funnest. And the most beautifulest.”

  Rachel, sitting in the passenger seat, puts her shaking hands to her mouth, trying to mask her sobs as if she was actually in the car and not simply a specter witnessing events already past.

  The other Rachel smiles, just another cute moment from her son, something to store away in the memory bank. “Aww… thanks, buddy. And I think your dad is the coolest too. And the handsomest.”

  Charlie giggles and turns his attention back to the coloring book balanced on his lap.

  The rain starts. It’s not hard, that comes later. Just enough to add a thin sheen to the asphalt road. She wants to reach out and grab the wheel, yank on it to send them into the ditch. Even at full-speed it’s better than what she knows is coming.

  Lights flash behind them and she turns just as the other version of her looks up into the rearview mirror, adjusting it to get a better look. It’s a sports car, a BMW of some kind, sleek and glistening in the light rain. It’s on her ass, headlights flashing, even though they are on a two-lane road with a double-yellow line.

  She hears her driver-self whisper, “Asshole,” under her breath.

  Up ahead the taillights of the logging truck appear in front of them. They come up to it quickly and Rachel driving the car slows down. It’s going under the speed limit, a fact later determined in the investigation. Another fact later in evidence was that Reggie Perkins, the driver of the truck, was working off a hangover with the help of a bottle of bourbon and a couple of Percocet. Still, what happened wasn’t because of Reggie Perkins and his lapse of judgment. Then again, maybe it was. Had he been going at least the speed limit, he would have been farther down the road when she caught up to him. Or if he’d called in sick, he never would have been on the road to begin with.

  Such was the thing of any specific event, that any single thing leading up to it could have changed the trajectory of the world.

  …had Reggie Perkins not grabbed a second cup of coffee that morning.

  …had Rachel not changed her shirt before leaving the house.

  …had the owner of the yet-to-arrive pickup truck barreling toward them been going only sixty miles an hour and not eighty-five.

  …had the BMW driver waited until he’d crested the small incline before seeing what his German engineered car could do.

  It was a game best played in a padded room, because none of that happened. Only the terrible thing happened. And it was about to happen again.

  “Get off the road,” she says to the other version of herself, her voice thin and pleading.

  The red brake lights from the logging truck glare brighter in the windshield.

  “Stop the car. Pull off the road.” Louder now, laced with anger directed at the woman next to her who won’t listen. From the corner of her eye she sees the BMW make its move, swinging out into the not-empty-for-long lane next to her.

  “Pull over, you stupid bitch,” she screams. “Slow down. Do something different for once. For the love of Christ, DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT!”

  A blink of her eyes and she’s behind the wheel.

  Thank God.

  She twists the wheel to pull off onto the shoulder but her hands don’t move.

  “No… no… no…”

  She hammers the brake with her foot but nothing happens.

  Then everything happens.

  The BMW roars past her. She wishes she could kill the son-of-a-bitch. But she knows the pickup truck is about to take care of that for her.

  Instinctively, she slows down, making space for the BMW between her and the logging truck. But the driver ignores the gesture and goes for the double-pass on the blind rise.

  “What an assh—”

  The words stick in her throat when she sees the truck headlights crest the hill right in front of the BMW. Things slow down and she sees every action and reaction in mind-numbing detail.

  The BMW swerves right, scraping sides with the logging truck. The pickup has room to swerve to the outside, but it doesn’t. It crashes head-on into the BMW, destroying the fronts of both cars with such violence that only small parts of the drivers are later found.

  The truck launches up into the air over the smaller car, twisting in the air. The wreckage of the BMW jams under the logging truck, pushing it sideways. Reggie, half-asleep from the booze and painkillers, over-corrects and the cab and trailer jackknife and roll over.

  Rachel hits the brake and this time it works because it’s what really happened. She screams as the anti-lock brakes shudder. The undercarriage of the logging truck is in front of her like a wall across the middle of the road. She swerves but still smacks the wreckage of the BMW, careens off of it and the world turns upside down. She’s weightless, flying through the air like a missile at the logging truck.

  Charlie.

  It’s her last thought before impact.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The crash itself is a black hole, so powerful that her mind mercifully blocks it out. When she wakes up, she’s hanging upside down in her chair. The seatbelt cuts into her neck and shoulder and the airbag sags toward the ceiling. She’s disoriented, confused by the lack of gravity and by what’s happened to her. But that doesn’t last. In a rush of panic, she remembers that her whole world is in the backseat of the car. She turns to look and the movement creates a searing burst of pain. She sees her little boy, still strapped into his car seat, face bloodied from shards of glass, head hanging to one side.

  “Charlie!”

  She digs at her belt buckle but it’s stuck. She yanks on it, then tries to just crawl out of it. But it’s locked and not moving.

  Then the air catches on fire.

  The first burst of flame rolls toward her like a wall as the vapors from the logging truck’s punctured gas tank ignite. The deflating airbag bears the brunt of the flame, and she covers her face with her arms, gasping as the oxygen burns out from around her. The superheated air sears her skin and she screams. The flames recede but the car itself is on fire.

  Desperate, she beats against her seatbelt buckle. It comes undone and she falls to the roof of the car. She drags herself out of her brok
en window, gulping down the fresh air outside. She crawls to the car’s back door, only somewhat aware of the burned skin sloughing off her arms as she moves. Black smoke billows in her face as she pulls herself through the smashed window, oblivious to the shards of glass ripping into her legs.

  Charlie’s awake. Crying. And she thinks that’s good because the dead don’t cry. He’s upside-down in his child seat, hanging in the five-point harness. That helps too since his head isn’t in the smoke.

  He sees her and he makes an animal sound that has the word Momma buried somewhere in it. He grabs for her, pulls her hair.

  Her hands fumble over his car seat, her brain trying to make sense of where the straps are attached.

  The fabric lining for the roof is on fire. The front seats. The air smells of gasoline and burned flesh. Her flesh.

  She pulls on the straps but it just makes them tighter.

  Charlie screams. Not in pain, not yet, but in pure fear. He knows the fire is coming for him.

  Please God, let me save my son. Take me, just let me save my Charlie.

  She presses one of the locking buttons again and this time it gives way. Charlie’s left shoulder is free. If she can get the leg free, she can drag him sideways out and then…

  The pain washes out her last thought. The whole left side of her catches on fire. She screams but doesn’t move. Her body is all that’s protecting Charlie from the flames. She reaches out for the last button. Her finger touches it, then slides off. She reaches for it again, gets her grip on it and cries out as she presses down on it.

  But the second she does, she slides backward, out of the car, away from Charlie. She’s outside where she can breathe, but her baby is still in the car. She crawls back to the window, but someone pulls her back. Then several pairs of strong hands have her. Good Samaritans thinking they are saving her life when really they are just killing her son.

  Then the screaming starts. Impossibly loud, the sound of horrific pain.

  She’s on the ground, the strangers holding her there, her head against the pavement, looking right into where Charlie kicks and jerks in his car seat as the fire reaches him. She sobs as she watches her little boy, the one with the summer tan and his father’s blue eyes, the one who likes to catch fireflies and ride his tricycle for hours, the one that fills her with more love than she ever thought possible. She watches as he burns alive right in front of her, screaming and kicking. And she’s unable to do anything about it.

  She closes her eyes and disappears into herself. The sound of the fire is still there, the smell of the smoke. Then there are sirens. Too late, always too late. They can’t do anything for the little boy burned alive in the car, but they can and do save the life of the woman who lost her son.

  She opens her eyes and she’s in a graveyard. The sounds slowly fade away until they are in the background, only white noise. She walks next to a man and they are holding hands. When she turns, she sees that it’s John. She realizes that she’s known all along who he is and the charade that he was some kind of stranger at the cabin seems odd now. This is her husband. The father of their dead little boy.

  She wants to say something to him, but she knows that she’s still just a spectator. This has happened before. She has to see it through.

  They come to a gravestone and kneel in front of it. The grass has grown over the spot where they put Charlie’s charred remains all those months ago. A year was plenty of time for Mother Nature to recover from the trauma of her skin being pierced through when the grave was dug. Not so for parents grieving for their child, especially one lost in so terrible a way. They sit for a long time together, crying, holding one another. She asks for some time alone at the grave and John reluctantly gives it.

  Once he’s gone, she kisses her hand and places it on Charlie’s headstone.

  “I’m so sorry,” she whispers. “So sorry.”

  She reaches for her purse and removes the gun from it. She looks around the world one last time, her attention oddly enough drawn to a nearby tree, reduced to bare branches by the ravages of winter. It’s covered entirely by black birds who seem to watch her with interest. She smiles, then puts the gun to her head and pulls the trigger.

  The shot rings out and her point of view spins violently. A blink later and she’s on the ground, eyes fixed up at the sky. The black birds rise in unison from the dead tree near the grave, scattering with angry calls. Rachel feels the earth on her back, she feels the cool metal of the gun against her fingertips. She can feel these things but she can’t move.

  Then the ground slowly gives way. Inch by inch, she sinks down into the soft earth like she’s food to be absorbed. The dry grass and leaves scratch against her cheeks as she drops deeper into soil. Her body’s relaxed, no fight left in her, at peace with returning back to the darkness.

  When the soil finally folds over the top of her face, it forces its way into her mouth, down her throat. The dirt drives up her nostrils, into her ears. This is when she panics. She tries to take a deep breath but can’t with the pressure on her chest. She struggles against the darkness but she’s packed in under the ground, buried alive.

  “No!”

  The scream is only in her head because her lungs are filled with dirt, but it’s loud enough to shatter the world around her. The ground opens up beneath her and she falls, weightless, spinning out of control.

  She lands roughly on a hard surface. She looks up and sees that she’s in a white and sterile-looking hallway, lights spaced overhead in an endless series. There’s a door at the end of the hallway, so far away that it’s almost hard to see. It flies open and then bangs shut, like it’s being blown around in a storm.

  She takes a few steps toward it and the lights behind her blink out, sending the hallway behind her into total darkness. As she jogs forward, the lights continue to wink out as she passes them. She breaks into a run but the lights turning off speed up too and she can’t keep up. Soon she’s running in darkness, trying to catch the extinguishing lights before it’s too late. With her legs burning, she sprints the final stretch, jumping at the door just as it closes.

  She falls into the cabin’s living room. The storm is gone, replaced by a brilliant sunny day. She turns and watches the plaster grow back over the door like it’s a living thing until the door is gone and only the blank wall remains.

  She gets up, looking for John. She wants to know why he didn’t tell her who he was. She wants to know what he’s doing in this place now that she understands what it really is.

  There’s a smear of blood on the floor where she left him, but he’s not in the cabin. She goes outside. “John? Where are you?”

  There’s no answer and no sign of him. Slowly, she turns to look at Granger’s cabin across the lake. She walks to the water’s edge. The old man stands on the far side, binoculars up to his face, watching her.

  “Granger!” she yells across the lake. Ripples spread across the surface from the power of her voice. “I know who you are. You hear me?”

  Granger lowers the binoculars and tosses them to the side. They both know he doesn’t need them.

  “I know who you are,” she yells. “And I’m coming for you.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Rachel drags the canoe into the water and jumps in. She paddles across the lake with her gun on her lap, making a straight line toward Granger. The old man stands his ground and watches her approach.

  As she digs into the water, her paddle bounces off something solid but she ignores it. But her next stroke strikes a mass under the surface again and she looks over the side of the canoe to see what it is.

  The water is not the usual greenish tint; it’s dark, almost black. She pokes at the water and hits something just under the surface. She pushes against it and it rolls over like a log finding a new center of gravity. As it turns, a hand breaks the surface, fingers grasping at air. An entire body bobs to the surface. She recoils and slides to the other side of the canoe. It tips and she nearly capsizes. Another body b
reaks the surface on the other side of her. It has a white, ghastly face, swollen from being in the water, holes eaten through its cheeks and neck.

  She looks on in terror as the surface of the entire lake swells with bodies, writhing under the surface, churning the water. There are thousands of them, so thick that she could walk on them across the lake. She leans over the edge and the body nearest turns in place. It’s John, eyes wide in fear, mouth open in a frozen scream.

  “No!”

  She reaches over the edge to grab him but he sinks back down under the press of the other bodies. Hands of decayed flesh and brittle bones reach out for her arms, trying to pull her in.

  She breaks free and grabs her paddle. She digs into the piles of wet flesh around her and pulls. The canoe lurches forward, cutting through the bodies. She paddles hard and the canoe gathers speed even as she has to fight down her revulsion from the sickening, wet sounds as it cuts through skulls, ribcages and dead flesh.

  Finally, she reaches the shore and climbs out of the canoe. She strides toward Granger’s cabin, gun in hand. Granger stands halfway between the water and the cabin, shoulders squared to her.

  But Granger isn’t there alone. The cabin is covered with black birds. Wolves pace back and forth along the tree line. Snakes slither on the ground and hang from tree branches all around him. As she approaches, some of the birds burst into flames and launch screaming into the air, twisting in a manic flurry of wings before thumping to the ground.

  “I know who you are,” she yells.

  Granger looks unconcerned. “What do you think you know?”

  She raises the gun and fires five shots into the man’s chest, striding toward him the entire time. His body jerks with each impact, but there’s no blood. When she stops shooting, he stands up straight and holds out his hands, smiling.