Endangered Species

by Barr, Nevada

  Sitting on a fallen log, Anna unlaced her boots. Beneath she wore two pairs of socks, thin knee-highs next to her skin to wick away the sweat, and thick cotton midcalf socks over those to cushion her feet from the rude leather of her Red Wings. Having pulled off both pairs, she laced her bare feet back into the boots, then fashioned a collar and leash for Flicka by tying all four socks together. The end of this stretchy line she jammed down over a stub of broken branch that stuck up from the log where she sat.

  “I’ll be back,” she whispered, and cupped his face between her hands. “Please, please be quiet or I’ll make you into a venison sandwich.”

  Flicka licked her hand.

  “Stay,” she whispered, and moved quickly away, afraid to look back lest eye contact inspire a spate of hopeful bleating.

  The collapsed bank reached to the edge of the sound, blocking her path and providing cover. She stopped and listened. Flicka was blessedly quiet. From beyond the irregular wall of soil and roots she could hear Mona.

  “I can’t walk anymore.” Mona’s voice was too high, too loud. A thud, the recognizable sound of metal striking flesh, followed.

  “Quiet.” Schlessinger.

  Moaning as directionless as that of the wind in the mountains undercut the command.

  “You didn’t have to—” Dot.

  “Quiet!”

  Quiet followed. Mona’s bones were old, growing thin and brittle. Did one’s skull grow thin and brittle as well? Anna couldn’t remember reading anywhere that it did. Pressing her belly into the dirt, she wriggled her way upward. The ridge was ten or twelve feet high on the landward side and exposed the reaching claws of live oak root. Seaward it dwindled to nothing where the current took and redistributed the soil. Where Anna was it was maybe six feet high, and soft from its recent separation from the island proper. Loose dirt served her well, covering the noise of her ascent. Lizardlike, she reached the top of the berm and lifted herself up on her arms to peek over the crest. A lizard measuring distance, she thought as she bobbed on her short front legs. Laughter, as unbidden as when she was stoned, built in her lungs and she wondered if she’d become humor-impaired from her recent adventures.

  On the far side of her hiding place Dot, Mona, and Marty Schlessinger were crowded onto a narrow neck of beach, squeezed between bank and marsh. Schlessinger stood, shoulders and butt resting against the vertical wall of dirt. He held a six-cell flashlight in his left hand, its powerful beam trained on the two VIPs. In his right was a handgun. Not the simple cowboy six-cylinder wheel gun, but a Glock or a Sig-Sauer. Anna wasn’t enough of a weapons aficionado to know the difference in the dark, but she could tell it was a semiauto with a magazine holding ten to thirteen rounds and one in the chamber. Looking at the familiar chunk of iron, she felt soft and naked. It wasn’t at all pleasant.

  Mona was crumpled in a heap, hugging her left knee the way Anna had seen injured hikers do. Dot knelt behind her in the mud, cradling her head against her chest. From beneath her fingers, near Mona’s temple, a line of blood or slime crawled downward. By the indirect spill from the flashlight, Anna couldn’t be sure which it was. It just looked black and viscous.

  “She can’t walk any farther,” Dot said firmly. “Your hitting her is just going to make it worse.”

  “I told you, I’ve got a bad knee,” Mona said in a reedy voice. “It’s gone out on me before. I can’t walk on it.”

  “An old football injury,” Dot said.

  Anna caught the wry and startled glance Mona shot her friend.

  “Two choices,” Schlessinger said. “You get up and walk or I shoot you where you sit.” His body never changed position nor did the expression on his face alter in any way. Because he held the light, Anna couldn’t see him as well as the others, but by the reflection of the moon off the water, Schlessinger looked too tightly strung, a guitar string about to snap. The skin of his face was rigid beneath his eyes and over his cheekbones. In the brief silence that followed the ultimatum, Anna became aware of the faintest of sounds, like distant rocks clashing together in the surf. Marty was grinding his teeth. The barrel of the gun hanging down by his thigh twitched spasmodically. The fingers of his left hand drummed on the barrel of the flashlight.

  If his drug of choice was cocaine and he’d bolstered his courage with a line or two more than he was accustomed to, Marty Schlessinger was in a volatile state. Fear was not a factor, but paranoia was. Pain wouldn’t figure into the equation till the drug wore off. Freedom from fear and pain gave him more courage than Anna cared to think about. Consequences, squeamishness, ethics, morality—all the leverage human beings use to keep themselves and one another from tearing society apart—would have no effect.

  “Shoot me then,” Mona said, and dug a cigarette from the pocket of her trousers.

  “I thought you used those to leave a trail,” Dot said accusingly.

  “Held one back to smoke before the execution. I’m a sucker for tradition.” The words were brave and Anna was impressed, but she noticed Mona’s hand shook so badly she could scarcely light her cigarette.

  Their captor seemed not to hear or not to process the information. With a visible effort to keep the quaver from her lips, Dot went on with forced nonchalance. “We left quite a trail, Marty. There’s no way you can erase it all. We left enough clues to send you to the gas chamber. Why don’t you just let us go? Mona and I don’t care a fig about this turtle thing. We never really understood how it worked. We’re just a couple of senile old schoolteachers. Let us go and this never happened.” Her voice grew stronger as she spoke. Years of compelling children to learn were not wasted.

  With a glimmer of optimism, Anna waited for Marty to see reason.

  Unmoved and unmoveable by humor, logic, or pathos, Schlessinger raised the semiauto with the unstoppable glide of a machine: preprogrammed and soulless.

  “Holy shit,” Anna whispered. All the weapons she didn’t have flashed before her eyes. The tire iron still hung from her belt but it only worked when applied up close and personally.

  The pistol was reaching the end of its arc. No sign of humanity yet sparked in Schlessinger’s pupilless eyes. Dot and Mona, closed in a circle of hard light, Dot’s hands on Mona’s shoulders, watched the barrel with frozen fascination. In a supreme act of courage and defiance, Mona raised the cigarette to her lips and took in a lungful of smoke.

  Time was up.

  Without thought, Anna snatched up a rock the size of a Ping-Pong ball and hurled it at Schlessinger. Gender had robbed Anna of a childhood spent throwing and catching spherical objects. The rock hit the biologist in the leg. Light and gun rotated toward the embankment. Three rapid shots were fired into the woods. Schlessinger thought Anna was above him.

  “Run!” Anna shouted. Dot and Mona sprang up, Mona’s knee miraculously healed. The shout brought Schlessinger’s gun and flashlight back around. He caught the VIPs in the beam. They had bolted north, away from the fall of dirt that hid Anna. Land gave way to marsh and they plowed only a yard or two through the knee-high muck and grass.

  Screaming like a banshee, Anna began throwing everything she could lay her hands on: rocks, sticks, dirt clods, and something that felt suspiciously like a frog. Her shrieks were guttural, visceral, everything she could remember from training, monster movies, and PBS snuff films. She hoped she sounded like an army of lunatics.

  Forgetting Dot and Mona, Schlessinger turned on Anna, this time firing in the right direction. Anna saw the muzzle flash at the same instant she felt a slug pound into the dirt by her elbow. Loose dirt was no match for bullets fired at close range. At best it would slow them down just enough so the hole they blasted through her body would be bigger and she’d die with less time for suffering. Balling up like a pill bug, she rolled to the bottom of the hill.

  Three more shots slammed into the bank in rapid succession, sending down a rain of dirt. Now would be a good time for backup, Anna thought, though to be rescued in such an ignominious position would be galling.
/>   She wanted to uncurl herself and move to better cover. The original barrage of rocks would have tipped anyone off—even someone slightly mad and seriously high—that their attacker was unarmed. Any minute Schlessinger would be coming over the ramparts of Anna’s fort. For what seemed a deadly eternity but was less than a second or two, Anna’s body refused to uncoil, to expose more of itself to danger. Then she was on elbows and knees snaking south through the mud. As she crawled, she hollered for Rick, Al, Dijon, and Guy; like Beau Geste, calling up a phantom army to keep Schlessinger off balance long enough for Dot and Mona to get out of the line of fire.

  Given the efficiency of the island grapevine, Anna didn’t hold out much hope the ruse would work for long. That the Hansons were to be staked out for a drug bust wasn’t common knowledge, but everyone knew fire crew had been called off Cumberland for some law enforcement cloak-and-daggering.

  A broken beam of light snapped over the berm. Anna logrolled into deeper water. Stretched full-length, she presented an irresistible target. The water was close to body temperature, making it hard to tell where she was wet and where she was dry. She could feel her hands sinking into the ooze that nourished the salt meadow. Grass, terribly sparse for the duties she required of it, rose a foot or so over her head. Disturbed slime gave off the rich smell of death and new life intermingling.

  Distressingly buoyant, Anna’s legs wanted to float, her shirt and trousers ballooning with air. Grasping the grass down near the roots, she anchored her boots in the muck and forced her body beneath the surface.

  Marty Schlessinger reared up on top of the tumble of earth. Either he was crazy or he’d figured out Anna had nothing but rocks in her arsenal. Anna suspected both.

  “Aaannaaa.” The call was long and eerie, like that of an evil child. “Olly olly oxen free.”

  Despite the tropical temperature of the water, Anna felt an icy current running down her spine. Crazy people made her nervous. Politically correct or not, crazy people made everybody nervous. In madmen one couldn’t help but see one’s own potential slippage from sanity. All rules were suspended. The game changed. Not even the board remained the same.

  “Your little old ladies are dead.”

  Sadness seasoned by a bitter sense of failure welled up within Anna. A repulsive gush of self-interest carried it away. Marty didn’t dare leave Dot and Mona alive. If he’d already succeeded in killing them, Anna’s responsibilities were at an end. She could lie low. She could run away. She could save her precious little hide. Inch by inch she began easing backward through the marsh grass toward the open sound. A quarter-mile’s slither would bring her to swimmable water. After her long intimacy with chiggers and ticks, leeches struck her as almost family.

  Pathetic bleating halted her progress. Flicka, tied to his stump, had been alarmed by the shots. Sorry, Anna thought cravenly. You’re on your own.

  “Flicka!”

  Anna winced. It was Mona. Schlessinger had lied—or been mistaken. At least one little old lady was still alive.

  His mistress’s voice excited the fawn and he began to cry frantically, as if he were being disemboweled with a dull knife.

  “Flicka!” Mona called again, closer this time. The fawn, unwitting, yet as effective as a Judas goat, was leading Anna’s lambs to the slaughter. Cowardice begged her to stay in the marsh, her arms and legs and heart were heavy with it. Warm enfolding mud was her dearest companion. Eyes above the waterline no more than a self-respecting alligator’s, Anna watched the events on shore unfold. Things slowed. A creature of the marsh, she watched the human drama with something approaching disinterest.

  Grimly, methodically, reminiscent of the wooden men in clocks who raise their mallets day in and day out to strike off the hours, Marty Schlessinger’s gaze was pulled from the south where Anna hid. The semiauto began to swing up. Pivoting smoothly on his uphill foot, he turned toward the fawn’s guardian angel.

  Necessity overcame self-preservation. With a shout, Anna came up out of the mud like a creature in a horror film. Less than twenty feet separated her from Schlessinger, but it stretched as distance will stretch in a dream. Pulling the tire iron from her belt, Anna pushed through air thick as the mud she’d come from. Roaring filled her ears. Some of it she recognized as her own, some a higher-pitched staccato. Mona and maybe Dot shouting.

  His back to the bank, the ocean in front of him, besieged from two sides, Schlessinger screamed like a cornered animal. The flashlight fell away, its beam spiraling down the side of the mound. Marty had the pistol in both hands. Fire flashed. Anna saw the ten inches of blue and knew the shot had gone in the direction of the VIPs. She yelled again. Time and distance collapsed. Suddenly she was at the bottom of Marty’s mountain. Black of metal, of roots, of human limbs ran together. An explosion, so close Anna was deaf with it, struck at the same time as a numbing blow to her inner thigh.

  Anna had been punched, rolled in toxic waste, tumbled off cliffs, and once, a woman had tried to drown her. But never had she been shot. Outrage flooded her veins. “You shot me!” she heard herself screaming. “You fucking shot me.” Fury swept her up. She’d never been so angry; she was amazed her hair didn’t catch on fire.

  She hit Schlessinger in the knees and he fell back, head down the far side of the berm. His feet came up; the toe of one boot caught Anna under the chin. Maybe it hurt, maybe it didn’t. Anna was beyond pain.

  Grasping Marty’s ankles, she clawed her way up his body. Dirt mixed with the water streaming from her clothes and she stuck like glue. A fleeting question: How much of it was blood? She was alive, so the femoral artery hadn’t been severed. That would have to be good enough.

  Hands hammered at her head. Anna fought back, smashing the tire iron into what she hoped was fallible human flesh and not the unfeeling dirt of the bank. Locked in tightly, there wasn’t much leverage and the blows did little harm. Stiff, clawlike fingers tore at her cheek. One ripped the corner of her mouth. She bit it and hung on like a terrier. Blood trickled down her throat, choking her. Her teeth were stopped by Schlessinger’s bones.

  Reduced to hand-to-hand: Schlessinger had lost his gun. Optimism lent Anna strength. Eyes were useless, the world was black. Her nose was clogged with the smell of dirt and sweat and fear. Kicking hard, she launched herself over the top of the crumbled earth to land on the biologist’s chest. Shoving the tire iron down on Marty’s throat, she held on.

  The finger was wrenched from her jaws. Arms, strong as cable, wrapped around her. Together she and Schlessinger rolled down the far side of the bank. The cross of iron caught on something and was ripped from Anna’s fist. She felt the tail end of it rake across the side of her neck. The fight had been going on less than half a minute but already Anna could feel her energy peaking and knew that before long she’d be out of gas. Fueled by drugs, Schlessinger had the upper hand.

  The world twisted. Schlessinger was on top, his weight pinning Anna to the muddy earth, his knee planted in the middle of Anna’s chest. Fingers closed around her throat. Air was cut off. Muscles were burning up their reserves. Anna could feel her limbs growing heavy, her chest swelling. Grabbing one small finger, hopefully the one she’d bitten half through, she bent it back with all the force she could muster.

  Schlessinger roared, thunderous and wild like a wounded lion, and Anna sucked oxygen in through a bruised throat. Shouting and curses battered the air above her. Schlessinger still had one hand locked on the soft flesh of Anna’s neck. His fist began to pound into Anna’s face. By whipping her head from side to side, Anna kept the blows glancing off. One landed true and she felt her eyeball explode under Marty’s knuckles.

  Anna jerked the knee of her uninjured leg up and arched her back. Unseated, the biologist fell away. Anna was stunned. She’d practiced that move a hundred times in self-defense classes all over the country. It never worked. But then she’d never been matched with someone her own size. The men she’d sparred with usually outweighed her by forty pounds or more. Schlessinger, living on
speed, couldn’t have weighed more than one-hundred-forty.

  Rolling to her stomach, she pushed up on all fours in time to catch a boot to her right ear. Down again; night closed around her in black bat wings, all the hurts heretofore unregistered clamoring for revenge; revolutionaries at long last loosed from under the thumb of the tyrant.

  Doggedly she tried to think how she’d parry the killing blow.

  It never came.

  Shouts rained down instead, and light scraped across her face. Anna lifted her head. A great shadowy hulk that could only be Rick Spencer clutched a windmill of arms and legs to his chest. In the agitated strobe of a flashlight held in unsteady hands, Anna could see he’d caught Marty.

  “Don’t move or I’ll break your arm.”

  “He will,” Anna mumbled through rapidly swelling lips. “I’d do as he says if I were you.”

  Schlessinger continued to struggle. There was a sickening snap, a scream, then silence.

  “You okay, Anna?” Rick asked.

  “I was winning.”

  “Right.”

  Anna tried to rise and her left leg collapsed under her. “I’m shot,” she remembered aloud. “The son-of-a-bitch shot me. My leg.”

  “Shit.” The flashlight beam had steadied. By its light Anna could see Rick threading two pairs of flexi-cuffs from the band of his hat and securing Schlessinger’s wrists. “How bad are you?”

  Anna shook her head, remembered she was in the dark, and said: “I don’t know. Maybe bad.”