Left for Dead: A gripping psychological thriller

by Deborah Rogers

  So what if I am? It could be the trauma, the punishment meted out to my body, the stress of it all. Being late does not necessarily mean the worst-case scenario.

  But even as I think this, I am flooded with doubt. I press my abdomen with my fingers. Could my rapist’s child really be growing inside me?

  Then another disturbing thought registers—Disease. Herpes. Gonorrhea. AIDS.

  Oh God, I’ve got to get out of here. I need to get help, now more than ever. Even though it’s late afternoon, I decide to go right now. I gather my supplies, bundle them up in a partially decomposed grain sack, and hurry to the other side of the valley.

  The wolf stands and looks at me. For a moment, I don’t think he will come but by the time I reach the cypress tree, he’s trailing me through the brambles.

  As I walk I think of all the other near misses—my friends’, my own. Twice before with me. The last time with Matthew at my side, our eyes glued to the wand, waiting for the blue lines that would tell us yes or no. I was almost disappointed when the test was negative. “Next time,” Matthew had said, unable to hide his relief, “when we’re ready.”

  Then there was Macy Jones, a girl from junior high I did not know very well, who I found crying in the bathroom after Thursday English class. She told me that no one in her devout Jehovah’s Witness family could know, and asked if I would come with her to the clinic. Can’t you adopt it out? I said. She shook her head and wouldn’t tell me why. It was only later, as we sat in the clinic waiting room, that she whispered that her uncle had been abusing her for over a year.

  What if it was too late for me? What if I couldn’t bring myself to go through with an abortion? How would I be able to look at the child without seeing Rex’s face? And what about the child? How would he or she feel knowing they were a product of rape?

  My foot is hurting again so I stop to sit on a flat rock and examine it. My plastic bag shoes have worn through and the wound that was healing so well is now ugly and inflamed. Using a little water to wash it, I fold the plastic bag into a strip and tie it around the bridge of my foot.

  I get up and keep moving, pausing briefly to add to my food supplies when I see a handful of black-lipped mushrooms, blossoming along the base of a tree.

  By mid-afternoon I top out on a ridge. I look at the rolling hills and valleys, and can find no sign of farmland or the gorge or anything else that signals human life. The sky is mule gray but I can just make out the sun behind the glue. It’s to my left, so left must be north, south right.

  For another hour at least, we continue south along the ridge until it grows too stony and narrow to progress any further. I circle back down into a gully, the wolf following at a distance, and we walk on until the failing light forces us to stop.

  Finding a half-circle of spruce for shelter, I gather wood and undo the burlap bundle to retrieve the lighter. In an instant I see the smashed eggs. I stare at the goo. How could I have been so stupid not to have packaged them better? I pluck out the cracked shells and throw them away and tell myself at least I have potatoes, berries, and a fistful of mushrooms.

  I return to the package to hunt for the lighter. But it’s elusive. So one by one, I remove each item, lay them all out, pat the ground around me in case I’ve dropped it. I sit back on my heels and stare at the collection in the half-light. Wherever the lighter is, it’s not here with me.

  26

  I am sick in the night. It comes in waves. Bile spills from my lips, into the dirt, in strange syrupy puddles. The wolf sits watching me, ears pricking every time I retch. It could be the mushrooms or the water or a foot infection. Whatever the source, it’s bad.

  My sides contract in a fierce spasm and I retch again. I lift my head, gasping, and look through the trees at the corpse-gray sky. I wonder if this is it. I wonder if I have come to the end of the road.

  The wolf whines. Then rain is upon us in sudden watery sheets. I do my best to protect myself with the tarp but the rain comes at me sideways. I hate the feeling, the acute ickiness of wet hair sticking to the back of my neck, the thin cotton dress clinging to my skin.

  The wolf stands and blinks at me, face dripping. When I don’t move, he drops beneath the cedar opposite and rests his head on his paws.

  I throw up again and it rains and rains. Heavy, thoroughly, limitless. I think maybe it’s a sign. The forest is stronger than I will ever be. Give up. There’s no way out. Dying in the hollow of a tree is the best you’re going to get. I shut my eyes and try to remember my mother’s poor excuse for a Monet above the toilet, and the wrong shade of violet she used for the agapanthus. Then I try to remember her face.

  *

  The rain continues all through the night and into the next day. The vomiting subsides but I shudder between hot and cold. A fever, which mostly likely means infection. With food poisoning at least there was a chance of the illness passing, but without antibiotics an infection will only get worse.

  Finally, I decide to move. I force myself to my feet and take three deep breaths and limp toward to the ridge. The wolf hangs back. It’s not until I’m at the stand of redwoods that he follows.

  Clutching my meager supplies to my chest, I hobble through the rain, not sure where I’m going. I just listen to the voice in my head. Keep moving. Just keep moving.

  As we walk I tell the wolf my darkest secrets. I tell him about the time when I was nine and made three crank calls on a dare at Laura Jane Bettison’s slumber party. I tell him about how I stole a pack of colored felt-tipped pens from the bookstore just because the clerk’s back was turned. I tell him about how envious I was of all my friends’ perfect nuclear families, with Mom and Dad and kids around the dinner table eating supper and thinking nothing of it. I tell him about the summer when I was sixteen and invited to stay with my best friend, Chloe Jenkins, and her family at their beach house in Onondaga County, and how I came on to Chloe’s father when Chloe and her mother went into town for supplies. He and I were by the pool, side-by-side on the deck, him reading Wilbur Smith, me Bridget Jones’s Diary. I let my bikini top slip a fraction. At first he pretended not to notice, so I let it fall even further, and he put his book down and said, “What are you up to, missy?” but he was smiling and I smiled back and he leaned over and rubbed his palm over my nipple. But when he realized what he’d done he abruptly withdrew his hand and stammered an apology and got up and left. For the next two weeks I looked at that unfinished Wilbur Smith perched in a mini tent on the side table and thought about what I’d done.

  “Maybe that’s why I’m here,” I tell the wolf. “Maybe I deserve this.”

  I squint through the rain. There are more important things I should be remembering. The ten things. Kermit. Rex. Numbers on a license plate. But I don’t know what else. Oh God, a baby. Not a baby. Please not a baby.

  My bad foot gives way and I fall to the ground.

  I cry. Everything hurts.

  27

  I wake up on my front, cheek pressed into the mud. I turn my head and see the wolf figure-eighting back and forth. The rain has cleared but left behind a merciless chill.

  Something registers. Through the brush, in the distance, a color. Out of place. It doesn’t belong in the wilderness. Orange. Man-made. A tent.

  Without thinking, I scramble to my feet.

  “Hey!”

  My leg buckles and I collapse. I get back up again, do my best to ignore the pain.

  “Hey! Anyone there!”

  I drag my leg behind me.

  “I’m sick, I need help!”

  I hurry through the trees to the camp and scan for signs of life. The tent is half-collapsed, the left side sagging in on itself, buried in pine needles. Disappointment washes over me. No one has been here for years.

  I approach the tent and open the flap. Inside there’s a sleeping bag rolled out. A pillow. A Walkman with a cassette. Prince and the Revolution. A flashlight, its rusty batteries oozing manganese oxide. I crawl further inside and look through a small backpack in th
e corner. Winter clothes, woolen socks, thermal underwear, gloves. I remove my wet dress and put on the foreign clothes, ignoring the spicy scent of a male and mold.

  There’s a bag filled with six packets of freeze-dried food without use-by dates. I tear one open. But the contents are no more than congealed paste and it’s too risky to eat them.

  I return to the backpack and find a journal, a wallet, a set of keys. I look at the driver’s license. A red-haired guy in the big lips Rolling Stone T-shirt. Born in seventy-two. Alain Dufort.

  I open the journal. Its pages mildewed and cracker stiff. Entries fill almost every page in exquisite neat penmanship. All in French. Wedged in the center pages of the journal are photographs—five. A family of four. Mom, dad, son, and daughter at an airport, suitcases at their heels. A man and a woman holding hands. A greyhound nudging a tennis ball in a park. Alain Dufort at a Bruce Springsteen Live in Ramrod concert T-shirt doing the peace sign to the camera.

  I flick to the last journal entry, where he had written, in precise English letters—Snake! 28 November 1989.

  *

  I decide to stay and rest. A day at the most. I shake off the leaves and resurrect the tent and get inside.

  My foot is in a sorry state. The wet has not helped, and when I examine my sole, it’s the color of an avocado left to go bad. I think of trench foot and the open fungal sores soldiers used to get, and how they needed amputations, and sometimes died because their bodies could not take the rot. I can do nothing but wash the lesion with water then bind it with a torn strip of Alain Dufort’s underwear, and hope that by some miracle I will make it out soon.

  Next, I do an inventory of my supplies. Six potatoes. Two turnips. A quarter-full jar of mushy salmonberries. Eight long-stalked mushrooms I won’t be eating again.

  Even though I have no appetite, I select a small potato and force myself to eat. It sticks between my teeth like straw.

  Afterward, I lift the opening of the sleeping bag to check for critters then crawl inside. Closing my eyes, I feel myself drift. In the bottom left-hand corner my big toe nudges a forgotten balled up sock.

  *

  I am a child again. The sleeves on my sweater are retreating up my wrists. My mother tells me I must stop growing. My father’s study is quiet. I know I shouldn’t be in here but I have come for the Golden Gate, to trace its girders, stroke its suspension cables, smell its lubricant on my fingers.

  I glance at the turned back of my father. He’s bent over his drawing board. A ribbon of smoke curls up from a ginger glass ashtray. I want to stop growing, too. I want to stay here forever, in the dimness of this study, watch my father work, touch the bridge, blink at the halo of lamplight on the ceiling.

  My mother calls me. I withdraw to a corner and pull my knees to my chest.

  “What are you drawing?” I ask.

  He doesn’t answer.

  “Show me.”

  Without turning, he says, “You’re not supposed to be here.”

  But he holds up the drawing. A baby without a face, just an opening for the mouth, shaped like an o. I look down at my growing belly, feel it kick. Then he turns around and I scream. It’s not my father at all. It’s him, the other man, in my father’s chair, holding the faceless baby.

  “Take it,” he says.

  My eyes fly open. I am breathless and ready to run. Orange fabric swells loosely above me. The tent. I am safe in the tent. I wipe sweat from my eyes. It doesn’t mean anything, I tell myself, it’s not a premonition, it’s not a sign, I don’t know for sure that I’m pregnant at all. I pause then, catching a new thought. What if I made certain I wasn’t? What if I was brave enough to take a stick or the wire in the frame of that backpack over there and make sure I wasn’t?

  I feel sick at the thought. It’s too much of a risk. I could hemorrhage. My infection could become worse.

  I haul my aching body to a sitting position and peel back the sleeping bag damp with my sweat. My mouth is a cotton ball. I need water so I reach for the backpack.

  But the backpack’s not there. Twisting, I scan all over. It’s nowhere to be seen.

  Outside, a noise. Rustling. My pulse begins to race. I reach for the only heavy object I’ve got—the flashlight—and unzip the flap.

  A few feet away there’s a shadow and it takes a second to register. A wolf, my wolf, nose deep in the backpack. I stumble from the tent. Potato and turnip fragments litter the ground.

  I look at him. “You lousy, greedy, thoughtless son of a bitch!”

  He backs away, chewing.

  I toss the useless flashlight at him. “Get the hell out of here!”

  He darts into the forest.

  I get to my knees and stretch for all I can salvage.

  28

  I wait all night for the wolf to return. I’m sorry I yelled at him. He was doing only what he is programmed to do. Even if it meant stealing from me. At daybreak I shuffle to the edge of the camp and call for him. But there’s no sign of him anywhere and after an hour I give up and return to my shelter.

  *

  In the afternoon, I rouse myself from a thick sleep and hobble outside to a nearby culvert and squat in the leaves. When I’m done, I limp back toward the tent and stumble and fall right on top of Alain Dufort’s head. At least that’s what I think it is. I stare at what could be a skull and a column of vertebrae. There are fragments of a T-shirt and a pair of pants, too. Using a stick, I lift away the clothes to reveal what’s left of Alain Dufort. Nothing more than a collection of bones, most of which are missing, including his arms and legs. But the butterfly of his pelvis is still there tangled in a nest of gama grass, as well as the slender bone of a finger.

  Poor Alain Dufort. I wonder what befell him. The snake referred to in the journal? I think of his family who has suffered all these years not knowing where he is.

  Close by is a pair of trekking boots still in good shape. I pick them up and shake out three tiny metatarsals. Would it be so wrong? I can hear my mother warning me of superstitions about walking in a dead man’s shoes. I try them on. A tight fit but better than nothing. I feel a surge of hope. Tomorrow I will wear these boots and walk myself right out of here.

  *

  A few hours before dark, the wolf returns. I am hot from the fever and taking in air through the tent flap when I see him. He circles the camp three times then drops into a patch of tall grass. I’m pleased he’s back. I watch him sleep. I long to touch the velour of his muzzle, feel his cool, damp nose against my palm. We are kindred spirits, with our various disabilities.

  *

  I wake before daybreak and lie listening to the wolf run in his sleep. A bashing fist of a headache lobs at the base of my skull. I look at the boots and push them away.

  29

  A thorough leaden fatigue has conquered my muscles and joints. The tiniest act is an effort. I know I should move on, that I must find food, that I need to get help, but all I can do is lie here in Alain Dufort’s sleeping bag and stare at the billowing ceiling.

  Outside it’s raining. I listen to the patter and think of my little brother and older sister, and wonder what they are doing now. I think of how we once played a game of Monopoly that lasted an entire Labor Day weekend. I think of my mother’s basement and the steamer trunk filled with my childhood things, the Barbie dolls I didn’t really like, the drug store crossword magazines I devoured, the dress-up clothes three sizes too big. The collection of who I was meant to be. I wish I could go back and open the chest and see what else was inside.

  I turn over, run my finger along the seam where the condensation has collected, lick. I have a feeling today is my birthday. September twenty-fourth. If I’m right, I am now thirty-two. Last year my mother had come down from Ithaca and met Matthew for the first time. We went to a Chinese restaurant and ate Szechuan chicken, and pork and chive dumplings. The owner put a candle in a barbeque pork bun and sang Happy Birthday in falsetto.

  *

  The days and nights bleed into one another
and I sleep more and more. I am disappearing. In an effort to preserve its existence my body is consuming itself cell by cell. It emits a strange earthy odor like wild tarragon.

  The wolf, too, is suffering. He’s barely more than a loose bag of bones. He has taken to sneaking off for hours at a time. I watch him drag himself into the woods, his peculiar, crooked gait more pronounced than ever. I don’t know where he goes but he usually returns chewing. Bark, I think. Whatever it is, it’s not food because his ribs are protruding worse than mine.

  Last night I dreamt I ate him.

  Perhaps he dreams of eating me.

  I blink at Alain Dufort’s things—his boots, his journal, his Walkman—and think how easy it would be to unpick those shoelaces from the eyelets and tie them around my neck. What a blessed release it would be.

  I reach up and touch my sunken cheek.

  30

  A storm bears down in the night and I am shocked awake by flying debris hitting the tent. The tent shakes so violently I’m afraid the fabric will split. I watch helpless as a corner comes loose from its moorings. If I don’t secure it, the whole thing will collapse.

  Dragging my bad leg behind me, I hurry outside into the howling wind. It’s difficult to stay standing as I fight my way through the cold raw hail to the back of the tent. The rear guy line snakes wildly in the air, the metal peg nowhere to be seen. I need a rock or some other heavy object to weigh it down, but before I can find anything, the other rear corner comes loose, then the two front ones. The tent lifts off the ground and levitates before me. It shoots upward, spiraling and spitting out contents then snags high in a tree. I stand watching it. Icy needles rattle my skull.