by Sarah Graves
And for herself, because it hurt so much. Please. Please, somebody come and help me.…
But nobody did, and after a long time, when it sank in that no one was going to, she stopped. Cold, it was so cold here…
And wet. Mist dripped from the trees, soaking her. Chills rattled through her bones, her teeth chattering hard, muscles spasming with agony. And her head…
"Oh," she groaned, shifting slightly to get her weight off her leg, cramped beneath her. A bolt of pain shot cruelly through it, but she sat up anyway.
Listening. Shivering and listening, because they might still be here. Shoving her wrists to her mouth, she held her breath, still wondering if maybe she actually was dead, and this was…purgatory?
Or hell. But the sounds from the woods all around her were merely the ones she expected: leaves rustling, droplets pattering from them in a breeze that only made the cold more penetrating.
The low, breathy hoo-hoodoo! of an owl came from somewhere in the trees. Far away, a coyote yipped. A loon's maniac laugh on a lake nearby told her that it wasn't very late, yet, despite the darkness—
Suddenly from just above her came a deep, urgent moaning; the leaves rattled sharply and she gasped, rolling into a ball as small as possible and never mind how it hurt.…
Ungh, mmungh, ungh… Were they there, those guys, sitting up there in a tree just waiting for her to wake up? So they could shoot her again and get it right this time, maybe, like a game? Playing with her for a while, until they killed her for real.…
Fear drilled through her until it came to her, finally, where she'd heard that sound before: with her stepfather, on one of his damned nature walks. It was a porcupine up there on that tree branch, talking to itself.
Or maybe even two of them. She'd seen them hanging out together in the branches of a young tree, chewing twig ends and having a grand old gabfest, the slender tree swaying under their weight. She'd been out in the woods with Jody and seen it.
A porky party, Jody would've called it. A laugh that was half a sob forced its way up her throat as she remembered that day; Jody wasn't like any other fathers she knew of, football or barstool-sitting their only regular interests. He always had to be out somewhere, on a boat or in the woods, herding tourists around or guiding visiting hunters, and if he wasn't doing that he was fiddling with electronic stuff, fixing something or taking it apart just to find out more about it.
Or with her, making her walk for miles on dirt roads so far from the beaten track, she sometimes wondered how even he ever found their way out again. Silent, mostly, especially when she got so mad at him that she wouldn't talk, either. He didn't get it, that it just wasn't the kind of thing she liked, boots and blisters and warm black coffee out of a metal-tasting thermos.
Or he didn't care. Either way, if she wanted to keep peace she had to go, and after a while she'd given in and done it when he asked, stomping around with him, listening to his endless talk about the disgusting things that were edible out here, and which side of the tree moss grew on, and other useless information.
God, how she wished she were out here with Jody right now. He'd know what to do. Sniffling, she sat up again. The pain was still so awful, and her fear of those guys was even worse. She couldn't get over the idea that maybe it was a trick, that any instant one of them would jump out of the dark at her, and then…
Boom. It would be all over. As it should have been already. She'd seen the gun's muzzle flash, so why wasn't she…
But then she paused, frowning in the darkness. Because wait a minute, if the gun really had been pressed to the side of her head when the guy fired it, how could she have seen that?
Puzzling over this, she brought her tied wrists to her lips, began rubbing at the cloth gag in her mouth with the knot of the rope the guy had used for binding her hands together. A massive boom of pain thudded in her jaw each time it shifted, but she moved it anyway because the gag made her feel she might throw up.
And if she did that, she definitely would die here. Get the airway open was practically the first thing Jody had ever said to her about outdoor survival tips and wilderness safety; trust him to get to the worst stuff first. Like out in the woods you were ever going to meet someone who couldn't breathe, she'd thought scornfully.
But now here she was, and wouldn't it be stupid to survive a shooting only to choke on her own upchuck? Except that the more she thought about it the more certain she was that the guy hadn't shot her. Rubbing the gag up over her nose and past her eyebrows, she rolled the disgusting thing off the top of her head.
There… She sucked a breath in. The air tasted like lake mist, fresh and weedy and with a faint tang of minerals. Then she began using her teeth to work at the knot on her wrists.
The side of her jaw where she'd been punched felt like a tennis ball had been stuffed into her cheek and set on fire in there, and when she'd been working on the knot a while, biting into it and pulling, one of her back teeth on the hurt side fell out, or broke off. Spitting it out, she probed with her tongue and found a raw space that tasted warmly of blood.
Fresh, vigorously pulsing blood…She spat again, resisting the renewed urge to throw up and wishing desperately for a drink of water. But it felt better, the tennis ball in there shrinking suddenly to the size of a walnut. A throbbing walnut, but still, and now the knot around her wrists came free, sending twin pulse beats of agony into her hands from where the circulation had been cut off.
Cold, scared, hurting, and alone, Helen sat rocking back and forth and rubbing her hands together for what felt like hours, weeping quietly, lurching in terror at each new sound—a fox's rusty-hinge cry, that loon's last evening giggle, the mutter of distant thunder, and an accompanying flare of lightning overhead.
Waiting: for her fear to back off a little. For her teeth to stop chattering, sending rat-a-tat bolts of fresh anguish through her head every time her poor aching jaws clacked together.
And for somebody to show up and save her. None of which, she began realizing as the thud of her pulse dulled and deepened to a low, ominous drumbeat of despair…
None of which was going to happen.
Thinking this, she forced herself up. She could die, here. She would, unless she did something. And…
Get away. They might come back.
He hadn't shot her, the guy with the gun hadn't shot her, but what if he changed his mind? Or if the other one, the really mean one, found out that he hadn't?
The thought sent her flailing through the darkness, whippy branches slapping her face until she fell, gasping and trying to hear through the booming pain in her head.
Were they out there? Were they? Was this part of it, just a sick prank, let the girl flounder around for a while and then shoot her, pick her off like a wounded bird or a deer?
But when the thundering in her head faded she heard only the loon once more. Louder. Or…nearer?
Wretchedly, she struggled up. The thunder she'd heard hadn't sounded again, but it still might, and now the moon was rising higher, shedding a pale glow. That meant once the rain passed it would probably get colder out here tonight, maybe a lot colder.
Freezing, even. It was why you could get in real trouble way up north like this, even in summer, if you didn't have the right gear. But loons meant lakes, and around here lakes meant camps, the small primitive places that people went to in summer to fish, swim, and relax.
And camps, even the simplest ones, meant woodstoves, caches of food, candles and kerosene lamps. Some of them had generators, and a few even had ham radios.
Standing unsteadily, she prayed to hear the loon's lunatic call once more, and did. Hearing it, she looked up at the moon; keeping the white, cold orb in the same position overhead as she walked would help her to avoid going in circles, just as Jody had taught her.
Or so she hoped.
Eat!" shouted the kid once they got inside the house.
Anthony was worried that she might not have bathroom skills. Back in the home they'd had kids l
ike that, older ones who should have but either couldn't or wouldn't manage their personal tasks for themselves, and sometimes he'd had to deal with them.
And right now, he wasn't in the mood. But after he'd carried her in—making sure while he did so to keep all his parts well away from her teeth—she demanded at once to use the facilities, then did so very competently and efficiently
Marky didn't say anything about that, or about how good it was that the lights worked now that Anthony had figured out about running the solar power, or that he had also found and turned on the built-in propane heater set into the living room wall.
All Marky did was complain. "Jeeze, what a dump," he groused irritably, rubbing his hands in front of the flame while waiting for Anthony to do something about dinner.
"Yeah," Anthony said, still shivering. He would have built a fire in the big stone fireplace that was in there, too, flanked by rustic baskets filled with small, splintery sticks on one side of the hearth and big, bark-encrusted log quarters on the other.
But he'd never built a fire before and wasn't sure he knew how. Besides, if he did build one, somebody going by out on the main road might smell smoke and call the fire department or something, to the house where nobody was supposed to be and so why was there a fire going out there?
"Yeah, it's a drag," said Anthony, peering into the kitchen cabinets. They should've brought things to eat, but they hadn't done that, either.
"Buncha yokels," Marky had said after their visit to town. But even Marky must have noticed the eyes of the guy behind the counter in the hardware store. Not yokel eyes, and that wasn't any yokel brain looking out from them, either. Marky gave up pretty fast, too, when the hardware store guy didn't cooperate in talking about the woman in the picture.
After thinking about it, Anthony had concluded that maybe they weren't even supposed to get any information about her. Just show it around, get the word out that they'd been asking; make her nervous, maybe, for some reason that Anthony didn't know the whys or wherefores of.
And at the moment didn't care. "Eat, eat…" the little girl chanted as she marched around the kitchen.
"Shut that kid up," Marky ordered from where he gloated over the gear on the dining table. The goggles for night vision looked to Anthony like the eyes on monsters in science fiction movies.
The kid kept yelling. "I mean it, Anthony," said Marky.
Yeah, yeah, Anthony thought. You mean it; what else is new? There was a small telescope-type thing on the table in there, too; he didn't know what it was, but he didn't like it any more than he liked the goggles. A gadget guy, Marky had said of their employer when Anthony had first begun loading all the items into the cardboard box, back in New Jersey. Likes all this stuff.
But all it had meant to Anthony was loading things into a box, carrying them, and carrying them again. Anthony do this and Anthony do that, he thought as the kid stomped up to him now and stood there, so close to him that the toes of her little cowboy boots nearly touched the toes of his big sneakers.
"Eat!" she demanded. And that probably would shut her up at least for a while, so he grabbed whatever came first to hand from the kitchen cabinet. Saltines, jar of applesauce, canned ravioli…He hunted for a can opener, then looked down to find the kid pulling at the tab-top on the can.
Unsuccessfully; she thrust it at him, her gaze expectant. Opening it, he slopped some into a saucepan and turned the gas stove on.
"Hey! What's the holdup out there?" Marky yelled. Anthony guessed he'd found the liquor cabinet, because the next thing he heard was Marky grumbling to himself about no ice in this dump.
The ravioli began sizzling. Anthony turned the heat down and stirred the stuff around a little, emptied it onto a plate with a dollop of applesauce and some of the saltines.
"Here," he said, holding the plate out. But the kid just looked at him, like, What are you, stupid? Then after a moment she marched over to the kitchenette set, yanked a chair out for herself, and stood there waiting, eyeing him kind of pityingly, he thought.
For a flaring instant he considered dumping the plate on the floor. She'd already bitten him, he had Marky on his case about dinner—and canned ravioli was not going to cut it with Marky, Anthony knew that much for an absolute fact—and now she thought she'd pull the old wait-on-me, I'm-a-princess act?
"Hey!" Marky yelled again from the other room. "What're you, playin’ with yourself out there?"
His tone was noticeably uglier this time, as if never mind the ice, he'd been pouring himself doubles of whatever he'd found in the booze department, on the shelf with the fancy glasses and so on. Next, Anthony heard a lamp's chain being yanked over and over.
Just like he's yanking mine, Anthony thought clearly. "Yeah, yeah," he muttered under his breath, meanwhile deciding to humor the kid. Because what the hell, if he'd gone through all that she had today, he'd be doing bloody murder by now, not just nipping people with his teeth.
"Okay," he said, putting the plate on the table and the kid in the chair. She still wasn't high enough so he found a big flat ket-tle in one of the lower cabinets, set it upside down on the chair, and sat her on that.
She waited patiently while he did this—arms crossed, not quite tapping her booted foot at him—then began forking the ravioli hungrily into her mouth. No milk; kids drank milk, he remembered from the juvie home.
Although back there it was powdered milk inadequately mixed into not-very-cold water, a concoction the mere memory of whose taste threatened to gag him, not to mention its gritty texture. But there was a case of root beer in the pantry, so he opened one of those plus another one for himself, and she swallowed some of it without protest.
When she'd washed down the final ravioli with a gulp of the stuff, she plunked the bottle down in businesslike fashion like a guy drinking beer out of one and began scraping up applesauce, holding the spoon in a clumsy, overhand way but getting it in there all right.
She sure knew how to put away the groceries, he thought with grudging admiration; she might be little, but the kid had stones. Figuring it would take her a while to finish, he turned back to the kitchen cabinets. Canned stuff was all they held, that and dry staples: rice, macaroni, freeze-dried potato mix with what looked in the picture like melted cheese, but it was really only powder in a packet. Something called Instant Breakfast lurked at the rear of the top shelf; it looked like some kind of chocolate drink and the kid might like it.
So mix it with water, maybe. Fill up her little belly, maybe she'd fall asleep soon, although he was not opposed to breaking out the sedative bottle again if that proved necessary. Or even just convenient, because from the sound of things in the living room, Marky was getting drunk in there.
"Shoot," Marky snarled thickly, only that wasn't what he said, exactly. "Shoot, shoot, shoot," he recited, slurring the sh sound a little more each time.
Then came the sound of something hitting the wall hard and shattering against it, plastic pieces clattering to the floor and scattering. A TV remote, maybe; there was a satellite dish in the yard but most likely that service hadn't been left on.
Marky appeared in the kitchen doorway. "What the freak?" he uttered unpleasantly "Where's the freakin’ food?"
He narrowed his eyes at the child still seated at the table, finishing off the saltines. There was an orange smear of ravioli sauce on her face and a root beer dribble stained the front of her overalls. "Hi!" she greeted Marky brightly.
Uh-oh, thought Anthony, whose experience with Marky didn't lead him to believe the kid's chutzpah would impress Marky very much. Or at all, actually.
But Anthony had found a bottle of olive oil, another can of ravioli, some unopened Ritz crackers, and a jar of peanut butter plus a can of Cheez Whiz. While the kid ate, the ravioli had been sizzling in the olive oil on the stove and he'd made cheese-and-peanut-butter snacks.
"Here," he said, thrusting a full plate at Marky, hoping the food would distract him.
"What the shoot is this?" Marky asked sourl
y, but he took it and went back unsteadily into the living room with it.
Anthony wished the TV worked, because Marky with a snootful was not exactly going to be a joy to be around this evening, Anthony could already tell. Also, he was pretty hungry, himself. But the kid was done eating and starting to get antsy, pounding on the table, her plate, and her empty root beer bottle with the side of her fork.
"Down, down, down," she chanted in time to the clinks and bangs. "I wanna get down, get me down, I wanna get down—"
"Shaddup in there!" Marky yelled. "What do I hafta do to get a little peace and…"
"Quiet," Anthony whispered to the kid, who stopped in midchant, her eyes widening. She was, he realized suddenly, scared out of her little mind; that, not some freaky adult fearlessness, was why she was being so good. Holding herself together, waiting for this to end, waiting for things to go back to the way they'd been before.
Waiting to go home. Good luck, Anthony thought, feeling the same way. In fact when you got down to it, he couldn't remember a time when he hadn't felt it.
Maybe there'd never been one. He put his hands around the kid's middle. "I hear you," he said, lifting her, remembering to keep her teeth away from himself. Her booted feet started moving even before they hit the floor.
"Yayyy!" she shouted, running away. Oh, jeeze, he thought, now we're in for it. But in the doorway she stopped short.
"Ssshh," she whispered, turning back to the kitchen with an elaborate finger to her lips. "Man is sleeping."
Sweeping: the kid way of pronouncing it. "Yeah, he is," said Anthony, moving up beside her.
Peeking into the living room, he saw Marky sprawled on one of the sofas with his empty plate on his lap, a cut crystal glass with an inch of whiskey still in it on the floor beside him.
"Come on," he said, reaching his hand down to the kid. He didn't want her running away from him again, yelling her head off and maybe waking Marky up early.
