CLAWS 2

by Stacey Cochran

  “Just hold still,” Jonas called.

  He inched closer to the door. He saw that the back left tire was sliding over the snow slowly inch by inch. Suddenly, the truck lurched again, creaking loudly against the tree. Angie screamed, but her voice was muffled through the glass.

  “Can you open the door?” Jonas shouted.

  Angie looked down and saw that her seatbelt was fastened. She reached her left hand over to unfasten it. Her thumb pressed the button, and the belt fell free. Jonas was almost all the way to the door. The rope was taut behind him. He reached out to touch the door handle, and the truck lurched another half foot to the right. Angie screamed, and a metallic wrenching sound moaned out from the undercarriage. The hood titled crazily down into the abyss.

  Jonas reached out and grabbed the door handle. The truck momentarily teetered back from the edge. He glanced down to his right and saw the back left tire was several inches up off of the ground. Adrenaline struck him hard, and his hands began to shake.

  “Shit,” he muttered. “Lean to your left, Angie!”

  Angie looked at him through the window. Her eyes were wide, terror clear on her face.

  “Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” she said. “God, help me please!”

  “Just hold still,” Jonas shouted, his own feet slipping on the snow. He tried to dig in. “I’m going to open the door. I want you to grab my hand.”

  Angie nodded her head frantically.

  “On the count of three,” he said.

  Angie looked into his eyes.

  “One,” he said. “Two . . . thr—”

  The truck lurched wildly to the right just as he opened the door. He held onto the door as the whole thing fell away from him. He felt the rope tighten fiercely around his waist, digging into his flesh. He grimaced. The door was wide open, and Angie reached out and grabbed his forearm.

  Jonas staggered to his right, and his left hand shot forward and grabbed her arm. Then, all at once, the truck screamed out metallically over the rocky ledge, and Jonas fell down face first on the snow.

  He watched in horror as the truck fell away from Angie. He had her arm, but the truck continued to fall. Angie screamed, holding onto his arm, and the truck vanished down the hillside beneath her. She hit the ground hard, and something cracked in her shoulder.

  “Don’t let go!” she shrieked. “Don’t let go!”

  The Bronco exploded in a ball of orange fire one hundred feet below them, and Angie hung from the edge of the cliff, Jonas’s left hand gripping her arm.

  “I’ve got you,” he said.

  He started to pull her up. She managed to get her arms up over the edge, and he squeezed tightly and inched her up slowly and gradually.

  “Almost there,” he grunted.

  Her feet dangled beneath her, but she managed to get her shoulders over the edge. She swung her legs to the right, and Jonas felt the rope tightening behind.

  “Don’t do that!” he said.

  He glanced back over his shoulder and saw that the rope was fraying about four feet behind him. He could see up the hill about one hundred meters to his patrol car at the side of the road, its blue lights spinning round and round.

  “Just hold on!”

  The rope behind him twanged with each thread breaking and unraveling. He gripped her arm tighter and pulled her up as best he could. He tried to climb to his knees with her arm gripped in his hands. His elbows dug into the ground.

  “What are you doing?” she shrieked.

  “The rope,” he said. “It’s about to brea—”

  The rope snapped with a twang! and Jonas fell down hard and started sliding toward the edge. Angie screamed.

  “Oh, God!” she cried. “God help us!”

  Jonas could feel the ground sliding beneath him. Angie’s other hand clawed at the ground, her shoes clambering to dig into the rock.

  “I’m not going to let you go!” he shouted. “If you go, I go! Okay, Angie? Okay!”

  Angie looked up at him. He was right at the edge of the cliff, now holding onto her. She was wholly over the edge. His fingernails clawed into her skin.

  Suddenly, they heard another car up the hillside. It sounded like a car door slamming shut. They heard people shouting.

  “They’re down the hill! Come on!”

  Jonas could not afford to look over his shoulder to see who it was coming down the hillside, but he had managed to stop sliding toward the edge. The leverage of his arms hanging over the side kept him from sliding forward anymore, but he felt that his grip was slipping on her arm. Angie was sweating, terrified, and holding on for her life.

  Jonas felt something grip his legs.

  “Just hold still,” someone said. He recognized Jack Dante’s voice. “I’ve got you.”

  Then, Jack realized that Jonas was holding onto Angie who was totally over the edge.

  “Oh, my God,” he said. “Just hold on.” Jack turned and said, “Give me a hand!”

  And then all at once, Jonas felt another pair of hands gripping his right leg, and he was sliding back from the edge.

  Angie held on, and for the second time, her arms came up over the rim. Next her head, then her shoulders.

  “We’ve got you,” Jack said. “Just don’t let go!”

  And then, inch by inch, they pulled Jonas up and Angie with him. Angie managed to get her hips up over the lip.

  “Almost there!” Dan Gardner shouted. “Hang on!”

  Angie kicked at the ground, her thighs now up over the top. She felt her knees digging into the ground, could feel the blood drained from her arm where Jonas squeezed firmly. Her shoulder had been knocked out of socket at some point, and the pain was excruciating.

  She managed to shimmy forward up the slope, Jonas holding onto her arm.

  Twenty-four

  Angie sat behind a curtain in the emergency room. It had taken an hour to reach the hospital, after she staggered up to the roadside with the help of Jonas, Jack, Dan, and Laura. She was lucky. Jonas had seen her exit the parking lot and noticed that something was not right with her Bronco. He’d turned on his police lights and raced after her. Jack, Dan, and Laura had stopped off at a Texaco and saw Angie racing past. They’d decided to check it out.

  Once at the hospital, she’d had to wait three hours to be seen in the ER, and now that she was finally out of the waiting area, she could hardly keep her eyes open. She felt like she hadn’t slept in a week. She had a deep cut on her left shoulder that needed stitches, and her shoulder would need an X-ray.

  Jonas stuck his head around the curtained partition. “How you doing?” he said.

  “I’m tired,” she said. “I just want to go home.”

  Angie wore a hospital gown and lay back on the bed with a single sheet pulled up around her shoulders.

  “The doctor will probably see you soon,” he said. “Do you want some water or something?”

  “Thanks, Jonas. That would be great.”

  “What do you think happened?”

  “You mean with the car?”

  Jonas nodded.

  “The brakes went out,” Angie said. “Maybe they did something at the garage.”

  “That’s strange,” he said. He looked into Angie’s blue eyes. “I’ll go get that water.”

  He stepped around the curtain, and Angie heard him walking away on the tile floor. Through the curtain, she could hear an elderly man groaning in the bed next to her. A voice came over the hospital’s intercom requesting a doctor from oncology to call the third floor lab. Angie’s mouth was dry. She stared at the curtain.

  The man who stepped around the curtain was dressed like a doctor, and Angie looked up into his eyes.

  “Dr. Rippard?” he said.

  “Yes,” Angie said. “Are you the doctor?”

  “Just lie still,” the man said.

  He stepped over to her and placed his hand on her chest. Angie noticed that the man wore rubber surgical gloves. She tried to remember whether she’d written down in
any of the paperwork that she was “Dr.” Angie Rippard. She might have. She couldn’t remember. That was nearly three hours ago.

  “So, what do we have here,” the man said.

  “The brakes went out on my truck,” she said. She noticed a flicker of recognition in the man’s eyes. “I’m lucky to be alive, I guess. I’ve got a cut on my left shoulder, and I had to pop my right shoulder back into socket. Other than that I think everything’s going to be alright.”

  The man touched her right shoulder. Angie looked at his face so close to hers. She looked into his eyes. She could have sworn that she’d seen this man before, sometime in the previous day or two, but she’d spent a lot of time around this hospital so it was likely that she’d seen him then.

  “I want to give you a shot for the pain in your right shoulder,” he said.

  “My right shoulder’s fine,” she said, “once we got it back into socket. It’s my left that’s going to need stitches.”

  Angie glanced at his name tag. It read “Dr. Ibarra.” He removed a vial from the right front pocket of his white lab jacket. He reached up to the wall behind her bed and removed a fresh syringe. Angie watched him pop the top on the syringe and saw the needle glisten in the light.

  He punched the needle into the vial and drew a shot for her arm. Angie suddenly felt alarmed.

  “You’re lucky there was someone there to rescue you,” he said. He glanced from the filling syringe to her lying on the bed, her head on the pillow. “Now relax.”

  “How did you know that someone rescued me?” she said. “I didn’t tell you that.”

  The man paused a moment, a shot of adrenaline making him momentarily defensive.

  “Well, you got here didn’t you,” he said, smiling. “Somebody must have rescued you.”

  Angie could hear the old man groaning in the bed next to her on the other side of the curtain. The man removed the needle from the vial. He turned to face Angie. She saw a drop at the tip of the needle. It stood there for a moment, then fell to the floor, and Angie realized that this man was not a doctor.

  She’d seen his eyes before, and it had been when he was standing on the front porch of her cabin, wearing a Yoda mask.

  She screamed, “Help!”

  The man swung the needle down towards her thigh. Angie cried out and rolled to her left just in time. The needle buried in the mattress.

  Instantly, the man withdrew the needle. He sliced it through the air swiftly, but Angie was out of the bed.

  “Help!” she cried. “Help!”

  The man was on the other side of the bed. He lunged at her over the bed, and Angie fell backwards into the curtain. It ripped from the ceiling, and she fell backwards into the next partition. She struck a bed table, and cups and a pitcher clattered to the floor.

  The old man in the bed looked at her. “What in tarnation?” he said.

  Angie was enveloped in the curtain, but she looked up and saw the man who looked like a doctor. He stepped around the end of the bed and stood over her. He still had the needle and syringe in his hand. Angie could hear the ER staff shouting from across the room. They’d heard the commotion.

  The man swept down with the needle, but Angie rolled to her left under the elderly man’s bed.

  The needle whickered past her leg, and Angie crawled through to the other side of the bed. The old man cursed them both.

  The man with the needle turned and ran, but he got no farther than ten feet from Angie’s bed before Jonas dove onto his back and knocked him to the floor. There was a scream from the other side of the corridor.

  Angie saw the syringe hit the floor. It skidded out past the foot of the elderly man’s bed, and she scrambled toward it. Jonas and the man who looked like a doctor wrestled on the floor.

  “Help!” Angie shouted. “This man’s not a doctor! He tried to shoot me up with this!”

  Three orderlies raced over and helped subdue the man on the floor. Jonas rose to his feet and crossed to Angie. She saw the biggest of the three orderlies on the man’s back. His knee was in the small of the man’s back, and he gripped the man’s arms behind him. Another orderly slapped a plastic binding around the man’s wrists, and he writhed back forth, cursing and swearing.

  Jonas helped Angie to her feet, and they stepped a safe distance away.

  Someone near the nurses’ station shouted: “Security! Security! We need security in the ER!”

  Twenty-five

  “We are faced with a troubling matter,” Governor Janet Creed said to an audience of five hundred people, “that strikes at very heart of an issue that concerns us all. Three days ago, eight people died in the San Juan mountains less than twenty miles from where we stand right this moment. They were attacked by a grizzly bear, part of a remnant species that authorities believed was extinct.

  “Most experts thought that the last San Juan grizzly bear was shot and killed in 1979. The animal had been eradicated from its native habitat. It was considered extinct.

  “That assumption has proven incorrect,” she said.

  The crowd was a potent mix of citizens. Many were on their way to their morning jobs in downtown Telluride or at the ski resort. Others were out-of-work laborers from southwest Colorado who had been alerted to the governor’s presence the day before, and many of these folks hated the money surrounding Telluride and its fancy ski resort. Others still were activists who supported such charitable organizations as the Sierra Club and Green Peace and believed in protection of the environment with almost religious devotion. And then a final, yet no less vocal group, were made of citizens who did not want a grizzly bear in their state at all. They believed the bear was a killer that had no fear of man. Tensions were high.

  “The world will little note what we say here today. In time, this will soon be forgotten. You should all know that a biologist—an expert in wildlife management—pulled a claw from the side of the attacked SUV. It was not a black bear claw. It was not a panda bear claw. It was a grizzly bear claw.”

  A wave of distress went through the crowd. The television cameras continued to roll. Flashbulbs flashed.

  “This is a troubled victory in a sense because it represents the triumph of an animal that was thought to be extinct. It represents the triumph of an animal that had been hunted and killed to the point of extinction. We believed it was extinct.”

  Governor Creed paused. She listened to the crowd respond. All five hundred were whispering at once. The reporters scribbled notes. The story was in the process of breaking wide open into a national and even international level of coverage.

  “It is a troubled victory because it now presents us with a serious problem.” She pointed to the mountains to the south. “There is a bear in those mountains that attacked and killed innocent people. The problem is that the San Juan grizzly bear is member of a remnant species whose numbers are less than ten. If we exterminate the problem animal—which is standard protocol when an animal has killed someone—we may be exterminating the remnant species from the face of the earth forever.

  “However, if we leave the animal up there, it is likely to kill again. We cannot move it to a larger wilderness area because then we make it someone else’s problem. Aversive conditioning—shooting the animal with ‘bean bag’ guns—has proven ineffective in dozens of similar situations.

  “My concern is foremost for the safety of the people of this state. My concern is also with a critically endangered animal, an animal that was thought extinct by most people just two weeks ago. I will not let us wipe this animal from the face of the earth again.

  “We made that mistake once before when Ed Wiseman shot and killed what was believed to be the last San Juan grizzly in 1979. We have been given a second chance, and as you all know that doesn’t happen very often in life. I’m going to do everything in my power to prevent the same mistake from happening twice—”

  The fight started in a section where people were gathered to voice the danger of having grizzly bears in southwest Colorado. They sta
rted booing, and a group from the Sierra Club’s local chapter started shouting at them to shut up. Governor Creed watched one person push another.

  She glanced nervously at security along the front of the crowd. It was turning into a fight, and it had broken out fifty feet inside the crowd. People pushed and punched at one another.

  Governor Creed tried to restore order. “Please calm down,” she said. She pointed for security to try and wade into the crowd to subdue the fighting, but someone threw a punch at one of the security guards, knocking him flat. Another security guard sprayed someone with pepper spray, and people screamed and fought back.

  “We must have order!” Governor Creed said. “Do not fight. We are united!”

  The crowd was getting out of control. Everyone had been tense, and now a melee had broken out. Some people were trying to get away from the fighting. A few tripped and fell; they were trampled on by others.

  A bottle whizzed up out of the crowd, whickering past Janet Creed’s head. She ducked to her right, and the bottle shattered against the wall behind her. Immediately, her security personnel surrounded her. All the while, the news cameras rolled. This story would be on every major news network within the hour. The scene was quickly turning into a riot.

  People flooded away from the fighting. Others stood their ground and fought back.

  Governor Creed fought with her security and stepped back up to the podium.

  She said, “This can affect our environment. Please, we must stand together on this. Please cease your fighting.”

  One angry-looking woman near the front of the crowd shouted: “I need work! My family doesn’t have food to eat, and grizzly bears are killers! To hell with grizzlies! To hell with you!”

  “We can provide jobs. We can provide food. But we must preserve the remnant species of this region. . .”

  One section started booing, and suddenly her microphone screamed with feedback and distortion. Someone had cut the power. The fighting in the crowd spread, and Governor Creed was surrounded by her security guards and rushed off the stage. Trash and debris flew up out of the crowd toward her.