Scream Catcher

by Vincent Zandri

  Rosie exposed, alone. Her time is up.

  He pictures Lennox holding that iPhone before her mouth while pressing the silenced .22 caliber pistol barrel against the back of her skull.

  He hears the words, “Scream. For. Me.”

  Is the beast about to press the trigger? Jude dreads the two quick flashes that will accompany the two back-to-back trigger bursts. He will see them easily enough from all the way down inside the pit.

  Another couple of seconds pass. Or has it been a full minute?

  It’s hard to get a grip on himself, much less the passage of time.

  The cell phone screams again.

  The Player is trapped … Game over for the Player.

  “No, I will not die … Not here … Not like this.”

  But they are wasted words and Jude knows it. He is in no position to save himself, least of all Rosie or Jack. But then that’s when something comes to him. An idea that flashes before his eyes with all the clarity of the Maglite.

  His position.

  His body—the way he stands vertically inside the pit. Of course he can’t help himself by simply standing there doing nothing. The only way he might get the hell out of that pit is by shifting his position in order to conform with the pit walls.

  Closing the phone back up, he shoves it back down into his jeans pocket.

  He sees himself down flat onto his stomach on the dirt floor, turns his body so that head and feet are pressed up against the pit’s opposing narrow walls. With his face in the dirt, he can’t help but laugh. Maybe he’s in the process of losing his marbles; going entirely crazy. But he can’t help but giggle out loud like a crazy man. He has no idea why it takes him so long to figure it out. How if he stretches both arms and legs across the narrow width of the pit, it is possible for him to inch his way up and out by using all four limbs, just like a spider working its way out of a spider hole.

  The climb takes all available strength, all available will. His body is battered and torn. But by then he is full of rage and insanity. He also feels a light emerging from within himself. A bright white light that somehow fills him with the determination he needs in order to beat the pit.

  Jude climbs.

  It’s a slow, tedious process, raising right arm and left leg simultaneously. Then repeating the process with the left arm and right leg, digits scraping and shredding against the rough dirt walls. In that manner he inches his way up one hand-over-foot length at a time, wide open eyes staring down onto the pit floor, onto Fuentes’s head, but no longer afraid, all pain in hands and ribs be damned.

  He is working up a scream, but not the kind of scream Lennox wants to catch.

  I’m going to beat you at your own kill game you stupid fuck! You stupid fucking Black Dragon! I’m going to beat you no matter what you throw at me!

  When Jude feels the cold air blowing against his rain-soaked back, he knows he’s reached the top and his freedom. Without taking even an extra second to think about it, he exits the pit by throwing all momentum onto his left side, abruptly rolling himself over onto his back.

  For the moment he allows the rainwater to fall steadily onto his face.

  He is almost hysterical with laughter. He whoops, yelps, screams; voice so loud it drowns out the distant thunder and rain spattering against the leaves on the trees, against the earthen floor.

  In his heart emerges a new hope.

  Back up on his feet, Jude wipes the water from his eyes, approaches his wife.

  78

  Tongue Mountain

  Friday, 3:08 A.M.

  She is his best friend and his wife; his girlfriend and his life-partner; the mother of his unborn daughter, the woman he was to grow old with. Now her hands and wrists have been duct-taped together, along with her knees and ankles, her entire body wrapped in clear plastic. When he finds her she is lying on her right side as if purposely facing him, eyes closed, expression distant and vacuous, pallor clay-like.

  Her mouth has also been covered over or gagged with gray duct tape.

  She is dressed only in a knee length, white cotton nightgown, position fetal. Maybe Lennox didn’t plan for her to die on him that way; maybe the beast intended for her to live at least until the designated hour was up. Or maybe he had every intention to kill her off even before Jude had the chance to score a rescue.

  It all depended on the kill game’s grand design.

  But from where Jude stands in the dark, the cold rain running down his face and chest, he has no doubt about her absolute stillness, her petrified body. There is only the still body of his wife and the invisible child she bears laid out on the pine-needled floor, the rainwater spattering against the plastic, every lonely drop stenciled with the name “Rosie.”

  Chest heavy, pained, split down the center, Jude feels the oxygen drain from his lungs. He isn’t laughing now. He isn’t whooping or yelling. He isn’t cursing Lennox or God.

  He is fucking insane.

  Rubber legs give out from under him.

  He collapses.

  From down on his knees he clenches his left hand into a tight fist, pounds it against his chest. He howls like a dog. The bright Maglite shining on her still, sleeping face, he leans into Rosie, places lips to hers, embraces her through the plastic.

  It’s not what he expected.

  It is a cold, sodden kiss, entirely devoid of feeling or sensation other than lifelessness.

  A plastic kiss!

  With tears and raindrops streaming down his face, Jude forces himself up onto one leg, then the other. No matter the grief, no matter the shock, he has to move himself.

  The kill game is not over.

  He and his son … they are still in Play.

  He can’t allow himself to make the same mistake twice. He must get to Jack before the boy too is allowed to die.

  Turning back to Rosie, Jude eyes her one more time, as if to offer up a last goodbye to wife and daughter—as if such a goodbye is at all possible. Ripping his own heart out would be easier. He’s about to pull himself away from her, turn and make for the stream when he catches sight of her right eye springing wide open.

  79

  Tongue Mountain

  Friday, 3:12 A.M.

  Dropping to his knees, he tears off the plastic. Soon as he pulls the tape from her mouth, Rosie begins to cough and choke. A kind of yellow/gray bile rises up from her stomach, oozes out her mouth and lips. Without thinking, Jude pulls the nightgown back down over her midsection. At the same time he rolls her onto her chest and stomach.

  “Let it out,” he insists. “Let it out.”

  “The baby,” Rosie mumbles between heaves and purges. “The baby.”

  “You’re alive … We. Are. Alive.”

  Coming from behind them, a shriek.

  The noise cuts through skin and bone, tingles the nerve endings in his body.

  Lennox is right behind us …

  “The baby,” Rosie chokes. Her body begins to shiver, quake. Her face takes on a tight, open-eyed panic. “Where am I? Where am I?” She is screaming now, alarm overwhelming her.

  “You have to get up,” Jude begs. “We have to leave this place.”

  Another shriek, closer now, from inside the pine trees not twenty yards beyond the rushing stream.

  “We have to save Jack.”

  Rosie shakes her head like it is all coming back to her in a wave of nightmarish recollection: the terrible night; the reason for her waking up in the middle of the woods.

  She whispers as though in agony, “The baby, Jude … The baby.”

  Jude pulls the rest of the plastic away from her legs and feet, thrusts his arms under her arms, proceeds to lift her as gently but forcefully as possible.

  “Try and stand,” he repeats. But in the back of his head, he’s thinking about the S.P. that crippled her insides just two days before. With his help, Rosie manages to get back up onto her feet. She stands wobbly, out of balance. She is a strange and desperate sight in her soaked-through nightgown with th
e deep woods for a backdrop, the rain coming down steady onto long dark hair, the distant lightning flashes that expose her pale face for an instant at a time.

  A third shriek comes from the same area across the stream, only closer this time.

  “We have to go. Now.”

  The Maglite poised on the fast moving whitewater out ahead of him, he takes hold of Rosie’s hand, leads the way.

  80

  Tongue Mountain

  Friday, 3:20 A.M.

  Moving through the woods, the Maglite lighting their path, they pick up speed. By the time they make it to the stream bank, they are able to hit the water running.

  “Hold on as tightly as you can,” Jude spits, head and shoulders just barely above water, feet kicking beneath him against the current.

  It’s how I should have handled the stream all along. Head on. Sometimes you have to forget about thinking. You have to ignore the voices in your head that hold you back …

  He pumps and pumps. But the drag of the whitewater is too powerful, too relentless. Almost immediately it begins to drag them downstream. He can’t imagine how Rosie is able to hang on to him without being swept away, her arms wrapped around his shoulders and neck, fingernails digging into his skin, his windpipe blocked from the force of her forearm pressed against it.

  If only he were able to shout for her to let go, let him breathe, he surely would. But making any kind of noise whatsoever is a physical impossibility.

  But not for Rosie.

  She screams from the initial shock of the frigid whitewater, from the panic of being pulled under, of swallowing the water into her lungs. The continuous scream is interrupted only by the water that pours over their heads before they suddenly reemerge gasping for breath, the water pouring out of their nostrils and mouths.

  If the stream were any wider, it would consume them entirely.

  But the mountain stream is not wide. Jude knows that under normal conditions, the stream would be more like a brook, easily passable on foot. But now it runs swift and heavy with whitewater because of the torrential rains. Despite its pull, momentum is on their side. They swim and kick with an inspired ferocity. If Jude has to attribute their efforts to any one thing, it would be the coldness of the water having injected new life into their veins. Because just when it appears that they are about to be swallowed up, he reaches out with his hand, locates a handhold along the opposite bank.

  Pulling Rosie in towards him, he wrenches her forearm from off his neck. At the same time, she is able to find a thick tree root that juts out of the bank. She grips the root with both hands while for just a moment, her legs and feet continue their downstream trek, twisting her body sideways until it is parallel with the bank.

  Jude sucks a deep breath, feels the pain in his Adam’s apple in the exact place that Rosie innocently maintained her chokehold. Now side by side in the stream, holding to the bank, they somehow manage a smile. It’s at that moment Jude knows how desperately they both want to live. With drenched heads and faces they gaze back at one another for only the briefest of moments before wordlessly thrusting their bodies up and out of the fast water, onto the safety of the solid earth.

  * * *

  Coming upon the first clearing, Jude stops. He does it not by choice, but as if having run face-first into some invisible stone wall. Rosie stops, stands beside him, arms crossed over chest, her breathing having grown labored since climbing up and out of the stream.

  Calm down and think. You can’t possibly get anywhere if you don’t calm yourself down and start thinking logically. But where is Lennox? Where did he go? He was screaming at us just a minute ago from inside these very woods. Now he’s not making a sound. He must be watching us, maybe baiting us towards another trap … For Christ’s sakes, stop it, Parish. Stop it right now. Ignore the demon. Think this fucking thing through … But where’s the Black Dragon? … Stop and think this through the right way for a change and get your wife and child out of these woods to safety …

  He recalls the topo map.

  He remembers that according to Lennox’s hand-drawn indicators, the boy is located somewhere upstream, above the clearing in which he was initially dropped—the very spot from which the kill game began who knows how long ago. Exactly how far upstream Jude can’t be sure.

  But what he can rely on is that between the downstream woods and the upstream woods that lie closer to Tongue’s dirt access road, there will be more pits waiting for them. More pits, more traps. More natural obstacles to be sure.

  Jude peers into his wife’s face.

  Gritting his teeth, he wraps his hand around her wrist.

  Her teeth are chattering. For all Jude knows, his teeth are making the same bony music. Rosie’s skin has grown pale, brown eyes glassy, long dark hair veiling an exhausted face. Still she has enough strength to offer him a nod, as though in complete understanding of what must be accomplished if they are to stay alive.

  “Stay close,” Jude says.

  They run.

  81

  Tongue Mountain

  Friday, 3:40 A.M.

  Black Dragon feels the stretched rubber-band tightness setting into his thigh muscles as he rapidly climbs hand and foot up the steep, level-five grade towards the mountain outcropping. He feels the pulsing pain that radiates from the high-strung tissue, the throbbing of the fibrous strands. Gloved hands poised before him, he grabs hold of the jagged boulders. He plants his feet, pulls himself up through the rain and the pain until he makes it to the rock ledge.

  From up on high he feels the cooler than cool air on his black-painted face, senses it on the back of his neck where the sweat has collected above the low-collared bodysuit. The air penetrates the skin-tight waterproof fabric, causes the pores on his hairless flesh to close up, goose pimples to rise up at attention.

  Laid out before him for as far as the eye can see is the wide open Lake George Valley now consumed in darkness interrupted only by startling, jagged, sky-to-earth lightning bolts. Directly beside him along the edge of the long outcropping lays five large, preassembled rock piles. In each of the piles a pretreated four-by-four has been inserted at the base. For now the timbers jut out not vertically from the heavy piles, but at forty-five degree angles. Positioning himself behind the first pile, he grabs hold of the timber with both hands, wraps his fingers tightly around the hardwood. Knowing precisely the path the first-person Player and its now liberated sig-other will be taking on their way to rescuing their son, he patiently awaits the sounds that will signal their approach on the narrow trailhead directly below him.

  True to design, it’s only a matter of a few short minutes before he overhears the telltale footsteps along with the panting, heavy breaths. He hears the Player begging its wife to go faster. Because after all, Jack’s life is at stake. They don’t have much time left to save him.

  As they approach the precise spot along the trail, Black Dragon poises himself, begins to pull back on the timber. The first of the cannon-ball sized boulders come loose, begins its rumbling, downhill descent.

  82

  Tongue Mountain

  Friday, 3:40 A.M.

  With Rosie in tow, Jude runs. Not for his life, but for hers; for Jack’s.

  He holds to his wife with one hand, to the Maglite with his hurting hand. He aims the beam dead ahead in the direction of the deep black and white woods, the round light shaking and bobbing with their every step over the undergrowth and through the sometimes thick sweetbriar.

  They run in an uphill direction for a time that seems forever.

  There is no talking. No breath leftover in the lungs to talk.

  On the outside there is only the forested incline of thick pines and scrub brush. But on the inside hearts beat, pulses soar, blood pumps through wiry veins while the misty cool air burns up lung tissue. Eventually Jude spots the trailhead in the circular beam of the Maglite. Fighting back all thought, he pulls on Rosie’s arm, heads directly for it.

  When they come directly upon the narrow pa
th, Jude can see that the trail crew has laid it out in a straight, uphill (west to east) line, in between the tall pines that line both its flanks. These pines are so old and thick with branches that drape over the trail they provide an almost ample shelter from the rain. Tacked to the trunk of every fifth or sixth tree is a little red trail marker made of tin. Jude shines the Maglite on each one of the little round markers as they move ahead.

  They continue on in the direction for maybe three minutes until they come upon the first split in the trail, the path identified by the red markers continuing to the right, the path that veers off to the left identified by a new batch of blue markers.

  “My God,” Jude grouses, surprised to hear how hoarse and breathless his voice sounds.

  While tempted to go left in the direction of the Tongue Mountain access road, instinct tells him to remain on the straight and very narrow—to ignore any temptation to deviate from the original course he set for himself earlier. After all, he’s not a total stranger to these mountain trails. Maybe it’s been years if not decades since he’s climbed them with a full backpack strapped to his back, but he knows enough to avoid the narrow splinter trails. The splinter trails veer off and go on for long distances until coming to abrupt stops at either a random cliff edge or perhaps a dry swamp.

  Don’t think Parish, just do …

  “Rosie we’ve got to move faster. Jack hasn’t got much time.”

  The two continue their forward progress on the “red” trail for another ten or twenty uphill steps when Jude senses something strange—a low rumbling noise coming from above; a noise that is rapidly rising in intensity and that cannot be confused with thunder.

  He looks up in the direction of a Tongue Mountain summit that looms large and all too hidden behind the low-lying storm clouds. Only a fraction of a second passes before the rumbling increases in intensity, its source becoming all too apparent.