by Nevada Barr
The rope pulled tight. Another blow landed, and Anna knew she was going to die. She’d dropped her guard, wandered tipsy and brain-dead in the night, trusting to a God who had never shown her much in the way of personal attention to watch her back.
Anna fought, but it was a lost cause. Like a rattlesnake with a gravel truck parked on its spine, she writhed, tried to unseat her attacker. Her arms were under his knees, pinned to the ground as surely as if he’d driven railroad spikes through them. Feeling from the elbows down was draining away, starved for blood. She tried to kick him with her heels but he sat too far forward, straddling the small of her back. Her struggle only won her more blows. If he’d had anything but his bare hands, she would already be dead. When he’d jumped her, he must have left his shovel behind. Once she lost consciousness, he’d go back for it.
Not long now. Anna couldn’t think. Every thought was shattered by a blow. Strength had been spent, a sixty-second bid for freedom, all given, nothing held back, could not be repeated.
Possum. Play possum. Pushing her face into the mud, pulling her shoulders up to protect her ears the best she could, Anna forced her body to go limp. No longer even willing the beating to stop. Merely wishing without prayer.
It didn’t. She blacked out, a moment, maybe more. A sharp rap over her left ear, piercing the eardrum, dragged her back. The bastard wasn’t just going to kill her; he was going to beat her to death with his fists.
Anger, till now muffled by pain and shock and fear, sparked deep inside, a tiny spark not even so big as a firefly, but white-hot and located somewhere between her heart and her spine.
Not knowing if it was a false light, the one those surviving near-death experiences report having tried to lead them out of this world, Anna began shutting down, focusing on that spark, following it inside. Her mind was gone, reacting from the blows that fell as regularly now as men with sledgehammers battering through a wall.
The man on her back had raised up, weight on his knees, cracking the humerus bones above her elbows, the better to put his weight behind his work.
The spark moved through the blackness of Anna’s hell, hotter than anger, colder than hatred. This light would not lead her to glory but into the arms of the devil. She didn’t care.
The spark moved, with no will of hers, into her right hand. Slowly, dragging an inch at time, her arm, feeling no more alive than a bit of broken lumber, bent at the elbow, and her hand, palm up, moved over her hip, up onto her kidneys until her knuckles rested on her spine as if she waited compliantly to be cuffed.
The spark flared, a star of ugly strength, and Anna forced that hand into her assailant’s crotch. His trousers were loose and soft—thin wool. He wore no underwear. Her fingers closed around his testicles, and the star flamed, welding her bones shut in a grip so tight she could feel her nails dig into her palms and a mute crushing as if she flattened clay.
The rain of blows was cut short by a shriek so high and wild it could have been the wind tearing sheets of tin off a barn roof. A desperate swing landed a fist against her neck. Had she been alive, the force of it might have paralyzed her, opened her hand. But Anna was just that spark now, just that hand closed over the man’s testicles. Rigor would set in, connecting her fingers around their prize. She would never let go. With the odd, detached sensation of tightening a metal vise, she felt her hand crank down, the fingers close fractionally.
The weight on her back began to shift. Knees left her numbed arms, booted heels drummed bruisingly at her legs. Anna felt only a deeper sinking in the mud as if the thrashing of the man on her back were but the lashing of the storm and she bedrock.
Bit by bit, the shrieking above her resolved into words as life began to reassert itself in her bludgeoned brain. Half words, through a tunnel. She was deaf in one ear.
“You’re killing me. You’re killing me,” the wind shrieked, and the storm raged over her buttocks and thighs.
The words gave her strength. She pushed up, face free of the mud.
“Off,” she croaked. Then louder: “Off.” And the talons that her fingers had become clawed deeper. “Off.”
The weight left her. All that remained was whatever was attached to the balls in her right hand. The thrashing ceased.
Feebly, Anna clawed at the rope securing the canvas over her head, but the slip knot had pulled tight and she couldn’t get it free or drag the stiff canvas from under it.
She rolled to her side and pulled her knees up, never once loosing the grip she had on her assailant. Movement brought searing pain, so sharp and cruel she felt blackness come back to her brain, and for a moment, her world shrank down again to the spark, the hand.
If she let go, she would die. Maybe she was going to die anyway. Ribs were broken. Kidneys screamed. Her head was loose on her neck and felt broken inside and out.
“Move and I’ll rip them off,” she heard someone say and wondered if it was her.
Using her free hand, she pushed until she’d rolled herself up, knees tucked under her, face inches from the ground. The acid stench of vomit cut away a tiny bit of the fog from her rapidly swelling brain. She must have thrown up.
For what seemed like a long time, she stayed there, turtle-like, knowing the rain pelted down on her back but unable to feel it through the pain. There was no beginning to it, no end. She was made of pain. Muscle was gone to it and blood and bone and will, and she could not move.
And she could not hold on forever. And she would die. Beaten to death. The spark was dimming. Soon the pain would reach her fingers, and they would open. She had to get away. Blind, deaf and crippled, she had to get away.
Slowly, she breathed in through her nose, hearing the air hiss and bubble through the blood. With the breath, she pushed the pain down through her neck, her lungs, into her belly and held it there as long as she could. Then she let it out in a yell that grated the broken bones of her rib cage. On that yell, she summoned the power left of her rage and hammered the fingers of her right hand closed, then ripped with all her might.
The light wool probably kept her from dismembering her assailant, but she knew the joy of feeling his flesh tear and hearing him hiss out agony too deep for sound. Knowing she’d bought herself all the time she could afford, not knowing how much that was, she began to claw blindly up the slick and dissolving bank.
A hand grabbed her ankle, and she kicked out. The movement sent a racketing pain through her skeleton to explode in her neck, but she felt the hand slide free.
No thought. Just survival. She pushed on. Hands struck wood, the smell of grass seeped through her soiled death mask. Like a mortally wounded animal, Anna crawled an erratic path, trusting the storm to cover her noise. Rotting bark shredded beneath her knees. Broken branches gouged the skin from her chest. Thorns clawed at her arms. Head down, draped and noosed for the killing, Anna pushed on till she could move no more. Her arms and legs would not obey her and her mind was lost.
Curling up as small as she could, she raked the litter of the forest floor over herself and entrusted her keeping to the gods of darkness.
★ 17 ★
Anna slid in and out of consciousness, a sign that she was badly hurt. Brain damage. That sent a stab of fear through her so sharp her feet twitched with it. Her ankle. She had to protect it, not touch it, not rub it, keep it dry. Why that was so was lost, but she knew it needed to be done.
Noise came and went. Whether real or imagined, whether she was conscious or unconscious, she didn’t know. In dream or mind’s eye, she saw a form bent double, scouring the woods on a stream of invective hunting to kill.
A wounded rabbit, she lay still as death in her burrow, fear singing through nerve fibers till she could hear the hum in the broken places.
How to battle fear? She’d been told once. With faith, she remembered. Faith in what? Faith in herself had been battered out of her as the strength was battered from her body. Faith in her fellow men had proven a bad gamble. Mother Nature could only be trusted to do what was be
st for Mother. Father Time could be trusted to heal with annihilation.
Faith was not going to save her. Stubbornness might. Too stubborn to move, though it hurt to lie still. Too stubborn to cry out, though knives in her skull tried to saw voice from her. Too stubborn to stop breathing, though each intake of air pushed ragged rib-ends into her chest wall.
Time passed. Minutes or days or months. Consciousness rolled around again. The world had grown quieter. The storm had passed. The evil crashing of men had left the woods. Or waited in silence for her to give herself away.
Evil crashing. Anna’s memory was cut into pieces. She remembered to be afraid, remembered she must hide, remembered her left ankle was somehow important. What she could not remember was why.
She decided to open her eyes and felt a creaking pain as she pushed swollen lids into bruised sockets but sight didn’t come. Revealed as if in a flash of lightning, she saw herself kneeling in the rain staring down into an open grave.
She had been buried alive. Suffocating.
Forgetting the need to be still, she clawed at the dirt clogging her mouth and nose. Not dirt, cloth, canvas. And around her neck, a rope. That memory came back too. Not in a vision but in total recall of how the noose had felt tightening around her throat, forcing the stiff canvas folds into her flesh.
Feebly, she fumbled at the executioner’s hood with fingers that felt made of rotting wood. So much pain accompanied each tiny movement she mewed like a kitten.
Pain cut through the panic and a thought surfaced—not because her brain worked, but because this had always been so, ever since she was a little girl. There was a jackknife in her pocket, the last in a long line of Swiss Army knives that served, were lost or broken, and replaced.
It took a long time to remember how to remove an item from her pocket, an inquisition of pain to execute the task, another eternity to pry open the small blade, and the briefest of minutes to saw through the binding rope.
Spent, Anna hadn’t the strength to pull the canvas from her face, but lay panting shallowly, reveling in the seep of sweet air that came up under the edges now the rope was loosed.
Maybe she browned out again. Time was proving itself as relative as old what’s-his-name insisted it was. Anna knew she should remember the name, it felt important, as if it would prove she’d not lost too much gray matter, that her brain would not swell and squash personality against the unforgiving confines of her skull. Thoughts were falling apart, leaking away through cracks.
With an effort that left her dizzy and nauseated, she lifted her hand and dragged the canvas off. Air, misted with minute warm droplets, touched her face like the end of a fever. Afraid of the pain in her ribs, she sipped at it, savoring it like a fine delicacy, while wanting to wolf it down as a starving woman might.
Faint gray touched the sky somewhere, Anna could just make out a tracery of branches overhead. “Thankyoubabyjesus,” she whispered and laughed, a bark cut short by injured ribs. She was not blind. The beating her skull had taken had not robbed her of sight. Broken, covered in mud and blood and vomit, Anna was jubilant. Soon she was going to sit up. It would be easier to think then. She would sit up and wait for the light. That was all she needed to concern herself with. With the light would come knowledge of what the next right thing was and she would do that.
Sitting up took an excessive amount of time and brought such pain that bile she hadn’t the breath to spit out trickled from the corner of her mouth. I’m drooling, she thought, but that was the least of her worries. Her head felt as big and heavy as a medicine ball, and she was afraid. If her cervical vertebrae had been cracked, its weight would tear them apart, paralyze her from the neck down. Christopher Reeve, pray for me, tinkled through her troubled mind.
As from a distance, through gun slits, she watched her hands pull her knee up and bind the canvas that had been her hood around her left ankle with fumbling care. She wondered why they did this. Her ankle, it seemed, was the only uninjured part of her entire body. Maybe her hands sought to preserve it for posterity.
Darkness came again. Not the void she’d fallen into before but a troubled dream state, the shadow world the comatose could recall only in pieces.
She’d been kneeling by a grave looking at bones, human bones. Why she’d been there was knocked from memory. A gold-colored belt buckle, her house searched, an old black woman complaining her book had been stolen.
These things came and went on Hashcards held up by a teacher patient with her stupidity. Mrs. White from second grade? Sister Mary Patricia? No matter. Teacher and cards were gone, replaced by a squad of Union soldiers, ghost riders, vanishing into thin air, followed by a three-legged dog.
Anna could not lose consciousness again. The ebbing and flowing of the life of the mind bespoke head injury. If she could stay awake, she believed she could hold on to her mind by the sheer power of her thoughts, thoughts in a stream like the drizzle from the faucet left running on viciously cold nights: movement to keep the pipes from freezing.
Keep the pipes from freezing, she told herself. The flashcards, the ghost riders, the dog. Again and again she played them through her mind, a trickle, a flow. At some point they began to match up, one from column A and one from column B. Her brain wrote them on its damaged walls and drew lines between the matches as Anna had on countless tests throughout her life.
The ghost riders; the buckle.
The buckle; the search of her house.
The old black woman’s book; the ghost riders. Leo Fullerton; the missing book; Civil War soldiers; the buckle. Barth with his books; Civil War soldiers. Danni’s popliteal artery; Anna’s bound ankle.
More lines and more till the map in her cranium was crisscrossed as a cat’s cradle, and Anna knew all these things were part of a whole.
“Got to move.” She tried to speak aloud and felt her lips moving but heard no sound. A blow to the ear. Deafness. She remembered that. Fear rose and fell. She could hear morning birds. One ear. That was enough. “Help,” she said and heard what was meant as a cry come out a tiny whisper.
“Opening my eyes,” she announced to her brain in hopes of greater cooperation. After a while, the message was delivered and her eyes opened. There was sunshine now, shadows on the ground. Time had passed since last she’d managed this feat. Thirst troubled her. Peeing wasn’t an issue. She was too dehydrated. “Not good,” she whispered. And: “Moving my hand.” Seconds later, a puppet’s arm under the guidance of a drunken puppetmaster floated up before her eyes.
The arm was out of focus. A thing of green and brown, grass stains and mud. “Other arm,” she commanded. Seconds passed, but pain disallowed compliance. The humerus was broken or cracked. Knelt on me, Anna remembered. Somebody knelt on me. A sensation flashed through her of being facedown in the dirt, a terrible weight on her arms.
Voices wove through the woods, and Anna stopped breathing to listen. Under this sea of green, she was utterly lost. Though she knew she was probably no more than fifty feet from an improved trail, she could not guess fifty feet in which direction. She would not let the thought form, but her body knew she could not crawl much farther than that. Her mind knew she would not be found where she was, not for many days.
One chance. Fifty feet. Toward fading voices. Anna listened with every fiber of her being. Aware of an ominous creaking of neck bones, she tried to turn her face in the direction whence the sound had come, but muscles were frozen.
Moving her upper body, she rolled to hands and knees and pointed her head in the direction she wanted to go. Spinning, pain, vomiting, Anna waited it out. Standing up was not in the realm of possibility. There was no way she could force the injured muscles to so much as lift her head so she could look where she was going.
For a minute, ten, maybe half an hour, she stared at the ground a foot from the tip of her bloodied nose. Even here at the bottom of the world, there were shadows, tiny, tangled, green, but shadows. If she focused, she could see they stretched ever so slightly to her left. Sure
as compass needles, they would keep her on course.
Whispering orders to her body, she crept along. Fallen logs she would have stepped over without thought the previous day loomed as formidable obstacles requiring great presence of mind, and more physical courage to surmount than she’d realized she had.
Sweat poured off of her, then stopped, her body out of fluid. Winston Churchill: “Never, never, never give up.” General George Patton: “Success is measured by how high you bounce when you hit bottom.”
And Anna kept on, knowing now, firsthand, that Christopher Reeve really was Superman.
Watching the shadows, pushing ahead an inch at a time, she finally came to a place where the forest floor dropped away in a cliff of brown. She’d reached the Old Trace. She could lie down now and figure out why it was she was here.
The sound of voices came to her, and she remembered.
“Help me,” she croaked. A woman screamed, and Anna knew why Danielle Posey had died.
• • •
Robbed of dignity, clothing and memories, Anna woke. A kindly black woman in the trim white authority of an RN uniform told her she was at the Baptist Hospital, then asked her gently if she knew her name, who was president of the United States, what day it was and what state Jackson was in. The first two Anna got right. The last two she failed. A C- in sanity.
Her brain took another holiday. When next it returned, and she opened her eyes, she remembered she was in Mississippi. If it hadn’t hurt so much to reach the call button, she would have summoned the nurse and asked if she could get her grade raised.
“Hey,” a voice said softly. “Welcome to the world of the living.”
Only a slot of vision was allowed Anna, and she searched the small room till she found the source of the voice. Sheriff Paul Davidson, smiling, was seated to the right of the bed, his chair thoughtfully moved so she didn’t have to turn her head to see him. A window was behind him, blinds lowered.
