by Tarah Benner
She settled back onto her elbows, trying to think about something else. Her mind wandered to Lark and where she might be, but the thought of her out there while she was trapped in hell just made her want to puke.
Bernie squeezed her eyes shut, willing the pain in her leg to go away. She wondered how long it had been since someone had come to adjust her meds. Had the pain killers worn off, or had she simply developed some sort of tolerance? She had been unconscious or mostly unconscious most of the time she’d been there, so it was possible they’d been dosing her for a while. Maybe they’d decided to cut off her meds as a form of torture.
Bernie glanced at the closed door and lifted her arm, rattling the handcuff against the thick plastic bed rail. Then she gripped the rail and shook it as hard as she could, but it only moved about a quarter of an inch from side to side.
She wouldn’t be able to rip the thing off the bed. Even if she did, she’d never get more than a few feet without a pair of crutches or a wheelchair. But if she could catch the nurses unaware when they came to walk her to the bathroom, there was a chance she might be able to overpower them.
A surge of excitement shot through her veins, and she looked around the room for anything she could use as a weapon: a pen, a toothbrush, a syringe, a spiral notebook. But there was nothing.
Then her gaze settled on her IV stand. It was positioned only a few inches away from her bed — easily within reach. Two little metal arms were fitted into the top, one of which held the plastic balloon full of fluids. Little grooves in the metal body of the stand implied that one could adjust the height of the bag by moving the metal arms up or down. If she could just detach one . . .
Bernie stopped herself. After everything they’d been through, she couldn’t believe she was contemplating another escape attempt. This time she was alone and severely wounded.
Well, she wasn’t alone — not unless they’d taken Portia away for good. She tried to imagine what it would be like to escape with Portia and then had the immediate urge to leave her behind. It would certainly be less of a headache. Portia was a whiny bitch on her best day and a sadistic nutcase on her worst. And she was pregnant.
She could leave Portia there. She didn’t owe her anything. Portia had made Bernie’s and Lark’s lives a living hell from the time they’d arrived at San Judas. She didn’t trust Portia as far as she could throw her, but being held in prison limbo together made her feel a strange sense of loyalty toward her.
Before she could make a decision, Bernie heard the sound of approaching footsteps. She swallowed, inched down on her mattress, and forced her muscles to relax. She couldn’t let on that she’d regained consciousness. Otherwise they might decide to up the dose of her meds or move her to a more secure location.
Suddenly the footsteps stopped, and she heard an obnoxious girly laugh. A woman was speaking just outside the door, her rising inflection and sporadic giggles grating on Bernie’s nerves. Every so often the woman would pause, and Bernie would hear the low rumble of a male voice. The nurse was flirting with the guard.
A second later their voices fell silent, and the door to Bernie’s room burst open. A woman walked in wearing a pair of navy-blue scrubs and blindingly white shoes. She was short and compact, with a bouncy blond ponytail. She had the slightly wilted look of a middle-aged woman trying to seem girlish, and Bernie pegged her instantly as the sort of person who walked a lot of charity 5Ks and baked gourmet cupcakes for fun.
Bernie let her eyes droop to make it look as though she’d just woken up, but the nurse paid her no mind. She was staring intently at Bernie’s monitors and humming to herself.
“Where’s . . . Where’s Portia?” asked Bernie in a groggy voice.
“Hmmm?”
Bernie tried again, working to keep her voice weak and raspy. “Where’s the girl who was in here with me before?”
“Never you mind,” said the woman in a dismissive voice. She fiddled for a moment with Bernie’s bag of fluids and used one long pointed fingernail to adjust her pain meds.
Bernie heard the high-pitched beep, beep, beep, and the woman turned on her heel and left.
The second she was gone, Bernie propped herself up on her elbow and stared at the clear plastic tube hanging off her bed. It was stuck to her skin with several pieces of thick white tape. The tube was too short for her to reach the needle with her cuffed hand, but if she could just get the needle out, she could avoid passing out from the pain meds.
Moving very carefully, she rubbed the side of her hand against the bed until the corner of the first piece of tape started to peel away from her skin. Then she brought her hand up to her mouth and caught the corner between her teeth.
She pulled and tugged, working the tape until it started to separate from her hand. After a moment, the top part of the tube came free, and there was only one piece of tape standing between her and freedom.
She repeated the same process for the second piece, and when it came loose, a feeling of dread settled in her stomach.
She knew what she had to do next, and she wasn’t looking forward to it. The tip of the catheter was still in her vein. She had to take it out.
Steeling herself for the wave of nausea she was about to experience, she lifted her hand as high as it would go and grabbed the tube between her teeth. She pulled, and the needle started to slide out from under her skin.
Her stomach lurched. The sight of her own blood made her feel sick and woozy. She pulled some more, and the tip of the catheter slid out.
A fat droplet of blood oozed out of her hand, and she had to fight the urge to pass out. Blood dripped down over the base of her thumb and down her wrist, staining the edge of the sheets. Hands shaking, Bernie dropped the tube and pressed her hand against the back side of her pillow to stem the flow.
She felt cold and clammy all over, and her body was covered in a fine sheen of sweat. But she’d done what she’d intended to do, and she was one step closer to freedom.
Once the nausea had passed, Bernie focused on the next phase of her plan: securing a weapon.
To her delight, she saw that the woman had inched the IV stand a little closer to her bed. If she could just reach the top, she’d have a shot at pulling one of those metal arms loose.
Bernie scooted up as high as she could and perched herself on her right hip. Her injured leg screamed in pain, but with the IV stand positioned just a few feet above her head, she barely even felt it. Trying not to look at the blood still streaming from her hand, she reached her free arm toward the top of the stand, groping for the thin metal rod.
She was still a few inches short. Having her left arm shackled to the bed severely limited her mobility, and even when she dragged the IV stand right up next to the bed, it was still too far away.
Gritting her teeth against the pain, Bernie scooted her butt up toward her pillow, dragging her useless leg behind her. She stretched her arm as far as it would go, and her hand closed around the cool metal bar.
A glorious surge of triumph erupted in her chest, and she had to stop herself from squealing out loud.
Those idiots, she thought to herself, practically thrumming with excitement.
She pushed the rod up to loosen it in its groove and then yanked it toward her. The metal arm broke free from the rest of the stand, and she was so surprised that she almost dropped it.
She glanced back toward the door, straining her ears for any sound of movement. She knew she hadn’t been as quiet as she should have been, but the guard was oblivious as ever. Bernie’s heart was pounding her throat. She had a weapon.
Granted, the arm of the IV stand wasn’t that sharp. The last inch was slightly curved so that the bag wouldn’t slip off, but she’d incapacitated people with much less. When working with an improvised weapon, timing and placement was everything.
Savoring the surge of optimism swelling inside her, Bernie scooted back down toward the center of her bed and tucked her makeshift weapon under her pillow.
She’d left a tr
ail of blood on one corner of the sheet, but if she shifted her pillow over a few inches and brought her covers up to her chest, it was barely noticeable. She held her right arm above her heart to slow the bleeding, too exhilarated to feel sick from the blood.
But then a sharp stabbing sensation broke through her euphoria. Her excitement had temporarily dulled the pain in her leg, but it had returned in full force. She still needed the pain meds — no doubt about it — but if she could just push through the pain and make the nurses think she was incapacitated, she might be able to get the drop on them when they uncuffed her.
A rough plan had taken shape in Bernie’s head. All her adult life, she’d fought against evil corporations like GreenSeed, and she’d unwittingly gotten caught up in their web. They had been using her as a guinea pig for two miserable years, but that was about to change.
Bernie was done being used. She was escaping San Judas — with or without Portia — and she was prepared to kill anyone who stood in her way.
twelve
Lark
The sun didn’t come out at all that morning. It rose meekly over the horizon, illuminating the cloudy veil of steel hanging over the farm and turning the sky a pale silver gray.
The barn was still smoking out in the burned, blackened fields. Soren, Axel, and Walt had rushed outside to dump water on the blaze as soon as the bikers had left, but the damage was already done. At least a third of the Baileys’ early crops had been destroyed, and half of the barn was unusable.
Four goats were dead, and all of the cows had been shot where they stood. The patchy front yard and the drive were scarred with deep rivets from the bikers’ tires, and the front porch was splintered with bullet holes.
But the inside of the farmhouse looked the worst. There was an enormous burn on the kitchen floor where the Molotov cocktail had started the fire, and the delicate white-and-gray wallpaper was stained with smoke.
In the living room, most of the walls were peppered with bullet holes. Pictures and knickknacks had been shattered, and there were several places where one could stick a finger into a hole in the couch and feel where a bullet had ripped clean through.
Lark and Simjay had righted all the furniture and cleaned up the blood, but the damage could not be undone. Soren found a few sheets of plywood in the toolshed and used them to board up the windows, but a more permanent fix wasn’t on anyone’s mind.
Simjay was repeatedly sweeping the floor in the same place to catch any stray shards of glass that might have lodged themselves in the floorboards, but no one seemed to know what to do with Starlight’s body. She’d been moved upstairs to the room she shared with Katrina, but Lark could tell that everyone was hoping that arrangement was only temporary.
Katrina was in hysterics, and any suggestion that Starlight be buried sooner rather than later was met with a tide of furious screams. If Katrina had seemed fierce and intimidating the day they’d met her, it was nothing compared to how she behaved in the throes of grief. She lashed out at anyone who came near her, and she’d hurled a plate at Thompson when she’d told her that they had to do something with Starlight’s body.
To add insult to injury, Mitch and Karen had taken off just before dawn. Lark had watched them leave from the loft, which was scorched from a second Molotov cocktail the bikers had hurled through the window.
There was a brief but strained conversation with Walt out in the yard, and once the kids were loaded into the back of the Geo, Katrina ran out and slapped her brother across the face. Her shrieks of rage carried all the way up to the loft, but they petered out within minutes as Katrina collapsed in the dirt.
Lark’s heart went out to Thompson, who seemed determined to maintain law and order throughout the entire ordeal. She helped Katrina back inside and then went out to feed the chickens. Simjay had been nagging her to rest all morning, but the woman seemed incapable of stopping.
Lark could tell that Thompson’s shoulder was bothering her, but the bullet had ripped clean through, and they’d managed to stop the bleeding. She wouldn’t be pitching for the major leagues anytime soon, but she would recover as long as the wound didn’t become infected.
The only person Lark couldn’t get a read on was Walt. She’d seen Mitch’s words rip him in two, but he’d appeared oddly stoic that morning as he watched his son and grandchildren go. He was the only one who seemed content to just let Katrina be.
Lark supposed that dealing with his daughter’s emotional ups and downs for twenty-eight years had prepared him for it, but she couldn’t shake the feeling that he was having the worst time of all.
The sight of him in that ratty white undershirt staring out at his decimated crops broke Lark’s heart. She couldn’t explain it, but she felt as though she knew Walt — that she could feel the weight of everything he’d been through.
After hours of tears and insults and cracked coffee mugs flying across the room, Katrina finally allowed Soren and Simjay to move Starlight out of the house. They carried her to the garden and laid her on an old quilt. Lying there in a blue bell-sleeve midi dress, she looked almost like Sleeping Beauty waiting for a kiss.
Katrina busied herself with weeding the perimeter of the garden, and everyone breathed a collective sigh of relief that Starlight’s body was no longer decomposing in one of the upstairs bedrooms. Thompson quietly asked the boys to dig Starlight a grave on the north side of the fields, and Lark busied herself with finding a rock that would be the appropriate size and shape for a headstone.
Later that afternoon, Soren returned to the kitchen sweaty and tired. He made himself a sandwich, slumped down at the table, and devoured the entire thing in three or four bites. He chased it with a tall glass of goat’s milk, and Lark watched him with a mixture of amusement and melancholy.
When he finished, he asked Lark to walk with him out to the barn, and she said yes. They made their way through the fields in silence, purposely avoiding the garden where Starlight’s body lay.
The front of the barn looked as though it had been burned in a chemical blast. The sliding doors had been burned away, and the front of the gable was blackened by smoke.
A few shell-shocked goats were ambling around outside, standing on the old tractor tire, chewing their cud, and pulling foliage out of the feeder attached to the fence. Chickens were pecking lazily at the dirt, and Denali kept darting anxiously around the perimeter as if he thought a bomb might drop on them at any moment.
Axel and Simjay were already sitting on the low fence outside the barn, looking as though they’d been waiting for them. Simjay’s hair was plastered to his face, and Axel had sweated through his borrowed gray T-shirt.
“What’s this?” asked Lark once she was within earshot.
“We need to talk,” said Soren, glancing over at the guys. “All of us.”
“Damn straight,” said Axel, surveying the charred landscape with a grim look.
Lark glanced at Simjay. “What’s going on?”
Simjay didn’t answer, so Axel chimed in. “We need to git the hell outta here ’fore shit hits the fan.”
“It’s a little late for that,” said Lark, glancing from Soren to Simjay.
Simjay wouldn’t meet her gaze. She knew that he didn’t think they should cut and run, but as a member of their little group, Lark knew he would go wherever Soren and Axel went.
“Whatever,” said Axel. “That shoulda been a lot worse than it was.”
“What’s your point?” asked Lark, a note of challenge in her voice.
“Those bikers got a beef with us now,” said Axel, raising his big caterpillar eyebrows as though Lark were very slow. “They’ll be back. And we need to make sure we’re long gone by the time they show up again.”
“Long gone?” croaked Lark, turning to look at Soren. “You want to leave? Now?”
Soren shifted his weight from one foot to the other, clearly uncomfortable with the situation but determined to talk it over.
“I think we should discuss it,” he said without
meeting her gaze.
“The sooner we go the better, I’d say,” broke in Axel.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” said Lark. “They just lost Starlight. Thompson’s hurt, and half the farm is gone.”
Soren looked up. “I know it doesn’t seem like a good time —”
“Oh really?” snapped Lark. “It doesn’t seem like a good time?” She rolled her eyes at them, completely disgusted by the unexpected turn of events.
In truth, it didn’t surprise her that Axel wanted to leave. Axel only cared about Axel, and he would do whatever it took to protect himself. But Soren?
“If Axel’s right and those bikers do come back . . .” Lark shook her head. “The Baileys won’t stand a chance.”
Soren looked away. Lark could tell he had something to say, but it seemed he couldn’t quite bring himself to spit it out.
“What?” Lark cried.
“To be fair, they’ve been defending this farm for a long time without our help,” he said. “Those bikers could come knocking . . . but so could the police.”
“Mitch and his family just took off,” said Lark. “Starlight is dead. They’re running out of food. They need our help now.”
But Soren was already shaking his head. “It’s too dangerous. And the longer we stay here, the harder it’s going to be to do what we have to do.”
Lark opened her mouth to argue, but he cut her off.
“What happens if those bikers don’t come back tomorrow . . . or next week . . . or next month? You want to stay here forever?”
Lark shook her head, fighting off the horrible emptiness that was expanding inside of her like a black hole. This was how it was going to be — moving from place to place, thinking only of their own survival, and avoiding any entanglements.
“Look,” said Soren, sounding as though he’d already made up his mind. “Two days ago, Katrina was holding us at gunpoint. They didn’t need our help then, and they don’t need it now.”
