by R.A. Graves
** * **
Debora had boxed herself in. From where she was, she could either go forward to a bridge that crossed the Great River, or she could go back toward the man chasing her. She considered the latter, but couldn’t make herself do it. She kept straight and hoped for the best.
The man was gaining on her. She would never make it across before he got her. She grabbed a support cable and pulled herself up, then shimmied up a vertical beam to a horizontal one. There, she waited to see if the man would follow.
He didn’t. He slowed and looked up with a scrunched face that indicated either confusion or the glare of the sun. She was a good thirty feet above the roadway and up there she was very conscious of the wind. It moved her clothes and her hair, whipping unpredictably around her. She grabbed on to the vertical beam for security. The man hollered something that was lost in the air. Debora fished the watch from her pocket and held it out. From her research, she knew it was water proof. The watch maker had gone through painstaking efforts to make sure the watch would stand up to any abuse. She made like she was about to hurl the watch into the river and yelled down to the big man. “I’ll throw it,” she said, not knowing if her message reached him.
The woman came up behind the man and she looked up with a plain and serious face. From her jacket she pulled a small pipe. In one end of it she screwed on a CO2 cartridge and in the other she dropped a silver ball, half the size of a marble. She aimed and fired.
Debora turned away, hugging her body against the beam. The ball hit her calf. She yelped and shook her leg. She turned back, wondering if that was all. It hurt, but she could withstand some pelting, so long as the woman wasn’t a good enough shot to hit her in the head.
The woman dropped another ball into the end of the pipe as Glen lumbered to the rail of the bridge huffing and coughing. “Don’t bother,” he said with a tone of anger. “We don’t have all day for that.” The woman slipped the loaded pipe back into her jacket pocket and instead, she took hold of the cable and began to climb. Glen slapped at her, calling her down. Then he started up himself. He wrapped his arms and legs about the beam and climbed, his face turning beet red, his throat making sounds of exerted effort. He made his way slowly but surely, like a vicious, methodical creature stuck in an inadequate body. Finally, he stood himself up on the same beam Debora was on and tiredly stumbled toward her.
“Don’t you know,” Glen said, “until you hand that watch over to me, I will hunt you, and torment you, and eventually, by will or by death, you will give it up.”
“Come any closer and I’ll throw it,” Debora said.
“Go right ahead.” He kept coming. “Retrieving it from the river might prove easier than from your dead cold hand.” His jaw clinched as he said it. She backed away until she ran out of space, bumping into the vertical beam behind her. Then she stepped off. With the watch tight in hand, Debora fell gracefully, almost one hundred feet to the water below. She went in without a splash.
The woman slid her jacket off.
“Let her go for now,” Glen said, “I’m getting tired.” He sat down on the beam and wheezed.
