by Jack Kilborn
“Maybe this will help.” Mal tugged a bottle out of his suitcase and held it up. Grey Goose vodka.
“Apparently you come equipped, too.”
“I travel a lot, and hate paying twelve dollars for martinis at the hotel bar.”
“I’m not sure getting drunk will help get the blood stains out.”
He shook his head and walked over, kneeling down between Deb’s legs. “Do you mind?” he asked.
Deb didn’t mind at all. She watched as he poured some alcohol onto a clean part of his towel, and then rubbed her prosthetics with it. For the briefest of moments, Deb could almost feel his touch on her missing legs, her brain linking his actions with remembered sensations. She shivered, and told herself it was because of the night breeze and not anything else.
“I think I can take it from here,” she said, holding her hand out for the vodka.
He looked up like a guy ready to propose marriage, which was something Deb knew she’d never see. The tiny flirtatious spark she’d felt a moment ago became resentment. At herself. At her legs. And at Mal, for daring to treat her like a normal person.
Scott, her boyfriend once-upon-a-time, didn’t react well to the loss of her legs. It freaked him out, and he didn’t act the same after the amputations. He alternated between treating her like a fragile China doll that might break, and acting like she was deformed. The one time they tried to have sex, and the comments he made, was so upsetting she dumped him right there, and hadn’t been with a man since.
She’d dated again, eventually, after getting through rehab on her own. But in Deb’s experience, all men were in one of two groups. Those that wished she had legs, and those freakazoids who had a thing for women without legs. Deb made the mistake of joining an amputee forum on the internet, and later an online dating service. In both cases, the only men she attracted were weirdoes with a stump fetish.
Mal, treating her like she was 100% normal, was messing with her head.
Deb wasn’t normal. She never would be. And if he didn’t stop staring at her with that sly grin, she was going to smack him.
“I said I got it, Mal. Back off.”
He raised his hands in supplication and quickly retreated.
Deb took a big swig from the bottle, feeling it burn down her throat, coming to rest like a hot coal in her belly.
Damn him for being cute, and damn him for being nice.
She poured more vodka on her towel and began swabbing her legs again. The alcohol worked fine at dissolving the blood. It also got rid of the blood caked under her fingernails, which was important considering she paid a hundred bucks to get them done. Still, she couldn’t wait to find this stupid inn and get into a bathtub.
Deb hoped it had bathtubs. She wasn’t good with showers.
Mal seemed to take the rejection in stride, hopping on one foot to get his fresh jeans on. Deb went with a pair of nylon snap pants, the kind basketball players used. They had snap-on buttons along the outside and inside of each leg, so they could be torn off quickly. That was a nice function, but Deb preferred them for the opposite reason; she could put them on by using the snaps rather than stepping into them.
“Have you done any climbing since the accident?”
She shot him a look. “Speaking of non-sequitors. Are we starting the interview now?”
Mal was buttoning up his shirt, another light blue one. “I figured we have three things we could be talking about. The deer.”
Deb shook her head. “I’m not sure I’m ready for that yet.”
“Me neither. That leaves the interview, and getting personal. And I assume, by the way you told me to back off, you aren’t all that interested in getting personal.”
Deb capped the bottle and tossed it to him, perhaps a bit too hard. “No, I haven’t done any rock climbing since I lost my legs.”
She shivered again, and this time she was positive it was the night air. Deb pulled a hoodie out of her suitcase and wrestled that over her head.
“Is the accident too difficult to talk about?”
His voice had a hint of challenge. Deb relaxed a notch.
“Not at all.” The only thing that scares me is flirting.
She threw the wet, bloody towel and the empty water bottle into the trunk, and watched Mal muscle his suitcase up and place it next to her sports legs.
“You’ve got three pairs of prosthetics in here,” Mal said. “What are each of them for?”
An easy question. Deb got asked a lot about her various legs.
“The ones that look like skis bent into question marks, those are my Cheetah Flex-Sprints. They’re made of carbon fiber, curved backward the same way the legs of a gazelle are curved, which transfers energy better than a human knee and ankle.”
He reached for one and asked, “May I?”
“Sure.”
He picked up the Cheetah. “Wow, they’re light.”
“Try to bend it.”
Mal placed the rubber tread attached to the curved bottom in one hand, and the stump cup in the other. It really did resemble an upside-down question mark, and when Deb wore them she thought she looked like a satyr—a woman with the legs of a goat.
Mal flexed, and the leg bent slightly.
“Strong,” he said. “And springy.”
“Very springy. With a running start, I can jump high enough to slam dunk a basketball.”
“What about these?” he said, replacing the Cheetah with a titanium bar with a clip on the end.
“I call those my Long John Silvers.”
“Because they’re sliver?”
“That, and they look like old pirate peg legs. The clip onto the bottom of the pylon hooks on my bike pedals. They’re shit to walk in, but function the same way as a tibia does, without any spring. Direct energy transfer from my thigh to the pedal.”
“Now you said you don’t wear your prosthetics while swimming.”
“I actually have a pair for swimming, with fins on the feet, but they’re for training and recreation and I left them at home.”
“So what are these?”
He picked up another leg. Like the Cheetah, it was a thin band, wide as a ski. But it wasn’t as curvy. Rather than a question mark, it looked more like the letter L. And instead of a rubber tread foot, this one ended in a rubber knob with small metal spikes. Sort of like the bottom toe of the L had a sea urchin on the tip.
Mal touched a spike. “Let me guess. These are what you use when you’re fighting in gladiator tournaments?”
“Rock climbing legs. Specially made.”
Mal raised an eyebrow. “I thought you don’t climb rocks anymore.”
Deb stared over his shoulder. She couldn’t be sure, but she thought she caught some kind of movement behind him, down the embankment.
Something big and dark.
“Let’s get out of here,” Deb said.
Mal put the leg back, and shut the trunk. Deb climbed back into the driver’s seat and started the car, peeling out back onto the highway.
“I’m a reporter, so I have to ask these questions,” Mal said. “But I don’t want to overstep my bounds.”
Deb checked her rearview mirror. Nothing there. “Go ahead. No question is off limits.”
“Do you mind if I record this?”
“Not at all.”
Mal flipped on the overhead light and dug a mini-recorder out of his pocket. It was about the size of a cell phone.
“Okay. Why have climbing legs if you don’t climb anymore?”
Deb felt the goose bumps on her arms, but she managed to shrug convincingly. “Because I’ll climb again. Someday. I just haven’t fit it into my schedule yet.”
“Are you scared?”
She glanced at him. He wasn’t mocking her, wasn’t judging her, and he had a notepad in his hand, jotting things down.
“How much do you know about my accident?” Deb asked.
Mal flipped to an earlier page in his notebook. “You were solo climbing in the New River Gorge in F
ayetteville, West Virginia. Not too far from here. The rock you were hanging on came loose, and you fell thirty feet, shattering both your legs. You had to crawl three miles to safety.”
Mal’s facts were actually wrong, on several points. But Deb only chose to correct him on a few, and keep the most important one to herself.
“I crawled 2.7 miles, not three. I went back and measured it. And I actually fell closer to sixty feet, but the first thirty were a gradual slide down an angled rock face. That first part probably only took five or six seconds. But it felt a lot longer.”
“I can imagine.”
Deb looked at him. “Can you? Can you really? I was on my belly, face pressed against the mountain, arms and legs spread out, trying to find some sort of grip, some kind of toe hold, so I wouldn’t slide over the edge. But the rock face was shear. As flat and smooth as glass. I skidded down it slowly—even slower than a child on a park slide. But I couldn’t slow down, couldn’t stop my gradual descent. You know, six seconds is usually nothing. Hell, I’ve been talking longer than six seconds. But as I was sliding, heading toward the edge, I had time to think. I had time to actually think about my own death. About what it would mean.”
Mal leaned in closer. “What would it mean?”
Deb stared ahead, into the blackness of the open road, and felt herself shiver.
“It would mean nothing. I was going to die for no reason at all.” She let out a clipped, humorless laugh. “The whole point of my life was to be a cautionary tale for other rock climbers to make sure you use pinions.”
“You weren’t using pinions?”
“I was hammering my first pinion in when… the rock gave way.”
Mal wrote something down.
“Can you talk about what happened after the fall?”
The memory was hazy, like trying to recall a dream, or a hallucination. But parts of it stuck out. Parts of it felt like they’d been burned into her head with a branding iron.
“It didn’t hurt at first. I remember waking up, confused about where I was. Then I saw my legs, both of them bent backwards. It looked like I had two extra knees, and the bones were jutting out the front of my shins. You know, I actually tried to pull one out? I thought I’d landed on a stick, and it was poking out of me. Instead, it was my tibia. I tried to yank out my own tibia.”
Mal cleared his throat. “That’s… horrible.”
“I was in shock, and I still wasn’t feeling any pain. But then I started crawling. That’s when it really got horrible.”
“Because the pain hit?”
“It hit. Hard. As I was pulling myself to my car, dragging my legs behind me, I kept catching my tibia bones on things. Rocks. Branches. I actually got snagged on a dead squirrel, and pulled that along with me for about a hundred yards.”
Deb could remember the crawling. The pain. The horror. The desperation. Because she knew, if she got to the car, the worst was yet to come. She hoped he wouldn’t ask about that part.
“I was also losing blood, getting dizzy. I’d tied my shirt around my knees to stop the bleeding, but I was still leaving a trail. And some local wildlife took notice.”
Mal looked up from his notepad. “A coyote? Bear?”
Deb shivered again. It was really getting cold. “Cougar.”
“I didn’t think there were mountain lions in West Virginia.”
“It followed me. I saw it up close. At first I thought I was hallucinating. But I wasn’t. Had to be close to two hundred pounds.”
Deb could remember how it stared at her. How it snarled. How it smelled. She would never forget its musky, pungent scent. Or its broken tail, bent in several places like a zigzag.
“Did it attack?”
She subconsciously touched the scars on her side. The cat had pounced on her, batting her with its massive paw, the claws hooking into her flesh. It did this several times. Playing with her. Taking its time. It even lazily groomed itself between strikes, its merciless yellow eyes following her as she tried to scrabble away.
“It treated me like I was a mouse. I would crawl a few feet, and it would drag me back. Like it was all a game.”
“How did you get away?”
“It was futile. Eventually I stopped trying, and just closed my eyes and waited for it to kill me. But it didn’t. Maybe it had already eaten. When I looked for it, it was gone. Then I continued on, to the car.”
“How did you drive? I mean, you couldn’t use your legs, right?”
So much for him not asking.
“Cell phones don’t always work in the mountains. Mine didn’t. And I couldn’t put any weight at all on my legs, but I couldn’t press the pedals with my hands and still see where I was going. So...” Deb let her voice trail off.
“So?”
“What would you have done?”
“I dunno. Looked for a tree branch, something long to press the gas.”
“There was a mountain lion outside the car.”
“Tire iron?”
“In the trunk. I could barely get myself into the driver’s seat. I couldn’t have pulled myself into my trunk.”
“I give up. What did you do?”
“I put my foot over the gas, grabbed my tibia, and pressed down on it.”
Mal set his writing pad in his lap. “That’s... that’s just...”
“Disgusting? Repulsive? The most terrible thing you’ve ever heard?”
“That’s the bravest thing I’ve ever heard. You’re one helluva woman, Deb Novachek.”
Deb looked at Mal. He was beaming at her. Then she opened her window a crack, because it had gotten kind of warm in the car.
“Look for a dirt road, on your right,” she said, happy to change the subject. “According to my GPS, it should be coming up.”
After a few hundred yards, Mal said, “Is that it?”
Deb squeezed the brake bar and peered where Mal was pointing. Rather than a road, there were two faint tire tracks that led into the woods.
“It can’t be.”
“There’s a sign. On that tree.”
The sign was half the size of a pizza box, painted green with a large white arrow. It read RUSHMORE INN ¼ MILE. Deb didn’t mind quaint and rustic. But backwoods and hidden weren’t a good match.
“You’re kidding me.” She frowned. “How is anyone supposed to see that?”
“Maybe they like their privacy.”
“Maybe they don’t like guests. It’s not even permanent. It’s hanging on a rope.”
And it was swinging, even though the wind had stopped.
Almost like it was hung there just a moment ago.
“The weeds are tamped down,” Mal said. “Looks like someone drove down there recently.”
“Never to be seen again.”
“Are you actually nervous about this?”
Deb didn’t answer.
“Come on. How bad can it be?”
“You’re asking the wrong girl.”
Mal shrugged. “Well, I’m tired and I need a shower, and there’s no place else to go, so let’s give it a shot. What do you say?”
Deb didn’t like it. She didn’t like the fact that it wasn’t on the map. She didn’t like the creepy manager who suggested the place. And she didn’t like Mal’s sudden enthusiasm for driving off the main road and into the woods.
What do I know about Mal anyway?
She hadn’t asked him for ID or credentials. He smooth-talked his way into her car, and now he had her out here, all alone, in the middle of bumblefuck. Hell, maybe there was no inn at all. Maybe this was some scheme Mal cooked up with that manager guy.
Then a very bad thought hit her.
What if that strange man who slapped the hood hadn’t done that to the deer?
What if Mal had done it?
Mal was covered in blood. And he had a few minutes from the time he left the car to the time she saw him...
“You look freaked out,” Mal said. He reached out to touch her arm, and she flinched away.
“Let’s keep our hands to ourselves, okay?”
He backed off, fast. “No problem. Do you want me to hike over there, check it out first?”
If this was all part of his plan to abduct her, what was to stop him from lying and saying everything was fine?
She stared at him. Hard. He was cute, charming, and seemed to be bending over backwards to accommodate her.
Of course, all of those same things could have been said about Ted Bundy.
“Let’s go back to the hotel, Deb. I’ll grab Rudy, and you can have our room. That’s what I should have done in the first place. Then I could have interviewed you over dinner, and we wouldn’t have almost hit that guy, gotten soaked in deer blood, and then wound up here, on the set of Texas Chainsaw Massacre 8.”
It was funny, but she kept a straight face without much difficulty. “Do you have a press pass?”
“Sure.”
“Can I see it?”
Mal seemed to study her, then he reached for his back pocket. He pursed his lips.
“My wallet is in the trunk. In my other pants. Look, if you’re still mad about me touching your prosthetic legs, I was just trying to be friendly. I knew I was going to ask some hard questions, and I didn’t want you to think I was a jerk.”
So he hadn’t been flirting. He’d been softening her up before the interrogation.
Deb went from paranoid to hurt.
That’s when the rear tire exploded with the sound of a thunderclap.
Deb’s eyes went wide as Mal lunged at her, his expression crazed as his fingers wrapped around her neck.
# # #
Felix hadn’t ever dwelt on the necessity of good hygiene, but its importance overwhelmed him when John climbed into his truck.
The hunter reeked.
It was a pungent stench; body odor, sour milk, and some sort of perfume that smelled like the soap his father used. Sandalwood. Felix tried breathing through his mouth, but it left a lingering taste on his tongue, so he opened his window and inhaled the air coming in.
“Am I going the right way?” he asked quickly before turning back to the window.