by Sarah Graves
“Bastard,” Jane snarled, letting go of Lizzie long enough to get off a single shot.
Dylan’s low grunt of pain said he’d been hit; in the flare’s Day-Glo brightness—Careful, you’ll start a forest fire, Lizzie thought, woozy and in terror—he staggered and fell.
No! she thought, not realizing she’d sobbed it aloud until the gun savaged her ribs again. She felt a sharp pain and a terrifying popping sensation, and her shortness of breath got worse.
Much worse. “I can’t,” she managed as the brightness flaring around her faded blessedly to black, velvety and welcoming…
She felt herself being hauled to her feet.
Around her the world burst into flame.
—
“What do you want?” Lizzie gasped it out. Only a few minutes had gone by since Jane Crimmins had appeared out of the darkness.
Now at Jane’s grim order Lizzie trudged forward, her eyes streaming with smoke, her chest heaving as she sucked in gulps of air that seemed suddenly to be in desperately short supply.
The trail curved sharply between cedar trees and up a steep slope. Jane switched on a flashlight she’d taken from Dylan, which gave Lizzie hope until she realized the beam was weakening, so dim that it wouldn’t be spotted through the smoke from the blazes now blowing up patchily all around them.
“Stop,” Jane uttered flatly. The flashlight’s yellowish beam picked out the rough boards of a small shed with a slanted roof and a dark, rectangular door opening. A few feet in front of it stood an old claw-footed bathtub, the water in it reflecting the orange-tinted sky.
At Jane’s gesture Lizzie ducked through the shed’s doorway. The interior smelled of hay and of something less pleasant.
“Why?” She dropped to the wooden floor, thickly covered with straw. “What’s this all about?”
Her back found the shed’s rough wall and she sighed in relief until it occurred to her what the other smell was: fear-sweat, not her own. She peered into the shed’s far corners.
In one of them lay Tara Wylie, her eyes wide with terror in the reflected glow of Jane Crimmins’s flashlight. Lizzie crept toward the girl. “Hey.”
The girl shrank back. Her thin wrists were bound by multiple wrappings of twine tethered to an old iron loop driven into the wooden floor. Her lips were bloody and swollen, the skin on the backs of her hands torn and purple with bruises. By the look of it, she’d tried pulling her wrists out of their restraints and when that hadn’t worked she’d tried chewing through the twine.
But she hadn’t been able to do either; now her wavering gaze lit briefly on Lizzie before her eyes drifted shut.
“What do you want?” Lizzie asked again. But Jane didn’t reply as beyond the shed’s low opening the night filled with smoke and flame. Then Lizzie saw what else was happening out there:
The fire’s sudden resurgence had apparently summoned fresh emergency crews, just now arriving; lights flared and faded in the billows of steam rising from half-doused blazes. Down on the main road a red flashing beacon sped away, its siren a thin whine. Dylan…Lizzie yanked her thoughts back with an effort of will as fiery light seeped threateningly between the boards at the rear of the structure, outlining the girl’s shape.
“Hot,” Tara moaned fretfully.
Lizzie struggled up, then jumped forward at a sharp stabbing pain in her arm, followed by a trickle of blood.
Interesting, she thought, then leaned back again cautiously, edging her bound wrists up toward where the sharp thing had been: broken glass, perhaps, or the tip of a nail poking through one of the old boards.
Lit by the glow of the fires creeping nearer, Jane’s eyes were pools of misery hollowed by rage. Lizzie stretched on tiptoe, ignoring the jolt of pain it cost her.
Her rib’s broken end was probably raking through some new, even more vital bit of tissue inside her. But she had to keep Jane talking, keep her preoccupied. Don’t let her see…
“Well,” Lizzie managed, tasting blood and shoving aside the new jolt of fright it caused, “if I’m going to die here…”
A cough, deep and agonizing, cut her words off; she spat and went on. “I’d like to know why,” she finished.
“Oh, you would, huh?” Jane laughed unpleasantly, sounding as if what she really wanted to do was weep. But the gun in her hand was steady.
She shook her head as if in regret. “Well, if you must know, it’s because of a girl named Cam and a creep named Henry Gemerle.”
She began to weep quietly. “I thought she got free, but Cam was never really free.”
“I see,” said Lizzie, not seeing at all. But that wasn’t the point.
The point was keeping Jane Crimmins distracted. “That must have been disappointing. Where’s Cam now?”
As she spoke, Lizzie lifted her bound wrists up behind her yet again, hooking the plastic bags tied around them over the nail’s sharp end. Finally the nail end, or whatever it was, caught on the plastic and tore it…but only a little.
Not enough. “She never came back to me! It was always him,” Jane sobbed. “Even after he took her baby away from her. She still forgave him. But she never forgave me.”
Fifty yards distant, a flaming tree crashed to the earth in an explosion of fire.
“She chose him,” Jane said bitterly, “not me. Right up until the end, and then…”
Lizzie stopped working her bound wrists against the nail. “Oh,” she said, understanding. Not all the details, maybe, but the reason; the heart of the matter.
“You loved her. And she betrayed you. Is that it?”
Jane nodded mutely. “All she really wanted was to get back to him. She just used me. But—”
She stopped, biting her lip anxiously. But in the end she couldn’t resist saying it aloud:
“But at the end, she knew I was the one who cared about her. The only one.”
“The end?” Lizzie inquired, more to keep Jane talking than anything else. After all, the New Haven apartment had been a slaughterhouse according to the cops reporting from there; Cam’s body would no doubt be found sooner or later.
She jerked her wrists upward again, more blood running warmly over her hand. She hoped it was washing the nail wounds clean, at least. Tetanus, blood poisoning…the list of stuff you could get from a rusty nail was long and terrifying. But none was as bad as burning to death, and now the flames outside leapt eagerly, ever nearer.
“Never mind about Cam.” Jane evaded Lizzie’s question. “Now all I’ve got to do is get away from here.”
Lizzie hooked the plastic-bag wrist restraint over the nail again and it held there this time. “So how will you do that?” she asked, very short of breath again suddenly.
But before Jane could answer a cedar torch outside ignited with a vicious roar. A shred of the plastic around Lizzie’s wrists gave way just as a shower of orange sparks erupted only a few feet from the shed’s low doorway.
“I’m waiting until I know the fire will burn everything,” Jane said as the roar faded to a steady crackle. “You, both your buddies down there, this place…”
So there’d be no evidence, Lizzie figured, an assumption she thought was incorrect despite the fire’s fury. It took a lot to incinerate teeth, for instance. And it seemed the emergency crews might’ve found Dylan; she prayed they had.
But despite her struggles the plastic around her wrists hung on stubbornly. And now not only were the bindings that held her refusing to tear any farther, they were stuck on that damn nail.
Around her, the air thickened like poisoned syrup. Pain-sweat prickled her armpits, blackness creeping at the edges of her vision. She couldn’t even tell if Tara was still breathing.
And any minute now I won’t be, either. Yanking against the nail only rocketed another thrilling jolt of torment through her, so intense this time she felt her eyes roll back for an instant.
“So you killed Gemerle,” she gritted out, sawing desperately back and forth with no result. “You got him out, got him to come here,
somehow.”
The wind swept the flames sideways, whipping them up for a final assault. “And then you killed him?”
As she’d hoped, Jane couldn’t resist. “Of course I did,” she declared proudly. “Someone had to,” she added, and seemed about to go on.
But Lizzie wasn’t listening anymore, all thought suddenly dissolved in a vat of pain. One whole side of her chest felt like an animal was in there, chewing its way out, as she went on sawing desperately at the ties still restraining her.
A wind gust sucked the smoke from the shed briefly. In the blessedly clear interval she breathed shallowly through her own blood, the salt taste sickening her. Then:
“What’s that?” Jane demanded, and stepped outside just as Lizzie’s wrist wraps gave way abruptly, one last ferocious yank bringing on a jackhammer of agony.
Jane’s dark shape loomed in the doorway, silhouetted by fire, as Lizzie hit the floor hard and rolled away from the acrid smoke gushing in at the shed’s opposite corner. The blaze screamed…but it wasn’t the fire this time.
It was a voice. “Tara!” someone screamed hoarsely, the sound as wildly ragged as the fire’s crazed howl. “Tara, are you here?”
Lizzie bent swiftly to the unconscious girl as the inferno shrieked. But the knots in the twine on Tara’s arms were pulled rock-hard by her earlier struggles.
“Tara!” The scream came again as Jane turned, fully exposed in the doorway, her weapon raised and her face flat with sudden, unwelcome knowledge: that someone really was out there.
She must still have been realizing it when in the next moment a sharp pop sounded from outside and a chunk the size of a silver dollar flew out of her head, sailing through the smoky gloom in an explosion of bright-red blood.
—
“Tara?” Scrambling over Jane’s body, Peg Wylie half fell into the shed, her face soot-smeared and her yellow hair a fire-crazed frizzle. She fell weeping by her daughter’s unconscious body.
A slough of burnt skin sagged from her jaw, and her eyebrows were gone. But she’d found her lost child and the tears streaming down her face weren’t from the searing smoke.
“Oh, honey,” she breathed. “Mommy’s here now, it’s okay…”
But it wasn’t. Flames munched one corner of the shed and an ominous creaking sounded from above. The roof’s far end sagged abruptly, releasing a sparkling shower of glowing embers.
“Tara,” Peg cried brokenly, trying to lift the girl. But the strands of twine that bound Tara’s arms, still tied to a ringed iron spike set into the floor, were too short to stretch any more.
When Peg tried again, though, a bit of the floor moved, too. Lizzie shoved Peg aside, gritting her teeth against the misery of each labored breath.
“Try once more,” she gasped while her fingers scrabbled on the splintery wood for what must be there: a trapdoor.
Because why else would the floor move, why would a shed like this even have a wooden floor, unless—
Finally she found the edge, hooked her fingertips onto it, and pried upward. As the trapdoor rose at last, dank air gushed up from below like a blessing, smelling of cool earth.
“Go,” she told Peg just as the roof overhead sagged again with a sharp, splintering crack!
Peg dropped her legs through the opening, shimmied down the rest of the way, and held her arms up for Tara. “You’ve got to cut that twine somehow, please!” she cried. “Hurry…”
Glancing around wildly, Lizzie saw no tools at all. And Jane had taken the jackknife she always carried from her duty belt. But then she spied her own weapon fallen beside Jane’s body. And it was a crazy idea but maybe, just maybe, it would work.
Seizing the weapon she laid the barrel end at an angle against the twine, now stretched taut across the floor. Then she let her finger tighten on the trigger, felt the firing mechanism slip past the pressure point until…
The weapon’s report was like a bomb going off, deafening her. But the rope’s strands parted and Lizzie half dragged, half rolled Tara down through the trapdoor into her mother’s arms.
Then as the roof dropped warningly with an agonized groan of burnt timbers, Lizzie looked back a last time at Jane Crimmins’s motionless body. Sparks flared in her hair and a tide of dark blood spread around her.
“Hurry,” Peg cried again from below.
FIFTEEN
Above them in the burning shed, a row of beams let go with a sound like big bones snapping. Lizzie rushed to the open trapdoor Peg held up for her.
A rafter slammed down. A splinter daggered her arm. “Come on,” Peg urged as a wall ignited with a whoosh.
Fire poured through the roof as Lizzie slung her legs hastily down into the hole and fell through it. The trapdoor dropped shut with a dull, final-sounding thud. Hitting the floor, she felt her teeth click together and her head snap forward with the impact.
“Ugh.” The agony in her chest was nauseating. She managed to haul herself up on her elbow, opening her eyes just as Peg’s flashlight snapped on.
Then as she turned her head woozily she came suddenly face-to-face with the other occupant of the crawl space:
Short, dark hair, wide-open eyes, mouth sagging sideways in a lifeless yawn…
“Gah.” Lizzie scrambled back. Dead bodies were one thing…
“Who’s that?” Peg Wylie stared.
…but sudden dead bodies were something else again.
“I’m not sure. But I’m guessing it’s Cam Petry.” From above came a cascading crash: the rest of the roof falling in, Lizzie thought. Which meant…
“You know what, though?” she said as a new wave of dizziness swirled through her. “Never mind who that is. We’ve got—”
Other things to worry about, she’d meant to say, but instead she passed out. When she came to again, Peg was bent over a blue plastic jerrican in the cellar’s corner.
“What are you doing?” Lizzie whispered, the words coming out in little gusts on the tiny sips of air she could get.
“Opening up the stored water.” Peg had pushed the dead body into a far corner, laid burlap sacks over its face. Tara lay propped against the opposite wall.
Lizzie licked her parched lips. “I didn’t know you had a gun.” She rose up on one elbow, felt a gritty crunch of something grating deep inside her, and coughed up a wad of blood.
“There’s a lot you don’t know about me,” said Peg. “But I’ve been waiting a long time for Henry to show up. Worrying, being afraid. So I took a few lessons. Gun safety and target shooting at the VFW range.”
The .22 pistol stuck out of her jeans pocket. “I never really believed I’d shoot anyone, though. Until I did.”
“Yeah. I felt that way the first time, too.” Lizzie squinted around, trying not to think about the pain in her chest and her shortness of breath. “What is this place, anyway?”
Above them, the shed went on thudding and shuddering as the rampaging fire devoured it like a ravenous beast that howled and stomped as it ate.
“Shepherd’s hut,” Peg said. “That bathtub outside is a trough. Hauled water for the animals, someone got it up here in a pickup truck. This crawl space is to stash supplies in, animal feed and supplies for people, too, so no wild critters can get at it.”
A metal cup hung from the jerrican. Peg unscrewed the can’s spout, removed a plastic plug from it, then reattached the spout and poured liquid into the cup.
“Up here in Maine, if a blizzard blows in and catches you by surprise you still have to take care of your livestock. You need shelters like this one.”
She brought the cup to Tara’s side, lifted the girl’s head tenderly, and dribbled a little water onto her lips.
“That’s probably why it hasn’t burned,” she went on calmly, “because sheep graze right down to the ground around these things, eat the roots and everything.”
She pushed the moisture into Tara’s mouth with a finger. “Wrecks the grass, that’s why cattlemen and sheep people always butt heads. Makes a kind of natura
l firebreak, though.”
She carried some water to Lizzie. “But now stuff is blowing, the fire doesn’t need tinder on the ground to spread. Sparks fly through the air, and—”
Something large fell somewhere above. “Anyway, in bad weather the shepherd might have to hole up here awhile,” Peg said. “Get the animals under cover, then come down here and wait it out. So that’s what the supplies are for.”
She put the cup to Lizzie’s lips. “Drink if you can.”
The water tasted like blood; Lizzie repressed a gag while above the fire bellowed, crackling and snapping. At the time, coming down here had seemed like the right move.
The only one, in fact. But now they were trapped. A glowing crumb fell from between the floorboards over their heads, blazed for an instant, and went out.
Another bright invader fell. Struggling up, Lizzie got her feet underneath her. “Take my jacket off me.”
Peg looked disapproving. “You should keep still. You’ll lose a lot less blood if you’ll just—”
“Get over here and get this jacket off. There’s a backpack underneath it, with a fire blanket in it.”
More embers sifted down, and the crackling sound they’d been hearing all along was much louder suddenly.
“Hurry.” The shed’s floorboards were ablaze. Lizzie’s knees sagged as Peg hauled the jacket off her shoulders; swaying, she spat another mess of dark red.
“Sorry,” she said, “but I think I’m—”
Bleeding. Suffocating. Dying. Cold fright pierced her.
Peg bent and draped one of Lizzie’s arms over her shoulder. The next moments were a blur of agony as Peg straightened with a sudden surge Lizzie recognized from her gym-rat days in Boston.
When the anguish cleared she was resting against the packed-earth wall. Peg pulled the fire blanket, like a gigantic sleeping bag made of shiny, silvery stuff, from its pouch.
“How come they issued you a big one?” Peg yanked the handles on the tightly folded item.