by Shannon Hill
In movies or TV shows, someone in that situation miraculously breaks free, or snap-kicks the bad guys to their deaths, or is rescued at the last possible second. In real life, you shake so hard you can’t even wet your pants. You get a few nanoseconds of wondering if it’d be better to die by shotgun, fright, or a big fall. You’d sob and beg, if you weren’t duct-taped across the mouth, and to hell with dignity.
I was trying to scream when Tall suddenly veered into a tiny gap between the boulders and that stone “wall” sticking out of the mountain.
The optical illusion evaporated. There, through an otherwise invisible space between what was actually the “wall” and a very big boulder, I could see perfectly gentle mountainside.
Not far away, near the base of the cliff, stood a log cabin. Log shack, more accurately. Complete with dead brambles and winter-browned creepers, a caved-in metal roof that looked too rotten to bear the weight of fog, and a stretch of disintegrating rail fence right out of a PBS show on frontier history.
It was too bad to be true. Too perfectly bad. And not bad enough, I noticed as we got closer. Sunlight glinted off window glass behind seemingly haphazardly nailed-on boards. No dead plants were near or on the door, which fit snugly in its frame instead of hanging loose or warped. The heavy chain across the door looked rusty, but the padlock gleamed. I’m no trail-master, but I could see there were no animal tracks, not even a single squirrel print, anywhere by the place. But the clincher for me was the black soot marks on the underside of the tree branches overhanging the old fieldstone chimney. That tree was maybe fifty-sixty years old. The shack at a guess was twice that, and had probably been uninhabited since the tree was a tiny sapling.
Uninhabited on a daily basis, that is.
I took a deep, sharp, lung-hurting breath. Crap. Moonshiners.
Some people run their stills at home for a little profit on the side. Others find a hole in the wall dump like this. Most choose a place more convenient to a road, but a quick covert look told me there were logging roads cutting through these forests. You could see them, and the previous year or two of brush and waste, without the masking foliage of spring and summer.
I know every moonshiner in our county. As long as they keep their product pure, and don’t sell it where I can see it or to kids, I turn a blind eye. The main crop for several decades in our county has been poverty. You don’t hang some old grandma out to dry over a few gallons of corn liquor that sell for ten-twenty bucks a pop and help her buy groceries. The big runners, the ones selling for twice those prices to big city markets, I leave to the feds. So what would a moonshiner with a covert set-up like this want with me?
When we got in the door, I knew I was right about the moonshine operation. Once you smell corn mash, you never forget it. You can’t. It’s etched into your sinuses the way the taste of moonshine gets etched into the backs of your eyeballs. Believe me, that’s not something you can forget, even if you try.
The one-room shack was snug. That busted-in roof? Not a problem when you’ve got another roof under it, hung low enough that you couldn’t raise your hand without smacking the underside of it. Fireplace? Blocked in tight. Windows? Easy to open from the inside if you wanted some fresh air, provided you pushed aside the blackout curtains. No electricity, but battery-operated camp lanterns had been stuck in the corners.
Shotgun kept his eye and his weapon on me while Tall pulled up a big metal ring in the floor. Trapdoor to a cellar—color me unsurprised—and a whole lotta scared running in my veins.
Tall went down first, with a lantern. Chivalrous of him. Then I more or less controlled my fall down the stairs, so steep they might as well have been a ladder. Shotgun came last, with another lantern.
The cellar had been hewn right out of the mountain, and it was easily twice the size of the shack above it. The far wall, like the floor, was native fieldstone. There were even two tiny windows peeping out into the valley, though at that hour, the sun came directly in. Late afternoon, nearing sunset, I realized with a shock. I’d been gone for hours.
There was nothing down there in the way of comfort. It was all copper tubing, huge kettles, gallon jars, and what looked like space for small tanks of propane to fuel the two big cookers—jury-rigged, I saw—and a stream running through the cellar. It came right out of the mountain, trickled down a sort of built-in trough, and out the far wall. On a hot summer day, this was probably a great place to be, even with the two big cookers going. In winter, it was cold. Not killing cold. At least, not right away.
Tall left the cellar. I shifted from one foot to another, trying to restore full circulation. It wasn’t working. Shotgun stood at the base of the ladder, watching me like he could see right through my fleece jacket. I turned my back on him and studied the cellar. Maybe twenty-four by twenty feet. In the center, more or less, was a big square-ish fireplace, probably once used for cooking up mash, now home to a wood-burning stove. By the smell of smoke, warm ash, I got the feeling it had been used fairly recently, maybe that morning. When they were preparing for my arrival.
Although there were logs in the bin, Shotgun made no move to stoke up the fire. I kept examining the cellar.
I’d bet the cabin had been built atop the spring when it ran along the bottom of a narrow natural crevice in the rock. I could see where massive old logs had been laid over the part that didn’t lie under the shack, and been reinforced later by both wooden and metal beams. I could even see old tool marks on the stone walls. This place had probably been built to house a still all along. From the shadows of twigs against the two tiny windows, I realized that the growth of the forest masked the place. People could have walked right over top of the whole thing for decades and not known it. Even locals would have a hard time finding it if they weren’t in on the secret.
Another bad omen for me.
Tall returned, with an armful of old, faded comforters. He set them down near the back wall, where the spring entered the stone-laid trough. He led me to them, and turned me to face the wall. When I heard the click of the handcuffs unlocking, I jerked my hands wide and tried to mule-kick him and elbow him at the same time. The best I could do was stagger hard and knock him a little off-balance. He aimed a smack at my head but I ducked it, catching the blow on my shoulder.
I’ve swatted flies harder than that.
Then I felt the shotgun in my back.
Shotgun pressed me down on the comforters, which smelled stale but clean. Tall fastened the handcuff to my right wrist and a length of light dog chain that he looped around a wooden beam more-or-less bolted into the stone floor. That puzzled me. A human can break a dog chain if they’ve got the right motivation, and I certainly did.
Tall went back up the ladder. Shotgun went up after him. The trapdoor slammed into place. I got both hands around that dog chain and threw my weight against it as hard as I could. It didn’t break. I backed up, took the duct tape off my face, inhaled deep, and tried again. That time, the chain broke, the handcuff leaving a sore red scrape on my wrist.
By the time I got up the ladder to push at the trapdoor, I could hear their footsteps, and a sound of dragging. I shoved at the trapdoor with all my strength, and got it up maybe half an inch before weight smacked it back down. I tried to think what had been up in the shack. An old table, maybe? Or an old bed? There’d been some shapes, but I’d had my eyes on Shotgun.
I went back down the ladder. I wanted to run to a window and scream, but I couldn’t even see another house, and chances were I’d be wasting my breath. I shivered, and went to the comforters. There were two. I chose the thinner one and wrapped it around myself from the armpits down. It helped a little. Then I shuffled to the wood stove. I opened the door. The ashes were still warm, all right. But not hot. I stirred them a little with a metal stick, a short length of re-bar, in fact, that had been doing duty as a fire poker by the looks of it. I blew gently. A few bits of something flared up bright, then died away. I shut the door and went hunting.
> There were plastic barrels under the two tiny windows, and I pried up the lids. I pulled out sacks, the kind cornmeal comes in when you buy it by the twenty-five-pound bag, still with some fine corn dust in them. I took those, and peeled the labels off three cans of soup I found in a tin box nailed to the wall as as cupboard. My fingers hurt and shook while I shredded the labels, and picked apart the sacks. I pried splinters out of the ladder with the re-bar, and made a little pile of kindling in the warm bed of ashes. I blew and blew, and prayed, and hoped, and finally, one little bit of smoldering caught along the edge of a label. It curled up quick and black. The next moment, a small flame licked up the pile, and the splinters caught.
I fed the fire the smallest log and waited for what felt like years for it to catch well enough for me to risk a second log. I was shaking from head to toe by then. With the door open, the woodstove put out enough heat that I finally felt warm by the time the sun went down and the dark closed in.
***^***
I let myself put one log in the fire only when the previous log was down to hot coals. I managed to make the fire last the night, but come cold sunrise, I had two logs left, and nothing else to burn but the ladder. I used the length of re-bar to start chipping splinters out of the trapdoor. The damn thing was made out of thick planks, aged, tight-grained. I might as well have tried to bite my way through teak for all the good I got from it.
At least the exercise kept me warm.
I drank from the spring, and when nature inevitably called, I did that in the stream a few feet before it tumbled out the wall. Then I went back to huddling in both comforters, as close to the waning heat of the stove as I could get. I gouged some splinters out of one wooden upright, but it wasn’t going to be enough to get me through the day, let alone another night.
I had to get out.
The windows were too small to crawl out of. The trapdoor was not giving way. I thought about it long and hard, while a can of soup heated in the stove near the hot coals of my next-to-last log. I’d popped a ragged hole in the top with my length of re-bar, and then pried up part of the top. Compared to Aunt Marge’s homemade masterpieces, it was garbage, but right then it tasted like heaven.
I stared upward. I either needed fuel enough to not freeze till someone found me, or I needed out. The trapdoor was too heavy to budge, and too sturdy for a piece of rebar to do much damage to. But I couldn’t give up. It wasn’t in me. Not yet.
I crawled up the ladder, and started attacking the floorboard parallel to the trapdoor. Sure, it was an old, thick plank. With luck, however, it might be more old than thick.
I fell off the ladder twice, and my hands were numb from the vibrations from the blows I struck, before I scraped up a handful of splinters and threw them in the stove. I drank some more water. It didn’t help.
I tried Plan B. That involved heating the tip of the re-bar in the coals and trying to burn the wood planks above me. I succeeded in leaving some black gouges.
Plan C was trying to hold a flaming log to the trapdoor long enough for the trapdoor to catch fire. It smoldered, and it blackened, but it did not burst into flame. Admittedly, setting fire to the cabin wasn’t my best option, but I was getting pretty desperate by then.
Plan D involved sitting by the woodstove watching the coals slowly cool and darken.
It was around noon when I went to the far wall and started attacking it with the re-bar. I’d shut the drafts on the woodstove and banked the remaining hot coals as best I could. If I got lucky—phenomenally, even-better-than-lotto lucky—I might hack my way out into the forest and at least have access to firewood. Then I could do something intelligent and hightail it off that mountain before dark.
When dark came, I was exhausted, my back and arms in agony from repeated strikes of metal on stone, and the cellar had gotten very cold. I ate a can of soup cold by the light of one of the two battery-operated lanterns. I’d turned off the other to save it. I huddled against the woodstove more for comfort than any warmth it had to give, and slept.
3.
I ate the last can of soup the following morning. I ached all over, from cold, from weariness, from despair. The carpet burns on my feet, plus the long chill, left them both numbed and irritated. My hands weren’t any better. I was not really warm inside my cocoon of two comforters, but I wasn’t freezing, either. I tried for a few hours to hack at the far wall again, but the re-bar’s vibrations made my arms ache clear to my eyebrows, and I was becoming light-headed from lack of food. I loaded up on the spring water, and fell asleep. I dreamt I had been forgotten by Tall and Shotgun, and that this was the plan all along: let me die by slow inches in this cellar, instead of clean and quick in the open.
I started shaking before dawn, when the cold had settled in hard and fierce. I told myself to jump up and down to get warm, but my feet were blocks of wood even though I’d been curled up tight all night in the comforters. To get a drink, I had to inchworm along the cold stone floor, then stick my face directly into the water because I did not want to make my hands any colder by poking them out of the comforters.
I got back to my spot by the woodstove and dozed off again. I wanted to be awake. I wanted to get out. The problem was, I was finally warm again, and so sleepy my body shut down without my brain’s permission. I jerked awake three times, and the third time, I got to my knees. I crawled to the far wall and picked up the re-bar length. Just a hunk of some kind of steel or iron, as thick as my thumb, as long as my arm, that’s all it was.
It was Excalibur to me.
I made my hands curl around it to hold it, and I made myself thrust its tip between fieldstones and start working out mortar. I had yet to get one stone free, but I chiseled away in fits and starts until I fell asleep again thinking I was still working.
I woke to thumps and shouts. I was so cold I couldn’t think. Some part of me thought it was Tall and Shotgun, come to finish the job, and I picked up the re-bar. It took me four tries to get my fingers around it. Yellow oozed out of my carpet-scraped hands and bruised palms. When I bent my fingers, some of the thin scabs burst and the fluid wept out. The pain startled me. I hadn’t felt any for what seemed like days.
I tried to get to my knees, but I was too wrapped in my comforters. I fell, and landed on my poor hands when my feet refused to do their job. Stars exploded in my head. I lay gasping, spinning, suddenly very hot. A small voice in my head told me I was in much bigger trouble than the rest of me knew.
There were more thumps and then a loud bang. I held onto the re-bar awkwardly. It was like trying to hold onto a needle while wearing mittens.
A flashlight’s white-blue beam cut across the cellar. The battery-operated lanterns had died out the previous night. I hadn’t realized how gray the cellar was until that flashlight came to blind me.
I heard a shout, and an uneven tread that nagged at memory. I knew that walk. Step-thunk. That was Punk Sims, who’d lost one leg at the knee in a car accident. He’d gone on disability, but he’d missed cop work enough to agree that being my part-time deputy was a new lease on life. Good man, Punk. Strange name, but good man. Who, I wondered, not for the first time, would wish the first name Purdy on anyone? No wonder he preferred Punk.
Punk got down on the floor next to me and took my pulse. His face was white as the snow. He bellowed, “Tom!” at a volume I’d never known him capable of. A moment later, Tom’s round, red face was there, too, floating incongruously around like a demented moon. “Lil!” he cried hoarsely, and then snarled at someone behind them, “Get a stretcher and some rope!”
To me, Punk said, “Lie still, okay? Just lie still. Let the paramedics do it all. We got you, Lil.”
That sounded nice. I asked, “Boris?”
“He’s fine, Bobbi’s got him.”
I smiled. Then I went back to sleep.
***^***
I woke up—again—in the big university hospital in Charlottesville—again.
These things really have to stop
starting that way.
First time around, I’d gotten a wicked knife cut across the ribs from a nutjob small-time drug dealer. Second time, a Collier ran me off the road. Third time…
I hurt. I mean I hurt like a broken rib or a knife cut couldn’t hurt. I thought my hands and feet were on fire. Live coals for bones and flames for flesh. Tears came out of my eyes without my permission. “Sweet Jesus!” I said through my teeth.
Aunt Marge—again—wailed, “Oh, Lil!” and informed me that I was completely and totally idiotic, shouldn’t be allowed out without a keeper, and all the usual sort of lecture I’d gotten from her before.
“Hurts,” I informed the world.
Roger kindly pushed a button near my hand. “It’s going to, for a while,” he said helpfully. Dear Roger. Ex-military, and don’t ask what it was he did, because you’ll never find out. He paints amazing watercolors in his retirement, and helps Aunt Marge run the Littlepage Eller Animal Sanctuary just outside town. She named it for me, and gets a peculiar grin whenever she tells the story of how I gave up my accidental Eller inheritance to build it. As she often says, it’s good to have one building with both Eller and Littlepage above the door.
A few moments later, the firestorm backed off to mere pain. “God A’mighty. What happened to me?”
“Hypothermia,” said Roger, still handing tissues to Aunt Marge. She was for once not toting a large bag full of clanking thermoses of the soups and juices she made. Aunt Marge had been a dietitian, and still considered it her mission in life to nourish the world.
I tried moving my feet. Holy Heavenly hosts, did that hurt. It hurt like eighteen toothaches in every toe, with some raw blisters thrown in. Roger nodded with sympathy. “Good news is, feeling it that much means there’s not likely permanent damage. Bad news is, it hurts like that.”
I squeaked in my throat. I’d tried to move my hand. The left one wasn’t bad, but the right one was doing a fair imitation of raw hamburger all the way to the elbow.