The Naked Edge

by David Morrell

Cavanaugh rushed him, then dodged away as the flashlight on the ground glinted off the knife Carl swung at him.

  Cavanaugh grabbed a thick limb from the ground, the size of a baseball bat. He braced himself to strike as Carl hobbled toward him, slashing his knife up and down and from side to side in a buzz-saw blur.

  Cavanaugh swung the club. Carl dodged. Cavanaugh swung again, wincing from the wound in his side. Carl leapt back. Breathing heavily, facing one another, they turned in a circle, looking for an opening, ready to strike, the flashlight casting shadows across them.

  At once, Cavanaugh realized that Carl had maneuvered so that his left hand now pulled back the branch with the stake. Lurching away as Carl released it, Cavanaugh struck a fallen bough and dropped backward, the stake zipping past him. Shouting, Carl charged, and all Cavanaugh could do was roll away from the light. Keeping his hand on the club but in no position to use it, he surged to his feet and raced from the trees.

  The picnic table, he thought. Its dark shape was suddenly before him. He almost banged into it but managed to slow in time to drop to his knees and scurry under it, carefully avoiding where he'd secured the stake. He groaned as Carl's blade sliced across his back. But he forced himself to keep crawling, sensing Carl leaning fiercely under the table to stab him.

  Something made a grotesque, liquid, popping sound. Carl's scream communicated sanity-threatening pain. Cavanaugh tightened his grip on the club. Rising beyond the table, he swung over it, aiming toward Carl, who twisted in a frenzy, his left hand clutching his left eye.

  The club whistled past Carl, who now did an amazing thing, the one mistake an experienced knife fighter never makes. Don't throw your knife at your enemy. You might miss, and then you're without your weapon. But in this case, it wasn't a mistake. At so close a range that the sounds Cavanaugh made guided Carl's aim, relying on surprise, Carl threw the knife. Hurled it with all his might. Cavanaugh wailed from the pain of the knife striking his ribs, chipping bone. The only thing that saved him was that the blade was upright and didn't slip between ribs to puncture his ribs or his heart.

  Nonetheless, he felt dizzy, in shock from blood loss. Gasping, he wavered. He fumbled, trying to find where the knife dropped, but Carl was suddenly on him, knocking him to the sand, his fingers around his throat, squeezing.

  Blood dripped from Carl's missing eye onto Cavanaugh's face.

  “Want to make a bet, Aaron?”

  Wheezing, Cavanaugh grabbed a handful of dirt from under the table and threw it at Carl's bleeding eye socket.

  Carl hissed as if the dirt were hot coals. But his hands remained firm on Cavanaugh's throat.

  Flesh separating on his sliced back, Cavanaugh reached painfully up to shove a thumb into Carl's empty eye socket. He actually got it in, feeling blood stream down his thumb. But before he could probe, his hand sank, his mind swirling, Carl squeezing harder.

  Carl's head jerked up, his remaining eye scanning the fog. Distant footsteps ran across the invisible soccer field.

  “You still can't do this without help, huh?” He leaned down, so close that he breathed against Cavanaugh's left ear. “I bet your friends never find either of us.”

  As Cavanaugh's mind swirled faster, Carl's last words echoed and faded.

  37

  Running toward the park, Jamie and Rutherford heard a shout. Reaching the grass, they heard a scream. Charging across a fog-shrouded field, they heard another. Instinctively, they knew when they were close enough that they needed to slow their frantic pace or risk giving away their position in the dark and being shot.

  Pistols aimed, they shifted carefully toward the last sound they'd heard.

  38

  Cavanaugh woke in darkness. Not the darkness of the night and the fog in which there'd been gradations of blackness and shadow. This was absolute darkness, made worse by foul air and the press of Carl's body against him. His neck felt swollen, the inside of his throat burning from having been choked. His sliced back felt on fire, blood streaming from it, making his mind swirl again. His wounded side throbbed. He almost vomited. It took him several moments before he overcame panic sufficiently to realize that he and Carl lay on their left sides, Carl's chest against his back. He felt Carl's labored breathing against his neck.

  “Awake, Aaron?” Carl whispered.

  Cavanaugh felt breath against his ear. He didn't respond.

  “Sure, you are,” Carl said. “I feel your heart beating faster.”

  Cavanaugh didn't see a point in pretending any longer. “Where are we?” The words stung his irritated throat.

  “Home, sweet home. Check out the expert workmanship. Feel the fine wood.”

  Cavanaugh's arms were pinned along his side. The narrow space, which increasingly reminded him of a coffin, made it impossible for him to touch what he now identified as wood against his cheek (a floor) and against his forehead (a wall).

  Carl's right arm was free. In the absolute darkness, he reached over Cavanaugh and tapped the wood, causing a muffled echo. “The best plywood available on the junk heap of a construction site. A sheet of plastic's above the roof so water can't seep in. Comfy, huh? Just the thing for spending a couple of days and nights. Of course, I didn't plan for company. When I was the only occupant, I had room to drink from a water bottle and eat beef jerky. Not too much, of course, because I didn't want to foul my dream house with more piss and crap than was necessary.”

  Cavanaugh almost threw up.

  “So relax. We'll find out if I win my bet. But I'm sorry to say, this is going to be a one-sided conversation from now on. You might try to shout and attract your friends. There's an air hole above my head. I can't take the chance they'd hear you. Open your mouth.”

  Cavanaugh didn't. In the darkness, he felt something sting his neck. The point of a blade.

  “I picked up my knife before I carried you here. Open your mouth, or else I'll slice the artery in your neck.”

  Cavanaugh obeyed. He felt a gritty, musty rag being shoved into his mouth.

  “I hope you don't have asthma,” Carl whispered. “I wouldn't want you to suffocate. So here we are, snug as two bugs in a rug. How do you suppose we should pass the time?”

  Behind him, Carl's voice was so soft that Cavanaugh could barely hear it. His hushed breath drifted past Cavanaugh's ear.

  “Why don't I give you a little lesson? You know the old saying, ‘You can't pick your family, but you can pick your friends.’ Isn't that the truth? If only Lance had been my father. Wouldn't that have been great? Me and the old man making knives. As for friends, well, most people throw that word around. What they really mean is ‘acquaintances’. They mean people they spend time with because they happen to live next to each other or work together or play sports with each other or belong to the same club or whatever. People who don't make trouble. People who don't ask for much, who don't inconvenience them.

  “But a true friend, Aaron. That's rare and special. A friend is somebody who accepts your faults, who's there for you always, even when you're not your best, somebody who'll do anything for you, somebody you can count on totally, just as a friend can count on you. It's the most powerful relationship there is. Most marriages don't come close, because in a lot of marriages the partners aren't really friends.

  “I chose you as my friend, Aaron. My only friend. I never felt closer to anyone. There isn't anything I wouldn't have done for you. Imagine how I felt when I realized that you weren't my friend, that you were just another self-centered asshole who said adios when the going got rough.”

  In the pitch-blackness, the gag absorbed moisture in Cavanaugh's mouth. It made his throat dry. It made the fetid air he breathed tickle his bronchial passages. He feared he would cough. He feared he would choke.

  “When you think about it, we've never been closer than we are right now,” Carl said. “It's not a bad way to die. Pressed against the person we love.”

  Fighting not to panic, Cavanaugh held his breath in the hopes of stifling his impulse to gag. He
failed. His stomach heaved. Bile soared up his throat.

  39

  Where? Jamie mentally yelled, not daring to speak and make herself a target. Where are they?

  Rutherford moved next to her, aiming to the right while she aimed to the left. They continued slowly, warily, into the fog. As much as she could estimate in the darkness, the screams had come from straight ahead. With her attention focused there, the ground beneath her suddenly collapsed. She fell, sliding downward, tumbling into water. Rutherford splashed next to her, sprawling, the creek flowing over them.

  They scrambled upright, but any element of surprise was now lost, and Jamie's stomach seemed filled with sharp heavy stones as she peered over the top of the opposite bank. More darkness and fog awaited them. She aimed to the left, listening intensely for any indication of where Cavanaugh might be. But what caught her attention wasn't a sound.

  It was a glow so faint that it might have been marsh light. Climbing from the creek, aiming, she crept toward the pale illumination, Rutherford moving next to her.

  They reached trees. The glow was stronger. On the ground. Among bushes. A flashlight. When Jamie picked it up, she did what Cavanaugh had taught her to do, keeping it away from her center of mass so that a bullet aimed toward the light wouldn't hit her chest.

  She scanned the trees and bushes. Rutherford pointed, crimson attracting her attention: blood on a stake tied to a branch. Her mouth sour, she aimed the flashlight toward the ground, seeing more blood. Following it, they left the trees. The blood went in two directions. Some of it formed a trail on the left, where the flashlight revealed a dead Labrador retriever, a knife sticking into it.

  “What the hell happened here?” Jamie murmured.

  “Hell,” Rutherford said. “Exactly.”

  The blood trail on the right led to a picnic table, and here Jamie found an astonishing amount of blood, a spray of it everywhere. The sharp stones in her stomach now felt like cold barbed wire twisting inside her. Rutherford pointed again. The blood led toward the creek. They peered down at the water, where the blood was no longer in sight.

  40

  “Take it easy,” Carl whispered, pulling the rag from Cavanaugh's mouth as bile rushed into his mouth. “We don't want you to choke to death. Especially when you've got the alternative of the dreaminess of bleeding to death.”

  Cavanaugh spit acid and gasped for air. He understood. Carl had spoken about the plastic sheet above the roof, the barrier that kept water out. But the floor was now wet, the fluid rising, and the only explanation for that was blood—from Cavanaugh's wounded side, punctured chest, and sliced back as well as from Carl's stabbed thigh and bleeding eye socket.

  “Aren't we a pair?” Carl said. “Just like being in a womb. From the cradle to the grave. Drifting away. On the path to dreamland. What's the best time we ever had together. No. Don't answer that. Instead of whispering, you might scream. I'm afraid I need to gag you again.”

  Carl crammed the rag into Cavanaugh's mouth, then nestled against him. “Blood sure smells like copper.”

  But Cavanaugh couldn't smell anything. Indeed, he had trouble feeling the wet, slippery wood beneath him. His mind again swirled.

  “The best time we ever had was when we went camping in Colorado and . . .”

  41

  Screaming inwardly, Jamie shifted along the creek, scanning each side of it while Rutherford aimed toward the top of the bank in case a dark figure attacked them. Where? she kept demanding. Where's the blood? She almost did scream when it occurred to her that they might be heading in the wrong direction. Rather than searching deeper into the park, perhaps they should have gone in the opposite direction. Her trembling hand made the flashlight waver, its beam flicking this way and that. Time seemed suspended, yet she felt that ten minutes went by in an instant. The blood! Where's the damned . . .

  There! She saw it, the crimson rising from the creek, blending with deep footprints that struggled up the bank on the right. She and Rutherford hurried to the top, and now Jamie felt the barbed wire in her stomach become molten. It expanded, threatening to burn through her belly. The blood formed a pool in the grass in front of her.

  But it didn't go farther.

  42

  “Looks like I'll win my bet,” Carl whispered. “If they were going to find us, they'd have done it by now. I cut a piece from my jacket and tied it around my leg so I wouldn't drip blood on the ground. I came back here and got one of the plastic sheets I stole from a construction site. I wrapped it around you so you wouldn't drip blood when I carried you here. As far as whoever's out there is concerned, we vanished. Ain't that great? Our last game of hide and seek.”

  Cavanaugh managed to nod. His consciousness wavering, he thought about all the things he regretted—not kissing Jamie more often, not telling her often enough how much he loved her. He regretted the beatings Carl had received from his father. He regretted not having spent more time with Carl in the weeks before his father's disgrace forced Carl's family to move to Nashville. He regretted having treated Carl's letters and phone calls as a nuisance. He regretted not having kept in touch with Carl after Global Protective Services fired him.

  What do you say we go out for a drink, Carl? How about a movie and a burger afterward? How about visiting my ranch in Wyoming? You'll love my home. Sunset over the Tetons. A friendship. All this happened, so many people died, because of a friendship that went bad.

  His suffocated mind couldn't find the words. Who's the self-centered asshole, Carl? You think I let you down? Pal, you let me down.

  He knew he ought to feel angry. Furious. And he was. If he had the strength, he'd find a way to grab Carl's head and pound it until . . .

  But he felt something else as well, and as tears streamed down his face, his blood and his life seeping from him, he tried to say it, tried to spit out the gag and tell Carl. . . .

  “Choking again, good buddy?”

  Carl's hand pulled out the vile rag. Cavanaugh's mouth was almost too dry to force out the words.

  “Got something to say?” Carl asked.

  Cavanaugh nodded weakly.

  “Let's hear it.”

  “I'm . . .”

  “Yes? Keep trying. Get it out. Last words and all that.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Ah.”

  Cavanaugh's mind seemed to plummet.

  “Sorry? You know what, my friend?” Carl said. “I am too. Three years ago, maybe I should just have kicked the shit out of you. Maybe I was afraid I couldn't do it. But hey, I sure kicked the shit out of you now.”

  Cavanaugh felt more tears streaming down his face. What he had tried to say was that, Jamie aside, he was sorry that he and Carl had ever grown up. I wish we were still kids, he thought. His head thudded onto the blood-soaked wood.

  43

  “John, help me think,” Jamie said. “Where did they go?” Jamie aimed the flashlight through the fog. Frantic, she stumbled forward into the darkness.

  “What's that over there?” Rutherford said.

  “Where?”

  “There.” Rutherford guided her hand, the flashlight dimly revealing a children's climbing-gym: rods and railings and tubes in a rock-walled grotto whose sides were topped with bushes and evergreen shrubs.

  Jamie entered the grotto and shivered as if in another dimension. She scanned the dim light over everything, the wood chips on the ground, the little bridge over a culvert through which children could crawl, the beams that formed a sandbox, the picnic tables.

  “There's no blood.” A sob escaped her. “I don't know what to do.”

  She stepped farther inside the grotto. She aimed the light at everything, lingering, staring. Finally, desperate to search somewhere else, she turned away. Her flashlight swung past something.

  “Wait.”

  She redirected the light.

  “Tell me if I'm seeing things.”

  “Where?”

  “There!”

  She and Rutherford walked toward the childr
en's bridge. It spanned a cement culvert that children would find exciting to crawl through. On the right, there was a second culvert, smaller, more exciting. Between the two was the rock wall, huge boulders embedded in a dirt slope.

  “That boulder,” Jamie said. “The one in the middle. Why are–”

  “Wood chips on it?” Rutherford asked.

  “There aren't any on the others. Help me,” Jamie pleaded.

  They rushed to the boulder. Rutherford grabbed its top.

  “Stand back,” he told Jamie. “Aim the light.”

  Jamie did. She also aimed the gun. Rutherford pulled with all his broad-shouldered strength, unprepared for how easily the boulder toppled away, revealing a nightmare, two men smeared in blood, the smell of excrement streaming out. Next to them lay the strap that Carl had wrapped around the boulder, hoisting the rock back into place, then pulling the strap through slits on either slide.

  At first, it was impossible to tell the difference between them, both were so mired in gore. One wasn't moving. But the other raised his head and peered out. His left eye was missing. His lips were crusted with blood.

  “Looks like I lost the bet.” Carl's voice sounded like his throat was filled with sand. “No matter. I was never going to let you win it, Aaron.”

  Carl lowered a knife to slit Cavanaugh's throat.

  Jamie shot out Carl's other eye.

  44

  Cavanaugh saw lights in his coffin. Blinding. Panicked, he jerked up a hand to shield his eyes.

  Fingers startled him, grasping his arm, lowering it.

  “You'll pull out your IV line,” Jamie said.

  His eyelids felt as if they were sewed shut. Slowly, he managed to break the imaginary threads and open his eyes.