‘You’re not the type to be content with a tie for second place,’ he said, shifting his gaze back to her. ‘You’ll never reach the hundreds that Elizabeth Báthory had, but you want at least one more.’
Elizabeth stood and buttoned the top of her pants. ‘And you think you’re that one?’
‘You drove Jason to suicide after you made him a Watcher,’ Tommy said. ‘And now. Here. With your father, that cycle is complete.’
She took a small step to the left, and she was now closer to the weapons on the ground than Tommy.
‘You were never going to let me live,’ he said. Which was why he had already decided to kill her. He was now questioning himself less about whether he could do it, and instead more about how he could do it.
‘Is that what you really believe, or what you’re trying to convince yourself of?’ He knew she saw him eying the weapons, and she shifted her weight, taking a step closer to the knife. ‘There’s a big difference between the two, you know. Very different consequences.’
Tommy shifted his weight. ‘That so?’
‘Of course. If you don’t think I’ll keep my end of our deal, then of course you’ll try to kill me here. In these woods. Bury me along with my father. Kind of poetic, really.’ Her fingers twitched, nervous excitement. ‘However, if you’re still trying to figure out if I’m going to go away, your resolve is lessened. It takes a lot of resolve to kill, Tommy. Unless you really feel directly threatened, you won’t kill me. I know it.’
Tommy felt the woods around him still, as if a large door had just been closed, sealing them in a small room. His vision sharpened as he looked again at the knife on the ground. He could read the writing engraved on the blade. Adrenaline coursed through him, and his hands shook as they dangled by his side.
‘I’m through with you thinking you know me,’ Tommy said.
‘Oh, but Tommy, I do know you.’
‘Then you should know I made my decision before I even came here.’
They caught each other’s eyes. The moment lasted seconds or an hour.
Elizabeth lunged for the weapons.
Tommy pounced.
FIFTY-FIVE
Tommy had never been in a real fight before in his life. He’d boxed for years and sparred several dozen times, and though there was a reality to being hit in the face, there was always safety behind every move. Headgear. Mouth guards. A referee making sure no one was getting dangerously hurt. But most of all, there was humanity. The ability to stop and everything would be fine.
This was life or death. Tommy was strong and fast, but Elizabeth was a killer. She knew how to move, and Tommy couldn’t deny the fact that she simply might be a better fighter than him. If he lost, he would die. Existence would simply end, Tommy would die in the woods, and his family would never know what happened to him. He would either miss every single part of his children’s lives from this point on, or he wouldn’t. It all came down to the next several seconds.
All these thoughts somehow found time to rush through his head as he flew toward the ground. Mid-air, he could already see Elizabeth would reach the weapons first. The best he could hope for was to tackle her before she could use one of them.
Tommy landed on top of her, his jaw smashing into the back of her skull. He bit hard down on his lip and felt a sharp pain. Then he tasted the salt of his blood.
Her hands seemed to move in slow motion, but not as slowly as his. He lifted his head from her hair to unblock his vision, seeing the wet patch of red his bleeding mouth had left behind. It was too late to go for the weapons because he couldn’t see them, so he went for her arms instead.
Tommy focused on the right arm, assuming it was her strong one. He grabbed under her shoulder and wrenched it back, but it did little good. She held firm, face down on the ground, scrambling for either the knife or the gas canister. Maybe both.
My God, she is strong.
Elizabeth grunted as Tommy slid his right arm back under her, this time trying to lock the crook of his elbow beneath her throat. She pressed her head down, digging her chin into his arm, but he managed to secure a hold. He pulled back as hard as he could, using his left hand to help. She reared up backwards, and once she did Tommy locked his arm around her neck even tighter.
She began to choke as her hands frantically searched the ground for something to use against him.
‘You … don’t do … this, Tommy.’
He squeezed tighter, knowing he would kill her. It was no longer a question of whether he could do it. He had to do it. It was either her or him, and he wasn’t going to let his kids grow up without him. He wasn’t going to make Becky a widow. It couldn’t happen.
In an instant her right hand found the knife. Tommy saw her fingers grab around the handle like a snake squeezing a mouse. She was still facing the ground with Tommy behind her, so she didn’t have an easy arc to swing the blade at him. He could release his grip and go for her hand, but that might free her up enough to stab him with more force. And he knew Elizabeth could use a knife.
No, he thought. Keep choking her.
He pulled harder and tried to twist her neck at the same time, and the gurgled sounds coming from her throat told him he was slowly succeeding in killing her. Tommy looked down again at her hand and it seemed as if her grip on the knife was loosening.
He was wrong.
She swung her right arm in a backwards arc, using a flexibility Tommy imagined only yoga instructors capable of. In that instant, Tommy knew he had miscalculated. His mind processed the sight of the silver blade racing toward his body. He was calm about it. I’m about to be stabbed, he thought. I can try moving, but I’m too close and there’s not enough time. The best I can hope for is a flesh wound. Just try not to let go. Finish the job.
He shifted his torso the best he could and he managed to move a couple of inches before the knife entered him.
It pierced though his pants and entered his right thigh. She didn’t have enough momentum to bury the blade fully into his flesh, but at least two inches of the knife disappeared beneath his skin.
Tommy howled. In his endless research for his novels he had always read that, in a fight, adrenaline significantly dulled the pain of any wounds, at least temporarily. Bullshit. Pain seared though his body and he could not hold on to her.
He let go.
Elizabeth twisted beneath him, pulling the knife out of his leg. Pain shot through him as she pushed him off. He lost his balance and fell hard on his back. Elizabeth scrambled to be on top of him, where she could deliver a lethal blow.
Tommy saw the trees above him. He saw the spiny hands of the barren top branches in such detail he wondered if he could reach up and touch them, though they were fifty feet above his head.
Those trees are the last thing I’m going to see.
Elizabeth came into view. She now straddled him, just as she had straddled her father. Just as she had straddled Rade.
Her throat was red and swollen, but she paid it no attention. Both hands were now wrapped around the blade of the knife, which she raised high above her head.
Her blue-jean eyes were wide, and there wasn’t a trace of rage in them. There was only excitement. The excitement of a kill. A special kill.
‘This doesn’t make you win,’ Tommy said. It was all he could think of to say. Appeal to her ego. Tell her what she won’t get if she kills him.
‘Tommy,’ she rasped. She cracked a crooked grin, the smile of a young girl, a girl with perfect skin and long red hair that spilled down her back like water. ‘I always win.’
She stretched the knife higher until it seemed lost in the spiny branches of the distant tree limbs.
In the final seconds, Tommy noticed the tree-filtered sunlight making its way to his face.
He could almost feel its warmth.
Almost.
FIFTY-SIX
He reached his hands out. His only hope was to throw her off balance as she brought the knife down. The blade would surely slice easily thro
ugh his hands, but maybe he could keep from going into shock long enough to overpower her.
He no longer felt the wound in his leg. Guess that bit about the adrenaline was true, after all.
Tommy brought his left hand up to stop the knife as he swiped his right hand along the ground. His fingers ran along the small towel before touching something else. Cool and smooth. Metal.
The small canister. The one with the hydrogen cyanide.
Elizabeth brought the knife down.
His left forearm partially blocked her strike, and instead of the top of the blade puncturing his chest it buried itself in his left shoulder. Tommy screamed in agony as she twisted the blade, an effort not simply to cause more damage but also to extract it for another blow. A fatal blow.
He grabbed the canister and turned it in his hand. It was small, no larger than a travel-size shampoo bottle, the top of it containing an aerosol-style spray head.
There were so many things wrong with his only chance of survival. First, the canister could be empty for all he knew, or contain nothing more than water. And if it did contain some kind of lethal gas, Tommy was just as exposed as Elizabeth was. He would be spraying it up at her, and gravity could simply bring it back down on his face. Finally, Tommy couldn’t see which direction the spray nozzle was pointed. He could press down on it and the gas could shoot out to the side or right back on his own face.
But it no longer mattered. He didn’t have a choice. He had to try something, or his two stab wounds would be accompanied by countless more.
Elizabeth finally pulled the knife out of his shoulder and Tommy’s stomach lurched with nausea from the pain. She held it up, dagger style, both hands around the handle. Tommy tried to raise his left arm for another block but his shoulder was too damaged, the muscle torn.
Then he raised his right hand.
Elizabeth saw the metal canister as she brought the knife down.
Tommy yelled as he pressed down on the nozzle.
FIFTY-SEVEN
At first he didn’t know what had happened. In fact, he thought nothing at all had happened. He thought he felt the nozzle of the canister press down, but maybe that was just his imagination. He heard nothing. He saw nothing except for Elizabeth bearing down on him. As Tommy sprayed he rolled as hard as he could to his left, over his damaged shoulder.
Elizabeth thrashed as Tommy felt her weight shift. She collapsed on the ground, the knife burying into the dirt just inches from Tommy’s torso.
As he pushed her off him, Tommy realized he was no longer holding the canister. He looked at the ground and didn’t see it, and then guessed it was underneath her.
Then the screaming began.
FIFTY-EIGHT
It lasted only seconds.
Then the screams were consumed by a series of frantic gasps, of futile breaths. Elizabeth twisted on the ground and flipped on her back, her mouth widening to suck in oxygen to no avail.
Tommy rolled away and then looked over at her in horror. Elizabeth tried to stand, as if by doing so maybe she could breathe, but her body spasmed and she collapsed to the ground, inches from the body of her dead father.
The seizures began seconds later.
The woman whose physical movements had always been so planned and graceful, sexual even, now shook as if in the jaws of an invisible monster. Tommy heard her voice try to escape through the convulsions but all that came out was a series of horrible stutters, violent death rattles.
Tommy, on his back, blood seeping from his shoulder and thigh, watched her die, wanting to do something to help her, wanting to run away, and wanting to do nothing at all. It seemed to take an hour, though probably less than three minutes passed until the shaking stopped, her body stilled, and Elizabeth’s head lolled to the left, staring with blood-filled eyes into the distance, staring in the same direction her father stared, and together they looked at something that was no longer there.
They stared vacantly into the woods where ageless children slept beneath chilling layers of dirt and time.
FIFTY-NINE
Tommy stood. At first it was a struggle, the muscle surrounding the wound in his thigh threatening to collapse. But he fought through the pain and stood, because he knew if he couldn’t stand he couldn’t walk, and if he couldn’t walk then he would likely bleed to death and join the two other corpses on the dusty and dead floor of the woods.
There was so much to process, but he knew well enough to let his survival instincts take over.
The thigh wound was the most concerning. He forced himself to pull apart the torn fabric of his pants and check the gash. It was deep, the pain excruciating, but the blood flow from it didn’t seem severe. Must have missed the femoral artery, he thought. Lucky. He hobbled over to Stykes’s body, reached down, and slowly unwrapped the jump rope from around his neck. The body wheezed its last stored bit of oxygen the moment the rope came free, and Tommy, even knowing it was a corpse, nearly fell over as he jumped away from the dead man.
Tommy looped the rope twice around his upper thigh and knotted it tight, slowing the blood flow to the open wound. The harder he pulled on the rope the more his shoulder blazed in fiery pain, and he next turned his attention to that wound.
Slowly and with delicate motion, he unbuttoned his shirt and pulled the fabric down, exposing his bare shoulder. Blood oozed from the wound and covered his chest and stomach.
A chill washed over him and wouldn’t leave.
Tommy worried about passing out from blood loss, and was tempted to cut some fabric off with the knife and stuff it in the hole in his skin, but he decided against it. The effort and sight might make him pass out, and then he’d be in serious trouble. Again, he felt sudden iciness and he slipped the blood-wet shirt back over his arm, which brought him no comfort.
He then looked at Elizabeth and thought about the cyanide. She had mentioned an emergency IV kit in her bag.
If I had inhaled enough cyanide to be a problem, I’d already be dead, Tommy thought.
His attention then turned to the shovel leaning against the tree. It was meant for Stykes, but now there were two bodies that needed burying. Afternoon sunlight lit upon the spade, highlighting it against the moth-gray bark of the tree it leaned against. It stood out like some kind of amulet, some representation of hope. A way out.
Tommy limped over to the tree and touched the cool metal handle of the shovel. He wrapped his fingers around it, feeling its energy. He remembered two other times in the woods when he had to dig. The first was when he was fourteen and burying a little boy. The second was just in his recent past, when he went to go find those same bones and instead found only a doll.
Can’t dig two holes, he thought. Not in this condition. My body would give up long before the first hole was even dug.
He pulled the shovel away from the tree and used it as a crutch, supporting his throbbing leg.
But I could go into town, get medical help, and maybe get back here before anyone finds the bodies. It’s a bit of a long shot, but it could work.
He looked down at Elizabeth. A long, slender spider scurried across her cheek and seemed to float along her disheveled hair.
If Tommy buried the bodies and got rid of all evidence, there was a chance of normalcy. He’d have explaining to do for damn sure – the two wounds the most complicated things to create a story for. But he could create a story, couldn’t he? That was his job, after all. He was Tommy Devereaux, storyteller. Create a story, answer a lot of questions, and then hopefully get on with his life. There was no one left alive who knew the real truth anyway. Just him.
Yet it had stopped being about him. Tommy wasn’t sure when that had happened because, as much as he didn’t want to admit it to himself, for a long time it had always been about him. But not anymore.
There was still a chance at getting his life back. But it wouldn’t be through more lies.
Tommy let the shovel fall on the ground, and then he bent over and picked up his manuscript, which was still sitting
in the dirt where Elizabeth had dropped it. There was no title for the story yet but Tommy was pretty sure what it would be. It was the subject line from Elizabeth’s first e-mail to him:
THE BOY IN THE WOODS
Elizabeth had told him to come with extra blank pages so he could write the proper ending, after it had happened. He’d brought them, but he wouldn’t need them. Tommy already had an ending he’d written the day before, and while it didn’t include him being wounded, at least in his version he was still triumphant. It was the only part of the story he’d written in anticipation of the events themselves, and overall he’d been mostly right. Right enough in that he was alive and she wasn’t.
The book was done.
Tommy clutched the papers in his right hand, his left being too weak to hold anything. Then he began to walk.
SIXTY
The afternoon was drawing old, and the chill on Tommy’s skin was slowly being matched by the dropping temperature of the air. Tommy didn’t see those deer again as he hobbled out of the woods, but he looked for them. He didn’t know why, but he wanted to see them one more time.
Walking the relatively short distance from the woods seemed like hiking the Appalachian Trail with his injuries. The pain had settled into a dull throb and the blood loss had abated enough for him not to think he was going to pass out, but the torn muscle in his leg threatened to hobble him at any moment.
He forged ahead along the same direction from which they’d come – north, if he was correct. North would lead him through the old clearing where he had spent so many days as a teenager. North would take him back toward his old house, the one some stranger had long since bought and would only put up shitty decorations at Halloween.
His instinct served him well, and a lifetime later Tommy limped past the last row of trees and into a clearing, a place where the dirt path ended and a cracked sidewalk began. The sidewalk forked and Tommy turned left, away from his old house and toward a row of six houses that looked pretty much the same now as they had thirty years ago, save a few coats of paint and much taller trees.
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