Fury

by John Coyne

  “But you’re writing an article about it?”

  “That doesn’t mean I believe in any of that shit.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” Jennifer said vaguely, now not knowing who or what to believe. She thought again of the session with Kathy Dart and the vividness of her past lives. Those were true, she told herself. Whatever else had happened to her, she had seen into her past, she thought, sighing, and she had killed people with her primitive strength.

  They drove in silence, out of St. Paul on Route 94, and into Wisconsin, then south through more flat farmland. For a while, Kirk fed cassettes into the tape deck. He played tapes of George Harrison, Billy Idol, and more John Cougar Mellencamp. She wished he wouldn’t play anything at all. She would have liked the silence, but it was his car, his drive, and she wouldn’t be demanding. She wanted only to get back to New York.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  “DO YOU MIND SHARING a room with me?” Jennifer asked when Kirk decided to stop driving for the night. She had made up her mind when they had started across Wisconsin that she couldn’t spend a night alone in a motel room.

  “Hey, sure.” Kirk grinned.

  “I don’t mean anything by that,” she said firmly.

  “Yeah, you can trust me!” he said, grinning.

  “I know that.” She opened the car door.

  “Wait!” he told her.

  “What? Did you see someone?” She slipped down into the car seat.

  “No, of course not. Hey, Winters, no one is going to find you out here in the middle of this farmland. The farm doesn’t employ the KGB. Just wait here until I get the room, that’s all.”

  “Oh! How are you going to sign us in?”

  “Well, I thought I’d put down Mr. and Mrs. Kirk Callahan. Or is that being too pushy?”

  She allowed herself to smile back. “Fine! But don’t use my first name, okay?” She knew she was being paranoid, but still

  “Here!” She reached for her purse. “Let me give you some money.”

  He waved her off. “Buy me dinner.” He opened the car door.

  “Okay, but we’re eating in our room. And make it the second floor, okay?”

  He sighed. “Any other motel obsessions?”

  “No.” She smiled after him, thankful that he was handling all the details. Then she reached over and locked the car door.

  “How’s this, Mrs. Callahan?” Kirk asked, opening the door and letting Jennifer lead the way into the motel room.

  “Good!” she said, taking in the dimly lit room. “There are two beds.”

  “Hey, I asked for them!” He sounded hurt.

  Jennifer watched him for a moment, holding her small plastic bag of toilet articles. She knew he hadn’t been told enough to know why she was so on edge, but at least he was willing to take a chance with her, to go along with her erratic behavior. How did he know that she wasn’t some wacko from a mental hospital?

  She stepped over to sit down on his bed and said softly, “Kirk, I’m not trying to order you around or treat you like a kid.”

  “Then stop doing it, okay?”

  “We’re in an awkward position, thrown together, and I’m grateful for what you’ve done for me. You’ve saved my life. I just don’t want you to misunderstand, that’s all.”

  “I’m not misunderstanding anything.”

  Jennifer stood up. A single room had been a big mistake, she realized now.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “It’s all right.”

  “Jen, I just”—he looked off when he spoke—”I’m sorry, I

  “

  “Kirk, it’s okay,” she soothed. She kept herself from reaching out and touching his cheek. “I’d better take a shower,” she finally said.

  In the small bathroom, she turned on the shower, buried her head in a thick bath towel, and let herself cry, knowing that it would calm her down. She didn’t bother to lock the door. She wasn’t afraid of Kirk. Of all people, she knew she could trust him.

  She took a long shower, washed her hair, then went ahead and washed her panties and bra and hung them on the curtain rod. When she returned to the bedroom, she had wrapped up her hair in a bath towel and was wearing her red flannel nightgown. She’d thought about putting on her shirt and jeans again but decided against it. There wouldn’t be a problem. Besides, after dinner, she wanted to get into bed and go right to sleep.

  “Dinner is being served,” he told her, pointing to the tray.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Where did this come from?”

  “I told the desk we were on our honeymoon and I wanted to serve you dinner in bed. And they sent up the tray.” He lifted a bottle of champagne from a plastic ice bucket and held it up with a flourish. “And this,” he added.

  “Kirk, you’ve got class,” she said, impressed.

  “You think so?”

  “I know so. You’re an all-right guy.”

  “An all-right kid, you mean.”

  “We’re friends, remember?”

  “Right!” He sat down on the edge of his bed.

  “Hey,” she cocked her head, smiling out from under the towel turban, “come sit with me. Let’s talk. I’ve told you about Tom. Now it’s your turn. Tell me about your girlfriends.”

  “Which one?”

  “Well, let’s start with the most recent.” She bit into her hamburger, then took a sip of the champagne while Kirk told her about Peggy. They had gone to school together, but that Christmas she had announced her engagement to someone in law school, a guy she had met the summer before.

  “She was your great love?”

  “Yeah, I guess. I didn’t date much in high school. We lived outside of town; there were always too many chores to do. Then when I got to college, Peggy and I hit it off right away and went together pretty much all the time until last summer. When she came back after Labor Day, it was all over between us.” He shrugged his shoulders and went back to his hamburger.

  “Well, don’t worry. You’re a good-looking guy, and there’ll be plenty of others.”

  “You think so?” he asked.

  “Of course there will be.”

  “No, I mean, do you really think that I’m good-looking?”

  Jennifer glanced at him as she drained her glass. The champagne had had an effect. She felt relaxed for the first time that day, warm, and even safe. Impulsively, she reached over and touched his cheek with her hand, drawing her fingers down the length of his jaw. Fleetingly, she imagined what it would be like to make love to him, and then she pulled her thoughts under control and simply said, “Yes, you are a good-looking man.” She paused. “But I think you should let your hair grow out a little. And now I’m going to sleep.”

  Kirk picked up the tray, and Jennifer crawled under the blankets and put her head down on the pillow. Her hair was still wrapped up in the towel and she knew she should comb it out, but she was too tired to even move.

  Kirk leaned over, tucked the blankets up to her neck, then reached out and shut off the bedside lamp. Before he stepped away, he leaned down and kissed her softly on her cheek.

  Jennifer smiled and mumbled thank you, and then she was asleep.

  Much later, she woke up and saw Kirk standing by the windows in his white boxer shorts. She thought what a great body he had and then fell asleep again.

  When Jennifer woke next, it was daylight. She turned over and saw that Kirk’s bed was empty and she was alone in the room. She jumped out of bed at once and went to the windows, peeking out from behind the heavy curtains. Kirk’s Audi was still parked where they had left it.

  Jennifer sighed. What had she thought? That he would leave her there in the middle of nowhere?

  She spotted Kirk then, jogging across the lot. He had been out running, that was all. She sighed and watched him slow down and walk by a station wagon that had just pulled into the motel. It was only when the driver lowered the front window to speak to Kirk that Jennifer realized who it was. Kirk was telling him something, pointing a
cross the parking lot, but Jennifer had fallen away from the second-floor windows, fully comprehending what had happened. Kirk Callahan, the young man she had allowed herself to trust, had led Simon McCord to her.

  He ran. Clutching the fist-sized piece of quartzite in his hand, he scampered down the bank and headed for the muddy river. The others were close behind. They had found the body of the female, and now they were after him, following his scent through the underbrush, following his footsteps in the soft soil.

  He ran for his life. They would kill him, just as he had killed the female. He did not know why he had killed her. She would not come with him. But other women in tribes near the river had not come with him, and he had not hurt them.

  Yet her refusal had enraged him, and without thinking, he had swung the quartzite at her, its sharp point piercing her neck, spraying blood in his face. He could taste her blood on his lips, in his mouth.

  He reached the river and dove into the deep water, letting the swift tide carry him farther downstream. There were rhinos in the water, and crocodiles, too, sleeping up on the banks and in the shade of acacia trees. The sleeping crocs frightened him, but he feared more the band of men running along the muddy riverbank.

  If he didn’t bother the animals, he was safe. The river widened at the next bend, then swept away to the horizon. He did not know where the river flowed, but once, when he was younger, his grandfather had stood on the high cliffs behind their campsite and told him of lands beyond the grassland where elephants were as plentiful as raindrops and where berry bushes and yarrow plants grew beyond one’s dreams.

  He would have to leave this valley, he thought, catching hold of a bamboo limb and swinging up to perch on it. There were too many others living together in the valley of the honeycombs. He would be killed if he returned; the males of the woman’s clan knew him. They would kill another member of his family, sweep down into their camp that night and slaughter one of the women for what he had done to the clan.

  He knew that her people thought of him and his kind as nothing more than monkeys to be killed, their heads smashed with rocks so the sweet-smelling meat of their skulls could be scooped out with fingers, their eyes sucked like shellfish; and then, later, her men would heat the thighs and arms of their enemies’ dead bodies over the campsite fire and linger in the shade with no pain from hunger.

  Her people kept his kind away from the grasslands, away from the berry bushes on the far side of the river. Still, he and his cousins crept across the river after sunset, slipping by the sleeping crocodiles to steal the honey or to find the patches of yarrow and take away the white flowers in the dead of night. Her people said these fruits and berries belonged to them, to all the cave people who lived high up on the steep cliffs, and they drove off his people, kept him and his cousins from the lush vegetables. They fought his people off from the water holes where the bushbucks lingered, where they could trap and snare a zebra or giraffe, kill it with blows from their axes.

  He slipped his knife into his buckskin pouch as the swift river bore him away. It had taken him weeks to find the stone, then to shape it as he wanted, chipping away the slivers of quartz as his father had taught him. With it, he could kill. With it, he could defend himself against the cave people.

  He thought of the woman he had killed. He had seen her first by the river’s edge, then followed her to the crest of the hills. He had called to her then, but she had mocked him, jutting her chin out, pushing her breasts at him, slapping her thick upper lip with her tongue, and saying, “Maa-naa, Maa-naa,” as she turned to show him her behind.

  He had wanted to lure her from the track, to entice her into the deep gully beside the huge banana trees where the ground was soft and mossy, but she wouldn’t budge from the clearing. He watched her prance in the bright sunlight, flicking out her pelvis as if to entice him. He rushed out from the safe patch of underbrush, and she scooted away, giggling. Enraged, he had grabbed his new quartzite ax and struck her.

  He would stay with the river, clinging to the thick log of bamboo. His grandfather had told him tales, stories told to him by his grandfather, of hills beyond hills, of other people, tall and slim like running giraffes, who wore the skin of animals, and told tales of giant mountains where the rain was white and cold.

  These were only tales, he knew, shared around warm fires on cold nights, when the old people huddled and sang stories of lands beyond the river, stories they said that came to them in dreams, when the body sleeps, and the spirits sail with the moon, and they painted such songs on their cave walls.

  He did not believe the old men’s stories. He knew only what he saw, only what he tasted in his mouth, only what had happened to him.

  He had killed the woman, and the cave people would kill him. He did not want to leave his own woman, his children, or his mother and father, but he did not want to die from a flying spear and have his eyes sucked from his head.

  He clung to the bamboo stump and was happy to be alive, happy, too, that he had killed her. She had laughed at him with her eyes and jutted out her sex as if it were the lush fruit of a berry bush, but would not mate with him. Yes, he was glad that he had killed her, and he kept sailing away on the tide of the wide river, heading toward the rising sun and the land of white cold rain and tall slim men.

  CHAPTER THIRTY ONE

  JENNIFER BOLTED THE BATHROOM door and spun around to face herself in the mirror. Under the bright lights, she was amazed at how frightful she looked. It was as if she had stuck her finger in an electrical outlet.

  She thought of Kirk, of how he had come out of the night and helped her get away from the farm, of how he had been so nice to her. Her mind whirled as she linked together all the strange coincidences that had brought this man into her life. She had been trapped and double-crossed by this innocent-looking guy.

  “Oh God!” Jennifer exclaimed. The familiar rush of fear crippled her, and she slid to the bathroom floor, trembling.

  It was so obvious. He had been sent out onto the lonely Minnesota road to pick her up when she ran away from the farm. He had been sent by Kathy Dart to keep an eye on her. No wonder he was so willing to indulge her whims, to go along with her scatterbrained theories about the farm and Habasha. He was one of them.

  She curled herself into a tight fetal position, sobbing, but part of her mind had already begun to sort out what she must do to save herself.

  Why did they want her? she kept asking herself. Who was she that they kept coming after her?

  She forced herself to stop guessing and concentrated on how she was going to escape. Kirk would be returning soon, perhaps with Simon in tow.

  She would call the police, tell them she was being kidnapped. She remembered reading stories about cult groups and how they always fled once the police became involved.

  Jennifer pulled herself up from the floor and glanced around for a telephone. When she saw there wasn’t one in the bathroom, she leaned against the door and listened for sounds of Kirk moving in the room.

  Slowly, quietly, she pulled open the bathroom door and peeked into the bedroom. Kirk was standing in the door, filling the frame with his body. He was grinning at her, still sweating from his early-morning jog.

  Jennifer jumped him.

  “Jesus Christ, what’s going on?” He ducked her swinging fists.

  Jennifer tried to grab him by the hair, but it was too short. Frantically, she flailed out with her arms. Swearing, Kirk caught her arms in his hands and pinned them to her sides. She kept struggling, and he picked her up and dropped her on the bed. Then, with some effort, he turned her face toward him and forced her to look at him.

  “Hey,” he said softly, as Jennifer kept kicking. “Hey, what the hell is going on?”

  Her nightgown had torn open and exposed one pale, milky breast.

  “Christ,” Kirk murmured, keeping her arms pinned to the pillow above her head.

  “You! You’re one of them!” She tried to keep fighting, but then, exhausted, she broke down into t
ears.

  “What are you talking about?” he asked, holding her gently now.

  “Simon

  in the car

  ” She kept sobbing and explained how she had seen him talking to McCloud in the parking lot

  “Yeah, I know who he is. He wanted to know where the restaurant was, for chrissake!” He let go of her and stood up. “What are you talking, anyway?” He grabbed his sweatshirt and pulled it over his head.

  “He’s after me!” Jennifer said, sitting up. “Kathy Dart sent him after me.”

  “Jesus, you are paranoid.” He glanced over at her, shaking his head.

  “Why is he following me?” she shouted.

  “He asked me where the restaurant was. He told me he was driving to Madison. He’s giving a lecture or something,” Kirk explained, returning to the bed. “And what else, he doesn’t know you’re even in this motel.” He stared down at her.

  “He’ll ask at the desk!”

  “And no Jennifer Winters is registered.” Now he allowed himself to smile.

  “I’m so scared,” Jennifer whispered and, reaching over, touched Kirk. Her eyes were puffy from crying.

  “It’s okay,” he answered softly. “It’s okay.” He pulled her into his arms.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Jennifer pleaded.

  He was shaking his head. “We’ve got time. He’s having breakfast. Let him finish and get back on the highway.”

  “We can’t stay on that road.”

  “Okay, we won’t. We’ll take another route. Don’t worry, he won’t find you. I won’t let him. Okay?” He smiled at her.

  Jennifer nodded, unable to speak, overwhelmed by his closeness and his strength. She realized that all she wanted at that moment was for Kirk to hold and comfort her.

  He moved her then, gently eased her down onto the pillows. His eyes never left her, but his gaze moved from her face down to her breasts, then to her slender hips and thighs. He swallowed hard, and his gray eyes darkened. There was a long silence as they stared at each other.