Breathing, five counts in, seven counts out, she felt her feet touching the gravel, noted the grating sound as her weight shifted the fractured stone. Clogging strands of spiderwebs or the fine silk the small green worms hung from the trees tickled her face and bare shoulders. Anna noted their touch but did not wipe them away.
Frog and cricket song swelled from the woods on every side, her quiet passing not distracting the minute musicians. The childhood smell of grape Nehi floated around her like purple gauze. She was in the kudzu.
The path she followed turned sharply to the left, running along the south side of Little Sand Creek. The moon began a flirtation with the clouds and its light, moving and uncertain, threw handfuls of silver coins on the rippling water.
For a long moment, Anna stood on the bank of Little Sand, watching the play of shallow water and moonlight so different from what she was accustomed to. Here the chorus of night creatures sang so loudly that the water seemed to run in silence, no murmur of liquid over stones. No stones. The creek bed was of soft, smooth, golden silt.
By the willow-wisp light of the moon, it shone cold as pewter.
Clouds boiled up from the southwest. Rain clouds, towering cumulus filled with lightning and winds. Yet here, beneath and amidst the verdant cloak of life, Anna could not smell the coming rain, could not feel the gusts that would herald it.
The hollowness left in the wake of Mrs. Davidson's visit was edged with a new fear: had she run so far in search of a promotion that she left behind the tie with nature that had been her mainstay? Would moonlight, wind and wild things no longer bring her comfort?
From behind her, over the sound of the frogs, she heard a woman shouting at her children, then the jarring blare of an automobile's horn.
REPENT. That was what the sign said when she'd first driven into this part of the country. REPENT. The second sign read: FINAL WARNING.
Dredging little-used information from the archives stowed in her brain during sophomore religion class at Mercy High School, Anna remembered "repent" meant to turn away from, turn back.
And she'd thought God worked in mysterious ways. Evidently in Mississippi, he just scribbled out his warnings on plywood and nailed them to roadside trees. Anna wished she'd paid more heed.
The irate mother shrieked again, and Anna walked farther into the darkness to escape the brawl of humanity The moon was gone to a shroud woven by the coming rain. Anna carried no flashlight, yet she pushed on, taking pleasure in the concentration it took to move along the wooded path in near-total darkness.
Her progress was creeping, one toe nuzzled ahead at a time probing, blind as a mole's snout, for roots or undergrowth lying in wait to trip her.
Hands loose at her sides, she continued to breathe five counts in, seven counts out, aware of each unevenness underfoot, every nuance of the frog concert. She was unafraid. She'd walked the path in daylight and knew there were no overhanging branches to bang her head into. Other visitors, out for an evening's stroll, would have sense enough to carry a flashlight so head-on collisions were pretty much ruled out. Coyotes were the largest predator in this part of the world, and as she was neither a cat nor a lamb, there was no danger from them. The only real risk was wading into the middle of a myopic and cowardly cottonmouth, but that thought never got past the booze and pseudo Zen that Anna was using to anesthetize herself. As she inched along, absorbed in her blind traverse, the emptiness within, if not healed, was filled with the richness of the night's sensory offerings.
Anna came finally to the three-cornered clearing where the path forked, one branch to the Old Trace, the other to peter out in the woods a quarter of a mile after crossing Little Sand Creek. Without the trees between her and the sky, enough light trickled around the edges of the storm that she could see. Being so long in the dark had made her night vision acute.
The Old Trace, wide and clear, would allow her freedom of movement.
Tired of the sightless pastime she'd so recently taken refuge in, she took the left-hand path and felt the joy of stretching her legs, covering ground.
In less than a minute, the Old Trace opened before her. She slowed to absorb the picture it presented. Wind she knew must be escorting the clouds had arrived. Through the frog's chirring, she could not bear it, and down in the earth and foliage, though she longed to, she could not feel it. But the wide gully of the ancient highway cut a clear view to the tops of the trees on either bank and the clean ribbon of sky between.
Boughs tossed, leaves, black and ragged, swept a cloud-strewn sky only slightly lighter than they. Silver-edged by the hiding moon, clouds raced by at a speed usually only obtained by film makers fast-forwarding. Viewed in this narrow scope, the clouds seemed to be passing at the rate of geese flying south for the winter: winging, shapes changing, shadows racing over the brief canvas of cleared ground allotted.
Surreal.
Anna liked it. The real had been pretty piss-poor of late, and she was glad to step away from it.
Letting wind she could neither hear nor feel blow her on, she entered a canyon beaten so deep in the soil that finally even the ravening vegetation had had to retreat to the top of the world's skin, leaving a trail easy on the feet of travelers.
Perhaps if she hadn't had three glasses of wine, or been intent on hiding from her feelings, Anna would have sensed the restless spirit of the murdered girl or the malevolent spirit of her killer, but she felt neither and moved down the sunken Trace as one caught up in a wild dream. An eighth of a mile in, she began to feel raindrops and welcomed them. By the time she reached the great oak that marked where they had carried Danni Posey's body from the woods, the rain had settled into a steady downpour. The frogs bad hushed, their symphony replaced by low growls of thunder. The shifting light of the moon was lost in sharp flashes of lightning still too distant to be seen in anything but sudden glows, like the fire from bombs exploding far away.
In one such unexpected revelation of light, Anna noted the earth had been disturbed beneath the tree and along the bank of the Trace, digging too deep to be accounted for by the mere rootings of armadillos in search of grubs. The disturbance stretched along the side of the Trace for thirty or forty feet. But for one, gaping like an open grave at the far end, there were no holes, just turned earth, as if the digger had prepared the soil for planting or, having dug up what was sought, filled the excavations in again.
Given the soft and melting nature of loess, the soil of the area, one good rain would dissolve the evidence of the dig.
The call of her profession, or the curiosity that kills cats, did for Anna what nature and wine could not. She was pulled out of her selfpity and her attempts at hiding from self-pity. Wiping the rain out of her eyes and wishing she had a flashlight, she walked along the freshly turned earth till she reached the hole at the end.
Crouching, she waited for the next flash of lightning to tell her what was going on.
The rain on her shoulders wasn't cold; it didn't refresh, but fell in warm drops the size of nickels to trickle into her armpits and run down the small of her back into her shorts.
Lightning flashed and the hole before her was ignited. Harsh-cut edges made not by snouts or claws, but with the blade of a shovel.
A shovel, edged but not necessarily sharp, long-handled enough to swing with tremendous force. Not knowing how she knew, Anna was sure Danni had been struck down by a shovel. Struck down here. In her dulled brain sparked the nonsensical idea that this grave had been opened to receive, to hide the girl's corpse. Again a flash of lightning and Anna saw the bones. Washed clean by the downpour, they appeared in stark relief, like a Halloween skeleton under black lights, then were gone again in the darkness.
The lightning was followed by a crack of thunder so loud that it struck Anna down, a blow that landed her face in the mud.
Her ear was ringing from the impact and her mind struggling to right itself, form a cohesive thought, when the second blow landed.
Not thunder. Reflexively throwing he
r hands up to protect her head, she felt rough canvas and fought, in panic, to pull it from her head and face. Hard hands batted her arms away. She dropped her fists to the mud, pushed, tried to rise, to roll. She was cuffed down again. Bare knuckles pounded: neck, back, shoulders. Weight dropped on her spine and her face slammed into the ground. She could feel water seeping through the canvas, puddling around her mouth and nose, threatening to drown her.
Knees smashed down on the backs of her upper arms.
A big man, heavy. Anna would not fight free of this one. A blow crashed into the side of her skull above her right ear. Her brain skidded away from the force, dragging consciousness in its wake.
Anna could not draw breath, could not move, could not see. Another blow landed on the back of her head. Her jaw smacked against the wet canvas.
Muddy water, or her own blood, flooded her mouth and throat. She began to choke.
With a jerk, her head was pulled upward; then, as suddenly, it dropped again and she felt rough and uniform pressure around her throat. A noose. A noose like they'd found around Danni's neck had been put around hers. She too would be found in the Woods, rotting down to feed the fungi and the creepers.
The rope pulled tight. Another blow landed, and Anna knew she was going to die. She'd dropped her guard, wandered tipsy and braindead in the night, trusting to a God who had never shown her much in the way of personal attention to watch her back. Anna fought, but it was a lost cause. Like a rattlesnake with a gravel truck parked on its spine, she writhed, tried to unseat her attacker. Her arms were under his knees, pinned to the ground as surely as if he'd driven railroad spikes through them. Feeling from the elbows down was draining away, starved for blood.
She tried to kick him with her heels but he sat too far forward, straddling the small of her back.
Her struggle only won her more blows. If he'd had anything but his bare hands, she would already be dead. When he'd jumped her, he must have left his shovel behind. Once she lost consciousness, he'd go back for it.
Not long now. Anna couldn't think. Every thought was shattered by a blow. Strength had been spent, a sixty-second bid for freedom, all given, nothing held back, could not be repeated.
Possum. Play possum. Pushing her face into the mud, pulling her shoulders up to protect her ears the best she could, Anna forced her body to go limp. No longer even willing the beating to stop.
Merely wishing without prayer.
It didn't. She blacked out, a moment, maybe more. A sharp rap over her left ear, piercing the eardrum, dragged her back. The bastard wasn't just going to kill her; he was going to beat her to death with his fists.
Anger, till now muffled by pain and shock and fear, sparked deep inside, a tiny spark not even so big as a firefly, but white-hot and located somewhere between her heart and her spine.
Not knowing if it was a false light, the one those surviving neardeath experiences report having tried to lead them out of this world, Anna began shutting down, focusing on that spark, following it inside. Her mind was gone, reacting from the blows that fell as regularly now as men with sledgehammers battering through a wall.
The man on her back had raised up, weight on his knees, cracking the humerus bones above her elbows, the better to put his weight behind his work.
The spark moved through the blackness of Anna's hell, hotter than anger, colder than hatred. This light would not lead her to glory but into the arms of the devil. She didn't care.
The spark moved, with no will of hers, into her right hand. Slowly, dragging an inch at time, her arm, feeling no more alive than a bit of broken lumber, bent at the elbow, and her hand, palm up, moved over her hip, up onto her kidneys until her knuckles rested on her spine as if she waited compliantly to be cuffed.
The spark flared, a star of ugly strength, and Anna forced that hand into her assailant's crotch. His trousers were loose and soft-thin wool.
He wore no underwear. Her fingers closed around his testicles, and the star flamed, welding her bones shut in a grip so tight she could feel her nails dig into her palms and a mute crushing as if she flattened clay.
The rain of blows was cut short by a shriek so high and wild it could have been the wind tearing sheets of tin off a barn roof. A desperate swing landed a fist against her neck. Had she been alive, the force of it might have paralyzed her, opened her hand. But Anna was just that spark now, just that hand closed over the man's testicles. Rigor would set in, connecting her fingers around their prize. She would never let go. With the odd, detached sensation of tightening a metal vise, she felt her hand crank down, the fingers close fractionally.
The weight on her back began to shift. Knees left her numbed arms, booted heels drummed bruisingly at her legs. Anna felt only a deeper sinking in the mud as if the thrashing of the man on her back were but the lashing of the storm and she bedrock.
Bit by bit, the shrieking above her resolved into words as life began to reassert itself in her bludgeoned brain. Half words, through a tunnel.
She was deaf in one ear.
"You're killing me. You're killing me," the wind shrieked, and the storm raged over her buttocks and thighs.
The words gave her strength. She pushed up, face free of the mud.
"Off," she croaked. Then louder: "Off." And the talons that her fingers had become clawed deeper. "Off." The weight left her. All that remained was whatever was attached to the balls in her right hand. The thrashing ceased.
Feebly, Anna clawed at the rope securing the canvas over her head, but the slip knot had pulled tight and she couldn't get it free or drag the stiff canvas from under it.
She rolled to her side and pulled her knees up, never once loosing the grip she had on her assailant. Movement brought searing pain, so sharp and cruel she felt blackness come back to her brain, and for a moment, her world shrank down again to the spark, the hand.
If she let go, she would die. Maybe she was going to die anyway Ribs were broken. Kidneys screamed. Her head was loose on her neck and felt broken inside and out.
"Move and I'll rip them off," she heard someone say and wondered if it was her.
Using her free hand, she pushed until she'd rolled herself up, knees tucked under her, face inches from the ground. The acid stench of vomit cut away a tiny bit of the fog from her rapidly swelling brain. She must have thrown up.
For what seemed like a long time, she stayed there, turtle-like, knowing the rain pelted down on her back but unable to feel it through the pain.
There was no beginning to it, no end. She was made of pain. Muscle was gone to it and blood and bone and will, and she could not move.
And she could not hold on forever. And she would die. Beaten to death.
The spark was dimming. Soon the pain would reach her fingers, and they would open. She had to get away. Blind, deaf and crippled, she had to get away.
Slowly, she breathed in through her nose, hearing the air hiss and bubble through the blood. With the breath, she pushed the pain down through her neck, her lungs, into her belly and held it there as long as she could. Then she let it out in a yell that grated the broken bones of her rib cage. On that yell, she summoned the power left of her rage and hammered the fingers of her right hand closed, then ripped with all her might.
The light wool probably kept her from dismembering her assailant, but she knew the joy of feeling his flesh tear and hearing him hiss out agony too deep for sound. Knowing she'd bought herself all the time she could afford, not knowing how much that was, she began to claw blindly up the slick and dissolving bank.
A hand grabbed her ankle, and she kicked out. The movement sent a racketing pain through her skeleton to explode in her neck, but she felt the hand slide free.
No thought. Just survival. She pushed on. Hands struck wood, the smell of grass seeped through her soiled death mask. Like a mortally wounded animal, Anna crawled an erratic path, trusting the storm to cover her noise. Rotting bark shredded beneath her knees.
Broken branches gouged the skin from her c
hest. Thorns clawed at her arms.
Head down, draped and noosed for the killing, Anna pushed on till she could move no more. Her arms and legs would not obey her and her mind was lost.
Curling up as small as she could, she raked the litter of the forest floor over herself and entrusted her keeping to the gods of darkness.
Anna slid in and out of consciousness, a sign that she was badly hurt, Brain damage. That sent a stab of fear through her so sharp her feet twitched with it. Her ankle. She had to protect it, not touch it, not rub it, keep it dry. Why that was so was lost, but she knew it needed to be done.
Noise came and went. Whether real or imagined, whether she was conscious or unconscious, she didn't know. In dream or mind's eye, she saw a form bent double, scouring the woods on a stream of invective hunting to kill. A wounded rabbit, she lay still as death in her burrow, fear singing through nerve fibers till she could hear the hum in the broken places.
Nevada Barr - Anna Pigeon 08 - Deep South Page 31