by Barr, Nevada
In the forest, she would choose Wily.
More shouting; then a blade of light from the pilot’s flashlight stabbed into the clearing, raked the silver underside of the airplane wing, then steadied, pointing down the field in the direction of the derelict buildings. Anna could barely make out the forms behind the bright battery-driven star. The dude, Reg, and the pilot—she knew them by their voices—walked toward where she lay. In their midst, surrounded like cattle on a drive, were the women and girls. Or woman and girls.
When they drew level with Anna’s hiding place, she could see that no one was carrying anyone. Heath, then, not Wily, had been shot. Relief and sorrow canceled each other out. Only emptiness remained. Silently, she rose. Not bothering to keep to the trees for cover, she walked swiftly back toward where the women had been when she’d left them.
The thugs made enough noise to drown out her soft footfalls, she told herself. The pilot’s flashlight had rendered them night-blind, she told herself. She insisted on these things because the fact that she didn’t much care whether she was shot in the back or not was craven. To make Paul suffer her loss, to die when she could still be of use, was the coward’s way out.
Wily would be with Heath. Anna let that comfort float foremost in her mind. No one should die without the company of a familiar.
When she’d emerged from the woods, she was on the northeasternmost side of the clearing where it narrowed. Viewed from the opposite direction, nothing looked the same. The forest was a blank wall only slightly less solid than the earth. Without Wily’s nose, the odds of finding Heath were slim. Her headlamp would help, but its thin blade of light would be like a needle searching through the haystack for a fellow needle.
The men had reached the buildings. Their voices carried in the unsullied air, but she was too far to make out individual words. Three thugs, two pistols, and one rifle; that she knew. The pilot might also be armed. Cops and criminals liked their weapons.
On the black of the ruined barracks, to the sound track of their voices, a movie played in Anna’s mind: Katie held by the front of her shirt. Elizabeth beaten bloody. Wily slammed into a tree. Katie’s trousers ripped down to her ankles. Heath shot.
The pilot.
Reg.
The dude.
First, Anna decided, she would find Heath’s body. Then she would find Wily. Together they would go back and kill them all.
Entering the woods where she guessed she might have first come into the clearing, Anna clicked on her headlamp. “Wily! Heath!” she whispered, calling in hisses and poking into thickets with her lance of light. A logging road cut through the forest, old, partly overgrown, but navigable. This must have been what the thugs had intended to use to transport their victims from the original abduction site. For a moment, she was tempted to walk down it, not because she wished to leave her friends behind, but because she had been fighting cross-country for so long, to walk without obstacles was alluring.
She crossed and entered again into the midnight of trees.
Accustomed as she was to working in the wilderness—or as much wilderness as could be preserved when hikers, campers, firefighters, rangers, rescuers, EMTs, botanists, zoologists, and Girl Scouts used it—the forest at night disoriented her. Trees appeared in strips as her light struck them, then vanished as it moved on. The horned moon could not be seen, nor could the North Star.
Grief and fury kept her moving, whispering Wily’s and Heath’s names, pushing her body through the bony fingers of dead branches and the tangled stems of dying asters. Nowhere did she see a trace of her friend or the dog.
Was she intentionally blinding herself because she didn’t want to find Heath’s dead body?
That thought stopped her frenzied searching. Standing perfectly still, she breathed, forcing her mind to cease its stinging refrain of “Wily, Heath, Wily.”
It was then that she realized she was lost. On some arrogant level, she hadn’t believed that was possible, just as on some Disney level, she didn’t believe wild animals would devour her, not her, not Ranger Pigeon. Never would she be the focus of a band of gleeful heroes in green and gray descending with rescue stretchers or Bauman bags. Slowly she turned in a circle, her headlamp picking out three hundred sixty degrees of nothing but trees.
North, east, west, and south were the same to her. Heath was dead or dying; tomorrow the plane would fly out with Leah, Katie, and E. Wily would die of starvation or be killed by wolves. All because Anna didn’t know where in the hell she was.
Sitting down on a lichen-covered stone, she turned out her headlamp. Lost and tired, she was hungry; her arm was killing her. Thugs were killing her friends. She would have lain down where she was and, as the childhood taunt went, eat some worms, but she had appointments.
The pilot.
Reg.
The dude.
FORTY-FOUR
Heath’s first coherent thought was absurd: Night falls quickly in the tropics. Her head felt odd; she couldn’t see. Not too far away Elizabeth was screaming, “I can carry her. Please.”
The dude’s “Shut up” was clear and close.
There was a muzzle flash and an explosion of noise, then she had … passed out? Fainted from terror? Someone slammed her against a tree? That had to be it. “Hello?” she said feebly.
Her only answer was the racket of many feet tromping through undergrowth. They had taken Elizabeth and gone. Left her for dead. Left in the dark. Was that a movie title? No, that was Wait Until Dark. She didn’t have to wait. Absolute dark pressed in from every side. Dizziness, without visual spinning or distortion, gave her the sensation she was falling. Grabbing two fistfuls of duff, she held on until she could make herself believe the earth was solid and, once again, she rested atop it. For several seconds she was back beneath the water of the rushing stream, unable to draw breath, not knowing up from down.
Her fingers found a tree trunk she could not see. Hands on rough bark, she dragged herself into a sitting position. That was better; being upright was better. Gravity pulled down. Trees grew up. She was in place in the real world.
Reaching for invisible legs to pull them straight, her hand touched a warm wet patch on her trousers. She’d pissed herself. Who wouldn’t? she thought, without rancor. Piss covered her fingers. Piss?
A flash of light and the deafening report of a gun.
The dude shot her.
She didn’t feel anything but then, she wouldn’t, would she? She had no intention of tasting the stuff. Holding her fingers to her nose, she sniffed. It smelled like metal. When she rubbed her fingers together it became sticky as it dried. Not urine. Blood. She felt around until she found a knee. The wet place was on the outside of her thigh, not the inside.
Tuning in to it, she could sense her lower body telegraphing its eerie version of “May day, may day.” There was no pain, no physical sensation that the able-bodied would recognize, but a wave of wrongness so toxic it made the bile rise in her throat that swept through her in a poisonous fog. Maybe she closed her eyes. Who would know. Pressing her palm on the wound, she felt the blood warm and thick.
To bleed to death in the blind dark without feeling a thing; that was pitiful. How would she know when it happened, when she stepped through the veil?
A low airy grunt penetrated her absorption. Something warm and slimy slid along her cheek: monsters, Sean, Jimmy, crawling oozing zombies come to eat her brains. Before she could scream, a cold nose followed the wet tongue.
“Wily,” she breathed. Her hands found his head and she wrapped her arms around him, burying her face in his fur. “You came back for me.” Holding on to her dog made everything instantly better. Dark was still stygian. Blood still oozed, dripped, or spurted. Elizabeth was still in the hands of vicious men, but with a dog, there was love. With love there was hope. Hope was strength.
“It’s not far,” she told Wily. Her hand slipped down his back to strike a hard flat object. “What…” Wily stood patiently, licking what parts of her his to
ngue happened on, while she traced the outline. Sensitive as they were, fingers were not eyes. She could not figure out what had been done to Wily. Since whatever it was, Anna must have done it, she left it alone.
Male laughter rippled faintly through the brush.
“We have to go, Wily,” Heath whispered. “Without their voices to home in on, I haven’t a snowball’s chance in hell of heading in the right direction.” Her hand struck a water bottle near her thigh. She stuffed it into the front of her jacket.
Sans sight, sensation, and supplies, Heath didn’t bother to try to stem the flow of blood. Either she would bleed out or she wouldn’t. Ears tuned to the notes of the human voice, she began traveling backward, an inch at a time, palms of her hands on the ground, arms doing the heavy lifting.
Wily was at her feet, at her shoulder, ranging ahead, whining softly in her ears, licking her cheek when she had to stop. Even with his constant encouragement, Heath despaired, but she didn’t stop. Not quite as glamorous as dying in the saddle, but she would at least die trying, and with her boots on.
Determination was wavering when she saw the light, literally. A spark of orange no bigger than a firefly flickered when she looked over her shoulder. Lest the disappointment be too great, she told herself it was a hallucination. Several more hard-won feet told her it wasn’t. She’d made it to a clearing. A hundred yards or more away, at the opposite end of the field, a fire had been lit.
Heath had no plan. She’d chosen not to die in the dark because of the vague notion that she might somehow be of help to her daughter, even if that help consisted only of letting Elizabeth know that she hadn’t died because Elizabeth could no longer carry her. If nothing else, she thought she could lift that burden from E’s shoulders.
E was over a hundred yards away.
Glaring at the mocking glow of the campfire, Heath toppled over on her side and lay in the grass. Walking on water was a piece of cake. Inching backward more than a hundred yards would require an actual honest-to-God miracle. Rested, on her best day, in her living room, on the level, clean hardwood, her personal best was ninety-seven feet, two and a half times down the length of the room and back. In a kind world, floored in smooth hardwood, she would still only be able to make it halfway to her daughter.
Sighing noisily, Wily flopped down beside her. She rolled her eyes in his direction. Without the shroud of foliage, she could see him, or the shadow of him, and the glint of his eyes. “Good boy,” she whispered automatically. Beyond Wily, hinting at the possibility of a sun in some far distant universe, the thinnest, most niggardly of moons rimed the aluminum of the leading edge of an airplane wing,
Twenty feet? Twenty-five?
By her own math, she should have at least eighty feet left in her repertoire. Heath struggled again to a sitting position, turned her back to the plane, and forced herself an inch closer to it. Twigs and grass collected under her heels as they dragged. Every foot or two, she rested, gathered the sticks and weeds, and stuffed them down the front of her jacket. Every time she stopped, she craned her neck to see over her shoulder. The airplane never seemed to grow closer.
Wily ran reconnaissance toward the plane. He trotted halfway back to the trees to act as rear guard. When she stopped to cry, he mopped her face with his tongue like a boxing manager toweling a fighter’s face between rounds.
Her eyes grew accustomed to the meager light. The hard object on his thigh was a splint made from the lid of the first-aid box. Wily must have broken his leg when the dude hurled him against the tree. Anna had rescued him before Sean could finish the job.
Wily seemed scarcely to notice he had only three good legs. Being in open space instead of an endless wrangle of trees and bushes affected both of them positively. Heath breathed more easily. Oxygen, unfiltered through last summer’s leaves, gave her new strength. Wily didn’t quite disport himself like a puppy, but his gait was less faltering.
Inches became half inches, then quarter inches. Grass and sticks grew into a great belly under her jacket, poking out the neck until she resembled a poorly constructed scarecrow.
Night misted her eyes. A shadow within shades of black. Again she stopped, again looked over her shoulder. The plane was there. Right there. She was beneath the wing.
To prove she’d not slipped the surly bonds of earth and was only imagining the airplane, Heath reached out to touch the wheel cover. Cool smooth aluminum soothed her torn fingers. Sliding her hand beneath the metal, she touched the rubber of the small wheel. As she’d expected, the rubber was hard, unyielding. A hatchet might cut through it, but there was not going to be any poking holes in it with sticks.
During the endless trip across three yards of grass and weeds, Heath had formed a plan. It was simplicity itself. Reaching beneath the aluminum wheel cover, she felt for the air stem. She would uncap it, push the little button, and let the air out. Unless the pilot carried an air pump, two flattened tires would effectively abort takeoff. At least she thought it would.
The inner rim of the tire was smooth. The pilot had fancy Alaskan bushwhacking, tundra rolling, solid rubber things.
“It doesn’t matter,” she told Wily when he returned, panting, from a foray. “I’m sure the bastard carries an air pump anyway. Plan B.” Plan B was neither simple nor foolproof. Don Quixote would have embraced Plan B.
Near the wheel, centered under the pilot’s-side door, away from the thugs and their campfire, Heath removed all the sticks and grass she had collected on her journey. Directly above her, housed in the wing, was one of the plane’s two gasoline tanks. If she could get a fire high enough, hot enough, it would explode.
Maybe it would explode.
Working mostly by feel, she laid her fire; the driest, finest grasses first, crushed and wadded, then the smaller sticks, then the larger fuel—if twigs one or two feet long and as big around as her thumb could be called such. The pile, which had seemed so enormous when packed in her coat, was pitiful when laid out on the ground. Reaching as far around as she could, she gathered a few more handfuls. Wily lay down nearby. In the wing’s shadow, he was invisible, but the sound of his breathing made her feel less alone.
Her socks went on the pyre next. She set her jacket aside, then removed her shirt. With teeth and nails she managed to rip it into several pieces. The pieces went on the pile. In bra and panties, praying to Jesus and Pele, Heath took the lighter from the pocket of her jacket. Two cigarettes remained in the crumpled pack. The pack went on the fire, one cigarette behind her ear, one between her lips. Shifting her thumb on the rough wheel, she struck a light. Before putting it to the cigarette end, she admired it for a second. Light in the darkness, heat, fire was the first magic the gods had shared. According to Anna, gods had long since been banished into myth by churches. According to Paul, that didn’t alter the fact that their gift still worked.
Heath sucked in a lungful of smoke, then held the Bic to the pile of grass and sticks. Tiny flames ran out to the ends of the blades of grass and died. Heath twisted the smallest piece of her shirt and lit it. One hundred percent cotton. It burned just fine. Before she’d broken her back, Heath wore synthetic fabrics. During the first year after she lost the use of her legs, she developed a paranoid fear of fire.
On a visit, Anna happened to mention that wildland firefighters wore cotton underpants because natural fibers wouldn’t melt into the skin if one were caught in a burn-over. Since that day Heath had become a purist. Paranoia passed, but her panties and bras were still cotton.
Fire devoured the fine fuels with ravening tongues. Heath put her jacket on the blaze, then her pants, then her boots, then her bra. Flames reached no higher than a standing man’s waist, and she was down to her skivvies.
The fire died down as quickly as it had flared up. Not once had it climbed anywhere near the wing of the plane where the gas tank was housed. Its puny heat didn’t even discolor the aluminum. The gas probably hadn’t even gotten warm.
Plan B had failed.
Heath had faile
d.
Falling flat on her back, she stared at the underside of the wing. She felt like an egg with the meat blown out; the only thing remaining was a thin, fragile shell of skin. Inside her was hollow. Too worn down to feel sorry for herself, she turned her head and, cheek on the grass, stared at the fire she had given her all to build. Knee-high, no bigger around than a basketball, it had begun chewing methodically on her coat and boots.
Heath waited for it to die, and tried to summon up the energy not to die with it. Tilting at windmills. She’d known that from the beginning. Too bad foreknowledge didn’t dull the sting of failure.
Flames mesmerized her. Light spiked like the depiction of the star of Bethlehem. She blinked the illusion away. The fire seemed closer. The fire was closer. Flames were spreading. Not in a fierce wave that would destroy the airplane, in a creeping wall of fire scarcely two inches high. An able person would step over it. A clothed person would smother it with a coat. A rested paraplegic would scoot away. The best Heath would manage was swatting at it with bare hands. She wasn’t even sure she could sit up again without help.
In the faint and lurid light, she saw Wily rise to his three paws. He lowered his head and growled as if he would attack the flames. As the hungry little grass fire burned toward her, Heath tried to force herself upright. Her arms were made of water. They ignored her brain signals with the numb sullenness of her legs. Muscles would not bunch. Fingers would not bend and claw.
The line of fire was only a couple of feet wide. Behind it was nothing but thin blackened grass, laid flat like the hairs on a balding man’s pate. In horrid fascination, Heath watched it creep closer to her side, gnawing its thin blue and orange line. Would her skin catch and char? She didn’t think so. A line of blisters, maybe, until the fire reached her underpants. They would catch. Maybe she’d only burn to her bikini line. In desperation she rolled over and tried to wriggle sluglike away from the flames, the rough weedy ground scratching at breasts and belly. Not an inch. Her very bones had gone soft.