The Darkest Thread

by Jen Blood

  “Wait—” I started, but she paid no attention. She turned and limped toward the others.

  I looked down, and saw empty space below her right knee, where her leg had once been.

  #

  “Jamie,” a voice whispered to me. Familiar, but hard to distinguish above the roaring in my head and the persistent screams of someone in the distance. I felt a cool hand on my forehead, and started awake at the contact.

  Jack peered down at me, his concern plain. His flashlight was in hand, casting an eerie glow over the proceedings. Blood ran down the side of his forehead from a gash that looked deep. “There was a cave-in.”

  “An explosion,” I said. “I heard someone behind us—I could smell the charge, but we weren’t fast enough.”

  He looked baffled. “I just heard the rocks coming down. It felt like there may have been a small earthquake or something. I didn’t hear anything else. Didn’t smell anything.” He moved past that detail long before I had, seemingly dismissing it as inconsequential. “Can you move?”

  “Of course,” I managed, though the words came out rough. I thought back, pushing past the image of the one-legged girl in the red sweater and the clan of onlookers she’d had with her. “Did you see who did it?”

  He frowned. “I don’t think it was a who, Jamie. Places like this aren’t stable, and there’s been some unusual seismic activity throughout New England for the past couple of years… Seriously, just focus for a second, all right? Can you move?”

  It was only then that I realized why he was fixed on the question. In the blast I’d been thrown against the wall of the tunnel, my back against the limestone. Like Jack, I must have a head wound—I could feel wet, tacky blood on the side of my face alongside a persistent throb. My hardhat and headlamp had been thrown clear, the light shattered opposite where I sat. When I shifted, it became clear that the head wound wasn’t the only thing I had to worry about.

  I looked down at my lap.

  A Phantom-sized slab of limestone lay across my right leg.

  Beyond it, I peered through the still-rising dust and the settling debris. The path we’d been following was blocked off. There was no way we could get any farther. Then, I looked back the way we’d come.

  My heart stuttered and my chest constricted at the sight of another wall of limestone and debris.

  We were trapped.

  “Shit,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Jack agreed grimly. “You can say that again. I’m going to try and move the stone, all right?”

  He moved forward without waiting for word from me, but I stopped him with a hand on his arm. That simple movement was enough to send a jagged, wrenching pain through my leg.

  “What?”

  “I should check for other injuries first,” I said reluctantly. It wasn’t something I was looking forward to. “I think I’m all right, but if there’s internal bleeding, we’ll need to handle this a little differently than we would otherwise.”

  “I didn’t even think of that. Jesus.”

  “Most people wouldn’t. I’ve been doing this for a while.” I hesitated as he continued to regard me with a combination of curiosity and overt terror. “Would you mind turning around?”

  He looked confused. “This isn’t really the place for modesty—“

  “Please.”

  He handed me his flashlight, and turned around. I waited until he was facing away, then carefully lifted my T-shirt up over my stomach to just below my breasts. I put the flashlight in my teeth and searched for signs of bruising, then palpated my abdomen all the way back to my kidneys. My fingers paused at the burn scar that runs along the left side of my body, from my ribcage down to my upper thigh. The skin was rough, but well healed after eight long years. I moved down further still and pressed my fingers to the tender flesh at my lower waist.

  The simple act of moving brought on another wave of pain—this one severe enough that I gasped. The flashlight fell to the ground, and Jack turned.

  He saw the scar before I could pull my shirt back down. Without comment, he handed the penlight back to me and then, with light, gentle fingers, he pulled the T-shirt back down to my waist.

  “Okay?” he asked. His eyes held mine. There were questions there, surprise—pain even, I thought, though that pain didn’t seem to cross over into pity.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Not great, but I think the only injury we need to worry about is my leg. I don’t know if you’ll be able to move the rock on your own.”

  As though answering a call I had yet to send out, a shout came from the head of the tunnel, muffled by the layer of debris that now obstructed our path.

  “Jamie!” Cheryl’s voice. I couldn’t even imagine her venturing down here. “Can you hear me?”

  “We’re all right,” Jack called back to her. “Jamie’s pinned, but we’re both okay.”

  “Thank God,” she shouted back. “You scared the ever-loving shit out of all of us.” Her voice was getting louder—she was coming toward us.

  “What happened?” Jack called.

  “Earthquake. I about shit my pants when I realized what was happening,” she said. “You owe me a new pair of Carhartts, Jamie Flint.”

  “Get us out of here and I’ll buy you a gown,” I said. My voice was strained, the pain now radiating from my leg through to my entire body.

  “They need to make sure things are stable before we start digging you out, make sure we don’t do more harm than good,” Cheryl said. “Things seem pretty steady in there for now?”

  Jack shone the flashlight through the cramped space. The reality of the situation dawned yet again, my chest tightening as understanding took hold. We were trapped. Bear was counting on me, and I was going to fail him.

  “Jamie?” Cheryl’s voice came through again.

  “We’re okay,” Jack said, answering for me since I seemed to have lost the power of speech myself. “It’s tight in here, but I think it’s stable for now. Just get us out as fast as you can.”

  “We’re on it,” came Cheryl’s reply. A moment later, the scant beam of light from the other side vanished, and I heard her leave us.

  When she was gone and we were alone, the world fell silent. My fingers tightened reflexively in the darkness. I thought of Phantom, wishing for just a moment that she were here. There’s something about animals that’s always been inherently soothing for me; in the worst of circumstances, the presence of nonhumans—whether dogs or cats, hares or horses—has kept me going. There was nothing like that now, and the lack was notable and profound.

  “We’ll get out of here,” Jack said, breaking the silence between us.

  “I know,” I said. My unspoken question hung in the air: But will we get out in time?

  “How’s your leg?”

  “Fine.”

  “Circulation is okay?” he asked.

  I wiggled my toes in my boots, then twisted as much as possible to feel the pulse behind my knee. It hurt like hell, but in this case that was a good sign. “It’s all right—blood’s still flowing, anyway.”

  “Good. I should probably try to move the rock.”

  I resisted the urge to groan, knowing how much it would hurt. But he was right: the ideal in this kind of situation would be to get the rock off within fifteen minutes of the injury. I wasn’t sure how much farther past that we were, but the clock was definitely running. “Okay. Go ahead.”

  He set his flashlight on the floor of the tunnel, but it was a piss-poor excuse for illumination. I picked it up and held it above us in my left hand, the beam concentrated on the slab over my right leg.

  “Better?”

  “Better,” he agreed. “Far from perfect, but better.”

  I watched as he stretched his long legs out in the small space, trying to brace himself to get a sure hold on the rock. In the right circumstances, this would have been a breeze—it wasn’t like a building had fallen on me, after all. It was a big slab of rock, but I doubted it weighed more than thirty pounds. It was the position
ing that was the bitch of the scenario.

  “You’ll need to lift it clean off,” I said. “If you drag it, you’ll do more harm than good.”

  “If I lift it, do you think you can move out of the way?”

  “Yeah. Just get it off me.”

  It took two or three agonizing tries before he was able to lift it up and I scrambled sideways before he let it fall again. The restored blood flow felt like razorblades racing through my veins and my knee was already bruised and swelling. Crush syndrome—when the kidneys shut down as a result of a traumatic crush injury—was a distinct possibility, but I was trying to ignore that thought.

  Fluid loading was the recommended treatment for this kind of scenario, preferably sodium bicarbonate given intravenously. They’d want to take me to the hospital.

  Christ. I didn’t have time for the hospital.

  Jack checked the leg, but I could tell he didn’t really know what he was looking for. “Is there anything else I can do?” he asked.

  “Besides dig us out of here?”

  “Besides that.”

  I shook my head.

  He turned out the light in order to save batteries, but the darkness was oppressive and the air already growing stale. I felt as much as heard him shifting beside me, though he didn’t touch me. Seconds became minutes. Finally, Jack cleared his throat.

  “You do what makes sense, huh?” he said.

  He sounded more weary than angry, but I felt terrible regardless. “I’m sorry,” I said. “You shouldn’t have followed me in.”

  “I’m starting to think you’re right, actually.”

  “Yeah. Probably so.” I paused. “I’m just trying to save my kid.”

  “I know,” he said quietly.

  Silence fell once more. More time passed. I heard digging nearby, and wondered how much progress they’d made toward getting us out.

  “Talk to me,” Jack said finally.

  I turned my head toward his voice, but couldn’t see anything in the absolute darkness that surrounded us. “What do you want me to say?”

  He paused. I felt the weight of the questions I knew he had about my life: the scar he’d seen, my past with Brock Campbell, the childhood I never spoke of. Instead, he went with something simpler.

  “Why did you name your kid Bear?”

  I laughed despite myself. “I was young,” I said. “Old enough to have a kid…young enough to think naming him Bear was a good idea.”

  Usually, that put an end to the conversation when other people asked. Jack remained quiet, though, waiting for me to give him something more. I considered the question and, ultimately, opted for the truth.

  “I was fifteen when I got pregnant. Scared out of my mind. My folks were…not happy with me.” Tossed me out on my little Georgian behind, actually, though I didn’t tell him that. “I was pretty much on my own for a while there—moved out West, and managed to take care of myself all right. Not long after I got there, I had this dream.” I paused, remembering it. How alien the whole experience had been: this thing growing inside me that I didn’t want, hadn’t asked for, and yet…desperately wanted to keep.

  “What was the dream?” Jack prompted.

  “It was pretty straightforward, actually,” I said. “I went into the delivery room, had the baby—the whole process felt so real in those dreams, I swear I could feel the contractions even then. So, I had the baby, and the doctor took it away for a minute and I remember being so afraid they wouldn’t give him back. But finally, they brought him over.”

  “And it was a bear,” Jack guessed.

  I laughed again. “Yeah. I had the dream almost every night for most of my pregnancy. Sometimes it would be a black bear, sometimes a panda, sometimes a polar bear. So…”

  “You named him Bear,” he finished for me. He paused for a moment. “It could be worse, I guess. You could have dreamed he was an aardvark.”

  “Yeah. You’ve got a point.”

  Silence had descended for only a minute more before I gathered the resolve to ask my own question.

  “Why didn’t you call me?” I asked. “Last year, after you left Littlehope… I know we didn’t have anything in writing, but I thought we had a plan. I wouldn’t have been mad if you told me you wanted to do something else—I’m glad you got your job back. It would have been nice to hear something from you, though.”

  The words came out needier than I’d intended, and I hated the vulnerability I heard there. Jack cleared his throat. I imagined him there in the darkness, wishing for some way out of here. Finally, he spoke.

  “You remember last year in that blizzard, when you told me…that thing?” he asked, more hesitant than I’d ever heard him.

  Last year, when the entire town of Littlehope was in grave danger and a blizzard was blowing strong and it seemed at times that none of us would make it out alive, I’d made one of those mistakes I try to avoid where the opposite sex is concerned: I’d been honest.

  “I told you I’d had a premonition,” I said, “that somewhere along the lines, I’m supposed to save your life.”

  “Right,” Jack said with a sigh. He didn’t say anything more.

  “I’m not sure how that’s a problem,” I said. “I didn’t say that somewhere along the lines I’m supposed to murder you or bear your children or something. Saving your life should be a good thing.”

  “It should,” he agreed. Somehow, however, it wasn’t. “I can’t really explain it—I’m sorry. The whole thing just makes me uneasy. I don’t know how to handle the idea that I’ll put you in danger somewhere down the road. That you’ll have to make some kind of sacrifice, for me.”

  “How do you know it will be a sacrifice?” I said. “Maybe it will be as simple as me pushing you out of the path of an oncoming car. Or giving you the Heimlich maneuver over sandwiches.”

  A beat of silence followed. Then: “Do you really think that’s the way it will play out?”

  My non-answer was all he needed: we both knew it wouldn’t be that simple. This premonition I’d had, some fuzzy impression I still couldn’t completely define, didn’t speak of something as innocuous as choking over stirfry some evening. Whatever linked us, there was something weightier than that in store for the two of us.

  “I didn’t mean to freak you out when I told you that,” I said. “I thought we were in imminent danger of dying. I figured if I was going to save your life, it would probably have been then.”

  “But it wasn’t,” he reminded me.

  “No,” I agreed.

  I sighed. The air was getting stale, the cramped space damp and too warm now. My head ached; my leg was on fire. Neither of us spoke again. If I’d given him an opening, made the request, I thought Jack would probably comfort me. Hold me, maybe—he seemed the kind of person who would fall easily into that role. The great protector. I considered that for a moment: what it would be like to have his arms around me, my head against his broad chest. His hands in my hair; his lips at my ear.

  Steady, girl. Definitely not a road I wanted to go down—and certainly not now.

  That light no one else could see still shone over his left shoulder. Lucia. I wondered if it would always follow him, the way my own ghosts followed me. I was fairly sure she had his best interests at heart, but it still made me wonder why she remained there. Was there something that needed to be resolved? Her killer brought to justice, maybe? There is a darkness that follows me as surely as the light that kept pace with Jack, but I know that will keep following me for a very long time. Only one person to be brought to justice in that case; only one way the spirit that follows me will have peace. I’m not willing to give myself up to make that happen.

  I felt something light against my arm, sweeping down with surprising tenderness. Far from ghostly, that touch.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t call,” Jack said. His hand remained at my arm, a comforting weight.

  Before I could reply, there was movement again on the other side of the barricade. A voice came through—
this one belonging to Agent Paulsen.

  “You two still in there?” she called.

  “No, we popped out for coffee,” Jack returned.

  “Funny, Juarez,” she said. “We’re going to start moving the rocks, see how we do getting back through. You okay with that?”

  “We’re more than okay with it,” I said. “Just get us the hell out of here.”

  “Hang tight. Another thirty minutes, maybe an hour, and you’ll be out.”

  I leaned my head back against the limestone again, trying to shift my body to ease the pressure on my leg. Jack started to take his hand away, but a sound escaped my throat—not quite a whimper, but uncomfortably close. I felt the cool pressure of his hand against my face, his knuckles a light caress slipping past my cheek. Through the rock, somewhere far off, I heard the haunting cries that I’d heard earlier. They sounded farther away now, as though whoever—whatever—it was had been carried far from here. Not willingly.

  I closed my eyes. Despite the desire, I never leaned into Jack’s touch.

  #

  “Something’s going on out there,” Bear said, his gaze locked on the darkened night outside the window. Not that it did any good—he couldn’t see a damned thing. But he could hear, and what he heard was definitely not good.

  After Phantom’s howl, Casper had started up. Bear could tell because he’d memorized the barks of all their dogs: Phantom’s deep-throated shepherd bark; Casper’s high-pitched, almost deafening bully bark; Minion’s feminine woof… They were as distinct as human voices to Bear. On top of those dogs, he heard a dozen others he didn’t recognize. The forest had to be filled with searchers as far as he could tell, the dogs’ voices carrying well in the quiet of this creepy damned cabin.

  None of them sounded happy tonight.

  “Maybe they found something,” Ren suggested. She stood beside him but not touching, both looking out opposite sides of the same window.

  “If they found something, they would have alerted. These definitely aren’t alerts—they’re freaking out. Besides, it’s too late for them to be searching by now.”