Left for Dead: A gripping psychological thriller

by Deborah Rogers

  Behind me, he’s calling my name. I run and run headlong into darkness. Branches whip my face, tear my cotton dress. I go further in, circling around bushes, pushing through the brambles, ignoring my screaming feet. It’s so dark, so deep.

  He’s not far behind, crashing through the undergrowth, steps heavy with outrage.

  I veer left and now I’m running down the track to the lake. If I can just get to the lake I can swim across. Suddenly it appears before me, shining like a pearl. I clamber down the bank and get ready to launch myself into the water but I slip on a greasy rock and my foot slides out from beneath me. And here he is, thrashing through the water, grabbing my ankle, pulling me back. I try to break free with a kick, but he hauls me up and shakes me like a doll.

  “Why did you do that!”

  He drags me up the bank and back to the campsite by my wrist.

  “Stay there!” he says, pushing me to the ground.

  I’m a dripping mess and so is he, hair plastered to his head, clothes sodden. The cords on his neck are pumping and I’m crazy with fear because he’s never been this angry. He begins to pack up the campsite. Folds the tarps, rolls the sleeping bag, puts the trash into a plastic bag, pours water over the embers, buries the latrine.

  I begin to blabber. “Don’t worry, I’ll never say a word, and I understand you’re just going through a rough patch, we’ve all had those, and I know you’re not a bad person, that you only wanted some company, and I don’t mind, truly I don’t, all this, it’ll stay between you and me, and in fact, I’m grateful because this whole experience has taught me something valuable, that my life is precious, yours too, your son’s as well.”

  The campsite is empty and he glances around for a final check.

  “And now we can get on with our lives. Each begin anew. This is just a blip, that’s all, a blip. Just drop me on the side of the road. I’ll walk, hitch a ride, whatever. You don’t need to go out of your way. It’ll be as easy as that.”

  He looks at me. There’s a different face now.

  “Shut up, you fucking bitch.”

  He takes three great strides and knocks me out cold.

  *

  When I come to I’m in the trunk of his car. He’s driving too fast for the rough terrain and the car fishtails and the brakes squeal. He barrels on regardless, taking the next bend too aggressively, causing the car to slide again. I wonder if his plan is to drive off a cliff and kill us both. All I can think about is how I’m going to be a Saturday night mystery, and how my body will never be found, and how my mother will rock back and forth on the front porch at night and look at the stars and wonder where I am. There will be yellow ribbons tied to mailboxes and tree trunks and then first-year, then two-year, then five-year anniversaries. I will be a cold case in a manila folder in a dusty archive box in the bowels of a county police station. At my high school reunion they will speculate on my disappearance. There will be rumors that I ran off to Spain with a married man. I will be reduced to the phrase “Whatever happened to Amelia Jane Kellaway?”

  I wish there was a way I could leave a message, scratch a goodbye note to my family, but I can’t feel my fingers even if there was somewhere to write.

  The car stops sharply. He gets out. There’s the squeal of the back door opening, followed by his retreating steps. I wait and wait. Listening for anything, trying to temper my halting breath. Then the trunk swings open and he’s back, pulling me over his shoulder, carrying me a few feet then dropping me to the ground next to a grave-sized hole.

  “God no.”

  “Get on your knees.”

  His face is glistening with sweat and blackened with dirt.

  “Wait. You don’t need to do this.”

  “I said get on your knees.”

  I do as he commands and start to cry. “Please don’t so this,” I sob.

  “Say my name,” he says.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Say it.”

  “I won’t run again. You have my word. I made a mistake.”

  “Say it.”

  “Rex.”

  “Again.”

  “Rex.”

  He kneels down in front of me and puts his hands around my throat.

  “Just remember, Amelia, I gave you a chance.”

  “No, no, no, no.”

  He squeezes, his eyes laser focused, lips rigid. I claw at his hands. I am fading, slipping in and out, the world graying at the edges, and I can only think of one thing—how the hands on my throat once held a newborn.

  Wilderness

  16

  Before my father left we lived in a big house in a good part of town in Ithaca, New York, called Redmont. The house was a picture-perfect, two-story American Colonial with navy blue shutters. It had a farm-style kitchen, six bedrooms, and a large rose garden. Out of all the rooms he could have chosen for his study, my father selected the smallest room, located in the attic. There were places in that room where he couldn’t stand up straight because of the pitch of the ceiling. I’m not sure why he chose it, whether he had a thing for confined spaces or simply because it was the most silent area in the house. I used to think that maybe it was so he could watch and wave at us kids when we played in our yard.

  The house had a name—Redmont Rose. My mother invented it. She even had the name etched into a plaque made of walnut and hung it just above the doorbell so everyone would know what the house was called. Our yard bordered a huge park, with streams and a fort and a freshwater lake with ducks and swans. My brother and sister and I treated it like an extension of our yard and used a secret hatchway in our fence to go back and forth.

  Every year the neighborhood held cookouts and summer picnics there. But best of all were the Fourth of July fireworks extravaganzas put on by the Lions Club, who flew in a specialist team of pyrotechnicians from Sweden to run the event. Once my father took me to the top of our garage roof, promising it would provide the best vantage point to watch the fireworks over the lake. I remember looking at his face, luminous in the pink glitter of an exploding horsetail, and thinking how much my six-year-old brother looked like him. When the fireworks ended, I didn’t want to get down but eventually he convinced me that we would come back next year and do it again. Then he returned to his study and his technical drawings and worksheets and I was corralled into another room by my mother so he could get back to work.

  Six months after my father left, my mother had to sell our beautiful house. She was very brave. She piled us into the station wagon and told us not to look back, that our new place—an apartment, an hour’s drive across the other side of town—was just as good, if not better. She actually said that. It wasn’t. I had to double up in a tiny room with my sister, while my brother slept in what was meant to be a utility cupboard under the stairs.

  What my mother didn’t know was that every Fourth of July I would return to our old house in Redmont and sit on the garage roof to watch the fireworks. One day the man who was living there nearly caught me so I ran off and never went back.

  17

  At first I think I’m dead. It’s the black. The absence of sound and air. I feel cheated because I want the white light, the outstretched hand of dear Nana May. Then I realize I’m not dead after all. There’s dirt in my mouth and nose, choking me, pinning me down. And it hits me. Oh God, I’m suffocating. Someone help. For the love of God, someone help me. I hear a voice—my own, Nana May’s, God’s—I don’t know whose but it’s telling me to move. Hurry. Think fast. Get out.

  A sharp object presses against my right knee, a stone or stick, so I focus on that, moving my knee. Left, right, left, right. It’s taking too long. My lungs scream for oxygen. My head’s about to explode. I try harder. Pivot my leg back and forth. But there’s just no way.

  My brain turns to cotton and I begin to fade. Somewhere in this fuzz, I think of him—his face, his hands around my throat, the whites of his eyes. What he did to me. I won’t allow him to win. I push with everything I have, press my ribcage against t
he load, arch my back. But the dirt might as well be a solid wall.

  I try to remember every bad thing I ever saw, the YouTube clip of that white supremacist pouring Jim Beam down a puppy’s throat, that time in eighth grade when Brent Maxwell stole the cowboy hat from the Down Syndrome kid on the way to school in the bus, those people in the Twin Towers who had only two choices—burn alive or jump. It works. Adrenaline jets into my veins. I thump my chest against the earth tomb and a small channel opens up and I can scarcely believe it and I think more angry thoughts and fight harder and dirt loosens and crumbles and finally gives way and I go up and up until I’m breaking through the surface and sucking in the wet night air.

  I begin to laugh. I did it. I am free. I am alive.

  I brush the soil from my face and blink into the dark and my joy fades. He could be here, watching on in amusement, ready to do it all over again. I listen for his breath, the snap of a twig, the sound of his voice. I lift myself out of the grave and force one jellified leg in front of the other, heading for the trees, moving quickly but carefully to avoid knocking myself out on the low-lying branches. It’s so dark I can’t see my own hand in front of my face.

  I reach the first spruce and pause there and listen again. I keep going, arms out front as I walk, changing course whenever my fingertips brush against bark or the sharp point of a branch.

  Swallowing hurts. I try not to think about it, that someone tried to kill me, but I can’t help it. I walk and cry, sputtering into my hands because I don’t want to make a sound in case he’s still here, and, oh God, trying not to cry, trying to hold it in hurts my throat and I wonder if there are broken bones in there or if he’s fractured my windpipe because this aching doesn’t feel normal and I think to myself this is trauma, I am traumatized, I am split in two—the before and the after.

  I drop to the ground. I try to get up but my feeble legs give way.

  I look at the forest. The blackness is impenetrable. All around me, pines creak. Things scamper in the undergrowth. The distant moan of a wolf.

  I back up against a tree and stay there, listening.

  Something comes near. The crack of timber. Slow, careful steps. I cannot breathe.

  I reach out and feel the ground beside me. A rock.

  I take a shallow breath and taste iron on my lips. A pinecone comes loose and drops into the leaves. Then nothing. I press myself close into the bony roots of the evergreen and remain there with the rock in my hand. My human scent engulfs me. I wait and listen in the long, dark night.

  18

  Sleep does not come. The night inches by. Finally, light begins to seep through the treetops. With it, patches of brilliant blue. The forest stirs in ways different than before. Cicadas rasp. Birds flit overhead. A bunch of sagging oxeye daisies stiffen in the sun.

  I look around. I am in thick, steep woods. Even so, I feel exposed. Is he here? Hidden where I can’t see him?

  He’s gone, I tell myself. I have to believe that or I will be paralyzed with fear.

  I spit out some dirty drool and glance down at my filthy skin, the black bruises around my wrists and ankles, my bare feet. I’m trembling from cold and shock. Move, I think.

  I stand up and face the woods.

  “Okay, I got this.”

  But I remain anchored to the spot and before I know it I’m sobbing again. Last night someone tried to kill me. Last night I nearly died. I wring my hands and cry in breathless waves. I am a weak, bewildered child. I bang my head with my fists. Cut it out. Don’t go crazy. You can’t afford to go crazy. Go crazy and you’re as good as dead.

  I take a deep breath. Focus. Select a direction. Walk. That’s it.

  I begin to calm down. Yes, I can do that. I wipe my face and look at the forest. All I need is the road he took to get in here. It can’t be far—I didn’t cover that much ground last night.

  I choose right and move forward into the wilderness, which is like a fairground illusion that just keeps going. Pines, and spruce, and other trees that could be cedar and oak molt gold and copper leaves. Fall has come early. Soon the nights will be cold.

  I tell myself that doesn’t matter because a day or two at the most and this nightmare will be over. I will be out of here, clasping a hot drink, foil blanket around my shoulders, telling the police everything I know. The ten things. Kermit the Frog. I will tell them about that and the army blanket and the mint Capri and the brass-rimmed aviators. And him. Rex. His face. It’s right here. I’ll never forget it. His kid’s too, the boy in that dog-eared photograph standing next to a black BMX in his white sports socks. I hope he won’t grow up to be like his father. I hope he won’t hate me for sending his daddy to prison because that’s exactly what I intend to do. It hits me then—I never got the license plate. How could I be so stupid? I search my befuddled brain. Maybe an O, K, 1, and a 7, but that’s it.

  I walk all morning long, my bare feet cringing against the hard earth ground braided with roots and rock. I ignore the pain and trudge through the forest, searching for any sign of the road. But there are just trees and more trees.

  The poles of spruce sway and creak high above my head and I lick my roughened lips and think of the water I don’t have but desperately need. I wonder how long a person can live without it, and whether I will just keep on shrinking until my body dries up like an onion skin left out in the sun. This makes me think of my mother, the sun worshipper, who would coat herself in baby oil until her flesh was as glossy as a Danish, then starfish on the concrete out in back of our tiny apartment for hours on end. My mother and those ugly watercolors she used to make and the paint-spattered Monet T-shirt she wore for a nightgown. Then I think of my father and how all of us waited night after night for him to come back.

  Morning dissolves into midday then afternoon and there’s no hint of the road or the grave. I rest on a boulder and listen to the wind whistle through the trees. It all looks the same and I can’t be sure which way I’ve come. I chide myself for not having some sort of system. Marking trees as I went. Leaving a trail.

  I wipe the debris from the soles of my feet, get up, and walk on.

  I reach a slope with a series of switchbacks, pathways long overgrown, most likely belonging to an old packhorse trail. I stop and do a 360. There was none of this last night when I ran from my grave, I would have remembered.

  But the switchbacks could lead to a hill allowing a better vantage point so I carry on, skirting them as best I can to avoid the brambles and what could be poison ivy. Back and forth I go, zigzagging upward, but the pathways only lead me into deeper, thicker woods.

  I step in mud, then a puddle. I kneel down and scoop the brackish water into my mouth and wash my face. Sitting back on my heels, I look at the tiny pool. Branching out from the puddle is a trickle, just a ribbon really, and I wonder whether I should follow it. It could lead to a tributary then maybe a river or lake, and hikers or campers.

  I continue on and track the water and it soon grows into a creek large enough to step into and soothe my feet. Every so often, I stop to ladle some into my mouth, and tell myself I mustn’t forget to do this—I can live without food for a while but not without water.

  The ground becomes impassible, overrun with thistles, goosegrass, and gorse, and I’m forced to circle back down and leave the creek behind in the hope I can rejoin it on the other side. I weave through a swatch of trees, over some rocky hillocks, and hear the trickle again. I follow the sound until I see the glistening crack. But the creek is no more than a dribble now, and when I walk ten more yards, it dries up to nothing.

  Fatigue overwhelms me and I lower myself onto a fallen log.

  I have lost all sense of time. I can’t tell if light is fading or if the dimness is just because I am so low in the valley. For all I know, evening could be about to drop.

  I pull a splinter from my left foot and watch a kernel of blood appear. I think of the red feather lure. Then him. I think about how stupid I am. For all of it. Believing I could do the trek in the first
place, for lifting that God damn tire into that trunk, for being naive and trusting and just plain dumb.

  I haul myself up and walk on. The light is deserting me, and I try not to think about how I will have to spend another night in the growing cold, without food, clean water, proper clothes, and with animals I cannot see. My body cries out for rest, especially the soles of my feet, which are being pummeled by the stony terrain. But there’s no choice. I have to keep going.

  I ascend the slope, breaking a sweat, my arms two dead weights by my side. I pray the terrain will level out soon but it only gets steeper. Breathless, I wipe perspiration from my eyes and look over my shoulder. Dense woods are way behind me and I’m surprised to see how far up I’ve climbed. I face front and carry on until I’m stopped by a large cluster of rocks. This could be good, I think. Beyond the rocks there may be a summit.

  Digging deep, I search out toeholds and places for my hands to grip, hoisting myself up a little at a time. My arms scream for me to stop but I keep going, and with one final push I crest the highest boulder and step out onto a ridge, where I’m rocked by a sudden, frenzied wind. That’s when I see, in a blink, how much trouble I’m in.

  19

  In the bleak, graying light, nothing but trees and hills for miles in every direction. No highway. No town. No tracks. Just woods. In the far distance, scree slopes and jagged, snowcapped peaks. All I can do is blink at the infinite landscape with my wind-dried eyes, not knowing what else to do.

  A moonless black drops like a sheet and finally the dark and cold force me to move. Stumbling across to the other side of the ridge, I feel my way down a grassless slope until I am out of the wind. I take shelter in a gully of rocks and sit shivering, knees pulled up to my chest, back pressed into the iron-cold stone.

  I am nothing in this sheer vastness. A mere seed in a canyon. How am I ever going to get out of this place? And what if he is here watching and lying in wait? No, I think, he’s returned home, slipping back into his mundane everyday world, reliving memories of my life slipping away in his hands. As far as he’s concerned I am dead and buried and no longer a problem.