"It's okay. Shh. Shh. We'll be all right. Stay with me. Hush. Hush. I'm here. You're safe. Shh. Shh."
Candace began to relax. Anna could feel the rigor leaking away, the bundle of sticks she clung to becoming a girl. The bones of the jaw Anna held stopped trying to unloose. There was a chance now, just a chance.
"Good girl," Anna whispered.
Candace spasmed. Too late Anna realized she uttered magic words, black magic. Dog words. Fighting as if her life depended on it, as it had for so many weeks, Candace tried to bark. Muffled noises, reminiscent of the bark of seals, broke into the night. Candace kicked her heels into the duff. Her fisted hands pounded Anna's face and skull.
"Good doggie," crowed from the dark. The single great star that sought them turned toward where they hid, wending and winking through the trees.
Anna slid her arms into position, squeezed, choking the blood from Candace's brain. The pummeling fists fell away. Struggling and sound ceased. The girl melted against her.
The light that was no light at all but a harbinger of a darkness so great the sane mind could not comprehend it, slowed, stopped. Knife-sharp feelers went out, ripping orange life from dead needles and green from boughs, then killing them with its passing.
Whistling resumed: short, sharp, demanding.
Anna hadn't loosed the vise her arm made around Candace's throat. Candace's brain was sleeping. Soon it would start to shut down. Then it would die. If she let up, the child would awake. There would be noise. They both would die. Was it so bad after all that Anna helped Candace from this place? Should the child wake, and Buddy find them, would her death be easier? Would he let her drift quietly to sleep and then to obliv-ion? Or would he fill her last moments with terrors as great or greater than she'd already experienced? If, by some miracle beyond Anna's ability to devise, Candace should live out the night, survive Buddy, would she truly be alive? Already he had killed her childhood, her sense of herself as a per-son. The scars he had carved on soul and psyche would be there forever.
Wasn't it better that she slip peacefully away in the arms of someone who loved her?
Anna did love her, she realized with a jolt. An incomprehensible alchemy born of proximity; shared humanity and nearness to death con-nected them as surely as the steel cuffs entwining their arms. Anna loved the sweet warmth of Candace's body against hers. She loved the dusky smell of her unwashed hair and the memory of tears too hot to the touch. She loved that she had learned to bark rather than to die.
Anna loved the girl with an intensity that took her breath away; she loved her enough to kill her. But not now. Not till she had to. Not till the next death, guaranteed, would be her own.
Her arm fell away from the slender throat. Her cheek dropped to rest against Candace's.
The girl swam to consciousness on a scream.
Then Buddy was upon them.
Abruptly Candace went silent, her body stony in the circle of Anna's arms, a rabbit frozen under the coyote's eye hoping beyond hope it would be passed over. This time.
Fierce glare from a six-cell flashlight a yard from her face robbed Anna of everything but a harsh vision of the afterlife. This was fine; she had no wish to see Buddy's face.
Candace had gone away inside herself.
Buddy was cloaked in the absence of light.
Anna was alone under the spotlight. "So. What now?"
"I have made time for you now." The words came from the black beyond the field of Anna's vision. Buddy didn't speak. Nor did the ersatz Raymond Bleeker. This was a new entity. One Anna wasn't crazy about getting to know.
"You must be taught your place."
In a time warp that took Anna off guard, she was suddenly in a dark-ened theater-a black box, really, on the Lower West Side in Manhattan Zach, her husband, slouched beside her, his bony knees wedged against the seat back in front of him, his shoulders about on a level with the arm-rests. Rehearsal for The Boys in the Band. The salad monologue.
"No. Pace! Pace! I could drive a truck between lines," boomed down from overhead. Actors, blinded by the klegs, stared up at the light booth where the director sat behind the mike.
"God," Zach had explained.
"God," Anna said staring into the light masking Buddy.
"You learn quick."
From the white-hot glare of the cold dead night emerged a gray cylin-der. Two cylinders, one melded into the other, the barrel of an efficient, German-made semiautomatic weapon. Close. Closer, till it stopped four inches from the tip of Anna's nose. Her eyes crossed and two pistol barrels crossed, swam away from one another. She made herself look away, turn her eyes to the kinder shadows on the ground.
Buddy had come nearer. His sneakers rested either side of Candace's thighs. Anna sat on her heels, the position she'd adopted the better to asphyxiate children. This was the closest to her he'd come. Buddy was confident. Not confident, realistic. There was nothing she could do with the dead weight of a girl in her arms, their fates linked by bonds of Beth-lehem steel.
"Open your mouth."
Against Anna's will her eyes fixed again on the gun barrel.
"What?" she asked stupidly.
"Open your mouth."
Anna might have complied had she not been paralyzed by the thought that she was about to die. Her body was locked but her mind was racing. If she took the barrel in her mouth and Buddy blew her brains out through the back of her head, could he make it look like suicide? Get away with it? Anna did not intend to go to hell alone.
"Suck it," he said sweetly. "Suck it like it is St. Peter's cock and you're paying your way through the pearly gates."
The obscenity shocked and appalled her and she was amazed that she could be shocked and appalled by anything new a monster who tortured children might come up with.
"Open, open, open. Suck, suck, suck." Buddy was back with the play-ground singsong.
The barrel of the SIG Sauer twitched slightly up and down as an erect penis might twitch as its owner tensed with excitement and anticipation.
"Suck it like you love me or I'll jam it in our little doggie here and make it go off." Playground pervert was gone. It was the empty place within the shell that spoke.
Anna tried to look away from the gun and failed. Molly, her sister, came into her mind, as did Paul, her brand-new husband, Taco and Pied-mont and the newly acquired kitten. People and animals who loved her, who would grieve if she were gone from their lives. She thought of her husband's god who, real or not, had imbued half the world with the con-cept of sacrificing one's self for the good of others.
Those who loved her and those who depended upon her, like the warm still child in her arms, would be better off if she stayed alive, regardless of what it took to do so.
She leaned in toward the pistol barrel.
"Oh baby," Buddy moaned, as if he truly expected a blowjob. Maybe he did. Maybe this violence was his sexuality.
Those who needed her to live lined up across Anna's brain. It surprised her how many had come, how many cared.
But she'd been raised to worship John Wayne, not Jesus of Nazareth. Smiling an apology, she launched herself forward and rammed the thickest part of her skull into Buddy's left kneecap.
twenty-nine
Buddy twisted away screaming. Anna hoped she'd managed to dislocate the joint or break the kneecap. Hands entangled with the girl's, arms around the narrow shoulders, she could do nothing to check her forward motion and fell, Candace jackknifed beneath her.
Constrained by child and chains, the blow hadn't struck squarely and Buddy cried out as much from rage as pain. Before she could draw breath, he was on her back, riding her. The pistol whipped hard across the side of her face, the back of her head, her shoulders.
The speed of the battery shattered conscious thought. Arms pinned, center of gravity upended over a crushed girl, she could not defend her-self, could not roll away, could not separate pain from shock. Maybe he hit her half a dozen times, maybe twenty.
Then it was over. The whipping was frenzied, vicious but not deadly.
His weight lifted and she rolled to the side lest Candace suffocate beneath her.
Buddy retreated out of reach. She could hear him panting, out of breath from the exertion or sexually excited. Candace didn't move. Drag-ging their manacled hands up, Anna pressed her knuckle under the girl's nose. Warm air blew reassuringly across her skin. Candace still breathed.
A shoe slammed into Anna's back. Wordlessly, Buddy kicked and, using the six-cell flashlight, flogged her to her feet. Standing, she was able to lift her arms from the killing embrace she'd maintained around her fellow captive's neck and pull Candace up from the ground.
A kick hard enough to momentarily paralyze the big muscle landed on Anna's left thigh. It would have brought her to the ground again had it not been immediately followed by Buddy grasping the waistband of her shorts and jerking her up. Still breathing audibly, he whipped and kicked them back through the woods. Grunts and gasping and blows took the place of conversation.
Had she had time to think as she and her young chain-gang sister were driven down the dark trail, she might have been reassured. Clearly one or both of them were still of use to Buddy. Candace, she suspected, was kept on in the role of albatross. With a brainwashed girl shackled to her, Anna was effectively neutralized as a threat. How Anna herself might be expected to serve, she couldn't guess.
For the next eternity, they fell, were kicked to their feet, beaten onward to stumble and fall again. Gravel and needles and dirt packed into bloodied knees and elbows. Unable to break falls with her hands Anna's face was scraped.
When she could breathe she tried to draw Buddy out, tried to rally an echo of life from Candace. She cursed, threatened, promised, spat, spec-ulated and reviled. Nothing worked. Buddy panted and herded them with blows and pokes from a broken branch he'd picked up. Candace had hid-den so deep within herself she didn't cry out when she fell or when the skin was raked from her shins, made no sound when her lip split open against a stone. Anna believed she would go on like an abused beast of burden till there came a time when dying held no more terrors than liv-ing. At that point she would stop and be beaten to death.
After what seemed a lifetime, they descended the trail to the little bridge over the outlet of Fern Lake. Up on its stony rise the cabin was dark. Though Anna had the feeling it would be the end of the line for her, she felt a stab of gratitude. The forced march was over. The ground would stop rushing up from the flash-cut darkness to crack kneecaps and elbows, peel the skin from bare legs. Maybe the rough point of Buddy's stick would stop castigating the flesh of their backs, cutting at shoulder and neck.
Maybe that was too much to hope for.
.It was also too much to hope that Jean Claude Van Damme and Jet Li would be doing a bit of night fishing and hear calls for help. The lake was deserted, the surface calm and mirror-bright. It was considerably past midnight and the air had turned cold. What campers remained following the exodus after Labor Day weekend would be snug in their down sleep-ing bags.
Anna would not have called out to any camping group less formidable than the 10th Mountain Division anyway. It would only be inviting them to step into an early grave.
As she and Candace staggered in tandem toward the wooden steps up to Fern Lake Cabin's door, Buddy uttered his first words since the pistol whipping a couple of hours earlier.
"Home again, home again, jiggity-jig." He had cheered up since Loomis Lake. Perhaps some more fun was in the offing.
The narrow window of opportunity Anna was hoping for when he uncuffed them was never opened. In a move so sudden she never saw it coming, he smashed her on the temple with the butt of his gun. The next thing she knew he had uncuffed Candace and locked her wrist bracelets together around a head-high rung of the ladder that was bolted to the cabin wall to provide access to the small loft space. Chain-looped through Candace's linked cuffs, Anna could bring her hands no lower than her chin.
Chatting and bustling like a happy homemaker, Buddy began to lay a fire in the cast-iron stove. "I'd been hoping for company," he said conversationally. "They hadn't arrived yet when your radio call came through. Bad timing that. At first it looked like it would be bad for me- heavy-footed Neanderthals clomping around being heroes in my clean house. I shall miss this place. If it had a flush toilet I could live here. But now I have fixed things-I am a great fixer of things-and so it will be bad timing for you."
Candace, though freed, had remained standing in the middle of the floor, an automaton whose batteries had gone dead. The sound of water dripping caught Anna's ear and she shifted her attention from Buddy. Urine poured unchecked from the wide leg of the men's cut-offs to spat-ter on the wooden floor. The expression on Candace's face didn't change. Buddy's did. The Mister Rogers mask he'd donned so abruptly outside the cabin dropped away, Beneath it he wore that of an angry nun from a Catholic schoolboy's hell.
