Minus Tide (25 page)

“Sheriff?”

“Help me, Ann…”

When she reached him, his eyes fluttered as if straining to stay open. He was trying to reach for something near his leg but she saw nothing.

“Don’t move. I’m going for help.”

The sheriff shook his head. He raised himself again and stretched his hand toward something near his leg. This time he’d managed to grab his pant cuff and pulled it up far enough so that she could see what he was after.

Strapped to his calf was what looked like a snub-nosed .38 revolver. He nodded at her and she bent down and pulled it free. Just as she was about to stand up she felt his fingers claw into her ankle and she leaped back and briefly pointed the .38 down at him. He stared up at her.

“It’s too late for me, Ann.”

“Don’t say that.”

“He busted me up bad. You’ve got to stop him before he kills anyone else. Before he kills you.”

They both turned to see Cyclops emerging from the opening in the seawall. His face lowered with only his single eye floating behind a greasy curtain of hair. The sheriff began to tremble.

Ann leveled the .38 and fired. A bullet tugged at Cyclops jacket before he dove behind Chad’s car. She was unsure if she’d even hit flesh.

“Run,” the sheriff wheezed.

“No. I’m going to stay here with you. I can keep him away until someone comes.”

“It’s not going to work. Gun’s almost empty…

Ann broke open the chamber and glanced inside. The sheriff was right. There was only one bullet left.
How in the hell can I stop him with one bullet?

It made sense that she should leave. If Cyclops followed her, the sheriff might stand a better chance. It was obvious that Cyclops had only gotten started on him.

“I’ll get help…”

“Don’t worry about me. I’m finished.”

She turned and ran toward the highway.

Chapter 55

It was as if a hot coal had been shoved into the flesh of her leg. Ann had run some brutal cross country races in the past, but she’d never felt like she was on the verge of blacking out. She wondered how far the scarlet line of infection had traveled. Did running make it rise faster? Would it reach her heart by the time she got to town?
I should be feeling cold but I’m burning up inside.

It wasn’t the actual running that concerned her the most. She could do that, even if her leg went numb and she was forced to drag it along behind her. It was her mind that she was worried about—the thoughts that kept coming and going in her head—some times so real that she wondered if she were already blacking out and didn’t even know it.

It’s because you’ve got a fever from your infection. It’s affecting the way you think, altering your perceptions. That’s what’s happening to you. Now concentrate on getting back to Traitor in the little time you’ve got left.

She gritted her teeth and pushed forward. She could still sense Cyclops behind her, although the last few times she’d risked slowing down to look, all she’d seen was an empty highway.

Swift clouds moved across the night sky like silent boxcars. She could smell the vinegary scent of rain moving off the ocean, feel the drop in air pressure. She thought she heard dogs barking and wondered if she was hallucinating.

Not much further up the highway, she remembered to take a shortcut locals often used to get to Traitor—a series of long and sometimes steep switchbacks that eventually led down to a railroad track far below. There were many drop offs you had to be careful of but once you reached the tracks, the rest was an easy distance into town. When she was younger and a lot more foolish she’d taken the trail many times at night with only the moon lighting her way. Tonight the moon wasn’t going to be much help. Whatever light did make it down to her now was too weak. But she still had the flashlight she’d found on the boat. And the .38 she’d taken from the sheriff.

Stepping cautiously down the slippery trail, she thought about the railroad tracks far below. As kids, she and her friends used them often in the summer to pick blackberries, although their parents warned them to keep away. She’d grown up hearing the same stories as everyone else. Of crazy hobos lurching down the tracks, looking to hurt someone. Neither she nor her friends ever encountered anyone like that but sometimes they’d find empty liquor bottles and once James said he watched a crow fly off with a bloody finger someone must have suffered the loss of while hopping a train or getting into a knife fight.

In the spring she’d come down with her friends and pick wildflowers before the berries ripened, set pennies on the rail to see what the train would do to them. James once put a quarter on the rail and after the train flattened it he took it home and drilled a hole in it and made a necklace. Later his father had found out and given him hell for wasting money so he’d given it to Ann. Her mother had seen her wearing it and asked her about it, teased her about James being sweet on her. It must have been only a few days before she disappeared…

You had me pack my pink suitcase. The one I’d covered with animal stickers. You told me I was just going to have to stay with Aunt Kate for a few days, that you’d be back before I knew it.

But it wasn’t true. You didn’t come back. And if you thought you could keep Duane away from me you were wrong. Duane, before he lost his teeth and the words still slid off his tongue as if they’d been buttered… A year later he’d talked Aunt Kate into letting him take me out for a chocolate shake. And on the drive back I broke down and cried and he’d pulled over and tried to hold me but I could tell it made him uncomfortable. I told him I must have done something wrong to make you go away and he hadn’t said anything or didn’t know what to say and he got out of the car and lit a cigarette and leaned against the door and just stared in at me. I think he was scared and didn’t want me to see it.

“I’m sorry Ann. I really am. But there comes a time when you have to accept things you don’t like. That’s life. I’m trying to move on and you need to start too.”

“Something bad happened to her. I know it. She’d never want to leave me.”

“Of course she didn’t want to leave you. But she did. And her leaving had nothing to do with you so stop torturing yourself.”

“You’re just saying that.”

“What? Are you calling your stepdad a liar?’

“You say whatever you think you need to in order to get your way. Mom told me that once.”

“News flash. We all do that, Ann. I don’t know who doesn’t. But I’ll tell you one thing—and I’m not just spreading icing over bullshit either. Sure, your mom and I had our problems. But I wasn’t the one who just up and left.”

“She was scared of you.”

“No she wasn’t. She was scared she was going to wind up dying in Traitor of old age. That’s what happens to women when they get big ideas in their heads. I hope that someday you’ll understand. And maybe you’ll also learn to listen to people before you start accusing them of things.”

“You hurt her. She tried to hide it from me but I saw it.”

“Look. I did not hurt her. Your mother was in another one of her moods. We’d had an argument and she went on one of her crazy cleaning sprees. She was scrubbing the kitchen when I came in to tell her to stop and she stood up too fast and caught her cheek on a cupboard door she’d forgotten to close.”

“I don’t believe you. I hate you, Duane.”

“I understand, Ann. When people go through bad shit they say a lot of things they don’t mean.”

And Duane was right. He was the closest thing to a father I ever had. When things were good they were really good. Like the time he took us to Seattle and we went to the Space Needle. We were all afraid of the glass elevator and had held hands like a family…

Everything went dark.

Am I blacking out for real this time?

She could still feel her heart thumping in her throat. The ocean hadn’t stopped roaring and her leg felt like a bloody stump, but she knew that by all logically sane accounts it was not.

Check the light.

She knocked the flashlight against her palm. It flickered and went out, then sparked again before finding a steady but yellowish beam that gradually died.

And then she heard the dogs again. Close.

Chapter 56

Until her eyes adjusted, Ann saw nothing but shadow layered over shadow. She stared west, beyond a clearing in the trees. If she concentrated she could see the ocean as a dark band, and above it a faded red thread of sunset.

You can’t out run them. You’re not even halfway down this mountain yet. You’ll break your neck if you’re not careful.

As the dogs howling got louder she stepped off the trail and began pulling herself blindly through the wet undergrowth. She came to a tunnel of salal and passed through it onto a worn deer path of hardened clay that followed a narrow ridge. On either side sharp cliffs plunged down to roaring surf. When she reached the end of the path she recognized an old fire ring and lichen-spotted boulders where she and James would sometimes sit up all night and talk until dawn. If the sky remained clear you could see the faint yellow glow of towns up and down the coast.

How long had it been since she’d come here? After she and James returned from Portland, they’d never made it back. They’d try to make plans but something else would always come up and they continued to put it off until one day it became a kind of cynical joke between them, a sign that their relationship had been forever changed.

Shadows shot from the entrance of the salal tunnel and coalesced in front of her. The dog’s barking deafened her. Cyclops emerged from the tunnel last and unfolded into an impossibly tall and horrifying figure. As he advanced toward her, the dog-shadow spread apart like a pool of crude oil. His gutting knife glowed as if harvest moonlight were striking it.

“I’m running out of time. It’s going to be daylight in a few hours and I’ve got a train to catch… How’s the leg by the way?”

“Go to hell.”

Cyclops laughed. “You’re kind of late to be saying that little girl ...”

“What do you want from me?”

“I think it’s pretty clear ... And if you think about it you’ve only got two options: The other side of that cliff behind you, or me. But it’s really just an illusion, don’t you think? Ann dead and Ann dead…”

Ann pounded the head of the flashlight against the side of her good leg. It burst on long enough to see that Cyclops was naked down to his waist. His chest was covered by tattoos and wormy white scars. She noticed his arm was bleeding where she’d shot him but it looked like she’d only grazed him and the blood was drying.

The light in her hands died and everything fell back into shadow.

“Why am I hearing dogs but not seeing any?”

“Because they’re ghosts, Ann. My ghosts. People I killed for business and people I killed because they looked tasty to them I guess.”

“I still don’t understand why you want me.”

“I’m just trying to survive the only way I know how.”

“By killing people.”