Resurrection Dreams (26 page)

Jack was moving fast.

She swept her eyes over the rippling surface of the river all around him. No sign of Charlie.

Again, she imagined his black, charred body coming at her from below. She fought an urge to scramble onto the canoe’s upturned hull.

Jack flung his arms around the other end of the canoe. “Let’s…flip her,” he gasped. “Count of three.”

Vicki let the paddle float beside her. She slipped her hands beneath the submerged point of the prow.

“Ready?”

“Yes!”

“One, two, three!”

She hurled the canoe upward, turning it and sinking herself. Under water, she heard a metallic smacking sound. She bobbed up. Her shoulder bumped the canoe and she winced as pain exploded from the bite. She eased away and looked. The canoe was riding a little low, but upright. She swam to the paddle, made her way back to the canoe, and tossed it inside. It splashed.

“Get in,” Jack said. He held the other side. Just like before.

Vicki peered over the gunnel. The bottom of the canoe was awash with water, but Charlie wasn’t there. She flung herself over the side, landing on her back with a splash. When she got to her knees, she saw Jack a distance away.

The second paddle floated several yards ahead of him.

“Don’t bother!” Vicki yelled. “Get back here!”

He kept swimming toward it.

At least he’s going in that direction, she thought. Toward the middle of the river. Away from the place where they’d left Charlie.

Vicki picked up her paddle. She swung her head around, first scanning the area near the canoe, then searching the river between her and the shore.

She almost wished she would spot Charlie.

Better to see him, even nearby and swimming closer, than not to know where he was.

Vicki hobbled astern on her knees. She leaned forward, slipping her paddle into the water, and drew it back.

Half expecting Charlie to grab it.

But he didn’t.

The canoe moved sluggishly forward, turning.

Jack, she saw, already had the other paddle and was coming toward her. She stroked again. The prow swung farther and pointed at him.

“Hurry!” she shouted.

The distance closed.

Still no sign of Charlie.

Jack hurled the paddle into the canoe and flung himself in after it. He scurried to his knees. He jabbed the paddle down into the river and swept it back.

Vicki turned the canoe southward.

Soon, they were rushing over the river. The water inside the canoe slopped this way and that, splashing up Vicki’s thighs, sweeping away, coming at her again like a small tide, rolling from side to side.

She paddled as hard as she could. She huffed for air. Every muscle from her neck to her calves felt stiff and heavy. The narrow slats of the floorboards punished her knees. The bite on her shoulder burned. But she dug the paddle deep and jerked it back and stretched forward and rammed it in again. Again. Again.

She didn’t speak. She didn’t look to see if Charlie was near. She stared at Jack’s bent back and blinked sweat out of her eyes and kept on paddling.

At last, they rounded the end of the pier. Vicki steered toward the beach. The canoe sped alongside the pier. The instant it hit the beach, Jack leaped out. He dragged it a few feet up the sand. Vicki jumped over the side. She lifted her end. They ran the canoe to the place where they had found it. When they overturned it, the trapped water slopped out. They tossed the paddles under the canoe.

Vicki in the lead, they dashed across back yards. The water in her shoes made squeeshing sounds, and she was surprised to realize that she still had them on. All that swimming, and she’d been wearing sneakers. Could’ve gone so much faster without them. But she was glad to have them, now.

Finally, she rushed into the river and rounded the fence at the border of the public beach. She splashed her way ashore.

Safe on the beach, she hitched up her sagging wet shorts, then bent over and held her knees and tried to catch her breath.

Jack flopped onto his back.

“Get up,” she gasped. “You’ll tighten up. Gotta keep moving.”

With a moan, he pushed himself off the sand.

Heeding her own advice, Vicki straightened up. She walked in circles, back arched, head thrown back, hands on hips. Jack staggered backward, watching her. She was suddenly aware of her broken bra hanging loose from her shoulders. She felt one cup like a wadded hanky above her left breast. The other was crumpled beneath her armpit. The way her sodden T-shirt clung to her skin, she probably looked almost naked. She realized that she didn’t care.

She only cared that she was away from Charlie. She was safe. Jack was safe.

“What’s that on your shoulder?” Jack asked.

She glanced down at her shoulder. The T-shirt there was dark. “He bit me,” she said.

“Jesus.”

“Are you all right?”

“My head hurts,” he said.

She went to Jack. She rested her hands on his sides. “I was afraid you might drown.”

“I was never out cold,” he said. “But the boat…it was pretty far off when I came up for air. I had a hard time catching up to it.” He moved closer to Vicki. His arms went around her and he eased her against him. She felt the rise and fall of his chest, the thumping of his heart.

“Thank God you’re all right,” she whispered.

“Did he hurt you?”

“Not so much. Just the bite.” She squeezed Jack hard. “It was so horrible. He tore my clothes. He…pawed me.”

“Was it Charlie?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t get it. Why would Charlie…?”

“He acted crazy. I don’t know. Did you see him?”

“Not really. Just a glimpse.”

“He was…all burned. Third degree burns.” A tremor passed through her. “Jack, his skin was…incinerated. And he didn’t have any eyes. And his head…one side was completely caved in. I mean, he should’ve been dead. Nobody could survive that kind of head injury.”

“Apparently, Charlie did.”

“What’ll we do?”

“About what?” Jack asked.

“About him.”

Jack was silent for a while. His hands slowly rubbed her back. “I’m in no mood to tell the search team, that’s for sure. He could’ve killed us both. He hurt you. The hell with him. He’s probably drowned by now, anyway. Or died of his injuries. Either way, good riddance. Let the bastard wash ashore. Or disappear forever. I don’t care. I know he was supposed to be your friend, but…”

“That was Charlie, but it wasn’t my friend. I told him who I was. He went ahead, anyway, and…he would’ve raped me, Jack. That’s what he wanted to do. That burned-up…he wanted to rape me.”

Shuddering, she pressed her face to the side of Jack’s neck. He held her tight for a long time. Slowly, the tremors passed. Vicki’s strength seemed to seep out of her. Only Jack’s stout body kept her from slumping to the sand.

“Do you think you can walk as far as my house?” he asked.

“I’d rather go home. To Ace’s. You’ll come with me, won’t you?”

“You bet.”

“Good,” she said. She kept her arms around him. “In a while?”

“Would you like a drink, or something?” Vicki asked as she turned on a lamp in the living room.

“That can wait until you’ve taken care of yourself,” Jack said.

“I’ll hurry.”

“Do you have an old towel for me to sit on?” he asked, plucking at a leg of his damp shorts.

Nodding, she headed for the hallway. She thought how odd it was that Jack had ended up here in the house tonight, after all. She felt a small stir of excitement, but it was blunted by the weariness of her body and the leaden weight in her mind left by the encounter with Charlie.

When she reached the linen closet, she took down her beach towel. She carried it back into the living room, where Jack waited. She gave it to him. “You might want to get out of your shorts,” she said. “You can wear this, if you want. We haven’t got a robe or anything large enough for you. I can put your stuff in the drier a little later.”

“I’m fine,” he told her. “Go ahead and don’t worry about it.”

“Back in a while,” she said.

In her bedroom, Vicki took her robe out of the closet. She found a nightgown in a drawer. Then, she shambled back down the hallway to the bathroom and shut herself inside.

Rump against the door, she bent down. She pulled off her shoes and socks. The shoes had sand in them. Sighing, she staggered to the waste basket and dumped the sand.

She remembered the car accident during her sophomore year at college. Tim was driving.

One of the guys I didn’t marry, she thought.

They were on their way back to campus on a stormy night when a car ran a red light and broadsided them. They’d both walked away from the crash with nothing more than a few bruises. But this is how she’d felt afterward, waiting in the rain for the police to arrive. Her muscles like warm liquid. Her mind dim and out of focus. Exhausted, dazed, hardly able to stand on her feet.

Hands braced on the sink, she leaned forward and peered at herself in the medicine cabinet mirror. Her damp hair hung in ropes around her face. Her eyes looked vacant. Her skin seemed pallid in spite of the tan. She had a dark smudge on the right side of her face, and wondered vaguely where that had come from.

Stepping back, she glimpsed the way her T-shirt looked. Wet and dirty. Clinging. She had taken a moment, before leaving the park, to reach inside and arrange her bra. Otherwise, Jack would’ve had an eyeful. Which would’ve been all right, she supposed. She really didn’t care much, one way or the other. Too messed up to care.

She only glanced at the shirt’s torn, filthy, blood-spotted shoulder. Then she pulled it up over her head, wincing as the fabric came unstuck from her wounds, feeling the loose cups of the bra fall aside once the shirt was no longer there to hold them. She slipped the straps off her arm, and looked “Uh!”

She flinched rigid. Her hands flew up and stopped, inches from her blackened breasts.

She understood, now, how she got the dirty face and shirt.

She stared down at herself, moaning.

Her chest, both her breasts, her stomach and sides were smeared with dark soot. Hand prints. Smears. Streaks and swirls left by Charlie’s burned fingers. One broad, black smudge was low on her belly. She knew it didn’t stop at the elastic of her shorts.

She lowered the shorts and stepped out of them.

The black stopped just above her pubic hair and swept sideways to her hip. At her hip were a few scratches, red trails in a field of char.

She drew a fingertip across the grimy top of her left breast. The filth was greasy.

That’s why it hadn’t come off in the river.

It’s what you get on your fingers, she thought, if you picked up a grilled steak. One that’s well-done. One that’s been burned to a crisp.

She suddenly gagged. And gagged again and again, her eyes watering as the spasms hunched her over. She didn’t vomit, though. She supposed that her medical training, especially her time as a resident in the ER, had pretty much cured her of that. She’d seen such stomach-turning sights, day after day, that they had finally ceased to disgust her.

But this disgusted her.

This was on her.

When Vicki stopped gagging, she stood up straight, took deep breaths, and wiped her eyes. She felt a little better, now.

Just clean it off and forget about it.

Regular soap, she thought, might not do the job.

Crouching, she opened the cupboard beneath the sink and took out a can of scouring powder. Its label boasted “grease-cutting action.”

With that in her hand, she stepped away from the sink and looked around. The mirror showed that her back, from just below her shoulder blades to her waist, was nearly as filthy as her front. From lying on Charlie in the canoe, she thought. Twisting herself, she saw that the backs of her legs also bore smudges.

Jack, she thought, may have a long wait.

When she finished drying, she checked her towel. It looked clean. The mirror was fogged. With a corner of the towel, she wiped an area clear. She inspected her shoulder. Charlie’s teeth had left a pair of discolored crescents. Far apart. His mouth, she thought, must’ve been open very wide. The incisors had broken her skin. Four uppers and four lowers. The edges of the wounds looked ragged.

That’s a pretty nasty bite he gave you.

Weird, she thought. I just treated Melvin for a bite, now I’ve got one.

Must be going round.

She smiled grimly at herself in the mirror.

We’ve got something in common. We can compare notes on our bites. Sure thing.

She gave no more thought to Melvin as she soaked her wounds with hydrogen peroxide and taped pads of gauze in place. Then she turned her attention to the scratches on her hip. They were minor. She dabbed them with the disinfectant and didn’t bother to apply a bandage.

Takes care of that, she thought.

She put on her robe, carried her nightgown into her bedroom, then shut the door and slipped the robe off.

Turning slowly, she studied herself in the mirror. Her wet hair was a tangle. But her body bore no traces of the greasy ash. Her pallor seemed gone, replaced by a rosey hue.

The hot shower had not only brought color to her skin. She felt as if it had also awakened her, washed the daze out of her mind and turned her exhaustion into a rather pleasant laziness.

She slipped the nightgown over her head. It drifted down her body like the caress of a cool breeze. Its pale blue fabric gleamed in the lamplight.

Quickly, she brushed her hair. She considered blowing it dry, but Jack had already been waiting too long. She put her robe on, and hurried from the room.

She found Jack sitting on the couch. He smiled when he saw her. “You look fabulous,” he said.

“I sure feel better.” She knew she was blushing. Partly the compliment. Partly the fact that he was wearing the beach towel like a skirt and she doubted that he had anything on beneath it. My idea, she reminded herself.

But her mind was fairly clear, now, and she found herself reluctant to join him on the couch.

“Sorry I took so long,” she said, stopping in front of the coffee table.