The Remains (21 page)

It’s precisely what I started on when my
right hand exploded in pain.

I FACED MY NIGHTMARE in the flesh. Whalen
stood over me, green goggles covering his eyes, masking his face.
He stood erect, body dripping rain water. I sensed him with every
nerve and neuron in my body.

His right foot had come down on my right
hand, boot heel crushing flesh and bone. The pain shot through my
arm, passed the elbow and up into the shoulder, then up into my
head. The entire right side of my body was on fire. I screamed, my
voice howling into a night punctuated with rain, thunder and
darkness. I heard my own voice echoing off the cliff-side, shooting
out into the valley, out over the deep woods, out over the fields
of tall grass, out over the valley and the farmlands.

I felt the pain with every exposed nerve in
my body. I held to the edge, ran my free hand over the shale wall,
searched for a chunk of loose rock. I located a piece about the
size of my own hand. The rock was smooth on one side, with a sharp
jagged edge on the other. I fit the rock into the palm of my left
hand, gripped it with every ounce of my strength. Then, with one
swift downwards swing of my arm, thrust the sharp edge into his
foot.

He screamed, his high-pitched voice crying
out into the deep night. He was the suddenly maimed monster. Whalen
may have had the power to see in the night. But he never
anticipated the chunk of sharp shale coming for his foot. He yanked
his right foot out from under the rock, yanked it loose from the
tip of the sharpened edge and fell flat onto his back.

The pain left me then.

There was only the bleeding and a rush of
energy that shot up from the tips of my toes, entering into my
limbs. I did not pull myself over the edge so much as leapt over
it, landing directly on top of him.

I wasn’t me anymore. I’d become my
sister.

It was as if Molly—her strength, her
fearlessness, her courage—had entered into my body and my soul.
Pressing knees against Whalen’s arms, I pulled the flashlight from
my pant waist, raised it high. Using it like a club, I swung. There
was the good feel of a tooth or maybe teeth breaking on contact,
his lips popping, gums tearing. Two tubular incandescent eyes
stared up at me while the monster once more screamed a high-pitched
yodel that cut not only through the forest, but sliced its way into
my skull and brain.

I loved
every second of it.
Molly
loved
every second. We’d been waiting for a chance like this for thirty
years. Not even death was going to keep Mol from having her
revenge.

I swung wildly, hitting the monster again and
again. But the pain I inflicted seemed to do no good. Whalen lifted
his head, spit blood into my face, and smiled. The devil smiled,
worked up a gurgled laugh while swinging his right arm around so
quick, I never saw the rock that slammed against my skull.

The tables had reversed themselves then. Now
it was me who was on my back, left side of my head pounding in
rapid pulses of sting.

I gazed up at green eyes.

“Kill me now!”

The air went abruptly still. The rain, the
wind, even the lightning seemed to halt their fury as if God
Himself were creating a still-life of the scene. Whalen wiped his
mouth with the back of his gloved hand, did it without the least
bit of effort as though impervious to the pain.

He spit another wad of blood and spittle.

“Little… kitten… has… lost… her… mittens,” he
whispered through clenched, broken, blood stained teeth. “Cry, cry,
cry little kitten.”

From down on my back I stared up into the
mechanical green eyes, at the rain water that dribbled down off his
shaved head, down onto bloody lips. I tried to speak. But no words
would come. Only the silent motion of a mouth opening and closing.
As if responding to the silence, he reared back and away from
me.

Just like that, the devil shot off into the
night.

DOWN FLAT ON MY back, I sucked wet air
through a gaping mouth. I opened my eyes, set my left hand onto the
ground and pushed myself up onto my feet. Stuffing my damaged hand
into my jeans, I approached the tree line.

Bushwhacking almost blindly through the thick
greenbrier and second growth saplings, the sound of stream water
grew more prominent with each step forward. I had no choice but to
swallow the pain, ignore the five senses and focus instead on the
anger, on the determination to reach Michael.

But there was something I had to do before
anything else. My nose was broken. I couldn’t leave it like that.
If I was going to get to Michael, I needed to breathe through it.
Without thinking about it, I cupped the broken nose inside my two
hands. Supporting the fleshy nostril portion between opposing
thumbs, I sucked a deep breath through my mouth, cracked the
cartilage back in place.

I released a strained shriek that shot off
into the valley.

But when the sting went away, I sensed only a
dull soreness where the skin was split.

There was one more thing I had to do. It
dawned on me that maybe if I opened up the flashlight, shifted the
batteries around, there’d be enough power left in them to give me
light. Even if only for the few minutes it took to get to the
house. That’s exactly what my father used to do when I was little
and the power went out. He’d make the flashlight batteries last
longer by shifting them around inside the tube. I unscrewed the
end, poured the batteries out into my hand, reversed their original
order and reloaded them into the tube. Holding my breath, I
switched the light on.

It worked. I had light. Not a strong light,
but enough of a dull yellow glow for me to see my way through the
darkness.

I took off.

Trekking through the thick growth, the rain
poured down even harder than before. It came down with such force,
it penetrated the tree cover, raindrops shooting and scooting
between the now illuminated leaves like a spray of bright yellow
paint. The rain smacked against my face, stinging the laceration on
my nose. For the first time since having been dropped into the
woods, I felt like I had to come to grips with my exhaustion.

I was
dead tired. Tired
and
wired. I was
living a very bad dream and all was as much surreal as it was the
real deal. Branches slapped and jabbed at my face. It was as if the
trees had eyes and saw me coming. But I didn’t feel the pain and
sting anymore. I felt only the urgent need to get to
Michael.

I knew then that Whalen was going to kill us.
That it was only a matter of time. I didn’t want to die alone. Not
at the hands of the devil. I wanted to die alongside Michael;
wanted to die in his arms, the two of us married once more.

HE’S A THIN MAN. Not short, not tall. But
wiry and strong. He’s dressed in filthy khakis, work boots, a white
t-shirt that’s turned filthy gray, and a green baseball hat with
the words ‘Christian Brothers Academy’ sewn across its brim. His
face is gaunt and covered in black stubble. He’s holding a pistol.
He doesn’t say a word when he grabs hold of my hair and pulls me in
toward him.

When Molly comes at him, her hands and
fingers held out before her like claws, he cocks back that pistol,
hits her over the head with the butt. She falls like a rock beside
me on the floor.

I want to scream, but the pain in my head is
too great. The man grabs hold of my hair with one hand and tries to
caress it with the other. It’s the first time a man other than my
father has touched my hair and I become immediately nauseous.

I feel him shiver, his body quake.

“
Two little kittens,” he chants. “Two
little kittens have lost their mittens and they begin to cry. You
naughty kittens. Now you shall have no pie.”

“
I’m sorry,” I plead, tears streaming down
my face. “I’m sorry, sorry, sorry.”

“
And they begin to cry,” he repeats. “Cry,
cry, cry.”

He drags me downstairs, then goes back up
after Molly. I want to run but I’m afraid he’ll kill her.

Molly is groggy by the time she is laid out
on the warped floor beside me. Without a word about his intentions,
Whalen is kneeling over us. He’s tearing off these extra long
pieces of duct tape, wrapping them around my right wrist and
Molly’s left wrist so that we’re joined together. When he’s
finished, he yanks us up onto our feet.

“
Little kittens have lost their mittens,”
he chants, “Run away little kittens so I can catch you. Cry, cry,
cry.”

Molly is more awake now. But she’s not
saying anything.

The man presses his forearm against his
eyes.

“
I’m counting little kittens,” he
sings.

“
Run,” Molly insists. “Anyway we can, as
fast we can.”

I BROKE THROUGH THE tree-line, the trembling
beam of flashlight lighting the way. I spotted the stream. It ran
fast and wide on its way to the pool and beyond that the cliff. I
scanned the beam of dull flashlight over the surface of the stream,
searched for a way to get across without being dragged under by the
storm-fed white water. I looked for that old bridge of boulders
that Molly and I had used—the one with one rock succeeding another.
At the same time I looked for the lightning struck tree that might
have fallen across the stream’s width. I found neither.

My hand was broken, my ribs stinging and my
face split down the center. If I tried to swim, I’d drown. I moved
my way upstream for maybe thirty feet, then downstream until I came
to the edge of the pool.

No way across the open water. No way across.
No rocks, no felled tree, no shallow land bridge. The house in the
woods was located on the opposite side of the stream. Michael was
held hostage in the basement of that house.

I made my
way back upstream and stood on the edge of the bank, feeling the
oily mist on my face, feeling the stream’s white force. I had to
think like Molly.
What would Molly do if she were in my boots?
I knew exactly what she would
do. I stuffed the flashlight into my jeans, teetered on the edge of
the white water and gulped down my dread.

I jumped.

WE SKIP AND HOP our way down the porch
stairs, onto a narrow path that leads out into the woods. Molly has
regained some of her strength. Groggily, she pulls me along.

“
Come on,” she says in a muted but
screaming voice. “We can make it out of here if we try.”

But I’m slowing her down. I’m so scared I
can hardly move. We’re identical Siamese twins, joined at the
wrists. I’m crying, tripping, struggling to keep up.

Together we fall along the path.

Molly screams, “Get up! Get up!”

I cry, try to lift myself, but we fall
again. I try again to raise myself up and this time it works. We
raise ourselves up together. We hobble along the path until we hear
the sound of the stream.

“
All we have to do is get across that
stream,” she exclaims. “Then we try for home.”

We keep moving, playing the man’s strange
game of cat and mouse. All the while the sound of rushing stream
water gets louder, more forceful. When we come to its edge, Molly
asks me if I’m ready. Ready to jump in, that is.

She would pull me in if isn’t for the
gunshot.

THE ICE COLD WHITEWATER dragged me downstream
in a direct path for the drowning pool. I held out my hands for
anything I could latch onto. Body twisting and turning in the
water, I grabbed onto a rock with both hands and arms. For maybe a
second or two I managed to stop my downstream progress toward the
pool. But it didn’t take long for the smooth, moss-covered rock to
betray me. As the frigid water pulled at my body and the rock
slipped out of my hands, I felt my body once more being carried
away.

My head and body were pulled underneath the
water’s surface. I swallowed the water and felt myself drowning.
Until my head would once more reemerge, only to be sucked under
again. Deeper this time, the water filling my lungs, choking
me.

But instead of panic, an explosion of anger
erupted inside of me. It built up and up until nothing mattered
anymore. Not my pain, not the cold, not exhaustion, not the
suffocating sensation of drowning. Not fear. There was only the
need to beat the stream, to beat my fear, to put an end to Whalen.
To get to Michael.

Despite the pull of the rushing water I
yanked the flashlight from out of my pants and flicked it on. I
ducked under the stream’s surface and righted myself so that my
chest and legs were parallel with the streambed. I shined the light
in the direction of the opposite bank. An instant passed before I
located a felled tree that had been completely submerged by heavy
water.

As I came upon the tree, I took aim at one of
its thick branches. With my good hand, I grabbed hold of the
branch, grasping it as tightly as I could. It worked. Pulling
myself up and out of the stream, I spit out the water that filled
my mouth and lungs. Then I sucked in a deep breath of sweet oxygen.
Pulling myself in toward the tree, I planted my right foot in the
secure place where the branch met the tree’s thick trunk. With my
last breath, I heaved my torso up and over the stream bank.

I STOOD FROZEN, WATER-soaked and afraid. But
I was also proud of myself. Confident. It must have been the way
Molly felt so many times in her life. I swore I had to be smiling.
I could feel the muscles in my jaws constricting, tightening. A
smile, despite everything that had happened to me in the woods.