Authors: Jay Bonansinga

Twisted (27 page)

BOOK: Twisted

2.07Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

ads

But now all the sprains and fractures and gashesâand all the cuts and scrapes from wrestling through saw grass and hurling across ancient railroad trestlesâwere about to pay off. Especially if she managed to put her last remaining bullet through one or more of Doerr's vital organs.

The trouble was, like Grove, she found her vision was almost gone, and she couldn't hold the gun steady, and she really had no idea what she was doing. But she aimed the little thing anyway, feeling puny and impotent in the vortex of the coming winds, and trying to scream above the impossible racket: “Get away from him or I will put the next one into your head!”

In the gray distance Maura saw the faintest outline of Michael Doerr standing up and facing her, gunslinger style, as if they were in a dream or an old western movie. Grove, on the ground beneath him, face coated with blood, screamed something inaudible, looking like he was just about to chew his arm off in order to help her. Maura held her breath and aimed the gun at Doerr.

She had never intended to let him live. She had planned on killing him all along. She just wanted one single thing from God or the Fates or Lady Luck or whoever it was that granted such things:
one clean shot
.

Thirty yards away, Doerr began swinging a long chain with a sickle blade on the end. It swung and swung in the rain, almost hypnotically. Maura began squeezing the trigger.

But she stopped suddenly.

Doerr stopped, too.

It was the sound.

It was a sound unlike anything they had heard yet, a sound that heralded something deep and inexorable and maybe even biblical, and for one incredible moment Doerr and Grove just stared up at the thing that was coming off the southern horizon. Maura finally looked over her shoulder.

Her gasp was vanquished by an unearthly thunder, not from above but from
below
.

At first it appeared as though the very land were rising up into the air, like a vast hydraulic hoist raising the swamp, lifting it up over the cemetery. Maura had only enough time to drop the gun and grab the wrought-iron post, clinging to it with simian panic as the black tsunami finally crashed down, dumping a trillion cubic feet of ocean on the world.

The wave obliterated everything in its path as it unrolled across the cemetery on the force of the eye-wall winds. Tombs peeled away like papier-mÃ¢chÃ© toys. Stone walls tumbled like dominoes. Jumbled knots and bundles of something that looked like twisted tree branches took flight. Counterwaves crashed in the air like the rearing heads of white dragons, tossing and vaporizing in the black tumult, then slamming down and dispersing across the flooding land in vast, agitated sheets of foam.

Maura watched in mute horror.

The entire quadrant of swampâfrom the railroad tracks to the heart of the piney woods to the northâflooded almost instantly, as though a glistening blanket of oily black ocean had unrolled across the land. Some of the smaller marsh trees along the boundaries of the graveyard were ripped from their moorings and sent spinning. Thousands of granite markers tore loose and went careening on the currents.

Lightning cracked the sky once again, flickering mercury-vapor brilliance down on the apocalyptic scene.

A sharp dagger of horror and repulsion stabbed through Maura's guts as she realized that the jumbled, knotted bundles of tree branchesâmany of them now tossing on the floodwaterâwere not what she thought they were. They were
people
. Bones and shrunken, emaciated corpses. Human remains draped in rags of burial garb, many of them twisted and pretzled into unrecognizable shapes. Maura had to turn her rain-lashed face away from the scene for a moment.

Now the waterline had reached six feet over most of the graveyard.

Beyond the trees, almost a mile out, a monstrous gray thunderhead of debrisâmostly shards of foliage and earthâhad billowed up into the air. The swamp was being transformed, and it was exceedingly difficult to see now, the atmosphere so dense with rain shears and sea foam.

Maura had to squint just to see out into the far reaches of the cemetery, which were vanishing nowâthousands and thousands of salt-gray sand castles dissolving in the breakers. At last her gaze found the faint silhouette of one of the two living souls still in the graveyard.

The last thing Maura saw before all of it turned to floodwater was Michael Doerr flailing and writhing in the frenzied white water, tangled in his own chains and cables, his own instruments of destruction. The water finally punched through him and covered him.

And then he was gone.

Maura had no idea what happened to Grove.

The strangest thing was the silence. It was so abrupt and unexpected, so cold and black and stunning, that he lay there for several moments, completely still, holding his breath, trying to get his bearings in the darkness.

He knew several things. He knew he was underwater now, and he knew he had to hold his breath for as long as possible if he wanted to survive.

But he also had no idea how he was going to do that because his arms were still wrenched over his head, still bound to the rails.

The muffled pounding of the storm came from above, penetrating the water like dull depth charges, but it did little to rattle him. Grove knew he had to remain as calm as possible. He knew that panicking meant death. Panic would squeeze the air from his lungs, from his blood.

Panic would kill him.

He felt his untethered lower body slowly levitating, his legs drifting, swaying upward with increasing buoyancy, twisting him into awkward postures. He tested the bonds by yanking his wrists gently against the rusted metal. They slid a little bit, making a weird scraping noise, but were still secure around the rails.
Damn it! Think! Think, asshole!

The thudding noises reverberated down through the water, reaching his ringing ears, and his chest tightened and his throat closed down and his flesh crawled with the first stages of oxygen starvation. He had only a couple of minutes leftâthree at the most.

Something brushed across his shin, a branch or an errant fragment of dirt.

Lightning veined the black surface above him, flickering down through the water.

Human skeletons loomed in the darkness all around him, reflecting the silver light. Grove saw them in the tunnel vision of a single eye. In various stages of decay, visible only during intermittent flashes of lightning, they assumed all conceivable postures. Some of them, completely intact, as immaculate as laboratory specimens, stood erect in the soupy brine. Others, as black and leprous as tree bark, fringed in rotted burial attire and leathery shreds of mortified flesh, floated upside down, legless, headless. Empty black eye sockets stared at Grove. Disembodied arms and fingers softly caressed his extremities.

He felt something shift behind him, in the storm, and then he felt the rail jerk.

He realized Fiona was having her way with the cemetery, but that did little to help Grove. Surrounded by the dead, alone and helpless, he was about to run out of air. He felt his one good eyeball bulging with the pressure, an elephant standing on his chest now. His lungs had caught fire. The burning sensation stole his ability to think. Slimy seawater enveloped him in deathly cold. He was about to drown.

When he was a kid he used to read about the great escape artist, Harry Houdini, and all the amazing tales of Houdini's exploits. One particular trick that had always fascinated Grove was the “Water Cell Torture” escape. In this trick Houdini was shackled with iron handcuffs, then hung upside down, completely immersed, in a water-filled cell, the door of the cell securely padlocked.

Houdini reportedly had an almost superhuman lung capacity. He could hold his breath for nearly five minutes. Which is approximately how long it usually took him to wriggle his way out of the cuffs and then pick the outer lock of the cell, ultimately bursting out of the top of the cell, dramatically gasping for air, resurrecting himself from the jaws of death in full view of the amazed and appreciative Victorian audience.

The memory of this heroic escape taunted Grove, tapped into his rage, stoked his burning lungs, pounded in his skull. The fire raged out of control. The flames bloomed and spread through his body, blazed through his bloodstream, made every cell, every last drop of hemoglobin scream for oxygen.

He roared with anger, his cry coming out in a muffled wail of bubbles in the darkness, streams of bubbles that nudged the skeletons, and he silently cursed all the twisted freaks like Doerr who had led him here to this awful place to die, and the lightning flickered again almost in answer to his outburst, slicing down through the dark water, illuminating the stoic staring faces of the dead, and he started shaking and flailing his legs and furiously yanking on the ropes, and he had lost all control now, and he would die now ...

. . .
except!
...

. . . except! ...

In his convulsions, the ropes on his wrist had slipped a little farther, not much, but far enough down the greasy rail to alert him of something important, something that just might save his life. His heart was about to explode in his chest, but somehow,
somehow
, with his last soupÃ§on of strength, he managed to wrench himself around so that his belly was on the rail, and he stared up at his bound hands, and he saw over the space of a single instant, with his one good eye, his last chance of survival.

The rail to which he was bound had somehow been damaged in the flood, and now it buckled upward like a great crescent sticking out of the moving water.

Grove started climbing the rail, sliding his bound wrists along the bent metal, using the frayed rope for purchase as a mountain climber might shimmy up a cable, although he was never really conscious of what he was doing.

The maelstrom consumed his body as he slipped backward every few inches on the slimy iron, but he kept a tight noose around the metal, getting into a rhythm of yanking, slipping, clutching, then yanking, slipping, and clutching again. The flames chewed up his esophagus, searing his veins.

Only ten more feet to go, as lightning strobed through the filthy currents.

At a certain point, only inches away from the surface, Grove nearly slipped off the rail when the entire track shuddered suddenly, nudged by the storm, but somehow, through a simple, mindless stubbornness that was almost involuntary now, Grove managed to hold on.

Then he made last grunting lurch to the surface in an almost stupefied trance.

Grove burst out of the water and gasped and gasped for air but found none in all the pandemonium near the surface.

Waves sloshed against him. Debris swirled and clawed across the back of his head, and he clutched at that greasy rail as best he could for fear of being blown to smithereens. He sucked dry steel-wool rasps into his raw throat, but still no air would come. It felt as though someone had plunged a fist down his gullet and lodged it in his airway.

He noticed very little of the surreal wreckage or macabre debris hurling through the air at that point. He noticed nothing but his flaming lungs.

He was beginning to lose consciousness, his vision going completely dark as the freight train winds shook him and lashed him and pitched ribbons of torn funeral clothing and cypress bark through the air all around himâviewed in his failing single eye as a slow-motion flicker filmâuntil he finally hunched forward and heaved up a lungful of water.

His vomitâmostly muddy salt waterâroared out of him, instantly diffusing into the wind, then blowing back at him in a frothy spray that mingled with the blood on his face. Coughing and hacking, he clutched at the rail and tried frantically to get his senses back. The world around him blurred in his right eye, becoming a noisy cubist canvas of fractured glistening violence. The din was so deafening now he could only hear a tinnitic white noise in his ears.

At length Grove got his air back and started breathing regular gulping breaths.

Now all he could do was wait and hold on, turning his face away from the chaotic winds, and hope that nothing bigger than a branch decided to strike his exposed head. It almost seemed as though the hurricane had stalled over the graveyard, although Grove knew that Fiona was moving inland, as all hurricanes ultimately do, and soon the eye-wall windsâthe worst of them, at leastâwould pass through.

But the assault seemed to go on forever.

Clinging to that damaged train rail, Grove found himself doing something that he hadn't done since the worst days of the Sun City caseâ
he prayed
. He prayed to his own private conglomerate of a god: part African deity, part descendent of Abraham, part secular higher power. Trapped in that envelope of deadly wind, barely conscious, Grove prayed that the storm would pass soon, and he prayed that Maura would survive the initial wave, and he prayed that he would be spared. But he added a
caveat
to the latter:
Take me, if you have to, Lord, but please, please, please let Maura live.

How long did he hang there a mere inches above those roiling whitecaps? It was impossible for Grove to judge the passage of time. His blind left eye had gone numb, and his body was nearly paralyzed. Every few seconds a wave would slam into him, coating him with black foam, threatening to drown him. Debris grazed the top of his head more than once. There were stones, shards of bark, old fossilized bone chips, even dead birds pinwheeling through the air like ragged black meteorites strafing the earth. Grove kept his head down, his face averted, and his numb hands welded to the rail.

At last the noise and pressure subsidedâjust a little, just enoughâso that Grove was able to look up without getting tagged in the forehead by a rock or drowned by a fire-hose stream of horizontal rain. It was still nearly impossible to see a thing in the steady deluge, but the silhouettes of objects had returned in the shimmering dark, just barely, materializing in Grove's field of vision.

He ignored his exhaustion and creeping hypothermia. He could see that his own flesh was the color of ash now, and judging from the bleary vision in his one good eye, as well as the profuse shivering and incessant dizziness, he was most likely flirting with the advanced stages of hypothermia.

Grove knew all about hypothermia. He had experienced it on Mount Cairn a year ago, chasing the thing that was once Richard Ackerman into the upper altitudes. Hypothermia occurs when the internal temperature of the body dips below 95 degrees Fahrenheit, and it wreaks havoc with bodily functions. Without immediate treatment it can plunge a victim into unconsciousness, cardiac arrest, or coma. Grove could feel all the telltale symptoms. Each breath was a labor, and his muscles were as stiff as old rusted bolts. He felt almost narcoleptic, he was so dizzy. He also had to pee with a fierce urgency.

He was just starting to relieve himself, the warmth of the urine cloud strangely comforting as it engulfed his midsection, when he saw the figure ten feet away.

The figure was visible in a strobelike flash of lightning that only lasted a few seconds, but it was enough time for Grove to see the mangled body of Michael Doerr.

Grove figured it all out later: Evidently the railroad track had buckled so severely down the middle it had snapped, the two separate ends sticking up into the air like the bent tines of a monolithic fork. Somehow, in the initial tumult of the flood wave, Doerr had been thrown backward almost directly onto the jagged point of the broken rail. The rail had been driven like a stake through Doerr's upper body, presumably piercing his heart and a number of other vital organs and arteries in the bargain. The rail was nearly eight inches wide and would have killed him instantly. His brain might have lingered for a few agonizing moments, projecting God only knew what onto his mind-screen, before he quietly expired.

Which was precisely the state Doerr was in right now, Grove realized, squinting through the veil of rain at the body. To paraphrase Dickens, the boy was as dead as a doornail. Which made Grove feel ...
what
?

That was a central question throbbing through Grove's feverish mind now as he looked for a way to cross the gap of rapidly churning water in order to get to Doerr's body. He never asked himself that question at the terminal point of a killer's life. He usually felt nothing but a vague sense of disappointment: The chase was over, and in a way, so was Grove's passion. So why all the complex emotions now? What was prodding the back of Grove's mind?

What
did
he feel?

He took a deep breath into his sore lungs and dove into the water.

It took some effort but Grove managed to half swim, half lunge across the ten-foot gap of rapids until he was able to get his cold fingers around the other side of the broken rail, five feet or so below Doerr's body. Grove managed to tread water there for a moment, holding on to the blood-spackled rail, panting and coughing, his joints aching, full of ground glass.

He looked up through one eye.

Doerr hung above him, as bloodless as a scarecrow, skewered on that upward loop of rail in some corrupt parody of the Crucifixion. The man's feet were bare and dangling limply, his boots getting knocked off at some point in his demise. His black coattails flagged crazily in the winds. His face, marbled in blood, hung downward, void of expression. He almost looked peaceful in his waxen stasis.

The thing inside him was gone.

Grove noticed a jagged piece of cross-tie still attached to the rail only inches below Doerr's feet. It stuck out like a massive step, shivering in the wind. Grove stared at it and felt a strange compulsion cross his mindâall the contrary emotions swelling within him like a dissonant chordâthe contempt, the pity, the hate, the empathy. He pulled himself up onto that cross-tie.

Then Grove did something highly unprofessional that surprised even himself.

He braced himself on the cross-tie, the wood creaking faintly, then lifted himself up so that he was face-to-face with Michael Doerr.

It was so bizarre, perched on the rail like that, clutching that rusted iron bar and staring into a dead man's downturned face. Grove was close enough to kiss the young man. The coppery odor of entrails was strong, and Grove had to consciously keep his eye averted from the exit wound where the massive rail, still caked with gore, had impaled Doerr's left pectoral.

Grove felt that inscrutable rush of emotion again. It was inchoate, dark, and tangled, from the deepest recesses of his soul. He wanted to whisper something hateful into Doerr's ear. He wanted to spit on him. Finally he leaned forward and uttered under the sound of the wind so that nobody but Doerr could have heard it:
“I'm not your abuser. Okay? You got that?”

Lightning crackled in the mist, making this strange tableau glow and flicker like a surreal diorama in some nightmarish exhibit. Grove sensed the swamp coming back to life all around him, ravaged by the inner winds of less than an hour ago. Cypress groves looked like battlefields of broken kindling, their razed bald peaks sticking out of the floodwater. The area that was once the cemetery was now a single square mile of flooded granite wreckage, many of the battered coffins still floating away into the distance.

Grove looked at the dead man and continued whispering with great scorn,
“You killed my friend. You getting this, Doerr? You killed my ffâ”

On the word “friend” a pair of icy hands shot out and grabbed Grove by the throat.

Grove's one good eye popped wide as Doerr's head came back up on its own power.

A sound came out of Doerr's mouth that was neither human speech nor animal growl.

And Grove looked into the eyes of the abyss.

BOOK: Twisted

2.07Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

Read Book Download Book

ads