Amy turns again to look at Aaron, to see if the video woke him. He’s slumped in the corner, arms folded over his chest, sleeping.
His voice is under the music in the video. “The Kellogg Rooming House. June 15, 2010.”
The image shakes, as if the camera had been set on a table, although the woman is still the only one on the screen. She’s humming to herself, twisting her legs as she lies there, her long brown body full across the bedsheet. There’s a pop. The sound feeds back in short crackles. Then two more. The woman in the video drops her beer to the floor. Three small holes appear on her body, two in her stomach and one in her breast. The woman cries, it sounds likes drunk wailing, like she’s merely confused and lonely. The video plays for a long time after she’s shot, the loud music over her moans as the bedsheet blots red. Long after she stops making noise, stops moving, the video freezes on the image of the woman in her bed, the holes in her stomach and breast.
Amy holds the camera for what seems like a short time. The image of the woman dims and then fades to black. Amy still doesn’t jump; even the thought of it has left her. Her head buzzing. Her vision fuzzy outside the borders of the camera viewfinder. She can’t control it: Amy thinks of simple Chadron, her husband back in Aurora, drinking a morning beer at the kitchen table.
Sitting at the edge of the railcar with the camera in her hands, Amy doesn’t think that Aaron is awake while she watches the video. She’s wrong about that.
The train is going over a bridge. Amy sees this above her through a dizzying matte of tree branches. She’s landed at the foot of the pylons that support the bridge. There are whole minutes of blackness and white noise, the sound of train rumble vibrating through bridge feet. Amy feels behind herself. Her fingers bump the blood-sticky hilt of the knife in her back.
She felt the burning of it before she heard Aaron grunt, the knife needling into the softness of her lower back. It was the crescendo of pain rising in her torso that caused Amy to arch away from him, her body going stiff, legs straightening in shock, the fire of the knife at her kidneys. The camera was in her hands, his bag nestled between her legs at the edge of the railcar. It was only by chance that when Amy rolled away the train was going over a bridge that spanned a wide coulee, and that as she fell the thirty feet through snapping tree branches, clutching to his bag, she curled into herself and landed in the spongy gut of a stream bottom.
It’s when she bumps against the knife that Amy understands she’s still in danger, that the images on Aaron’s camera come back to her, and that she’s still holding the camera, she still has his bag — and he will come looking for them.
Amy is unable to stand when she first tries. The pain in her back saps the strength from her legs, the muscles battered, but she manages to gain her knees on the second try, and then her left foot as she leans against a tree. She can crutch herself along, grasping from one sapling to another, his bag slung over her shoulder, moving from the spot, down the coulee to where there’s light. It’s a narrow snatch of forest she’s in, a few acres hugging tight to where the railway bridge spans the gully. It gives her enough of a head start on Aaron, though.
He will make sure she’s dead, Amy knows this. That’s why she drives herself on, advancing quicker as her legs stretch out underneath, the pain in her muscles abating as she moves them. There’s still the blooming shock of the knife in her back, where the blade keeps her wound more or less closed, but Amy can’t worry about that. She doesn’t want to end up like those other women in the camera.
It’s when Aaron’s bag slips from her shoulder and dumps its contents to the ground that Amy finds his pistol. The bag tilts upside down as it drops, his wallet and notebook fall out, then the gun on top of them. The glint of its plating flashes a ray of light. Amy checks the pistol and sees it’s loaded. She secures the safety and stuffs it into her beltline. She unfolds his wallet, removes his driver’s license and sees that his name really is Aaron Kleinhardt, just as he told her. If he planned on killing her all along then it couldn’t matter if she knew his name.
At the edge of the woods Amy spies the open country of a farm, long furrows of soil ground in by tractor tires during harvest. The trees edge into a straight line where the field begins, along the right-of-way, so she can see a long distance in front of her. Aaron can see too if he’s looking. There’s an irrigation shed or something like it, a wooden structure in the clearing, about fifty yards away. Amy can just make out its flat roof, its wood shingles worn the same color as the soil. It’s getting cold again. As she hobbles across the frozen clods of dirt she can feel the wind blow through her.
She crouches inside the shed once she reaches it. There isn’t much to the structure, one main line that humps in and out of a concrete box dug into the ground, a few pipes that sprout near the door with gauges at their ends, the dripping odor of moss. But there’s space enough to settle against the wall planks and wait to see if Aaron will find her. She feels behind herself again, touches the sticky hilt of the knife. There isn’t much blood. Even with her fall, the blade’s channel hasn’t widened.
Amy isn’t sure what she’ll do when he discovers her. She girds herself, holding the pistol between her hands, and whispers that she can do this, she’s shot before. And it’s true, she’s shot a pistol many times. She knows how to prepare the gun, how to stare down the back of it while loading the chamber and how to flip the safety so that it’s ready to fire.
It isn’t long before Aaron finds her, a few minutes, as if he was poised at the other end of the clearing, watching as she entered the irrigation shed before circling in.
She hesitates, despite herself, when he opens the door, shocked somehow to see him standing there looking pathetic.
“I’m unarmed,” he says, holding his hands up by his face, his fingers outstretched. “Please don’t shoot.”
Amy slides across the concrete floor as far away from him as she can get before jarring the knife against the back wall. She doesn’t shoot. She holds the pistol out, both hands squeezed around the gun so that it looks tiny wrapped under her fingers, its barrel emerging darkly from her hands.
“I don’t want to kill you,” she says.
“Give me the gun, please. You don’t know what you saw. There’s a good explanation.”
Aaron inches closer as he talks, kind of leaning, his feet sliding to catch up. His body becomes bigger in the doorway once he clears it, the flimsy door quivering in the wind behind him, his hands still held out in front.
“Give me the gun and we’ll wait for the next train to come.”
“Stop moving.”
“We both made mistakes today. I’m willing to walk away. Just give me the bag.”
Amy feels like closing her eyes, to just black out everything and squeeze until this man is gone. But she holds Aaron in the doorway with her gaze, her jaw stern, eyes flashing a glint of blue above the pistol clutched in her fingers. She sizes him up, determines where she should shoot to wound him, where she can aim to kill. She looks him in the eyes again. It’s difficult to look Aaron in the eyes and not falter for an instant, to stifle a flutter of sympathy, because of the way he holds himself. His skinny limbs and bad posture, those ill-fitting clothes made for a younger man. And that half-smile, still he’s smirking, like he can’t believe that it’s come to this. All the while he inches closer.
Amy feels how those other women must have underestimated him, because of the way he looks and acts, like he couldn’t possibly get the better of her. But she can see it in his eyes too — in a too-late way like the others — how all this is thrilling him. She knows what’s going to happen.