“Al… ice. Come… find… me.”
That’s who it has to be, Alice decided at once. Jessie. Jessie Monroe had always been a great one for practical jokes.
Reaching for the handle, Alice wrenched open the door. She almost spilled out onto the ground as the heavy door swung open, pulling her with it.
“Jessie,” Alice called back, once she righted herself. “Is that you? Are you out here? Where are you?”
Assuming that she and her invisible playmate were all alone in the vast desert, Alice blinked in astonishment when she lurched to her feet and found a great mass of people looming along the road on the far side of the broad, bull-dozed drainage ditch that lined the black-topped ribbon of pavement. The ghostly crowd of onlookers stood tall, eerie, and silent, watching her expectantly-watching and listening.
“Who are you?” Alice demanded of the crowd, but no one responded. No one moved. No one spoke. It was as though they had all been rooted to the ground and struck dumb at the same time.
“What’s the matter? Cat got your tongue?” Alice asked. Still there was no response. “Suit yourselves, then,” she told them.
Reaching back inside the Buick, she dragged out the old, fraying sweater she kept there in case of emergencies. She put it on. Then, pretending the still silent crowd wasn’t here, Alice cupped her hands around her mouth. “Ready or not,” slit’ called to Jessie. “Here I come.”
Gamely, Alice Monroe Rogers set off across the desert, closing her mind to the cold, disregarding the darkness, and ignoring the loose pieces of rock and gravel that threatened to turn beneath her feet. It wasn’t until she crossed the ditch that she discovered the ghostly shapes weren’t people after all. What she had taken for a crowd of silent men and women was actually a thick stand of cholla. The tall, spine-covered cactus branches reached out in all directions, grabbing at Alice ’s clothing as she staggered past, snagging her skirt and tugging at the thread in her too-skimpy cotton sweater.
As she dodged between cacti, Alice came to a sudden puzzling realization. Jessie’s on a walker. What in God’s name is she doing out here in the middle of the desert? Susan and I must not be the only ones who are dipping into the Dewar’s.
Panting with effort, Alice stopped and took stock. “Jessie, come on out,” she called. “I give up. You win. It’s too cold to play anymore, too cold and too dark. Come help me find the car keys so we can go home.”
She stood still and listened. There was no answer, but there was something-a rustling of some kind that came from almost directly behind her. Alice was just starting to turn around to check on the noise when whatever it was crashed into her from behind. Because of her half-turn, the full body blow that should have sent her face-first into the nearest cactus hit her from the side instead. She reeled under the jarring impact and then went tottering sideways. She screamed as needle-sharp spines plunged deep into her paper-thin flesh, then she fell.
The cactus was far taller than Alice, but it was also far more delicate. The brittle, spine-covered branches dropped some of their needles and then broke off as she plowed into them. Under her weight, one shallowly rooted trunk broke off at ground level and collapsed. That first towering plant keeled over, and an accompanying domino effect brought down several of its near neighbors. When the cacti came to rest, so did Alice. She found herself lying face-up, her body impaled on a thousand razor-sharp, three inch-long needles, each of which burned into her body with the appalling intensity of an individual bee sting.
For a moment she lay there in agony, so stunned by shock that she didn’t dare move or breathe or even open her eyes. Locked in a pain-filled daze, she failed to notice the muffled sound of nearby footsteps. When they finally penetrated her consciousness, Alice realized someone was standing over her. That’s when she opened her eyes.
The awful pain remained but the terrible all-consuming darkness-a darkness that had verged on blindness itself-was gone. Overhead, beyond the shadow of whoever was standing above her, the sky blazed with the light of a thousand pinprick stars. It was still night, but the glowing starlight made it seem almost as bright as day.
My glasses, Alice realized at once. She had been wearing her glasses, the heavy-duty wraparound sunglasses Dr. Toon had given her after her cataract surgery. The act of falling had mocked the glasses away and turned the solid darkness to silvery light.
If the cholla hadn’t hurt so damned much, Alice might have laughed aloud, but this was no time for joking around.
“Jessie,” Alice managed. “I’m hurt. I’ve fallen in the cactus. You’ve got to help me up, but be careful the cholla doesn’t yet you, too.”
That’s when she noticed that the person towering over her wasn’t on walker. He or she was far too tall and too broad to be Alice ’s sister Jessie. Not only that, the face was all wrong too. The features were distorted-mashed together in a strange, monstrous way. Through the haze of pain Alice realized that the person leaning over her was wearing a stocking over his face.
When she spoke again, whatever booze might have once been in her system seemed long gone. “Please help me,” she begged. “If you’ll just take my hand…”
At once a gloved hand reached out and took Alice ’s, but instead of making an effort to lift the woman to her feet, the fingers clamped shut around her wrist, imprisoning it in a bruising, viselike grip. Roughly the gloved fingers peeled back the cuff of Alice ’s worn sweater, exposing the bare skin of her forearm. Alice yelped in pain as the yarn in the sweater moved across the cactus barbs impaled in the other side of her arm, driving them farther into her flesh.
“Stop,” she commanded. “Please don’t try to move the sweater. It hurts too much. Just help me-”
That was when she saw the syringe for the first time. Some-how it materialized from nowhere, appearing in her captor’s other hand. His rubber-gloved fingers held it upright, ready to plunge it into the naked flesh of Alice ’s captive wrist.
Alice ’s son, Clete, was a diabetic and had been for years. As a consequence, Alice was no stranger to syringes and needles. She knew them as distributors of the life-sustaining insulin that had kept her son alive, and as devices that had delivered the pain-killing drugs that had helped ease her husband through his final illness. At first she thought the person standing over her was trying to help her, that the needle held some kind of painkiller that would somehow counteract the poison pumping into her body from the cholla needles. Maybe he was giving her something that would combat the mind-numbing pain.
The metal part of the needle flashed briefly in the starlight and then she felt the sharp jab in her wrist. “Thank you,” she murmured. “I’m sure that will help. Now, if you’ll just help me up.”
Instead, the man produced another needle and shoved that one into her arm as well.
What if this isn’t a painkiller at all? Alice wondered. What if it’s something else, like poison, maybe? What if he’s trying to kill me?
“What are you doing?” she asked. Her tongue seemed to grow thick in her mouth. She had a hard time forming the words, but by then he had pulled yet a third syringe out of his pocket. She struggled and tried to yank her arm free, but even the smallest movement ground hundreds of cholla spines deeper into her back, legs, and arms. Once again the needle of a loaded syringe plunged into her arm.