One day, when she was a kid, her dad was driving off to work and she was standing in the driveway waving goodbye. There was a rabbit behind the car. They didn’t live on a farm, but in suburbia, so the rabbit must have been somebody’s pet. The damn thing didn’t move, it just stayed still, and by the time Jo saw it and screamed at her dad to stop, it was too late. He backed over it. The resulting mess, the insides of that rabbit, the way its innards seemed to take up more room on the outside than when on the inside, well, that’s where her mind went when she saw the policeman’s knee. It looked just like that. Except where there was fur all those years ago, there is a shredded pair of pants. She cried for days back when she was a kid. She’ll cry for days now too if she’s given the chance.
The policeman drags his leg, the raw wound of meat-that’s how she thinks of it now-behind him. He’s managed to unlock one of the cuffs. She knows what he’s going to try, but what she doesn’t know is if it’ll work. He makes his last lurch forward and latches the empty cuff around Cyris’s ankle. Both men yell out at the same time: Cyris in a loud “No,” and Landry in an even louder “Run.” Cyris stamps hard on the policeman’s hand. She sees the fingers buckle beneath his boots, and when Cyris steps away, the splintered fingers are splayed out like road signs pointing in all the wrong directions, but the handcuffs keep the two men joined. With his other hand the policeman throws the key into the darkness.
Cyris levels the shotgun down to the back of Landry’s head.
“Come on,” Charlie says, tugging her hand. She turns toward him. He doesn’t need to tell her what they need to do. They switch hands and step toward the river. There’s no hesitation. The shotgun explodes behind her, but she doesn’t look back to see what has happened. She stares into the water and a second later they’re falling into it.
She sinks as if a large stone has been shackled to her ankles, but the only extra weight she has is Charlie. She clings tightly to his hand as her nose and mouth fill with water that is far colder than she thought water could ever be. So cold it burns her eyes, and for all her efforts all she can see is nothing. This is complete and utter lack of any light. It feels heavy, almost appealing. For a moment-a long moment, impossibly longer than it ought to be, her heart stops. She’s sure of it. Doctors might disagree, but for a second or two the cold is enough to stop it beating, but then the shock of adrenaline starts it back up. She kicks upward, but it feels like she’s kicking at nothing. The current is moving them, but to where she doesn’t know. Maybe only deeper. Maybe nowhere at all. Maybe right back to Cyris. All three of those things panic her, but then, strangely, after a few more seconds, none of them do. She feels calm. It’s peaceful beneath the water. Quiet. And the prospect of drowning isn’t really that scary. In fact it’s almost. . almost what?
The answer is relaxing. Drowning is almost relaxing, and hadn’t she heard that somewhere before? Or read it?
Her feet hit something and she automatically pushes off from it, her survival instinct kicking in. Charlie moves in the same direction and she guesses his feet hit the same thing. The current twisting them, moving them through a corridor of no light, no sound. The relaxing feeling has disappeared. That panic from a few seconds ago takes hold, its hold so tight it makes her lungs burn.
They break the surface. It’s so quick she barely manages to suck in some air before being dragged back under. Charlie pulls her tighter toward him, then she feels part of him hitting something, but she can’t tell what. Her head hits something, something soft that she’s sure is part of Charlie. The pain is warm and reminds her all is not lost, but she’s not sure if Charlie will be feeling the same way. She manages to get above the surface again, but only for a moment, just enough to see the water angry around her. Charlie is pinned to a boulder, his back spread evenly across it, and the current is pushing her into him. He’s still holding the flashlight, only it’s not going anymore. The angle of the stream, the strength of the current, she’s not sure they’re going to be going anywhere either. She sucks in a deep breath and isn’t sure how much longer she can fight before the water pulls her back down.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
You’re shooting at nothing, Cyris, shooting at nothing.
The boulders he hits are laughing at him, and inside the laughter he can hear them telling him things he doesn’t want to hear. He shuts them up by firing the gun again and again, and his fingers feel heavy against the trigger.
Charlie and his girlfriend have gone, gone into the river and gone from sight, and maybe forever. He’s left out here in the darkness. Oh God, it’s so dark. The moon is up there, but it’s covered by cloud, and all he can see is absolutely nothing. He hates the black moon. He wants to kick it, but has to settle for screaming.
He moves away from the river. The handcuff is still attached to his ankle, the other cuff has flesh and blood scorched against it because his first shot after Charlie and the bitch woman jumped into the water was into the policeman’s hand. It blew apart into a pulpy mist. He walks back over to that policeman now. He points the shotgun at the cop’s head.
“Where’s the key?” he asks, but he already knows the answer. The key will be somewhere in the forest, out there making friends with the hedgehog he stood on earlier.
The cop doesn’t answer. His answering days are in the past, back there with days of breathing and thinking. This guy ain’t living no more. And now he has a stupid set of handcuffs hanging from his ankle. No way to shoot them off without shooting himself in the foot.
He searches the policeman for a flashlight, but finds only a packet of matches. He lights the first match and the rain puts it out, and the second, and the third, and suddenly he’s out of matches, just like that. The only thing he can think of that might help is to throw the dead cop into the river, which he does, only it doesn’t help at all. It was stupid to think that it even would. It does make him feel better, though-mentally, at least, but picking that bastard up has hurt his stomach. He presses his hand against his wound as he walks in the direction he thinks he came from. Then he digs his heavy fingers into his wet pocket and pulls out the bottle with the twist-off cap, but the cap won’t move, not at first, but in the end it does, and he swallows two pills, maybe three-he loses count. What he needs is the shit his buddy gave him years ago, but that’s all used up. He doesn’t know if he can get more. There’s his wife’s morphine-but he vowed never to touch that. Shit-has he touched it already?
He tries to remember how long he walked earlier, and for some reason his mind goes back to the other night. He cut one of the breasts off one of those women, and then he put it in a cardboard box, and then he left it in Charlie Feldman’s house. Why the fuck did he do that? He’s never done anything like that before and, come to think of it, he’s not even real sure he did that the other night. There’d be no reason to. Unless doing random shit is a good reason.
He looks for a track, but the black moon keeps it hidden. He wishes he had a flashlight, then remembers that he does-it’s the same flashlight he used earlier to read the note in his pocket. It’s only a small one, but it will do the job so he pulls it from his pocket and turns it on. He walks further from the cave and river, and he keeps on walking, following the sound of the water because he seems to remember hearing it on the way here, but this time he keeps it on his right. His stomach hurts. Hurts like a bitch.
A moment later vomit erupts from him, and his thoughts seem to focus for a few seconds as the drugs leave his stomach, but surely they’re in his system by now, aren’t they? He wishes he knew. For a few seconds things are clear and he knows the painkillers are killing much more than the pain. They’re killing his ability to think. He knows the shotgun is empty and knows there has to be more to all of this than just killing.