She tried to change directions. Her toe caught in a tough root She pitched to her knees, flinging out her left hand to break her fall.
She was scrambling up when she felt his presence flowing over her. She heard his breathing, glimpsed the white savage mask of a face in its growth of heavy beard.
“No!” The word was a crazed mingle of snarl and scream. “You won’t... I won’t let you... Let me go!”
Her left arm felt as if it were being torn from the shoulder socket. She thrashed wildly in his grip. Her mind seemed to burst. Nothing was real. Nothing mattered right then, except the sanctity of her person.
She felt the hands of the second youth grabbing at her free arm, her shoulder, her throat. They grunted soft, vicious curses, almost no match for her transformation in this insane moment. She fought bitterly, clawing, kicking, biting.
Then her face exploded. One of them had struck hard with his fist. The back of her head struck the stone-like bole of a wild palm as she hurtled backward and down.
The pain lasted for a fiery fraction of a second. Then she seemed to float in a weird nothingness. She had the strangest sense of detachment, as if a stranger lay here with two sweaty, hard-breathing strangers standing over the limp body.
A soft breeze flapped the bell-bottoms and touched bearded faces marked by her raking nails. The two standing figures were quite still for a moment, immunized to real fright by pills but touched with caution.
“Glom the back of her head, Zeno.”
“Yeah, all bloody.”
“Is she dead?”
“Who cares?”
“Nobody saw it.”
“That’s right.”
“But they’ll see her car, some cruising county fuzz.”
“So we’ll park it out of sight behind the store.”
“How about her? She comes to, busts a window in the store, finds a telephone before we’ve made miles.”
“Not if she’s in her car trunk.”
“Hey, man! That’s cool! If she ain’t kaput already, she’ll suffocate before anybody finds her.”
“Go get her car. I’ll drag her out of here.”
Marilyn was vaguely aware of hands shoving under her armpits, of muscles straining against her weight. She sensed she was being half lifted and dragged, her heels bumping roots and grinding through sandy soil.
She floated away. Then the pain of twisted arms and legs came through as they lifted her and stuffed her callously in the car trunk. Somewhere in her mind despairing words formed, begging for mercy. The trunk lid slammed shut over her, locking automatically, the thud of a sealed coffin.
She was swaddled in blackness and silence for a long time. At last she choked a soft moan. Despite bleeding where the scalp had been scraped, her head wound was superficial. Her brain resumed its function with sparkles of pain.
She tried to move. She was wedged between the trunk lid and spare tire, and she thrashed wildly for a moment, in the grip of a nauseating claustrophobia.
She fainted in the midst of the useless, helpless effort. When she came to, she was weak, trembling, bathed in sweat.
She could move her left arm a little, and groped in the blackness. By straining, she reached the latch, but her fingers were powerless against the hard metal.
She fought down a fresh wave of panic. Her moving hand touched a tire tool. It was wedged under the spare. There was no way she could get it out.
Her muscles were cramping, but the growing fire in her lungs was the more real pain. She realized she was having to breathe very fast. Her heart was racing in its hunger for oxygen.
She tried to scream; then restrained herself. Very little oxygen was left in the sealed trunk. The faster she used it, the quicker she would die.
Everything in her collapsed. She closed her eyes and wept silently. The pain was mounting steadily. She felt as if her chest were being crushed with a two-ton weight.
She tried not to think of Mom, Dad, the nice young associate professor at school, the faces she would never see again.
The scene tomorrow morning built frightfully in her mind. The storekeeper would return, see her simple black sedan, look it over, call the sheriff finally. They would talk, search the car. At last the trunk would be opened, and they would fall back and ask, “What kind of beast could do this?”
They would lift out the cold, dead body and wish the stiff, unfeeling lips could answer the question. Perhaps in the light of day they would wish it almost as much as she wished it right now in her dying moment.
A strange warmth suffused her. Then the fire seemed to die as her lungs gave up the impossible fight for oxygen. Bright motes began showering through her brain.
Her face rolled limply against the spare tire. The tread roughness meant nothing at first. Then a final thought struggled — spare tire. Pounds and pounds of compressed air, loaded with life-giving oxygen; enough air, taken a sip at a time, to be alive when the storekeeper came a few hours from now.
The thought of the zebra-striped car gave her a final ounce of strength. Her fingers fumbled along the spare tire, found the valve stem. She unscrewed the cap, set her fingernail on the tip of the core, and pressed her lips about it. She depressed the core and the first squirt of air volleyed deep into her lungs.
Only a little at a time, Marilyn cautioned herself. It was going to be a long night but a brand new morning would come — for her and, incidentally, for a pair of pillheads.
The Inspiration
Originally published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, October 1970.
Juliano stirred on the soured straw ticking, the movement of his slender body provoking a creak from the hardness of the crude plank bed. A breeze filtered out of the warmth of the Mexican night through the cracks of the slab-and-sod lean-to. It was tainted with the smells of the nearby bullring, parched sand, horse sweat, the faintest suggestion of old and rotten blood.
Juliano stared into the darkness. The silence seemed to pulse. None of the usual small sounds came from the stable or bull pen, the pawing of a hoof, a whinny, the blowing of slobber. Even the gaunt coyotes in the desolate hills above San Carla de la Piedras were ignoring the fullness of the moon.
Juliano squirmed to a half-sitting position, a premonition chilling him. He glanced at the lax form of Jose, his twin brother, beside him. Burro, his edgy mind formed the thought, one could not look at you and guess that our sister is in trouble.
His angry condemnation was followed by a quick barb of remorse. Jose loved Lista even as he did. It was only that, for all their likeness, they were different. When time came to sleep, Jose slept.
Juliano got up and padded to the open doorway. Clothed in the coarse, gray cotton pantaloons in which he both worked and slept, he was tall and very slender for his fourteen years. The moonlight lent a quality of brown satin to his bony, ridged chest, wiry arms, and an almost gaunt, broad-cheeked mestizo face that was shadowed under a mane of coarse, hacked-off, black hair. His details added up to a look of a particular kind of hunger, the hunger one suspects in the sinewy puma that has survived every hardship.
His large, liquid black eyes searched his surroundings, the shadow of the stable against which the lean-to clung, the barren stretch of dusty earth between him and the bullring thirty yards away, the pens against the wooden wall of the arena where the bulls for Sunday’s fight were black, lurking shadows.
Nothing moved, and the night was as silent as death. The scene was suddenly not good, as it had been three years ago when he and Jose arrived barefoot in San Carla, papa’s gift of twenty centavos easing the pain of papa’s explanation that it was now time for their hungry mouths to leave his table.