“ Must be,” I swallow, although I don’t recall much of a breeze blowing outside in those woods.
For what seems forever we just stand still inside the second floor of that home. We wait for another noise to confirm the worst: that we are not alone.
“ Maybe it’s dad,” Molly whispers.
Trooper Dan.
My stomach caves in on itself. Body grows weak, dizzy. I feel nauseas.
Then a footstep along the first floor. Heavy, leaden. And another.
Footsteps.
“ That’s not dad,” I swallow.
We wait, paralyzed, not knowing what to do.
The footsteps bear down, their sound growing louder with each step. When I hear the footsteps pounding up the stairs, Molly screams. I drop to my knees.
We’re not alone anymore.
Chapter 55
How long I was out, I have no idea. A minute, an hour. Who knows? Lying on my side on the soaked earth I had only a foggy memory of the head-on collision with a tree trunk. All I knew was this: one moment I was trying to run, bullets whizzing by my head, tearing off leaves and twigs, and the next I was opening my eyes onto a pain and a tight vice-grip pressure that began and ended in the center of my face. Like two separate sticks that had lodged themselves up inside my nasal passages, the tightness throbbing and stinging, making eyes fill up, my head ring.
Lifting my right hand I extended the index finger, gently touching the crest of my nose. I felt the surface sting where the cartilage had fractured, the skin split down the middle. I could breathe, but only through my mouth.
My nose was broken.
Blood combined with the rain, running thick onto my lips and tongue. It tasted of salt and water. There was a sick, inside-out sensation in my stomach. I heard another shriek coming through the trees, not far behind me. Whalen knew these woods like he must have known his own face. His thirty year absence from them would make no difference. He must have recreated them a thousand times before in the solitary confines of his prison cell. I heard the rustling of leaves and branches. Still, I could not see him. His presence was invisible to me. He was a small, wiry man. But the noise sounded like a bear crashing through the forest.
That’s when I felt them on my legs.
The snakes.
Maybe I couldn’t see, hear or smell them, but I could feel their thick rubbery, legless bodies slithering over my lower legs, one after the other as if I were laid out atop a nest.
The garden snakes frightened me almost as much as Whalen. All that rain must have forced them out of their holes; out from their havens in between the rocks. They were crawling on me and I could not move. I was immobile, catatonic.
I had to move. I had to get out of there, get away from the devil, away from the snakes. Inhaling a breath, I issued a near-silent shriek and forced myself up.
A pair of snakes fell to the ground. I felt and heard the sound of their rubbery bodies coiling against the leaves and the pine needles. With the powerless flashlight gripped in my right hand, I shuffled through the thick woods. Not in any specific direction, but away from the snakes; away from the devil monster crashing through the trees.
Without warning, I fell.
Chapter 56
The whirling current took hold of my body, drawing me into its center. I felt myself being pulled under, body spiraling, going down. I had no choice but to let myself go, be drawn under the surface of the drowning pool, be dragged along the rocky bottom of a rushing stream, spit out over the waterfall.
But something happened then. I didn’t free fall to the rocky stream-bed below. I found myself reaching out, clawing for something to grab onto, my nails bending back and tearing. Until I found a handhold in the form of a thick tree root that protruded from out of the cliff side.
The wide open valley lie a half mile away. Beyond it, my parents’ homestead. The farmhouse and the barn roofs were flash-lit by long spider-veined lightening strikes. To my left, the rushing stream water spewed out over the cliff edge. It shot off into mid-air before arcing downward, falling through the black night to the invisible rocks below.
To my right, the rock face. Positioning the toes on my boots, I searched for a foothold against the loose shale until I managed to locate some solid footing. Grip tight, I pulled and chinned myself up and over the tree root. When my head was above the rock-face’s edge, I raised my right leg, located a secure toe-hold.
Pressing my full weight down on the right foot, I let go of the tree root and thrust my right hand over the cliff edge. I then pushed the palm down flat onto the wet, gravelly floor. With my left hand still secured to the root, all I needed was to lift my body up and over the side.
It’s precisely what I started on when my right hand exploded in pain.
Chapter 57
I faced my nightmare in the flesh. Whalen stood over me, green goggles covering his eyes, masking his face. He stood erect, body dripping rain water. I sensed him with every nerve and neuron in my body.
His right foot had come down on my right hand, boot heel crushing flesh and bone. The pain shot through my arm, passed the elbow and up into the shoulder, then up into my head. The entire right side of my body was on fire. I screamed, my voice howling into a night punctuated with rain, thunder and darkness. I heard my own voice echoing off the cliff-side, shooting out into the valley, out over the deep woods, out over the fields of tall grass, out over the valley and the farmlands.
I felt the pain with every exposed nerve in my body. I held to the edge, ran my free hand over the shale wall, searched for a chunk of loose rock. I located a piece about the size of my own hand. The rock was smooth on one side, with a sharp jagged edge on the other. I fit the rock into the palm of my left hand, gripped it with every ounce of my strength. Then, with one swift downwards swing of my arm, thrust the sharp edge into his foot.
He screamed, his high-pitched voice crying out into the deep night. He was the suddenly maimed monster. Whalen may have had the power to see in the night. But he never anticipated the chunk of sharp shale coming for his foot. He yanked his right foot out from under the rock, yanked it loose from the tip of the sharpened edge and fell flat onto his back.
The pain left me then.
There was only the bleeding and a rush of energy that shot up from the tips of my toes, entering into my limbs. I did not pull myself over the edge so much as leapt over it, landing directly on top of him.
I wasn’t me anymore. I’d become my sister.
It was as if Molly-her strength, her fearlessness, her courage-had entered into my body and my soul. Pressing knees against Whalen’s arms, I pulled the flashlight from my pant waist, raised it high. Using it like a club, I swung. There was the good feel of a tooth or maybe teeth breaking on contact, his lips popping, gums tearing. Two tubular incandescent eyes stared up at me while the monster once more screamed a high-pitched yodel that
