reach it. I faced Kimberly’s cage just as Wesley let out a cry of pain.
Kimberly had started to swing.
Still hanging from his ankle, she flung her legs forward and up.
A kid on a swing, pumping for the sky.
“Stop!” Wesley wailed. “Stop it! Fuck!”
I jumped, reached high, grabbed two bars, squeezed bars between my knees, and began my struggle for the top of Kimberly’s cage. Slow going, awkward. I made progress, though.
As I pulled and scurried my way higher, Wesley’s voice raged in my ears. “My leg! Let go! Shit! You’re gonna rip it off! Fuck! Let go! Ahhhhh!”
Kimberly no longer acted like a kid on a swing. The smooth, graceful pumping action was gone. She’d turned wild, bucking beneath him, twisting, kicking her legs toward the barred ceiling.
She had a knife protruding from her left thigh.
I hadn’t even seen it hit her. Wesley must’ve hurled it down through the bars while I’d been looking somewhere else.
No wonder she’d gone wild.
She swung like a rabid Tarzan, a mad and naked Jane trying to ride her vine to the moon.
Through Wesley’s shouts and shrieks, I heard a gristly, popping noise.
His thigh bone bursting out of its hip joint.
His scream gave me goosebumps.
“Don’t kill him!” someone yelled.
A girl’s voice from far off.
Erin.
“Don’t kill Wesley!” she shouted. “He’s gotta tell where the keys are!”
And then my left hand caught hold of the crossbar at the top of the cage. I reached up with my right, grabbed hold and pulled myself up.
Wesley kept his eyes on me as I clambered over the edge. Suddenly, I found myself perched atop Kimberly’s cage, my hands and knees on the roof bars, Wesley a distance to my right and just beyond the end of the ladder.
Though one leg lay across the top of the bars, he squirmed and swayed like a human torso—or like one of those inflatable punching toys that swings back and forth when you hit it, and keeps coming up.
“Help!” he blurted at me. His face was streaked with sweat and tears, tremulous with torchglow and shadows, twisted ugly with pain. “Please!” he cried out. “Make her stop! Please!”
Though he pleaded, he held his second knife high, its blade pinched between his thumb and forefinger.
“Put down the knife!” I shouted.
He couldn’t seem to make up his mind whether to throw it at me or Kimberly.
Looking down, I saw her rising toward me on his leg. She seemed to be looking at me. In another moment, she was sprawled out beneath me like a lover. She lingered there, just below the bars, all shadowy and open.
Screaming, Wesley jerked the knife back toward his ear.
He’d made up his mind.
Kimberly.
His tormenter, and such an easy target inches below the bars, motionless, trapped in the moment before starting her downward course.
Yelling, I sprang.
Hurled myself—not so much at Wesley as between him and Kimberly.
I heard a thunk.
A grunt.
I landed flat and hard on the bars. They pounded me. They rang out. I slid on them.
Below my face was Kimberly’s face.
Eyes squeezed nearly shut, mouth open, teeth bared.
Her face huge and beautiful but torn with pain.
Then shrinking.
At first, I didn’t know why.
But as her face became smaller, more and more of Kimberly came into view.
Her neck, shoulders.
Her arms reaching overhead like a surrendering prisoner.
Her chest.
The knife handle jutting up between her breasts.
Her belly, her groin, thighs.
The knife handle jutting up from her left thigh.
Her long, spread legs.
All becoming smaller.
Then the shrinking stopped. She shook as if she’d suddenly been hit by a monstrous gust of wind. It shoved at the front of her whole body—spread her face, mashed her breasts, distorted her everywhere for a moment—then moved on.
I was vaguely aware of yelling.
Billie was yelling.
I was yelling.
Somehow, I missed the noise of Kimberly’s body smacking the concrete. It must’ve been drowned out by our cries of shock and despair.
I don’t know how long I lay sprawled on the bars, gazing down at her.
I couldn’t believe this had happened.
I wanted it to be a dream.
Or a trial run. I wanted another chance, a way to try things differently.
A way to save her.
“The bitch was gonna rip my leg off,” Wesley said. “I couldn’t just let her rip my leg off, could I?”
I raised my head.
“Hey,” he said. “Hey, look. Just settle down. It was an accident, okay? Accidents happen.”
In the Land of Pain
When the sun came up, Kimberly still lay sprawled on the bottom of her cage. A pool of blood had spread out around her, much like the gasoline that had puddled the floor of Billie’s cage, but dark.
Billie and Connie stood at the front corners of their cages, facing me.
I faced Wesley.
Alice and Erin watched from their distant cages.
Four spectators, four witnesses.
One executioner.
One motherfucking son of a bitch about to die hard.
During the night, I had lowered him to the ground. Billie and I had belted him around the neck to a bar of her cage. Neither of us spoke to him. He cried and begged and made excuses and carried on about a lot of stuff. We didn’t listen, though.
When we asked him about the cage keys, he said, “I’m not telling. If I tell, you got no reason not to kill me. They’re real bastards, these cages. Nobody’s getting out, ever. Not without the keys.”
Billie stood guard over him with the machete while I went away.
I spoke briefly to Connie, who was conscious but confused. She’d been out cold during the action, and had no idea that Kimberly’d been killed. When I told her, she seemed to shrivel. She sank down in a comer of her cage and covered her face.
