really did resemble an upside-down question mark, and when Deb wore them she thought she looked like a satyr—a woman with the legs of a goat.
Mal flexed, and the leg bent slightly.
“Strong,” he said. “And springy.”
“Very springy. With a running start, I can jump high enough to slam dunk a basketball.”
“What about these?” he said, replacing the Cheetah with a titanium bar with a clip on the end.
“I call those my Long John Silvers.”
“Because they’re sliver?”
“That, and they look like old pirate peg legs. The clip onto the bottom of the pylon hooks on my bike pedals. They’re shit to walk in, but function the same way as a tibia does, without any spring. Direct energy transfer from my thigh to the pedal.”
“Now you said you don’t wear your prosthetics while swimming.”
“I actually have a pair for swimming, with fins on the feet, but they’re for training and recreation and I left them at home.”
“So what are these?”
He picked up another leg. Like the Cheetah, it was a thin band, wide as a ski. But it wasn’t as curvy. Rather than a question mark, it looked more like the letter L. And instead of a rubber tread foot, this one ended in a rubber knob with small metal spikes. Sort of like the bottom toe of the L had a sea urchin on the tip.
Mal touched a spike. “Let me guess. These are what you use when you’re fighting in gladiator tournaments?”
“Rock climbing legs. Specially made.”
Mal raised an eyebrow. “I thought you don’t climb rocks anymore.”
Deb stared over his shoulder. She couldn’t be sure, but she thought she caught some kind of movement behind him, down the embankment.
Something big and dark.
“Let’s get out of here,” Deb said.
Mal put the leg back, and shut the trunk. Deb climbed back into the driver’s seat and started the car, peeling out back onto the highway.
“I’m a reporter, so I have to ask these questions,” Mal said. “But I don’t want to overstep my bounds.”
Deb checked her rearview mirror. Nothing there. “Go ahead. No question is off limits.”
“Do you mind if I record this?”
“Not at all.”
Mal flipped on the overhead light and dug a mini-recorder out of his pocket. It was about the size of a cell phone.
“Okay. Why have climbing legs if you don’t climb anymore?”
Deb felt the goose bumps on her arms, but she managed to shrug convincingly. “Because I’ll climb again. Someday. I just haven’t fit it into my schedule yet.”
“Are you scared?”
She glanced at him. He wasn’t mocking her, wasn’t judging her, and he had a notepad in his hand, jotting things down.
“How much do you know about my accident?” Deb asked.
Mal flipped to an earlier page in his notebook. “You were solo climbing in the New River Gorge in Fayetteville, West Virginia. Not too far from here. The rock you were hanging on came loose, and you fell thirty feet, shattering both your legs. You had to crawl three miles to safety.”
Mal’s facts were actually wrong, on several points. But Deb only chose to correct him on a few, and keep the most important one to herself.
“I crawled 2.7 miles, not three. I went back and measured it. And I actually fell closer to sixty feet, but the first thirty were a gradual slide down an angled rock face. That first part probably only took five or six seconds. But it felt a lot longer.”
“I can imagine.”
Deb looked at him. “Can you? Can you really? I was on my belly, face pressed against the mountain, arms and legs spread out, trying to find some sort of grip, some kind of toe hold, so I wouldn’t slide over the edge. But the rock face was shear. As flat and smooth as glass. I skidded down it slowly—even slower than a child on a park slide. But I couldn’t slow down, couldn’t stop my gradual descent. You know, six seconds is usually nothing. Hell, I’ve been talking longer than six seconds. But as I was sliding, heading toward the edge, I had time to think. I had time to actually think about my own death. About what it would mean.”
Mal leaned in closer. “What would it mean?”
Deb stared ahead, into the blackness of the open road, and felt herself shiver.
“It would mean nothing. I was going to die for no reason at all.” She let out a clipped, humorless laugh. “The whole point of my life was to be a cautionary tale for other rock climbers to make sure you use pinions.”
“You weren’t using pinions?”
“I was hammering my first pinion in when… the rock gave way.”
Mal wrote something down.
“Can you talk about what happened after the fall?”
The memory was hazy, like trying to recall a dream, or a hallucination. But parts of it stuck out. Parts of it felt like they’d been burned into her head with a branding iron.
“It didn’t hurt at first. I remember waking up, confused about where I was. Then I saw my legs, both of them bent backwards. It looked like I had two extra knees, and the bones were jutting out the front of my shins. You know, I actually tried to pull one out? I thought I’d landed on a stick, and it was poking out of me. Instead, it was my tibia. I tried to yank out my own tibia.”
Mal cleared his throat. “That’s… horrible.”
“I was in shock, and I still wasn’t feeling any pain. But then I started crawling. That’s when it really got horrible.”
“Because the pain hit?”
“It hit. Hard. As I was pulling myself to my car, dragging my legs behind me, I kept catching my tibia bones on things. Rocks. Branches. I actually got snagged on a dead squirrel, and pulled that along with me for about a hundred yards.”
Deb could remember the crawling. The pain. The horror. The desperation. Because she knew, if she got to the car, the worst was yet to come. She hoped he wouldn’t ask about that part.
“I was also losing blood, getting dizzy. I’d tied my shirt around my knees to stop the bleeding, but I was still leaving a trail. And some local wildlife took notice.”
Mal looked up from his notepad. “A coyote? Bear?”
Deb shivered again. It was really getting cold. “Cougar.”
“I didn’t think there were mountain lions in West Virginia.”
“It followed me. I saw it up close. At first I thought I was hallucinating. But I wasn’t. Had to be close to two hundred pounds.”
Deb could remember how it stared at her. How it snarled. How it smelled. She would never forget its musky, pungent scent. Or its broken tail, bent in several places like a zigzag.
“Did it attack?”
She subconsciously touched the scars on her side. The cat had pounced on her, batting her with its massive paw, the claws hooking into her flesh. It did this several times. Playing with her. Taking its time. It even lazily groomed itself between strikes, its merciless yellow eyes following her as she tried to scrabble away.
“It treated me like I was a mouse. I would crawl a few feet, and it would drag me back. Like it was all a game.”
“How did you get away?”
“It was futile. Eventually I stopped trying, and just closed my eyes and waited for it to kill me. But it didn’t. Maybe it had already eaten. When I looked for it, it was gone. Then I continued on, to the car.”
“How did you drive? I mean, you couldn’t use your legs, right?”
