Coming Back (16 page)

September 2013 (Before)

Christie

The burning feeling quickly came to my throat again, and the fire spread to my lungs until every breath was hell on earth.  I couldn’t lose him no matter how far I went.

Whether I was being too noisy or he had another tracking device on me, I didn’t know.  All I knew was that he was still coming for me and I was almost done.

My clothes and skin were torn in countless places, and I seemed to have an uncanny ability to find sharp stones to step on that my socks did nothing to protect me from.  It had been less than half an hour since I’d ditched my shoes, and I knew without looking that my feet were already bleeding.

I pushed my way between two trees and my foot fell on nothing but thin air.  That whizzing sound came again as I fell, another tranquilizer dart, but I didn’t feel the sting of it hitting me.

Maybe I was too preoccupied with the constant pain of breathing, but that worry was soon made irrelevant as I slammed down on to the ground and the wind was knocked out of me.  I tried to get up, but I couldn’t.  All my battered body would let me do was struggle for air as I heard those footsteps getting closer and closer.

I turned my head and saw that I’d fallen into an exposed riverbed, which had receded to a stream babbling calmly down the middle not too far to my left.  It was so peaceful compared to the stomping monstrosity on my other side getting closer with each passing moment.

If this was where he got me, I wanted that peace to be the last thing I felt.  Not the pain and terror that had been my life for the past months or years.  I had less than a minute to lose my mind in the tranquility of that stream.  If I could do it, then by the time he found me I’d be gone no matter what he did.

Don’t you dare stop fighting.

I can’t do it anymore
.

Get up.

I can’t.

Fight!

Just let me go.

Run!

There’s nowhere to run.  Shut up and let me go!

The footsteps came to the place at the edge of the riverbed where I’d fallen, and I heard an aggravated sigh as he carefully climbed down.

“At fucking last,” he muttered.

What’s that in your hand?

A good question.  For the first time since my ungraceful landing, I let myself feel something other than the pain in my chest and realized my hand, like the rest of me, had fallen on something smooth.  A river stone, tumbled and worn by the water over who knew how many years.  Smooth.  And hard.

“Time for me to start taking some of what I’m owed, bitch,” he said, and I felt him half-straddle me as he pulled at my shoulder to turn me over.

As quick as I could, I swung that rock around and felt it connect with brutal force on the side of his head.  He grunted in surprise and pain, closing his eye on that side of his head as a huge split in his skin opened up on his cheekbone and he scrabbled to find and control my arm that was wielding this unforeseen weapon.

“No!  No! 
NO!
” I screamed over and over again and lashed out with my stone once more.

By some miracle I connected again, a little higher, right on his temple and he rolled off me to the side, groaning.  I struggled to my knees, boiling with terror, rage, and panic.  I lifted the rock high over my head with both hands.

“
Never!
”  I cried so loud that I thought I’d flayed the skin from my throat with the force of it.

As he squirmed and groaned, I brought the rock down right on his forehead with everything I had.  Instead of a solid impact, there was a sickening wet, crunching sound, and every muscle in his body seemed to go tense, contorting him into an ugly quivering shape like he was being electrocuted.

Don’t stop!

The voice in my head was screaming as loudly as I was, keeping me in a frenzy of panic.  I brought the river stone down on him again, caving in his face, and he went still.

My hands went limp and the rock tipped out to the side, clattering on top of others that were indistinguishable from it except for the mess of blood smearing one side.  I looked down at myself and saw huge red splatters down my front.

I turned my shaking hands around to look at them, and they too were covered in blood.  In that new silence, I could suddenly
feel
more of it on my face.  What had I done?

The fighter in my mind went quiet, leaving me with nothing but the awful aftermath.  Its job was done.  I backed away from his body.  I’d never seen anything so shocking in my entire life.  I wanted to back away from myself, too.

There’s so much blood!

The new voice wasn’t so strong, but its battle cry repeated in my head nonetheless.  It was traumatized by what it was seeing.

There’s so much blood!  There’s so much blood!  There’s so much blood!  There’s so much blood!

I brought my hands up to my hair, gathering big fistfuls of it and pulling hard, still shuffling backwards away from him as much as I could.  My vision blurred and I heard myself starting to shriek in horror.

“There’s so much blood!  There’s so much blood!”

It pulsed out of his head in ever weakening spurts, soaking the stones underneath, and I watched in grim terror like those people you saw in movies strapped to a chair with their eyes held open while a TV played a series of terrible scenes and images.

The cold water suddenly flowed over my hands, and I yelped in surprise as it brought me back to reality.  I half stood and then fell into the shallow water, scrubbing at myself frantically.

“There’s so much blood, there’s so much blood,” I murmured.

Not having a chance to dry, it came off relatively easily, momentarily staining the water red before being carried off with the current.  I wished I could wash away my memory of it as easily.

The cool water soothed my aching feet as I stood up and tried not to see what I’d done.  I couldn’t help it, I looked one last time before I crossed to the other side and held my hand up against something that might have been a sob or my stomach emptying what little water I had left in me.

I tried to run again, tried to put as much distance between him and me as I could, but the water had cooled me off too much and the instant I pushed it, I cramped up.  I ended up merely limping along until dark.

*****

When I untied my blanket from the sling-mode, I saw a tuft of bright orange sticking out of it.  One of his tranquilizer darts
had
hit me, but had only gone through the blanket into my empty water bottle.  I pulled it out and stared at it in disbelief for a while before dropping it on the ground.

The cold of the previous nights was nothing compared to the cold of sleeping under a wet blanket.  I woke up exhausted, feeling like I’d been shivering all night.  Even though there was only a faint sign of the sky lightening to the east, I couldn’t sleep anymore and I stumbled southwards.

My leg cramps woke up much more invigorated than I had, and it wasn’t until the middle of the day that I was walking semi-freely again.  By this time, I was beyond desperate for water, and the sound of that stream haunted me almost as much as the sound of rock on bone.

I stopped for a lunch of chocolate and, after a quick debate about whether it might be contaminated, tried to wring some of the water out of my blanket.  Poisonous or not, the pathetic dribble I managed to get from it tasted like the finest spring water, and I managed a much better pace in the second half of the day.

The next morning, my mouth felt as dry as a desert and I spent almost two hours licking dew off of leaves and even the grass before it dried out and I set off to the south again.  Once again I was reminded that the forest was endless.  It still looked exactly the same in every direction.

Exhaustion and gradual dehydration set in sometime in the afternoon.  I started hallucinating that the trees were moving around and walking with me, so I wasn’t getting closer to any edge the forest might have.

Voices ran through my mind, not just those pieces of myself that told me to keep going or cried about the mess I’d left behind, but memories from the past too.  I let myself slip into these daydreams as I walked so that instead of wandering lost in the forest, I was nine years old and playing with my sister, or I was going to the prom with Nick.

I had no recollection of when these visions turned into dreams.  I was utterly confused when I woke up on the ground freezing cold again and it was morning.  Was it one day I’d lost?  More?

I hungrily licked dew for a while and started walking again, my speed reduced to a pathetic shuffle, and the trees walked around me, moving fast when I wasn’t watching, slowly when I was.  My eyes rolled up and I saw a bird sitting in a tree looking at me with interest.  I wondered if it was a vulture in disguise.

My legs were impossibly heavy and even though there were plenty of gaps in the leaves overhead and the sun shone through, everything looked dark like a haunted forest.  I shuffled onwards until…

Bonk!

With an almost comical sound, a tree materialized in front of me as I walked face first into it.  I staggered backwards and fell on my butt, a trickle of blood leaking from my nose and a sharp pain advising me of a new graze on my forehead.

The colors around me suddenly seemed brighter again, the sounds clearer, and I looked up at the tree stupidly for a few minutes trying to figure out what had just happened.  The tree had no answers for me and so, after a few minutes, I regained my feet and walked around it warily.

Sometime that afternoon, my legs gave up.  I spent a minute or so giving them some meaningless pep talk, but they didn’t listen.  I tried to step forward and fell to my hands and knees.

I moved my fingers through the underbrush and watched them move the leaves, twigs, and dirt around.  This was it.  My head was throbbing, my body sang with the pain of everything it had been put through and cried out for water.

“You tried,” I croaked.

Soon, I would collapse here and there would be no waking up.  Not like this morning.

“Love you, Mom.  Love you, Dad.  Love you, Amber.  Love you, Nick.”

Look.

Leave me alone, can’t you see I’m dying?

What is
that
?

I looked to my right and saw… something.  Something I thought I should recognize, but for the life of me, I couldn’t put a name to it.  It wasn’t
from
the forest.  It didn’t
belong
in the forest.  Like me.  It was something from my life
before
all this.

Trash!  It was a plastic cup.  I looked around and saw a plastic bottle, some candy wrappers, and a piece of Styrofoam.

Just a little farther, Christie.

I looked up at the small hill in front of me, and even that felt like a titanic effort.  I couldn’t do it.

What if…?

One hand reached forward, then one knee, then the other hand.  The ground was moving below me, along with the scattered evidence of civilization encroaching on the forest’s territory.

I forced my way between two more bushes and almost heard the woods growl in frustration at my insolence, as if it was
sure
I belonged to it.  On the other side was a small downward slope covered in grass and then… concrete. 
Concrete!

I crawled to the edge and knelt there, looking around in a daze.  Across the carpark was a gas station.  Cars.  People.

A wave of disbelief washed over me.  It wasn’t real.  It
couldn’t
be real.  I was somewhere in the forest and my mind was trying to construct some fantasy for me, something that I could escape to, but there was no escape for me.  There couldn’t be.

But… it looked so
real
.  It sounded so
real
.  A car, parked at the side of the station, started its engine and started driving towards me.  Things started feeling more real all the time and I dared to let myself feel
hope
for the first time.

“Is this real?”

People stepped out of the car and started walking cautiously towards me.  I held out my hands and started crying.

“I’m Christie.  Help me!  Please!  I’m Christie.”

What was going to happen to me now?

April 2014 (After)

Christie

Everything was silent for a moment after I finished speaking, as if the whole universe wanted to know what Dean would say.  He said nothing.

“So, that’s me,” I said quietly.  “I’m a m-murderer.  The kind of person you lock up.  Like the guy that took Kathryn away from you.  You… I understand… if you don’t want to have anything to do with me anymore.  I’ll… I’ll turn myself in and everything.  Can I just have today to tell my family?”

“Oh, Christie.  How could you think that?  You’re nothing like
him
.  Listen to me.”  Dean wiped the tears from my cheeks with his thumbs and held my head, locking eyes with me.  “I will love you
forever
.  Nothing you said changes that.  Not even a little bit, understand?”

It was more than I dared to hope for, more than I could easily bring myself to believe.  I felt like I was slowly pushing the rubble of a collapsed building off of me and when I didn’t reply, he continued.

“I love you, Christie.  I love you.  Say it.  See how it sounds.”

“You… love me?”

Dean nodded.

“You love me… and I love you,” I said.

He pulled me into a hug, and I stayed there with his arms all around me for what felt like a week, as long as it took to compose myself.  When I came up, only a few minutes had passed in the real world.

“What’s going to happen to me now?  Am I going to jail?” I asked.

Dean shook his head.  “I can’t imagine it.  It was self-defense.  With the kind of media that surrounded your story, it would be an absolute public relations nightmare for them.  People would riot for you, Christie.  I’m not a lawyer… but my guess is that they will work with you rather than against you.  We’ve got to tell the Feds though.  Right away.”

“Can we wait until tomorrow so I can tell my family?  My dad and sister aren’t here.”

Dean frowned and thought about it.  “Where are they?”

“Dad’s visiting my uncle in the hospital, and I don’t know where Amber is.”

Dean’s mouth pulled to one side, and he looked away for a second before looking back.  “Christie, the reason I came tearing over here at the speed of light was because I’ve been following some leads on your case.  You told me the other day you had food poisoning the day you escaped.  Well, I found a guy who fits the profile, someone who bought food at a Chinese restaurant that had a massive problem with food poisoning on the same day back in August.  Then he was reported missing in September.  It’s a lot of coincidences.  You’re sure there was no way he could have made it out of there?”

I thought back to all that blood, those ever-weakening pulses of gore coming out of him, shuddered, and shook my head.  “It’s not possible.”

“Your official statements are kind of… vague.  What did he look like?  Did he have any tattoos?”

“I saw a spider one on his neck.”

“See, that fits too.  I don’t think we can wait.  I need you to come with me to the station and I’ll show you some pictures.  You tell me if you recognize any of them, OK?”

I shrank a little at the thought of how angry the FBI agents would be with me, at the huge can of worms that was about to be opened.  My shaky plan had been to get over the trauma of my meeting with Nick, tell Dean tomorrow, and make it official after that.  Dean saw my reluctance.

“Christie, what if he did something like this to other women?  If you can identify him today, that might mean they get found.  It might mean closure for who knows how many other families.  One day means a lot to them.”

The blood drained from my face as I heard his voice from the past.

You’re already more hassle than any of the others.

I brought my hands to my face and covered my mouth, which had opened to an ‘O’ of growing horror.

“Dean… what have I done?”

“Better than most would have done in your position, Christie.  Will you come with me now?  You need to be strong for this, and I don’t know anybody stronger than you.”

I nodded and stood with his help.

“I’m going to stay with you all the way through, no matter what.  I love you.  Believe it.”

“I do.”