The Remains (20 page)

Another quick shot of lightning caught my
attention just as I began the sightless journey onto the narrow
trailhead. As I was about to place boot-heel to the soft
mud-covered floor, the lightning struck the ground somewhere off in
the distant valley, toward the field and my parents’ house at the
far end of it. Because of its flat, dark appearance, I became
convinced that I was looking directly at my parents’ property.

What had seemed like a dream was now
painfully real. Whalen had kidnapped Michael and I, somehow dragged
us up to Mount Desolation. Michael was inside that old house in the
woods. He was tied up, held hostage in the basement. If I didn’t
get to him before Whalen got to me, he would die. Or maybe we would
both die anyway.

I inhaled a deep breath, exhaled, tried to
get my head together, tried to think logically, without fear or
emotion clouding my judgment. The distant lightning strikes
provided just enough light to tell me the path I was about to tread
would lead downhill. Downhill toward the house.

I also knew that downhill could be deceiving.
Mount Desolation wasn’t really a mountain at all. It was made up of
several large hills that crested and dipped before finally the
flat, heavily wooded land took over. I also knew that if the empty
field behind my parents’ house was located in front of me, then so
was that terrible house in the woods.

Whether I liked it or not, that was my
direction. I was the blind woman forced to move by touch, one foot
before the other, the rain coming down stronger now against my face
and head, running down my scrunched brow in streaks.

A branch slapped me in the face and my eyes
teared up. Big tears fell and mixed with the rain on my face. I
tried to stay on the narrow trail. I was blind, trying to stay free
and clear of the brush and the trees; trying to do it by touch, by
feel, with arms and hands extended out in front of me while I moved
at a slow, frustrating trot.

Another lightning bolt revealed a landscape
of thick, dripping growth. The sight of it lasted only a split
second. Pine trees, mulberry bushes intermixed with birches and
oaks. Still another bolt revealed something else—something
scattering before me. Something alive, quick and fleeting.

At first I thought it might be a dog. Maybe a
deer. Instinct spoke to me, told me to drop to my knees while
gripping the flashlight, holding it out before me. It was my only
available weapon. Lightning struck. Thunder exploded. The
concussion took my breath away, shook the ground at my feet.
Lightning restored my sense of sight. It allowed me to spot the
monster, if only for an instant. That single instant is all it took
for me to know the truth.

Whalen blocked the trail.

Whalen, head shaved, dressed in dark
clothing, smiling, eyes covered with goggles. Green tinted eyes.
Green tinted, mechanical, night vision eyes. He stood in the center
of the narrow trail, heavy rain water washing over his lean
body.

All oxygen escaped my lungs. Blindness
returned. But not for long.

More lightning lit up the night sky. Another
eye view of the path came and went with the speed of a
heartbeat.

Now the path was clear.

Like the lightning, Whalen had vanished in an
instant.

Now you see the devil. Now you don’t.

WHEN I TRIED TO walk, I tripped. With every
step I took along the trail in the darkness came a branch slap to
the face, a tree trunk to the thigh, a boulder to the shin. I
caught a thorn from a thick bush that hung over the trail. It tore
into my jeans, penetrating the skin on my lower calf. I knew I was
cut. Not because I could feel the sting. But because I could feel
the blood trickling down the calf muscle, warm and wet, the thick
consistency not at all like the cold October rain.

It was a struggle to get anywhere in the
dark. Five minutes of walking and stumbling, and I managed to cover
no more than thirty or forty feet. Whether or not I was maintaining
a straight line was a mystery to me. I might as well have been
crawling.

The only way to continue with the blind trek
was to drop down onto hands and knees, feel my way along the gravel
trail the same way an animal might do it: by touch, by smell, by
sound. By using as many senses as possible.

It’s exactly what I did.

From down on all fours I crawled over the
smooth rocks and mud-covered gravel toward the sound of water. Not
rain water falling from the sky, but stream water running heavily
into a pool. I knew the pool from my childhood. It had to be the
same one. The more I crawled the louder, more forceful it became. I
knew the pool was situated close to the house in the woods. No more
than a couple hundred feet separated the pool from the house.

I was closer to Michael than I thought. Just
the thought of going to him, helping him, offered me a trace of
hope and a trace was better than nothing at all.

I felt suddenly lighter.

I began to move along the earth floor with
increased speed while the sound of rushing water became more
intense. A sudden burst of energy filled my veins. But when
something stung the back of my leg, I dropped down face-first onto
the path like a sack of rags and bones.

My God, had I been shot?

The ground zero of pain was located in the
back of my right thigh. From there it rippled throughout my body.
The pain shot up and down my backbone with surprising efficiency. I
might have rolled over onto my back then, bled to death.

But I attempted to move my feet, then my
legs. Until I pulled myself up from off the wet ground. I leaned up
straight, felt the welt growing behind my thigh. Because the wound
was out of vision, I had no way of knowing if a bullet had actually
lodged there or merely grazed the skin.

My gut reaction was a graze. Otherwise, I
wouldn’t be able to move my leg.

Then, coming through the leaves, the quick
whoosh of bullets flying overhead, slapping the foliage. Some of
the rounds that pinged against the stones blew up red-yellow
sparks. I dropped down hard onto my belly. My body ached while the
bullets came at me fast, but missing all the time as though Whalen
intended for them to miss. And I was sure he did.

Whalen had lived in these woods, hunted them
for food. He knew what he was doing. The silent rounds fell short,
most embedding themselves into the ground only inches from my face.
Water and mud splashed into my eyes, ears, nose and mouth. The
rapid fire rounds burst through the trees, but not a hint of
gunfire or a muzzle flash as though Whalen were using a silencer.
The scene was like something out of Michael’s manuscripts—guns,
bullets, silencers. But then I was no stranger to firearms. My dad
had been a trooper, a hunter, a shooter, a gun collector. I’d lived
with guns for my entire childhood.

From down on the ground I reached around to
my thigh, touching the spot of impact. The thick welt had already
formed. There was a small tear in the jeans above it. I felt the
sting of my touch. Bringing my fingertips back to my face, I raised
them to my lips. I tasted the fresh blood.

The rounds kept coming at me fast, furious
and accurately inaccurate. If this weren’t like a surreal dream, I
would have been too petrified to move. But none of this was real to
me. It was all a bizarre dream that only bordered on the realistic.
At least, if I wanted to live, if I wanted Michael to live, that’s
what I had to believe.

I had to do something. I could either lie
there and waste precious time, worry over the pain, worry that I
would never wake up from the nightmare, or I could make a move, get
myself further downhill, out of range, and closer to the house in
the woods. Closer to Michael.

A scream pierced the darkness—a yelp coming
from behind me along the high ground. The yelp shattered my senses;
cut through flesh and bone.

Whalen releasing thirty years of pent up
desire?

I made a silent three count. Breathing deep,
I pushed myself up and onto my feet and bolted off through the
brush like an angry field cat.

I RAN.

Didn’t seem to matter where to, so long as he
couldn’t aim a gun at me, hit me with a bullet. The whole of Mount
Desolation had become an unrelenting obstacle. Branches whipped and
flailed at my face, little devils stinging my arms and chest. I
limped and hobbled as fast as I could, off trail, in a
directionless panic, desperate to get myself out of range before
one of Whalen’s near misses connected again.

My escape should have been a good thing.

But it turned out to be a grave mistake when
a head-on collision with a tree trunk knocked me senseless.

THE NOISE FROM THE slamming door shoots
through me like an ice cold blade. Even Molly stops her incessant
mattress jumping. She stops and stares at me. And me back at
her.

The solid noise of the slamming door… It’s a
noise you feel as much as hear.

“
Must be the wind,” Molly says, eyes
wide.

“
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.

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.

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.