Authors: Mark Nykanen
Her resolve had hardly been reached when the first bullet fractured the air so close to her face that the backwash pulsed against the tip of her nose. She started to dart as randomly as the drops of rain that spattered against her skin. She heard two more shots before his gun fell silent, and he too began to run.
There was so little light left in the sky that she stumbled twice and almost fell. She could not suffer a twisted ankle, not now. But if it’s this bad for me, she thought, then it’s just as bad for him.
He yelled at her. She had no idea what he’d screamed. A command? A plea? It didn’t matter. She wasn’t negotiating.
Always her eyes came back to the river, looking for passage—quick passage—to the other side. She hoped for a rock arch. There were so many of them here in the desert, their great gaping windows chipped open by the chisels of ice and snow, water and wind. She could climb an arch, bridge this furious river, and head toward the compound. Maybe she’d find Ry, certainly the road and rescue.
But … there might be more of these floods, a veritable maze of rivers and streams crisscrossing the desert like a glass of water spilled on a kitchen floor, reaching out in the many arms of Kali.
One battle at a time, she told herself, and then you win the war. She sought simple solutions, their comfort and hope. But the simplest of all—the arch—was a fantasy, and she knew this even as she searched for the easy passage it would promise.
The lightning had passed on, and with it a more innocent fear, one born of nature, brute and direct; but the storm’s crooked fingers still lit the distant sky, and threw open the darkness to the boulder field she was about to enter. They looked as big as cars, as moving vans, boulders stacked on boulders; but no arches anywhere.
She ran among these obstacles, and dodged their smaller, spectral, shadowy brethren, the spindly trees and sharp-toothed cacti, the hump-backed stones and sudden gullies. Stassler fell back, and she took pride in her strength, her endurance, her besting of a man so clearly impressed with his fitness; but his was the self-consciously sculpted shape that comes from a gym. She’d seen this in her first glance, when he opened the door in a tank top and shorts, and the morning sun on his shoulders and chest threw sharp shadows across his smooth skin.
Lauren had earned her fitness running through the streets and parks of Portland, and down the dusty fire roads of the Angeles National Forest. Now she would conquer the desert, because to fail was unthinkable.
Eventually, he would have to quit. She’d run him till he dropped. And the longer she ran, the easier it would be for Kerry to escape. That had been her hope, to draw him farther and farther away from her student, to make him commit to her; but Lauren’s success had buoyed her, broadened her goals, for now she saw herself united with Kerry in a studio at the university, at work again in plaster or stone, hardwood or marble. At
work
. The very sound of it wildly pleasing, to work at what you loved, to get paid for doing something you’d be doing anyway.
These thoughts fueled her. She’d found her rhythm out here in the darkening night as she had found it over thousands of miles of trails. She heard her breath fall into its natural cadence, so clearly at peace with her flight that it seemed a wonderment to her, these rich endorphins coursing through her brain like the river through the desert.
She’d moved a good twenty feet from the bank now that his bullets had failed. So at ease in her stride that she had to blink hard at the sight of the boulders rising from the water, blink the rain from her eyes to see them piled randomly across the river, or perhaps not so randomly at all. Some of them were huge, one and two stories high.
When she looked back, Stassler had become a plodding, faraway figure. She hurried to the bank and studied the boulders. A bridge? Yes, possibly, though not as she’d envisioned one. More like a series of stones that let you step across a creek. But this was not a narrow creek you could clear with a few skips and a jump, and these were not mere stones. These were boulders caught in a flood powerful enough to sweep them away.
She froze as she imagined herself clinging to one of these massive rocks as it started tumbling down the river. She’d read about the thick-trunked pines that washed up on the Oregon coast, stripped limbless by the stronger arms of the sea. Every summer children played on them, and then died when “sneaker” waves turned the friendly looking trees into giant rolling pins that spilled their young visitors into the surf, and crushed them on the sandy bottom.
Stop it, she hissed. You can do it.
As she scanned the boulders one final time, she realized they’d formed a pinnacle, a tower rising incongruously—as all pinnacles do—from the desert floor, thick and brittle and broken apart by its fall, then smoothed and sanded by the abrasive elements of the earth itself.
Only three feet of water separated her from the first and largest boulder, and she claimed it quickly. The rain, as heavy as a winter cloak, beat her back and shoulders, and turned the rock slick; but she clambered to the top seconds later. She found herself twenty feet above the river; not so high as to instill fear, but high enough to survey the lesser boulders that awaited her, and to spy Stassler as he closed within two hundred feet.
More daunting was the five feet of water that swirled between this boulder and the next.
She eased herself down from the modest summit, studied the edge, then ran and leaped. She landed with inches to spare, emboldening herself further.
The third boulder waited a short distance away. Stassler, she saw, had drawn close to the bank. So let him. Run your own race, not his. But this was the worst kind of silliness, and she knew it as soon as she said it. Her only goal was to remain free of him. Anything less was suicidal.
She cleared the modest span to the third boulder without further pause, and descended to a saddle in the middle of it. After scampering up the opposing slope, she gasped at the gulf she now faced.
It did not look possible. At least eight feet. She swore, and the wind and rain carried her epithet away. She turned to check on Stassler, but couldn’t see him. Where
is
he?
She decided to jump to a lip protruding from the left side of the fourth boulder. If she failed, as she fully expected she would, she might at least grab the outreaching rock. And if she failed at that too? She would fight the current until she reached land, or drowned.
Still, she held back. Possible death, or certain murder? The decision might have seemed easy to anyone not faced with that dark, foaming chasm.
What made the jump even more frightening was the takeoff: it inclined about fifteen degrees, so rather than gain the momentum of a downward-facing slope, she would have to compensate for the added demand of an uphill run, however slight.
She could dither no longer. She pumped her legs and bent her knees and sprang into the cold darkness. While in the air her arms reached out, her legs too. She was the picture of athletic desire. But during that first second of soaring, she knew without question that her feet would fall short. An instant later she felt the cruel indifference of stone smash into her chest, knocking the air out of her.
Her hands froze on the outreaching lip as the rushing water sucked at her legs and the bottom of her torso, and tried to sweep her downstream. She battled mightily to hold on. The sounds that issued from her throat were the same horrified groans she’d made on the cliff, for this was very much like hanging in the air, only now the gravity that had tried to rip her hands from the rock had been replaced by the surging water that tried to wrestle her into the deep.
She had only seconds to lift her legs out of the current, or it would tear her loose.
Fighting for air, for handholds, fighting for her life all over again, she inched her right leg up onto the curved surface of the boulder, then brought her left up beside it. Now she clung almost horizontally to the stone, a burden she couldn’t bear a moment longer.
With a wrenching effort, she wedged her armpit up on the lip, and grabbed desperately at the rock until she found a hold. From there it was an awkward, painful, but successful effort to pull her legs up too.
Glancing back, she spotted Stassler on top of the second boulder trying to steady his gun in the wind and rain.
She sprang up the rock she’d gained with such difficulty, and dove for cover down the other side. He never fired.
The jump to the fifth and penultimate boulder proved easy, but as soon as she landed she felt it shuddering from the violent flow. Then it did move—a good foot or two! She ran toward the far edge, determined to jump without pause to the last and smallest of them, but stopped short when she saw that it was shaking too, as if caught in a quake of its own.
Her hesitation solved nothing, and as soon as she understood this she leaped over the four-foot gap. Seconds later she would have made a slightly shorter jump to land, if she hadn’t spied a wide crack in the bank about ten feet to her left. In the darkness she couldn’t see how far the crack cut into the bank, but it appeared on the verge of cleaving off a broad section of earth. Then lightning flashed, and she saw floodwater bubbling up from the crack all along a ragged line that extended at least eight feet from the river, confirming her worst fears about the bank’s stability. She worried that if she jumped, her weight would knock the bank loose and plunge her into the water, along with a pummeling cascade of rocks and soil. She also worried that if she didn’t move immediately, the bank would rupture on its own, leaving her at a dead-end.
From one unsteady roost to another. The boulder beneath her shook and rocked like a boat about to snap its anchor line.
Hit the bank and never stop, she urged herself as Stassler shouted. She couldn’t understand his words through the storm, but he sounded perilously close. He was. He’d dragged himself to the top of the fourth boulder, the one that had almost defeated her.
She did hit the bank running. Vibrations from the flood raced up her body until she’d cleared the crack. She gave thought to kicking at the eroded edge, to trying to break the bank loose; but her legs carried her beyond even these considerations in the next few seconds. Her only concession to this vengeful impulse was the prayer she offered as she raced off: that the land would indeed fail and dump Stassler into the murderous wash.
Kerry had trailed the river for miles, never venturing close, never challenging its raw authority. She saw no need. It appeared to roughly parallel the road that led to the compound, and as long as its course remained constant, she’d end up at the state highway, which would deliver her from Stassler, the storm, hunger. She was sure of this.
She’d run for the first half hour, but fatigue had slowed her down, and now she found herself walking, though it seemed that every easy footstep betrayed Lauren’s well-being by eating up seconds that might save her life. This spurred Kerry to hurl herself into a jog, which was all she could manage in her famished condition.
At once she saw the small sparkle of headlights, and called to them in a hopeless voice. They were so far away. She wept miserably as they passed into the night. She staggered to a walk, furious with herself for growing weaker. She felt like an ingrate. Lauren had lured that monster from her, and she couldn’t muster the strength to run to a highway no more than a mile or two away.
She closed the distance by jogging for a count of fifty, and walking for a count of twenty-five. Alternating in this torturous fashion brought her to the road far faster than she would have ever thought possible.
For some godforsaken reason, a barbed-wire fence prevented her from simply climbing up the five-foot embankment. And here comes another car. She could have screamed. She scaled the barbed wire anyway, snagging her hands and jeans but managing to race up to the road before the headlights blinded her. To the driver, she must have appeared as she was, the victim of a horrible crime. Streaks of blood ran from her upheld hands and arms. Her clothes were ripped, her entire body soaked by rain, and her eyes were wide with fright.
The car, as if reflecting the alarm on the girl’s face, screeched to a stop. Kerry shielded her eyes from the headlights as she staggered toward the open door of an SUV.
She climbed in, anxious for safety, for shelter from the storm; anxious as well to sit, to rest, to be rescued. And ever so grateful that a woman had stopped. She glimpsed this before she reached for the door, pulled it shut, and thought about how willingly she’d traded her fear of Stassler for the Russian roulette of flagging down a stranger. And it had turned out okay. A woman had pulled over. What a relief. So much safer than a man.
As it might have been, if the driver hadn’t been Diamond Girl.
I
FALTERED
. I
FALTERED SO
often that I lost faith in my own fury. How could it fail me now, the fuel I need to sink my hands into her stringy neck and choke her till her blue eyes bulge and her hands fall limp by her sides? Such mundane imaginings, and yet all during this pursuit I’ve found myself reveling in the most common renditions of murder—choking, beating, bludgeoning—as if each were a secret indulgence, a psychic slumming.
All my patience with the slow, delightful deliverance of death has deserted me. And with its flight went a few degrees of caution. This is the luxury I will grant myself, the absolute catharsis of an anger unbridled any longer by artistic considerations or impulses. This will be murder for its own sake, the sweet purity of singular purpose.
Murder for its own sake
.
I’ve repeated this mantra for more than an hour. It sustained me as my fingers turned bloody from those rocks, from saving myself from the black hole of that flood.
Twice I was almost killed crossing that river. Twice! I could only imagine the torture it must have been for her. I smiled only once during that entire time, and it was when I realized that if I was barely surviving, then she was doomed to die.