Kate opened the trunk. If they pulled him out by the feet, would the remainder of the blood in him come pouring out of his savaged head and arm, into the trunk? Was there any blood left? Val, looking peaked in the little light from the trunk, reached for the arm pits.
“Is this a good idea?” she asked.
“Not the right time to ask. We’re long past the point of no return.” Val flopped TJ’s chest and arm over the lip of the trunk, she could tell Val was getting tired, and he heaved and dropped the body onto the dirt by the edge of the drop off. Kate picked up the flashlight again, and looked into her trunk. She pulled up the blanket.
There was some kind of dark stain there that she was fairly sure hadn’t been there before. Using the heel of her hand to wipe the sweat out of her eyes, she closed the trunk. Its echoes ricocheted around the cavern. Val rolled the body the last few feet toward the edge then gave a final shove. She followed him down with the flashlight, but he dropped out of sight and she never heard a thud. Done.
Sweat beading on his forehead, Val started the bike again, filling the mine with deafening noise. Kate covered her ears with her hands. He walked the bike to the edge, then used its own propulsion to send it over the edge. It took a long time to land, but when it did there was a bright flash, a pop and silence somewhere far away.
“Let’s get out of here,” Kate said.
Val, in a shadow, said nothing.
She turned the light on him. He pressed his hands to his temples, his head down. “You really don’t hear that? Feel it?”
“Feel what? Are you all right?”
“Yeah. No, I don’t know, it’s that humming. It’s like I’m underwater, the pressure.”
“Let’s get out of here.”
He took his hands away from his face and in the dim light of the flashlight she could see blood coming from his nose.
“You’ve got a nosebleed.”
He looked at his hands, slow and stupid. He looked up at her, and she saw dark streaks on his face. Dirt? No, dark tears. She blasted him in the face with her flashlight, and he recoiled, smearing the blood on his cheeks, reaching out with bloody hands to stop the light. The streaks on his face: tears of blood.
“Val—” she said…a whisper.
Val brought his bloody hands to his temples and didn’t answer. His nosebleed showed no signs of slowing. And his eyes...what did that even mean with the eyes? At least there was less blood coming from there.
“Tilt your head back,” she said. “Get in the car!” Now the front of his shirt was soaked. Could someone die from a nosebleed?
“It’s like my head’s in a vice,” he said. He mumbled, and his walk was unsteady.
They weren’t alone in the mine. The knowledge crawled over her, making her skin tingle, and she looked around into the dark, not daring to shine the flashlight. She didn’t have any real reason to think there was something else with them. No warning jangle of the reptile part of her brain, no feeling of being watched.
“Come on, let’s get you home,” she said to Val, her voice quiet. She went to him, positive someone (no, not someone, some
thing
) was watching them. He leaned on her. Well, here was her hug she was looking for. When he took his hands from his temples she saw he’d left dark blood smudges there as well. She had to have something, an old T-shirt, in the car, something to catch the blood.
She told herself it was the bats as she led him to the passenger’s side. She opened the door, found a sweatshirt, not an old one, but one she rather liked, and handed it to him. She walked back around the car, making sure the trunk was shut. Something vibrated. Something down in the hole. Bats. It had to be the bats. There were a lot of them, when their wings flapped it must sound like this. The taillights illuminated everything red back here, and she heard something in the darkness, something heavier than a bat. She sprinted the few feet to the driver’s side and slammed the door behind her. She accelerated too hard at first, spraying gravel.
She took a breath through her mouth (breathing through her nose she smelled the sharp copper of Val’s blood, which looked malignant and black in the green light from the dashboard) and tried to clear her head. She did better this time, keeping even pressure on the gas, but as soon as they broke into the blinding sun Kate started to cry. Val put a bloody hand on her shoulder, and that made her cry even harder.
7
Val quit bleeding as soon as Kate hit State Highway 12, about the same time the hum went away. He didn’t notice it had stopped at first—it seemed so quiet in his head, blissfully empty. For a moment he sat, enjoying it, then Kate asked him if he was all right, panic in her voice. He pulled the sweatshirt she’d given him from his face. It was soaked with dark, red blood. She insisted he go to the ER anyway, and he agreed. He didn’t think the doctor needed to know about the hum, or how the pressure down in the mine felt like it was destroying him, far worse than anything he’d felt the night before, his eyes, his ears, his skin feeling too tight all over. He was pretty sure pressure caused the bleeding, but Kate seemed unaffected. It didn’t make sense. How could one person feel something like that, something that didn’t even affect someone standing right next to them?
A hospital seemed too much like jail, and he didn’t want to go back there.
The clinic even looked like a jail, another long, flat brown building on the outer edge of town. While Kate parked, Val pondered fight or flight. He followed her in, dragging his feet, keeping his eyes on the floor. He checked in, mumbling his name, then dropped to a chair, crossing his arms over his chest.
Val wondered how he was supposed to pay for this, his first medical expense in six years, but decided he’d figure it out later. It would be nice to know what was wrong.
He could feel the dried blood around his nose and eyes as he stood to go to the bathroom.
“Where are you going?” Kate asked, holding his arm.
“The john, I’ll be right back.”
She looked suspicious, and he kissed her forehead before he left. He wanted to go home. He wiped some of the blood off his face, the little bits by his ears. He could hear okay, so he guessed nothing had ruptured...he shivered at the thought. The whites of his eyes were pretty red. In the corner of his left he’d popped some blood vessels, leaving a dark red spot. Gross. It made the light blue of his eyes seem even lighter and more unusual. He raked his hands through his hair and left the bathroom without trying to make it lay down flat.
There was barely time to skim a three-month-old issue of
People
before a nurse came out to get him. The nurse took his blood pressure, which she said was normal.
“Bullshit,” Val said. “Try it again.”
She looked at him as if he’d grown a second head.
“Do it again. I don’t have normal blood pressure. It’s through the roof.”
Kate put a hand on his shoulder to still him, and he wanted nothing more in that moment than to shove it away. He felt like an idiot. His body seemed to want to make a fool of him.
The nurse sucked her breath in through her teeth, pulled out the blood pressure cuff and repeated the procedure. “It seems all right,” she said. Frowning, she showed him the dial and spouted some meaningless numbers at him.
With a little light-up tool she looked in his ears, nose and throat. Then she peered at his eyes and he could feel his pupils shrinking in the light. This was fucking jail all over again. How was his blood pressure not high? The nurse stood up and began to lead him towards the scale to get his height and weight. A vacutube dropped from the desk nearby. The sound of shattering glass made Kate jump and shriek. Val felt himself relax, though, a deep exhalation of tension.
She must have hit it with her hip...but he didn’t think she had.
“You should be heavier for your height,” she said, not looking at him, marking something on his chart before she called in an orderly to sweep the glass into a dustpan. In the slanted sunlight that shone through the small, high, prison-like window, the glass glittered and sparkled against industrial pink plastic.
“Thanks,” he said. He felt better but not great. With some of the anxiety about the bleeding gone, flushed out by the joy of watching Kate recoil from the broken glass, he thought about TJ. The nurse told them the doctor would be in to see him soon, and left them. Kate looked pissed and worried. He looked down at the shallow slices on his arms. TJ carried a knife. If he’d done something to TJ, he would’ve gotten deeper cuts than this. And plus the layout of the bike and the body...he couldn’t have done it.
When Kate said something he had to ask her to repeat it.
She looked wounded, all big brown eyes.
“Sorry. I was thinking.”
“I thought we could get breakfast after this. I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“I’ve got a lot on my mind.” He knew this would be an opportune time to reach out to her, to hold her, to say he was sorry, not because he actually was sorry, but because that was what she needed to hear. But instead he looked at the few glittery chips of glass left on the tiled floor. He could almost hear her waiting for him to say something, but he kept his mouth shut.
The doctor who bustled in was Mexican, Dr. Villanueva, and Val wondered if she’d been educated in America or Mexico. He supposed it didn’t matter. She looked at his ears and eyes, at his chart, and put him on a saline drip because he was dehydrated. It took three stabs to find his vein, but he didn’t hold it against her, they were always a bitch to find.
“Your chart says you were released yesterday from the New Mexico State Penitentiary?”
Why phrase it as a question if it’s written right there on the chart
, Val wondered. He nodded.
“How are you doing?” she asked in a soft accent that would have been soothing if it wasn’t steeped in condescension.
“I’ve been out for about fourteen hours and I’m in the ER ‘cause most of the holes in my head are bleeding. How does it sound like I’m doing?”
“You have a lot of anger.” The soothing voice didn’t help any.
“Is your PhD in the obvious? Tell me something I don’t know. Like why I’m bleeding.”
“The bleeding seems to have stopped. You are dehydrated. You drank alcohol last night?”
“It was my first night out. What do you think?”
“Answer the questions.” Kate glared at him as she interrupted, her arms crossed, her jaw set. “And tell her about the other thing with your head. He needs a blood transfusion. He lost a ton of blood.”
It was hard to be angry at her when she was so damn sexy.
“What’s wrong with your head?” Villanueva asked, wiping the crook of Val’s elbow with an alcohol pad. It took her two stabs, better than most, the second barely hurt. In danger of becoming a heroin addict he was not. He watched the tubing fill up with red.
“It was bleeding from some funny places,” he said, looking away from his arm to lock eyes with Kate, daring her to say anything else.
The doctor looked from one of them to the other. “If you choose to tell me, of your free will, you will feel better about it. Letting me know everything can only help you. I’m going to need to do a drug test.” She let the implication hang there as she unstuck his arm, picked up the two vials he’d filled and left the room: the drugs will come up on the blood test, might as well tell me about them now.
“As if you needed to lose more blood,” Kate said.
“She thinks I’ve been snorting coke.” He closed his eyes.
“You look tired,” she said.
“I didn’t sleep so well. Someone was distracting me half the night.” The other half, well, the other half wasn’t so restful either.
“You’ve mentioned.”
“I’m joking, you know.”
“Yeah. I’m tired, too.” He wanted to tell her it was all right, no one would find TJ, but he wasn’t so sure. Villanueva came back and told him she’d put the sample in for testing and he should have his results within a few hours.
Kate looked at him. Cleared her throat. “Did you tell her about the hum in your head?”
“It’s gone.” He didn’t want to talk about this here.
“All last night he was complaining of this hum,” Kate said to the doctor. She turned to Val.
“Like a low frequency ringing in my ears.”
Villanueva pursed her lips. “I’d like to do some other tests. A CT scan. Just to be safe. A lot of ex-convicts have a hard time adjusting to life on the outside.”
“I haven’t been out long enough.” Val knew he was snapping, but he didn’t want to be here anymore. This place seemed too sterile and too clean, with its white walls and white countertops. A different kind of pressure pushed in on him, but this kind he knew was a panic attack. He knew how to hold them off. You couldn’t melt down like that in prison. They’d be on you like a pack of hyenas on a limping antelope.
Inhale, count to eight, hold for four, exhale counting to eight. Color started to creep back into the room.
“It happens faster than you think,” the doctor said. “You’ve been in a structured routine for years. Now you’re drifting.”
“Why don’t I take a rain check on that CT scan?”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.” She checked some paperwork. “We could have you in by two this afternoon. By the time we get the blood work back, we could have you in for the scan.”
“I think I’ll be all right,” Val said, standing. “Thank you for your time.” His fight or flight mechanism was kicking in, jangling in his hum-free brain, and he didn’t want to start punching anybody, let alone a lady doctor trying to help.
He let Kate deal with the paperwork; he’d deal with the bill later.
Back in the car, Val said, “Can we stop at the Tire Warehouse? I want to get my truck back on track. As charming as it is to ride around in this thing all the time, I’d rather not.”
“Yeah, sure,” Kate said. She looked far away and pensive.
They didn’t talk on the way to the store. Val picked up two used tires, and as he started to move them to the car, Kate made one offhand comment that he shouldn’t be doing heavy lifting after his incident. After he politely told her to blow him, she leaned against the yellow hood of the car and watched him, looking surly, sexy and distracted at the same time, chewing at the skin around her fingernails.
Val popped open the Daytona’s little trunk and tossed the first tire in. He tried to ignore the dried Hershey’s stain that could be nothing but blood. He placed the tire over it, for optimal coverage.
“Is there blood?”
He willed her not to talk about it, but answered, “A little. Looks like old chocolate.”
She chewed on her lip, and it made him want her. Easy, down boy. He got in on the passenger’s side of the car. He bet she wouldn’t let him drive after being in the ER.
“Why didn’t you tell her how bad the hum is? It’s been driving you crazy since you’ve been home.”
“It’s gone now. Been gone since the bleeding stopped.”
“So what was it?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
Kate headed back onto SR-179, through Lott and into the desert to the south.
The pavement ended and they passed a small brown sign informing them they were nearing the Lincoln National Forest.
It started in harmony with the Daytona’s engine. At first he thought something was wrong with the motor, it whined a bit louder now. A belt wearing out? He tried in vain to come up with automotive solutions, grasping at them like a drowning man, but as it got firmer and settled around him like a glove, he knew the hum was back.