After (60 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

As they made their way around to the eastern slope of a hill, Nix caught sight of a large town nestled in the valley below them. A grid of brick cubes set between rigid lines of gray-brown.

“Jonesboro.” Gareth stretched an arm and pointed. “See that big square at the center of the town? There's a statue there. A memorial. I remember it from when I was a kid. Asking my dad what 'veteran' meant.”

They were closer than she'd thought. Hell, they could have spent another day and night in their little cave, with their steaming pool. Today, they could have gone for a swim in the lake where it was warmed by the spring. She hadn't swam in years. That would have been nice.

Maybe two miles north of the main highway that ran adjacent to Jonesboro, on the other side of a line of railroad tracks was a narrow dirt road that served the seven or eight houses that had sheltered odd families that hadn't wanted to live in town, all those decades ago, and where no one but fugitives would dare to stay, now. As good a place as any to nest for the night.

“I should go to town. Get us some food.”

“Yeah.”

He left. This time it was easy. There was no snake coiling in her belly. He'd be back. Alone. And she wouldn't run away. She'd wait for him and he'd come back alone and they would eat together. Then, maybe, he would read to her. Or tell her a story, one of the ones he remembered from all the books he'd read. And then they would go to bed. Together. Warmed by each other’s body. Lulled by the intertwining ins and outs of their breaths, their hope and want and joy stirred, caressed by a single fingertip tracing along the curves of a jaw, tracing the inside crease of an elbow.

Only. Instead of the snake in her belly there was a strange feeling in her chest.

Like her heart and lungs were gone. Or stopped. The center of her felt empty. Light.

He'd be okay. He had his gun. Sure, it was sketchy traveling alone, drifting too far from town. Men with guns and urges too dark for women. The wrong kind of brutality meant punishment and death. Only sanctioned rapes and tattoos and brands allowed.

So sometimes they took men. For sport. Out of poverty.

But he had his gun, his wits. He'd be fine.

She watched the sun sink below a fat, heavy cloud cluster, turning the sky into a beautiful bruise, all bleeding blues and violets. Sometimes the world didn't look real.

Now, with the sky like that, and the trees all the wrong colors, the dying of the leaves more lovely than their verdant birth and life, it was like nothing could be true. Everyone hadn't died, really. Bleeding like those clouds from their mouths and eyes and noses and ears and fingers. Her mom hadn't died like that. Those bloody bruises rolling over the white sun, those wrong-colored trees weeping red and yellow tears, a scarlet 'S' and her cunt watered with the sperm of a hundred men were just brush-strokes of a crazy man hung on a wall in the gallery her mom had taken her to when she was six or seven.

Her bladder ached. It would have been nice if every barn and abandoned shack had cupboards overflowing with rolls of snow-white, feather-soft toilet paper, like their ghost-town hotel had. And clean sheets. This joint at least had one roll, still nested in its wrapping of clear plastic, sagging in emptiness in the decades since the first three rolls had been torn from its membrane. She stuffed a wad into her pocket and after glancing out the windows, traipsed into the woods.

The hiss of liquid hitting leaves. That smell. The cold air on her face and bare ass and thighs and crotch. The sensation of urine gushing from her body, the pressure pushing it out, the easing of her bladder. Life. Her fragile, brief life in those old, enduring woods. It would be nice to be a bear.

Bears have big claws and teeth and don't carry guns to shoot people with. Cold heavy smooth metal, perfect for her hand. Like a glove. A baby rattle.

No wind, but the yellowed grass danced in her path as the tall blades caught fat drops of rain, bent under the weight, dropped it, and unburdened, sprang back up. Dark spatters exploded inches of dirt on the porch planks under patches of missing roof.

Rushing to get in before her clothes got wet with no way to dry them, not wanting to choose, again, between setting off in the morning in damp gear, or stuffing everything into her pack to mildew, she noticed too late.

Something wrong. A wrong smell. A wrong sound or silence. Or the air felt too full.

Someone was there.

Not Gareth.

Safety off. Still, breath held, she listened. That wrong silence.

Gun leveled on the dark, she backed toward the still-open door. Listening.

Looking for shadows moving in the dark. But everything was silence and stillness.

Back. Back.

The dull gray shape of their packs bent the dark just past the slanted rectangle of light thrown through the door, onto the floor. Not scavengers, then.

A dull clomp, the sound of her boot heel meeting wood. Clomp. Clomp.

Something brushed against her ankle, dull and numb through the high-laced leather. She glanced down. Caught her breath and kicked at the corn snake curving around her ankle.

Fuck. No. A curve of rusty metal.

The iron snake struck, yanked her feet from under her. The floor pounded her shoulder, her head. She aimed her gun at the blank dark. A blur flew by her eyes, squeezed her throat. She arched her back, craned her neck, looked back, got a shot off.

But something struck her hand. Now her arm was pinned, a big black boot crushed her wrist down on the floor. The noose on her neck choked. The man standing on her arm pried her fingers back. Took her gun.

Three.

She kicked hard, got her toe into a kneecap and one thumped to the floor.

Screaming.

Up. Almost. But the noose yanked her down. When one leaned in, she swung.

Broke his nose. To get leverage on her leash, she rolled, caught the rope, kicked at the one holding it, got his elbow and another scream.

It didn't matter. They got her inside, lashed her noose to the radiator, got her hands tied. Got started.

There was something about a woman. They hadn't been sure. They were glad.

But by the time they had her pants and underwear down, before the first one was inside her, she was gone. Gone from that body, under that man, gone from that rotting house in that dead outpost. It wasn't an act of will. Something she did. It just happened to her. It always happened to her.

For a while there was nothing, or almost nothing, nothing but a lot of gray, mostly dark gray almost black. Shadows, just shadows that shifted and sometimes they moved apart or other times came together, they overlapped and turned into the same shadow, twice as black. Blackness would fade a little, and around it or inside it there would be gray and also a sound, some sounds that were like the panting of an overworked dog, ribs showing corrugated through its short black coat, lolling long pink tongue hanging, quivering, drool dripping from the rounded, curling tip.

The nothingness receded as her head slammed back against the plank floor and for a second, she knew everything. It was the third one inside her now, his fists tearing her hair out and pounding her head on the floor and screaming at her because she was too still, too soft, her eyes too vacant. The nothingness was gone and he beat her head against the floor again and his eyes were bloodshot and his face was red and when he breathed out a clear dribble of snot advanced out one nostril. He kept hammering her head against the floor until he came. Then he stopped and there was nothing again, nothing but blacks and grays pulling apart and covering each other up.

Then she was bleeding. Bleeding everywhere. Warm wet spreading over her chest and belly and sex, her hands, her face. But it wasn't hers. It was streaming down on her. Wet and warm, streaming down. It didn't smell like blood, though.

They were pissing on her.

So they'd kill her. Because men don't piss on what they're about to fuck. And if they weren't going to fuck her any more, they were going to kill her.

When the shot came, it was strange because she thought they would have done it with their hands and also she could still feel the hot urine splashing down on her and she didn't feel any pain, not bullet pain like something ripping through her body but maybe she was just numb, still, with nothing. But gunfire clapped through the place again and again and the rain of piss stopped and there were footsteps and another shot.

Hands on her face and a voice in her ear, her name. His voice.

The nothing rolled back a little and her neck burned where the rope had rubbed her skin away, left the flesh raw.

Gareth's fingers barely brushed her temples and he whispered her name. At the center of the grays and blacks there was a color, warm like honey. And points of pink.

When she swam up, broke the surface of the nothingness, it was his face, his hand, his eyes like two puddles of blood each with a large silvered stone at the center. Even when she tried to focus, she couldn't unblur his fingers. But it wasn't her. His hand was shaking.

He whispered, “Nix.” His voice crashed and shattered on her name.

When he touched the rope, she felt his trembling fingers fluttering against her throat. It took a long time because he was being so careful, but after a while, she felt the strangling noose loosen. Not letting it touch her face, he lifted the loop of rope over her head. Then his shaking hands lit on the rope at her wrists but he couldn't get the knot untied.

His red eyes. His shaking hands. All of him tight and pale and shaking.

She said, “Use your knife.”

It looked like the sound of her voice hurt him; he flinched and shuddered and fixed his stones-in-blood eyes on her eyes, held her gaze as he fished the knife from his pocket, then focused on his blade and her bonds, and cut through the rope.

She wanted to get up, needed to get the clinging stink of their urine off her bruised skin, but excruciating sharp pain drilled through her head when she lifted it an inch from the floor. That wouldn't have stopped her, but Gareth was kneeling there with his red eyes and shaking hands, dying to do something for her, terrified to touch her.

Afraid his touch would hurt her.

So she rescued him. Said, “Help me.”

He met her eyes and nodded and touched his fingers to her wet, torn shirt, closed it over her.

“No,” she said. “Get me out of all this piss-soaked gear.”

Now that he had a clear mandate, something simple he could do for her, a way to be better than useless, he worked efficiently, still terribly gentle. Got her boots unlaced, got them off. Looked into her eyes to make sure, then worked her pants and underwear, bunched at her ankles, off. Then she let him lift her from the floor, cradling her head with one hand, her back with the other, leaned on his chest as he slid her urine-drenched shirt off her shoulders, down her arms.

He lifted her from the puddle of piss and carried her outside, into the pouring rain.

Sitting down on a patch of grass, he cradled her in the basin of his crossed legs and helped the rain to wash their urine from her hair. While he combed his fingers through the matted strands, slowly, gently, over and over, she settled against him, soft and still.

Gareth kept leaning over her shoulder, checking to make sure her eyes were open, afraid she would slip away from him because there was blood mixed with the piss that was running in rivulets from the ends of her hair, down her back, down her arms, over her chest and belly.

The icy rain was good. She didn't even feel cold. Just cleaner with each drop that fell and pelted her skin. But Gareth was shaking. Maybe it wasn't that he was cold, though. Rattling, like a lid on a pot of boiling water.

She told him, “I won't cry. I just don't, I mean. When this happens, I never cry, anymore. You can cry, though. If you're sitting there trying not to because of me.”

There was that same trembling where her back pressed against his chest, his fingers quivering as they combed through her hair. After a while, though, he reached down, touched her wrist, just below the seeping red wound where the rope had chafed through her skin, and convulsed and folded in on her, his arms encircling but barely touching, his mouth pressed to the crown of her head, his hot breath seeping through her wet hair. And then he broke. Soft wet choking sobs she could hardly hear.

What had he seen? Just three arcs of urine, steaming in the frigid cold, lit up bronze and gold by the setting sun? Or had he seen the third, beating her senseless as he fucked? She let him go on holding her, his tears streaming into her hair with the rain.

Then she let him pick her up, carry her inside, get her a set of clothes from her pack. Let him put her socks and boots on for her because bending down hurt her head so bad she thought she might throw up. The bandages he put on her wrists made her look like a failed suicide.

Gareth dragged the bodies into the field. There, the coyotes and vultures would take care of them. The whole time, dragging them off, one by one, the noose they'd slung around her neck cinched tight around each man's ankles, he backed away from the house with his burden and returned without it, never taking his eyes off the doorway, framing her watching him. It worried her. For a long time to come, he would be afraid to let her out of his sight again.

Neither of them could eat the food he'd bought in town, the reason he'd been gone when those men had come. Instead, Nix took a candle and searched all the drawers in all the rooms for any clothing that would serve in place of the shirt and pants they'd soaked in their piss, and Gareth drifted along behind her, room after room, sliding down the hallways like a shadow, dark and silent. She found a long-sleeved tee—gray with the cryptic letters UAMS in black across the front—that looked like it would fit all right. And two pairs of pants, the kind she liked best with big pockets on the thighs. Too big, but not by much.

No way would she be able to fall asleep, but what was there to do but get in bed?

No point wasting candles or sitting in the pitch dark. So she made a bed and got under the blankets. Gareth stayed perched on a hard wooden chair, pretending to look out the window when really he was watching her out of the corner of his eye.