Good Day to Die (30 page)

The pain of purgatory was alive in her belly. She had already given it a name; she called it Betty. After Betty Compton, who made her first-grade reputation by punching her fellow first graders in the stomach. Betty did this so often and to so many children that after a while she became a kind of force of nature. An earthquake or a volcano, to be avoided whenever possible, to be endured when there was no other choice.

Lorraine saw her hunger as a force of nature. Relentless, it acted on blind instinct, pounding at her viscera until she bent over, clutching her belly, trying to push it back inside. Which didn’t make a whole lot of sense, because it was killing her right where it was. Better to let Betty out. Better to let Betty punch someone
else
in the stomach.

Lorraine heard the rain pound on the cabin roof and smiled bitterly. An image popped into her mind, a pompous politico in a top hat. Pronouncing the nostrum:
Something Must Be Done About Betty.
But there was only one something to be done and that was to find a way out of this wilderness. So why, after a week of bright sunshine and warm temperatures, was it raining like hell?

She remembered a beer commercial that asked the same question over and over again: “Why ask why?”

Because Betty was eating her alive. Because, for the ten thousandth time since this nightmare began, she was telling herself that she had to do something. Because she didn’t believe she could survive in that rain. Because Becky wasn’t coming, today or tomorrow or tomorrow or tomorrow.

She heard a set of claws scrabble across the floorboards. Her friend. Not a rat, of course. Not even a teeny-weeny mouse. Lorraine pictured a furry brown chipmunk. All ready to sing its falsetto song. And why not? Are the blind to be allowed no advantages? Not one?

“Sorry, Alvin,” she said, “no dinner, yet. Maybe no dinner, ever.”

Once again, the rattle of tiny claws. Then silence. Lorraine took up the pitcher and drank. The warm water hit her stomach, found the accommodations unsuitable, came right back up.

The force of the retching drove Lorraine to her knees. Her stomach heaved again and again. Heaved until bitter acid burned into her sinuses and down through her nose.

She stayed on her knees for a while, then sipped at the water, rinsed her mouth, sipped again. Finally, she got up the courage to swallow.

This time it stayed down, and amazingly enough, she felt better. The pain disappeared, and with it her preoccupation with hunger and food. She listened to the rain outside, thought she heard a car’s motor in the distance, shook her head in disbelief. Then she was sure.

Panic. Her whole body shook before she could pull herself together. Before she told herself that it was time to act. That there were no more decisions to make. She stumbled across the room, retrieved the bag of rocks, hurried over to the door.

“Please, Lord,” she said, her prayer as fervent as that of a cloistered nun, “let it be Becky. Becky alone. Please don’t let it be Daddy. Please, Lord, please.”

She twisted away from the door, twisted at the waist, allowing the greatest possible arc to her swing. Telling herself to strike as soon as the door opened, before Becky’s eyes adjusted to the interior shadows.

The sound of the engine grew louder, roared into the clearing around the cabin, suddenly shut down. A door creaked on its hinges, then slammed shut. Footsteps slapped into the mud; hands rattled the padlock on the cabin door.

“Oh, Lord above, Lorraine. Things have just been so awful. Daddy and I have been driving for days and days, but we have had no damn luck at all. I swear I thought Daddy was going to kill me, but I said, ‘Daddy, we should go back and get our little girl. Remember how much good luck she brought when we took her driving? We should just go back and take her with us. Then our luck will change.”’

The lock snapped open and dropped to the ground. Becky grunted, the sound rising as she straightened up.

Lorraine took a deep breath, prayed that she was not frozen in place, heard the door open, knew her life was on the line. That this was her first, last, and only chance.

“I have got a wonderful lamb stew for …”

Lorraine swung with all her might. Willing the rocks toward the sound of Becky’s voice. The impact of rock on bone ran through her arms, rattled into her shoulders. Packages crashed to the floor, followed by the solid thud of a body.

Silence for a moment, then a long, drawn-out groan.

I’ve got to kill her, Lorraine thought, stepping through the doorway. I can’t let her get up.

But she didn’t strike until Becky began to move. Until fear propelled her into action. This time the force of the blow snapped her improvised sling, scattering rocks across the yard. She dropped to her knees, feeling about until one hand found a large stone while the other found Becky’s unconscious body.

“Do it,” she said aloud. “Don’t think about it. Do it. Do it. Do it.”

But the sound was too much for her. The sound of a stone crashing into the skull of a helpless human being. That first
crunch
and the trickle of blood that would surely follow. She could not bring herself to strike again.

Lorraine sat back on her heels. Realizing that the tears running down her cheeks echoed the cold rain falling on her hair and shoulders. She was suddenly hungry, suddenly ravenous; she cast about for the dropped package, found a plastic bag and felt the warm food and broken dish inside.

Her fingers tore at the bag even as she backed into the shelter of the cabin. The effort to separate the bits of meat and vegetable from the broken dish left her shaking. She knew, dimly, that she had to prepare to flee, that she could not wait for Daddy. Knew, too, that she’d better not eat everything. Knew it even as she pushed the last scrap into her mouth, as she tore at the apple, the slice of pie. Even as she turned the plastic bag inside out to get at the spilled gravy.

She finally rose, crossed to the water jug. The pain in her belly was gone; now she must face the rain and the forest. Unlikely as it seemed, even to her, she was suddenly calm and purposeful. Feeling as if she’d accomplished something for the first time in her life. Feeling like a four-year-old who’s just recited the alphabet to her doting parents.

The water slid down her throat, sat comfortably in her stomach. She felt her strength returning and wondered if she was strong enough to take the next step. The cold rain made that step unavoidable, though not necessarily easier.

“What cannot be cured,” she muttered.

Lorraine walked to the doorway squatted, grabbed Becky’s feet, dragged her inside the cabin. She reached for the zipper of Becky’s jacket, but her hands strayed to Becky’s throat, finding a pulse. Lorraine was relieved and frightened at the same time. Knowing that if Becky revived before she, Lorraine, could escape …

Knowing, too, that she could not kill.

“What cannot be cured,” she repeated.

The job turned out to be harder than she’d envisioned. Becky’s jacket and sweatshirt were soaked with rain, and with blood. The body was curiously fluid, seeming to flow away from Lorraine’s grasp as she rolled it over, tugged the jacket off, yanked the sweatshirt over the bloody head.

“Ignore the gore,” Lorraine muttered, then broke into a laugh. Thinking, I
can’t
be doing this.

But the weight of the soggy sweatshirt on her own flesh was too real to be part of any dream. The weight and the shiver that followed reminded her that she had no time to waste in idle speculation.

Becky’s worn sneakers came off easily, but the jeans were another problem altogether, and Lorraine pulled Becky halfway across the cabin before they slid off in her hands. She stepped into them, yanked the zipper up, snapped the top closed. The jeans were tight, very tight, but in a way, that was good. At least she wouldn’t have to hold them up. The sneakers were more important, anyway, and the sneakers fit.

Fully dressed, Lorraine wrapped a blanket around her shoulders and picked up the stick she once intended to use as a spear. Of course, she could still use it for that purpose. She could drive it into Becky’s unprotected chest, into her belly.

Becky moaned once, then fell silent. The sound echoed in the little cabin, echoed in the rain outside. Lorraine, purposeful again, found her way through the door, remembered to replace the padlock, groped her way to the van. The keys were in the ignition, and she pocketed them before beginning a systematic search of the vehicle.

She found tools and, of all things, an utterly useless flashlight and a stack of equally useless maps wrapped in a rubber band. But no food, no knife or gun.

Sitting in the back of the van, she remembered her last ride, the screams, the hollow thump when Daddy shoved the body out onto the ground.

Time to go. To step out into the unknown, the unknowable. A solitary figure driven through a shadowy forest. Branches clutched at her face; animals stalked her in …

Don’t give in to it, she reminded herself. Don’t surrender to self-pity and fear. If you wanted to surrender, you could have stayed where you were. No, think about what Daddy will do if he gets his hands around your throat. Think of dying slowly. Think of that woman in the van and decide not to share her fate. Better to stumble over the edge of a cliff.

Nevertheless, as she stepped out into the rain, she recalled a painting seen long ago in a museum. A bent, wizened monk struggled to cross an endless, empty plain. There was no water, no trees, just a few blades of dry grass and a sky filled with angry clouds. The painting was entitled
The Inexorable Winds of Karma,
which seemed to have no connection to her situation, because her only break was the lack of wind. The rain was falling straight down.

But it’s not, she knew, the literal scene that brought this painting to mind. That small figure, that monk with his wispy beard and hunched back, had seemed so alone, so lost, so helpless, that his silhouette had burned its way into her memory, whereas the rest of the exhibit had been long forgotten.

She felt that loneliness now. Or, rather, that aloneness. She could not expect any help, couldn’t call on the community of human beings. The forest awaited her, ancient and implacable; she had to cross it, driven by the inexorable wind of her captors’ insanity.

“Stop feeling sorry for yourself,” she said again. “Pay attention.”

And, a few minutes later, she had to admit that it was not as bad as she expected. At least not yet. She found the track without much difficulty, two ruts with a hump in the middle. If she followed it faithfully, she’d come out at the other end. Come out into that community of human beings she’d denied a few minutes before. It was that simple.

Cold at first, she began by shivering. Only to find that as the rain penetrated the two blankets, the jacket, the shirt, her body warmed the moisture next to her skin until the chills diminished, then disappeared altogether.

Only the uncertainty remained to cloud her concentration as she slipped, fell, struggled to her feet, continued forward. She had no real sense of how far she’d come or how far she had to go. In New York, she could measure the blocks, the intersections, but nobody had cut this wilderness into neat rectangles. The best she could say was that the track ran downhill, though even that wasn’t accurate, because it switched back and forth to avoid the steeper slopes. A fact she learned by nearly stepping off the edge of a cliff.

She stopped right there, stopped to rest and remind herself to be careful. If it hadn’t been for her improvised white cane, she’d have become the proverbial rolling stone. Gathering no moss until she reached bottom, where she’d gather moss until she rotted away to nothing. To bones and a few wisps of hair.

In the distance she heard a pair of crows calling back and forth, a jay screaming from the safety of a tree, a songbird still closer. But nothing remotely human.

She thought of her parents in ultra-civilized Forest Hills, with its carefully maintained apartments and private homes. Wondering if they’d given up hope, if they were in mourning. Of course, they’d already been to the police, but how could the police help? If someone had seen her kidnapping, if they’d gotten a license plate number, the police would have rescued her long before this. No, what they’d done was search the abandoned tenements, the vacant lots, put up posters:
MISSING, LORRAINE CHO, 5’4” TALL,
109 LBS., BLIND, REWARD FOR INFORMATION LEADING TO
.…

“I hope,” she said to the rain, “they at least used a cute photograph.”

Time passed. How much time she couldn’t say, because she couldn’t mark the sun’s progress by the feel of its warmth on her flesh. But in a way, she thought, that was an advantage. She could travel equally well by day or night, her only limitation being the strength in her limbs and her ability to concentrate. In fact, if she could tell light from dark, she’d lay up in the daytime and travel exclusively by night.

Because sooner or later Daddy was going to come roaring up the road in search of his darling wife. That was the rub, of course, the fly in the ointment. After Daddy found Becky, Daddy would come looking for Lorraine. At which point Lorraine would be forced to abandon the road, to hide until …

Until when? Until all danger had passed? How would she know when all danger had passed? Because
all
Daddy would need to do is sit at the end of the road and wait until Lorraine stumbled by.

“What cannot be cured,” she said aloud. Then she heard the growl of an engine.

She stood stock still, confused by the forest-muffled sound, but then she knew it was coming from in front of her. That it was Daddy roaring up to rescue his loving wife. Or to beat her to death for screwing things up.

Despite all her mental preparation, Lorraine panicked; she staggered away from the path, tripping over an exposed root, tumbling down a steep hillside, smashing against rocks and trees, hitting absolute dead zero bottom.

T
HE BEST DEFENSE BEING
a good offense, I’d prepared a diversionary tactic for Captain Bouton. She was standing beside me in the rain when I dumped the backpack into the trunk, looking grumpy and doubtful, which is exactly what I’d expected. With a little more street experience, she’d have
known
that she couldn’t trust me out of her sight. As it was, she’d spent a long night with her suspicions and needed some soothing.