Red Queen (12 page)

I ran into problems getting a slab of beef off the hook. I didn't know where these steers had been raised but there must have been plenty to graze upon. The meat was heavier than I could lift.

Yet my fear gave me added strength, and trial and error taught me to use more of my leg strength to lift rather than just my arms. I finally managed to free one of the smaller steers and drop it on the floor. Immediately I set to work trying to unscrew its hook.

Unfortunately, by now I could feel only two fingers on each hand, and none of them was a thumb. I couldn't get a grip on the hook. Plus the hook had either been screwed in place by a machine or else it was frozen in place. Whatever, it refused to budge.

“Damn!” I screamed. “God damn you!”

A minute later I got a brilliant idea.

I prayed to God it would work.

Yeah, so I was a hypocrite, so what. I was dying.

I had made a mistake removing the meat before the hook.
The reason was simple. The hooks were deeply ingrained in the meat. The beef had bulk and weight. If I could get my arms around one of the smaller steers and rotate it, I should be able to multiply my leverage tenfold.

I had already bumped off the smallest steer. I tackled the next one in size; it was substantially larger. But I managed to get a solid grip on its ribs and hindquarters. Looking up, I assumed the hooks had been screwed in clockwise. I began to twist counterclockwise.

I talked to the steer as I worked, like it was my partner in escape.

“Don't let that hook rip you apart inside. You were born for better things than to help fatten a bunch of fat tourists. Even in death you can save a life. You can be a hero. You and I, we're a team. Just hold together and help me tear your hook out of the ceiling.”

Wrestling with the steer, trying to get it to spin around, proved exhausting. I was just about to quit when suddenly the hook screeched. It did more than that; it twisted more than a half circle around. After that it was easy to unscrew the hook, I just had to give the steer a shove every now and then.

Two minutes later the meat fell to the floor, and the impact helped shake the hook free of the beef. Grabbing it by its pointed end, I hurried to the door, finally ready to try out my plan.

I discovered I had another problem.

While struggling with the meat and the hooks, I had managed to keep my fingers warm. But I had forgotten about my feet. I had spent too long standing in basically the same spot.

Now, I couldn't feel my toes. Worse, the soles of my feet had gone numb. It was weird, the instant I realized how bad they were, I began to have trouble standing. I shot out an arm to keep from falling. I was tempted to sit down, to rest and rub them and try to restore circulation that way. But it was a fool's temptation. If I sat down I knew I would never get back up.

The door waited for me but I had to turn my back on it and try walking away. Jumping was no longer an option, but I felt if I could just keep using my feet, they would return to me. My walk looked more like a side shuffle. I had to keep both hands planted on the wall to maintain my balance.

I ended up circling the meat locker before I began to feel a tingling in my feet. A second lap restored feeling to my soles and I even began to feel a few of my toes again. At last I was able to stand without having to use the wall for support. I swore to myself that, while working on the door, I would take a break every two minutes and walk around. Stomping my feet was still an effective method of stimulating my circulation, but it had begun to hurt. I wondered if that meant I was getting frostbite.

The door, the steel door, the damn door. It was so thick and strong! It was like the thing had been built to withstand an atomic blast, when all it was really doing was keeping a bunch of dead cows cold.

But there was good news. The tip of the hook was sharp enough to slip in behind the door hinges. Also, the handle of the hook was long, which provided me with plenty of leverage.

I started work on the lower hinges, figuring they would be easier to break because I could use the power in my legs to press on the hook. Now that I was finally using my feet for more than support, they began to wake up even more, and I was able to jump on the end of the hook. Once more I heard a reassuring screeching sound as the screws in the hinges began to tear free. Pressing my palms against the door for balance, I leaped again and again onto the flat end of the hook.

The lower hinge broke, snapping free of the wall.

Unfortunately, I fell on my last leap onto the hook, and ended up twisting my right ankle as I went down. Sorry, no mild sprain for you, babe. I heard a pop just before I hit the floor. Granted, it might have been the hinge snapping free, except the sound came from deep inside my ankle and a thunderbolt of agony shot up my right leg. The agony was both numbing and burning. I couldn't decide which was worse. All I knew was that I had hurt myself at the worst possible time.

Rolling on the floor, cursing, I tried to stand by clawing at the wall, but the second I was up and put my foot down, I screamed. The bone was broken. There was no doubt. The pain throbbed with my heartbeat. It pounded in my skull, in my mind, as waves of dizziness and nausea swept over me. I bent over and vomited but nothing came up. It had been a long
time since I had eaten. I felt as if I had been in the freezing locker forever.

I had no choice—I had to sit, to rest a few minutes and try to recover. I hoped that my ankle had simply popped out of its socket and would somehow magically pop back in. There was nowhere to place my butt except on the icy floor, and I sat with my back to the door, my spine pressed against the frozen steel.

I tried focusing on the busted hinge, which lay beside me. I had come far, I told myself, I was halfway to safety. All I had to do was break the top hinge and I would be free. I promised myself the instant the pain in my ankle stopped pounding I would stand and go at it. There was no way a little hinge was going to end my life. Not when my friend the steer had given up his life to free the hook so I could use it to snap the hinge . . .

“My friend the steer?” I said aloud. What was I thinking? What the hell was I doing? The broken hinge had vanished from view. Why? Because my mind had wandered off and I had closed my eyes. The danger of my predicament hit me like a boxer's blow. I was sitting with my eyes closed in a meat locker where the temperature was in the twenties. I was setting myself up to pass out.

To die. I was going to die unless I got off my butt.

Forcing my eyes open, I sucked in a series of fast breaths and tried pushing myself up with my good ankle. It seemed to work, at first, I started to slide up. But then I slipped and fell
back down. The reason was horribly clear. Even with my uninjured foot, I couldn't get a grip on the floor because the sole of my left foot was numb. The pain in my ankle was decreasing because my right foot was also going numb.

I had broken my promise to myself. That I would not sit down under any circumstances. I had broken it because the cold was playing tricks with my head. It had convinced me I had to sit down because I was injured. But the cold was not my friend, it was my enemy. It was trying to kill me. It would kill me unless I got moving.

Rolling onto my knees, I pressed the top of my head against the door and tried to stand, reaching up for the door handle. For a few seconds I was able to pull myself up to where I swayed on what seemed to be invisible legs, when I suddenly slipped and smashed face-first into the door. My fall to my knees was not far, not as far as when I had twisted my ankle, but a dark trail followed me back to the floor. My nose had struck the door and I bled all over it.

“Damn!” I screamed at no one. “God damn you!”

I raised a hand to my nose and felt the warm blood oozing over my face, but then it was like someone threw a switch and the blood stopped. At least that was what I thought happened. Then I realized my fingers had gone numb. My hands and feet were now both numb, both useless.

“I have to get up, I have to get up,” I kept repeating as I rolled over once more onto my butt. I had come too far to quit.
The hook was right there. The top hinge was a mere five feet above the floor. If I could get off the floor, slip the hook behind the hinge, and hang on it with all my weight, it would probably bust. If only I could stand up. If only I had not hurt my ankle.

If only I had not trusted Russ.

“Goddamn bastard, Russ. You'll pay for this. I'll make you pay.”

That's the last thing I recall saying aloud. At some point I must have closed my eyes again, although I don't remember doing so. My thoughts drifted back to the previous night at the blackjack table, when I realized that Russ had offended Alex on purpose. He had caused her to lose money so she would get pissed off and leave. He had admitted as much. Yet he had been confident I wouldn't leave with her. Strange how sure he was of himself. She was, after all, my best friend, and I didn't know him.

Why would he assume I'd stay with him?

Why had he seemed so familiar?

This guy I had never met before.

I noticed I was no longer shivering. That was a relief. If anything, I felt as if warm liquid were being pumped through my veins. Yet a part of me worried if that was a good thing. I seemed to recall that when people froze to death, they started to feel warm first.

Yeah, I had read an article about this high-school girl who
had gone skating on a lake that was supposed to be frozen over, but which had broken and swallowed her up for like ten minutes before a fireman had rescued her. The girl had been my age, we could have been friends . . .

She had been dead for more than ten minutes. More like fifteen.

But the fireman had brought her back to life. It was a miracle.

I tried focusing on what else the article had said but my brain got bored with the subject and wandered to Jimmy, to the one place where it had spent the better part of the last six months. Jimmy, my poor boyfriend, he must be real worried about me now. He was probably calling the police, maybe even filling out a missing-persons report. But I knew what the police would tell him. All the cops always said the same thing on TV. “Sorry, but we have to wait at least twenty-four hours before your friend's disappearance is official.”

They would look at Jimmy with pity but secretly they'd probably think the chick had run off with some older guy with money. Especially if Alex told them about Russ.

“Are you saying you didn't take a shower with me?”

“I did. But it wasn't after I got off work.”

That had been a strange discussion we'd had up at the lake. How could Jimmy forget the first time we'd had sex? Why, that was like him forgetting when my birthday was. Of course, he had forgotten my birthday. It was in November,
November twelfth, and I had told him it was coming up but it had come and gone before he remembered. I hadn't yelled at him or anything. We had just started dating and I didn't want to annoy him and come across as a bitch, and besides, it didn't really matter when I had been born, the date. What was more important was the date I died, which was going to be today, unless I got my butt in gear and . . .

And what? I couldn't remember, it must not be important.

Anyway, the first time we had sex, that was important. It had been in the shower, like I had told him, or rather, just after we took a shower. But he was right about one thing—he had not spent time in the shower washing the oil off his hands because he had not just come from work. I realized I had gotten part of the story right and part of it wrong. He had come from home and I was in the shower getting ready for our date. I had known he was coming over. He had called before coming. We were supposed to go to dinner and then a movie.

I had jumped in the shower because I was hot and sweaty. It was the middle of summer, it had been a hot day. And I had gone in the shower because I thought it might be a cool way of seducing him. He was kind of shy when it came to sex. I mean, I was too, since technically I was still a virgin. But I was getting kind of tired of waiting for him to make the first move so I figured I'd make it for him. In other words, the shower was just an excuse.

A nice cool excuse on a hot summer day.

Only I hadn't started dating Jimmy until October.

Wow, that was weird. Now my memory of that day was getting worse than his. But I could have sworn, right now, that we had made love in the middle of summer, or else late summer. Yeah, it must have been real late because it wasn't until after Halloween when I started to worry if I might be pregnant . . .

Pregnant? Whoa, hold on, I was never pregnant.

Yet I remembered . . . something. My swelling belly.

It was strange. It was like a mystery.

I don't know why it bothered me so much. I had much more serious matters to worry about. My nose was bleeding, my ankle was injured, and I was freezing to death. Still, it bugged me that I couldn't recall Jimmy washing his hands in the shower, which would have settled the argument once and for all of when we first had sex.

I had to admit, though, I was beginning to remember the situation a lot more the way he did. The day had definitely been hot, a real cooker, and he had not come over in the daytime, after work, but in the evening, to go out on a date. Yeah, his argument had a few facts in its favor, I would have to tell him that when I saw him again.

If I ever saw him again.

My last coherent thought.

Once more, everything went black.

Only it was a lot blacker than before.

I AWOKE TO LIGHT AND COLD.

It was a fact, even though I was no longer in the meat locker, I felt just as cold. In some ways I felt even worse, strange, like I was a piece of meat hanging from a steel hook. But that was not true because I was staring up at a hospital ceiling. A faint female voice spoke over an unseen speaker.

“Dr. List to emergency. Dr. Michael List to the emergency ward, please.”