Chuck Logan - After the Rain

He was driving due west on a back-roads two-lane blacktop, holding a steady hundred yards behind George’s Lexus. The surrounding farmland was more populated than he was used to back home. Holstein cattle. Dairy farms. Big barns with Dutch gambrel roofs. It was hard to see very far in this rolling landscape, the way everything was close in. He’d lost the sky.

He crossed I-35, the main north-south corridor in lower Minnesota, and continued driving west on the solitary road. Almost half an hour since they left. How much longer? He picked up his cell, tapped in George’s number, connected, and said, “Hey, George, let’s flip the switch.”

“A little more. When we turn south on 169,” George said.

Dale put the phone down, sucked his teeth, looked around briefly, then concentrated on the road ahead. The way the land was, they’d never see it go off. Might not even hear it. But it should rattle the windows a little. He turned and looked back at the drawn curtain.

And then…

Nina, drenched in sweat, was thankful for sick favors. Dale’s excitement had distracted him from sticking her with the ketamine again. She had a lucid window. She listened to the weather report on the radio updating the day’s forecast: Current conditions, sunny; 85 degrees Fahrenheit; dew point 64 degrees Fahrenheit; humidity 49 percent, visibility unlimited; pressure 30.00 inches and steady …

Wind from the north northwest at 9 mph.

So he must be driving west, into the wind, just like he’d told her. How much room did they want between themselves and the…Her mind balked at the image of a nuclear plant erupting in a radioactive fire.

Assume the worst. He’ll blow the plant. Unless I can get off this bed…

And do my job.

She needed to get at least one hand free. She needed him within striking distance of that hand.

The last self-defense course Nina had taken was conducted by an affable Green Beret at Fort Bragg. He began his class with an observation from the current fad of no-holds-barred Ultimate Fighting. He pointed out how there were only two rules in Ultimate Fighting matches: no eye-gouging and no blows to the throat.

In his first class, therefore, he taught Nina how to gouge out an opponent’s eyeball. She lay on her back, blindfolded. An instructor straddled her. He wore heavy safety glasses and he held two oranges tight against the goggles, to simulate eyes.

Nina’s job was to struggle up, find his head, locate the eyes, and drive her thumb through the orange peel, into the pulp and dig it out. The minute her thumb touched the orange the instructor started screaming and thrashing wildly. The idea was to overcome the normal human resistance to making contact with the visceral fluids and matter of the eyeball. Once you got past the aversion…the eye socket being a fertile nest of nerve endings, not only blindness but unconsciousness was a certain result.

She pictured Dale’s flat blues eyes as targets.

No problem.

Time to get to work. She visualized the muscles of her arm and shoulder. Angles, leverage, the structure of the bed. Okay. This time for real. Painfully, she rotated her right hand counterclockwise in the tightly wrapped cords, encountered the sharp edges of the crimped hooks, and wrenched past them, ripping her flesh to the bone.

Now her palm had turned 180 degrees, so it lay flat along the sideboard. She raised her shoulder, thrust down, and hooked her fingers on the bottom of the board.

Okay.

She had to perform two separate operations. The first was gymnastic, a matter of timing. Slowly, she diagramed the physics involved. She’d brace her left hand and both feet on the sideboards, push down and vault her body up, taking pressure off the mattress and springs. During the split second her weight was in the air she would have to jerk upward with her right hand, dislodging the slotted sideboard as she heaved her head back against the headboard. She had been practicing this move and had felt the sideboard almost come free.

The test would be the second operation, which involved sheer muscle strength. When one end of the board was free, the bottom end would still be anchored in the footboard. She had to drag her right hand, which would still be tightly lashed, along and then off the free end of the detached board. Which meant exerting tremendous pressure to the side and to the rear. Again, she visualized the muscles of her right arm: triceps, the teres major, teres minor, rear delt. They were small muscles and were not structurally suited to perform this unusual movement.

Lubrication would not be a problem. In the process of rotating her wrist against the cord hooks, she had ripped her wrist to shreds. Her right hand was now bleeding freely.

On top of everything else, she had to do it quietly. She couldn’t alert Dale before her right hand was free.

Nina blinked sweat from her eyes. Took a deep breath.

Now she focused back several years, on the Russian trainer she’d met in Kosovo. He’d been on loan from the Spetsnaz, the Russian Special Forces. He promoted a concept called “hyper-irradiation,” which argued that rigidly flexing all the muscle groups of the body simultaneously was a force multiplier.

She knew her muscles were designed with protective mechanisms-spindle cells and Golgi tendon organs. Their purpose was to prevent damage due to overload by stopping function. Getting free would involve tearing her right rotor cuff to pieces. It would also involve overriding the protective mechanisms, the lactic acid buildup, going past the breaking point.

There was fear, which she was riding like a wave.

And then there was pain.

Which was the shark inside the wave ready to bite.

Go.

Nina poised on the bed, felt her fingers, slippery with blood, hook firmly on the sideboard. She pressed down with her feet and her left hand, took a deep breath, and stopped thinking. Her body knew.

She thrust up her torso and yanked up with her right hand.

Yes.

As the slots came free she extended her right arm to keep the board from tangling in the headboard. The bed slewed to the side as the sideboard thumped on the carpet.

Did he hear? No, the radio covered it.

Now let’s see if that Russian knew what the hell he was talking about.

She flexed both feet and her left hand, painfully orienting her soles and her palm against the tight cords. When she had a solid platform, she pressed down on the sideboards. Working up from this tripod, she contracted everything she had: legs and upper body fusing into core abs and glutes. She had to transform the tension into a mighty fulcrum to send more power into the rigid lever of her right arm.

Her breath rasped, panting now. She felt sweat and then veins pop up on her screaming right arm as she strained it back, back. Inch by inch the bloody bungee cord started to slide rearward, toward the open slotted end of the sideboard.

Her strength flashed, so much fire into smoke. All mind now. She visualized every man who ever told her all the things she couldn’t do. And some women, too. Every face. Every sneer. Every dirty joke.

She got two more bloody inches from the vivid memory of Johnny Majeski, who wrestled her out of her virginity when she was sixteen in the backseat of a perfectly restored ’49 Mercury. And then blamed her because it went too fast.

Good memories, too. Dad. For all the hours in the pool and on the track; for teaching her to throw and jump and climb. For giving her a dollhouse and a chin-up bar.

She had two more inches to go.

Willpower gone. Muscles frozen, past spasm into total failure.

C’mon. Must be a few more muscles to call up in this act of self-destruction. She had gone past aching pain to piercing pain to red-hot burning pain to nothing.