Макс Коллинз - Spree

He tumbled half in the shallow grave, half out. Feet sticking out. She raised the shovel to hit him again, but he reacted quickly, for a stunned moron, pulling out that .38 and firing at her.

The bullet careened off the metal scoop of the shovel, with a whang, putting a dent in it as the sound of the gunshot cracked open the night and Sherry flung the shovel at him and ran.

She had no idea where she was headed; no sense of direction at all. She just ran where there was space, where the trees weren’t too thick, her shoeless feet, covered only in the thin little socks, crunching and cracking the twigs and snow-and-leaves-layered earth.

She could not hear him behind her, but perhaps that was only because her own breath was heaving so, filling her ears with the sound of her life struggling to hold on to itself.

Maybe that fling of the shovel had caught him good; maybe he was unconscious, not following her at all.

This she thought, this she prayed, but she didn’t slow down. She ran with strides as long as she could make them, cutting them only when a tree got in the way, and then she tripped over something, an extended root, and tumbled into the snow and leaves, and stopped just long enough to pick herself up and heard it: silence.

What a wonderful sound.

Maybe he wasn’t following her. Maybe the shovel did get him. Or she’d lost him, maybe.

Nonetheless, she began to run again, her legs aching, her feet nicked and nudged and pierced countless times by twigs and burrs and acorns, but it felt so good for her feet to tingle and even hurt, her legs to burn and ache, it made her feel so alive; at the same time her head no longer ached and the cold air was just something crisp to run through. Her face stretched tight in a sort of smile and she felt a euphoria as she ran breakneck through the woods, keeping up with the rolling clouds that shadowed her.

But the second time she tripped, catching another root, she went down hard, and it knocked the wind out of her. And as she was getting up, she heard him.

Lumbering through the woods, not far away at all. Twigs and branches snapping, cracking, like he was using a machete to clear a path; but it was no machete — just Lyle. Diligent, guileless Lyle, looking for her to take her back to the hole he was digging for her. Like his pa said.

She tried to run and realized she’d turned her ankle; she didn’t feel it going down: just now, trying to run on it, it made itself known. She could still run, but nowhere near as fast; this was a pitiful, hobbling sort of excuse for running, a shambling, mummylike two-step, and the sound of Lyle moving through the woods toward her was growing louder.

She hid.

She crawled behind a cluster of thorny brush, which nicked and bit at her skin, reminding her she was alive, yes, but she was past enjoying that sensation and teetering instead on the edge of despair and desperation. Her feet were cold and bleeding, the thin socks torn to shreds from her marathon run. She crouched behind the thicket and tried not to breathe audibly. She stopped breathing through her mouth, pulling the air in ever so gently through her nose, sipping and savoring it like a priceless wine.

She was quaking with fear and cold as he lumbered by, gun in hand; he wasn’t running, exactly — it was more like a jog. An idiot jogger wants to kill me, she thought.

Like a four-wheel-drive vehicle, he rolled past, woods be damned, the sound of his forward movement taking several minutes to die down. She waited. She had no idea what to do next.

Stay put? It was night, but she had no notion of the time — if dawn came soon, she’d be naked here. If nighttime lasted long enough, perhaps that dangerous dork would comb the entire woods and find her, finally. If she took off and started running again, he would hear her, quite probably, and, very certainly, take up pursuit again.

What would Nolan do?

Nolan would find a way to kill the bastard, but that wasn’t Sherry’s way. She’d given that her best shot with the shovel, and blew it. It wasn’t likely nature would provide her with a killing tool better than a shovel. Someone who knew the woods would find something to use, no doubt; but Sherry had only stalked shopping malls before. She had never been camping in her life. This was a hell of an indoctrination.

She was shivering with the cold, now. Wondering where she was. Looking up through branches at the spooky sky, wondering how to read it, wishing, way back when, she’d been a Girl Scout and not a cheerleader.

Maybe if she just moved quietly through the woods — in the opposite direction from where Lyle had pushed on — she might get somewhere. Maybe even civilization. The road and the river were around here somewhere.

She moved out from behind the bushes and began making her way through the woods again. Not running. Moving quickly, yes, but not running; pausing at a tree every few yards to listen for Lyle. Hearing nothing.

Pretty soon she came upon the grave in progress again.

It froze her to the earth, like Lot’s wife. She had no idea she’d gotten turned around. Here she was back at square one.

But — once past the shock of stumbling across what Lyle intended as her permanent home — was this so bad? There was the shovel again, sprawled half in, half out of the would-be grave, much as Lyle had been when she tried to bash him. It was a weapon. She picked it up.

And just in time, because Lyle stepped out into the moonlight and his handsome blank face squeezed in something like thought and he aimed the .38 at her and she swung the shovel like a bat and caught his wrist and the gun went flying.

“Don’t fight me,” Lyle said, reaching his hands out toward her as if she should embrace him. There was no malice in his voice at all.

“Fuck you, asshole!” She swung the shovel at him and caught him in the side and he went down, moaning. She moved toward him quickly, the hurting ankle slowing her just a bit, and raised the shovel to deliver a finishing blow, and the bastard reached out and grabbed that bad ankle and pulled her legs out from under her. She fell back, tumbling.

Tumbling into the grave.

It was shallow, but it was her grave, and it was no place she wanted to be; her mind filled with horror. The shovel was no longer in her hands. She was on her back in her own grave. A scream caught in her throat.

And Lyle was standing at her feet, in the grave, looking down at her, with his blank, banal pretty-boy face marred by one of her shovel blows. Good. She kicked a field goal with his nuts and he grabbed himself with both hands, howling, and pitched forward on her.

He wasn’t unconscious, but he was in pain, enough pain that he couldn’t do anything about her scrambling frantically out from under him, cursing him, hitting at him, clawing at him, and then scurrying off, back into the woods, a different direction this time.

Running again, hobbling on the ankle, but running, hearing nothing but her own panting, her stomach aching, her feet numb, her legs aching but pumping, like her heart keeping the blood going; she wasn’t dead yet.

She paused against a tree, panting. Wondering how long she could keep this up; when her legs would go out on her. She couldn’t hear him back there. That was something, anyway. Couldn’t hear him shambling after her.

But then she did hear something else:

A honking horn.

Car horn; distant, but she had a good fix on what direction. She smiled tightly and began to run. Even the ankle stopped hurting, stopped hurting as much, anyway.

She was no fool. She knew that that car could belong to Lyle’s father or somebody else involved in this foul fucking thing. She would have to be careful as she neared the highway. But once to the highway, she would know where she was. She could cling to the woods and bushes along the side of the road and follow it and if she saw a car that didn’t have Lyle or his pa in it, she would go for it.