Nevada Barr - The Rope

If she could get up from her knees, she could make it the rest of the way, she amended as she struggled to arrange burning feet under aching gluteus maximus so she could perform the amazing, showstopping trick of rising from the goddamn rocky red dirt.

The ridge retreated over the next pile of rock, then around the next jagged cut of sandstone. Then it appeared to be just over the next polished haunch of land. Another waterless hour passed before she reached the lip of the canyon. Steep gave way to flat without preamble, and she stood, the canyon at her heels, her hands dangling apelike near her knees from the last bit of the ascent.

Up close the trees weren’t much greener than they’d looked from below. They didn’t have the decency to form into a proper forest with shady lanes and mossy hollows. They straggled out of soil so arid and stony they were deformed by the effort. Wretched stunted things, they resembled something T. S. Eliot might have run across after the last ding-dong of doom.

Behind her, and to both sides, canyons cut into the mesa. Ahead, another escarpment reared up, crowned with ragged serrated trees cutting into a sky so blue it hurt. There were no roads, no houses, no telephone lines, not an animal pen or a fucking creek or a fucking watercooler in sight.

No water. She wasn’t going to find water. The only water in the world was a million miles back down Jenny Gorman’s sorry excuse for a trail. The last ding-dong of doom ringing in her ears, Anna limped to the nearest excuse for plant life and thumped down cross-legged in the niggardly shade. Her tongue had grown too big for her mouth. It stuck on her teeth and soft palate. Muscles in her legs were cramping. Skin on her face and the back of her neck stung when she touched it. There was no point in going farther, no point in staying where she was, and she doubted like hell she would be able to make it back down.

Not for the first time, she took the water bottle out of her pack and shook it. Over the months without Zach she’d come to think of the Grim Reaper as a guardian angel, ready to sweep her out of the mortal coils when they cut too deep. Now that He was grinning at her from the dry bottom of a plastic government-issue water bottle, she didn’t like him as much as she’d thought she would.

She took out the map and unfolded it—something to pass the time while dying. Subway maps and city maps made sense. Streets had names, they intersected; buildings had numbers. Subways had stops. Wilderness maps had crooked lines going nowhere, and nowhere had horrific names like Dry Fork and Turkey Knob, Panther Canyon and Devil’s Garden.

“There is nothing helpful on this fucking map,” Anna croaked. She balled the map up and threw the wad of paper over her shoulder.

For a while she sat in defiance, then levered herself to her miserable feet and tottered over to retrieve the litter. Glen Canyon might kill her, but she was damned if it would turn her into a litterbug.

She was picking her trash out of a stubble of desiccated grass when she heard the scream.

The pitiful shriek, scratching through the pitiful trees, lifted Anna’s spirits. The cry was too full-throated for a woman dying of thirst. Anna started to run in the direction of the sound. She, the Good Samaritan, would take a thorn out of the screamer’s paw, and the grateful thing would give her water.

A lot of water.

Running, hoping for water, there memory ended. Between dressed and whole to naked and broken there was nothing but nothing, not even the blank slate. Trying to remember was like trying to see with the tip of her finger.

Hugging her useless arm to her chest and staring up the gullet that had swallowed her whole, Anna wondered: Had she rescued the maiden? Traded places with the maiden? Had the whole thing been the hallucination of a severely dehydrated woman? Was this rock jug she was at the bottom of another hallucination?

Reality, so hard won, began to ebb. “Help! Help me!” she screamed.

Silence slammed down from the buff-and-blue horizon and struck her dumb. Like the silence after prayer, it deafened her; a silence devoid of presence, a wasteland mocking any who dared hope. She didn’t yell again. She didn’t do anything. She didn’t think anything.

Shade swallowed her. The ellipses of light oozed off of the sand and started crawling up the side of the jar. Where the lozenge of sunlight shone, the stone was burnt orange; behind it the stone was blue; ahead of it, toward the sky where the light was going, the stone was buff, as if the rock that held her prisoner was of living matter, reactive to light and heat.

July in Arizona, the sun set around seven thirty. The girl’s scream—and Anna’s last memory—must have been around two o’clock. She glanced at her wrist. Her watch was gone. Either she’d been in the bottle five or six hours or a night and a day. Instinct—or body clock—suggested the latter. Fear prickled in her belly. Thirty hours as a prisoner.

Prisoner. The word stuck crosswise in her brain, striking ice crystals from bone. Someone or something had taken her and imprisoned her, stolen her clothes, her watch, her ID, stolen who she was, and hid the leftovers in a pit like garbage.

Or, like leftovers: to be eaten later.

Again Anna started to cry for help. Fear of the answering silence cemented the sound in her lungs.

Soon, somebody—or something—would come. Monsters are a lazy bunch. They don’t take all the trouble to catch a thing and put it in a bottle if they don’t want it for some reason. They’d want to talk to it or poke it with sticks or make it sing or dance or fuck it. They would do experiments on it at the very least and torture it at the very worst.

Unless they just wanted to watch.

Suddenly Anna could feel hidden eyes leering from behind the rim of her hole, eyes that watched her vomit and scream like a fox in a trap. Watched her naked.

Scanning where cliff met sky, she studied every shadow, rock, and crack.

Nothing.

No one.

The sense of being watched didn’t leave her.

Her arm was throbbing, a pulse of all-encompassing pain. The ends of her fingers were numb and turning blue. She eased herself down until she was flat on her back, her bloodless dying limb supported by the sand. Draping her uninjured arm over her breasts to cover her nakedness, she studied the high eye-shaped rim of her world. The sun would come back or the monster would come back or insanity would come back or she would die of thirst. The last option seemed the least nasty.

“You have one job,” Molly said, as she had so many times over the past few months. “Staying alive.”

“Damn it!” Anna grumbled. “Why do you have to make things so hard?”

With her sister’s admonition tolling in her head, Anna realized how desperately she wanted a drink of water. The maiden whose paw she’d intended to de-thorn for a drink must not have come through. Lying in a stupor for—hours? a day?—the lining of her nose had dried to parchment. In place of her tongue was a splintery wooden clapper. Thirsting to death lost its place of honor as the least nasty possibility.

Along one curving edge of her prison jar, green plants with wilted white flowers grew. Datura, deadly nightshade; Anna knew that from the pamphlet she’d had in her pack. They needed water to grow. She could dig, then drink from the seep. The optimistic thought was stillborn; desert weeds needed drops, not buckets. If a plant needed serious water to live it would take root in Oregon or Louisiana, not on Mars or the Colorado Plateau.

Galvanized by attention, Anna’s thirst became its own entity, a clawed evil, tearing at her throat and shredding her thoughts until she could think of no worse death than death by thirst.