Майкл Корита - If She Wakes

Like a grave. You are in your grave, Abby.

She thought she could still see the headlights, but it was hard to tell with the fog gliding through the trees. It was a low, crawling mist that seemed to be searching for her. She wasn’t sure if the lights behind the mist were moving or stationary or if they were even out there at all. Her eyelids were heavy and her blood felt thick and slow.

She wondered how long it would take the kid to find her.

The kid. Yes, that’s who you’re running from. He’s a killer.

And he was quick. The way he had ducked that punch? That was more than quick. So it would not take the kid long to find Abby now.

What was his name? Had he said a name? Sure, he had. Gentleman Jack.

Abby burrowed into the soft embrace of the leaves that smelled like death and waited on the arrival of Gentleman Jack.

Her first awareness was of the cold.

She opened her eyes and saw a moss-covered rock, beads of water working slowly but resolutely over it, following the terrain like bands of determined pioneers. Then they reached the edge and fell, manifest destiny gone awry.

Plink. Plink. Plink.

She stared at the rock and the puddle for a while without recognition of anything else. Except for the cold. That was still there, and it was intensifying. Uncomfortable but also necessary, because it was pounding clarity into her brain.

Get up. Get up and move before you freeze to death.

She struggled upright, and the motion made her dizzy and nauseated. She rested on her hands and knees, head hanging, waiting for the vomit to come, but the nausea passed and she didn’t get sick. She worked a wooden tongue around a mouth so dry and swollen, it felt carpeted.

What the hell happened?

The kid.

That was what had happened. The night chase came back to her, and she was suddenly convinced that she wasn’t alone here, that the kid had to be right behind her, the kid with his baby face and his grown-up gun.

There was nothing in sight but the woods, though. Abby was in a gully below a forested ridge; above, white birches and emerald pines were packed in tight, and a stream there split and ran down swales on either side of her. No sound but the running water.

She tried to walk up the hill but her feet tangled and she fell heavily and painfully onto her side. She rolled over and breathed for a while and then tried again, slower this time. Each motion required caution because her head spun and her stomach swirled. She tasted bitter bile and her throat was sore, as if she’d been retching. She didn’t remember doing that, though.

The sky was bright enough to show some of the world, but not much of it. Predawn light. That meant she’d been down here for hours.

What had happened to Hank in that time?

She hobbled up the slope. Her left side and left hip hurt the worst, and she wasn’t sure why. She didn’t remember much about the drive, the run through the woods, or her fall. She just remembered that she’d been trying to get out in front of the kid and of whatever the whiskey had put in her bloodstream. They’d both been closing in on her fast.

And Hank had been well behind them, tied to the chair. Had he gotten loose? He’d had some time alone while the kid pursued Abby. He’d had a window for escape, if he’d been able to free himself.

She got to the top of the hill, but even from there, the Chrysler wasn’t visible. Just the trees. In her running and crawling through the night woods, she’d made it farther than she’d thought. The smell of rain was heavy in the air. She could find no clear track to show her how to get back to where she’d started, and she decided that following the stream made as much sense as anything. She started along it, walking uphill, breathing hard and fighting for each step, thinking, Maybe when I got out, that evil kid got scared and ran, and Hank’s still back there, tied to the chair and hurt, maybe, but alive. Waiting for help. For me.

When she crested the next rise, struggling to keep her footing on the slick leaves, she finally saw her car.

It was punched into an oak’s trunk and wedged between pines, and she was bizarrely pleased by how far she’d made it into such dense trees before getting hung up. When she stepped closer, she could see the dangling airbag visible through the shattered glass. Everything about the car was as she remembered.

Then she saw Hank’s body in the passenger seat.

Abby froze, then took a wavering step forward, knees going weak, and cried, “Hank!” Her voice was broken and hoarse. “Hank!”

Hank Bauer wasn’t going to answer. His head lay unnaturally on his left shoulder, and the right side of his face was swollen and bruised, his eyes open but unseeing. Abby wrenched open the passenger door, and Hank’s head dropped bonelessly forward, chin down on his chest, eyes still open, his neck obviously broken.

Abby stepped back and sat down in the wet grass. She rubbed a filthy hand over her face. She breathed with her eyes closed, then opened them and looked at Hank once more.

“What happened?” she said aloud.

Hank offered no insight.

The way he sat there, slumped in the passenger seat with the wound on the right side of his head and the broken neck, made it look as if he’d been in the car when it hit the tree and died on impact, when in reality he’d been dead before he was brought here.

Or maybe not.

Maybe he’d been alive and trying to stay alive by obeying orders, the kid saying, Get in the car, holding a gun to his head. Abby could picture him climbing into the wrecked car, hoping for mercy, only to have his skull smacked off the windshield, his neck snapped.

Abby looked up the road then, searching for either help or threat, finding neither. It was peaceful and quiet and lonely. When the wind gusted, raindrops fell from the trees like a fresh shower. Hank’s house was the last one on the isolated camp road. Nobody would have heard the crash. The kid would have had time to go back and bring Hank down here and not be rushed, but still, it seemed a reckless choice because Abby had been out there in the darkness, free.

He knew you were going to be down for a while, though. He was sure of that. He wasn’t rushing because he knew he didn’t need to.

Thanks to whatever was in the whiskey, the kid knew he had time. Maybe he even thought Abby was dead. Plenty of time, then.

Why move Hank’s body, though? Why bring him down here and put him in the passenger seat? Even if he’d thought Abby was dead, that arrangement didn’t make any sense, because there was no driver.

Abby looked at the empty driver’s seat, and suddenly she understood.

I didn’t realize your academic record was as poor as your driving record, the kid had said.

It was Abby’s car, and Abby had wrecked it. The physical evidence would say that, because it was the truth.

Hank hadn’t been riding shotgun when the Chrysler went into the trees, and he hadn’t broken his neck in the crash, but if the police found this scene and then found Abby dead in the woods, uninjured but with drugs and alcohol in her bloodstream, what would they think?

The kid was panicked and tried to rig the scene. A bad plan, but he needed something.

Was it that bad, though? When Abby called this in, she was going to have to tell the police that she’d been poisoned and that while she was sleeping it off in the woods, a teenager with a gun had killed Hank Bauer and belted him into the passenger seat. That was the truth, but it was going to be an awfully strange story to tell and an awfully hard story for a detective to believe. And if the detectives who heard it happened to know that Abby had ended up back in Maine working for Hank Bauer because of another night that went a lot like this one...