Sierra Woods - The Resurrectionist

She turned off the car and got out. As quickly as I could, I shifted to my back. Not a comfortable position when you have a watermelon in your belly, but when your life was on the line, you coped. She opened the back door and reached in. I kicked out with both feet as hard as I could, and she went flying.

I knew I had hurt her, or at least surprised the hell out of her, but I was certain we weren’t done yet. With any luck, she’d left the keys in the ignition, and I could get out of there. I scrambled out of the car as fast as any nine-months-pregnant woman could scramble, which wasn’t too sprightly.

“You’re a dead woman,” she yelled. “Fucking bitch.”

She was on her knees and clutched her front. Hopefully, I’d broken a few ribs. I didn’t know who she was or why she thought kidnapping me was going to improve her life.

“What do you want?” I tried to slide against the car toward the front door.

“You. Dead.”

The words didn’t make sense, but as a nurse, I knew that things many people thought didn’t make sense. She might have been an escaped psych patient who was on a mission from above or listening to the voices in her fillings. Or just off her medications. In any case, keeping her talking and away from me was my first step to survival. “I see, but why? Who are you?”

“You’re the only thing standing between me and Blake.”

Oh, shit. She was his mistress, who was supposed to be a former mistress. And she was freakin’ nuts. Good going, Blake. If I got out of this alive, I was going to put certain of his body parts in the blender.

“Are you out of your mind? What the hell are you doing?” Anger overcame fear for a moment.

“Blake went back to you.” The idea that Blake was married to me seemed to have escaped her. “If you hadn’t gotten pregnant, none of this would be happening.”

Oh, yeah. As if this was my fault. Another sign of pathological nuttiness. Blame everyone else for your personal failures.

“Now, just a damned minute. I have the right to sleep with my own husband. You are the one who doesn’t.” This was pissing me off. Now that I could see what was going on, I was damned mad and some of my fear wore off, which wasn’t necessarily a good thing.

“We were so good together,” she said with a wistful tone to her voice. “You should have seen us.” She spoke to me as if we were girlfriends sharing secrets. Definite lack of reality attachment.

“I would prefer not to.” I didn’t need anything else to make me nauseated.

“Bitch.” She reached for a large knife on the ground beside her and dove for me. I ducked, but that’s hard to do with a big, fat belly. The knife missed me, but the impact of her body against mine thumped me between her and the car. The air went out of my lungs, and I couldn’t breathe. A pregnant woman has a hard time breathing to begin with. When one is body-slammed by an insane woman, it’s all over.

We collapsed into a heap on the ground, and she clobbered me again. Back then, I didn’t know how to fight. Every woman ought to know how to defend herself, and this was one reason why.

When I woke up there was a knife sticking out of my stomach. I screamed, not certain if it was from pain or from the sight of the butcher knife protruding from my body.

The woman obviously intended to cut my baby out of me.

“Stop!” I reached out to the knife. Adrenaline and the heat of a white anger so deep I felt it in my bones surged through my marrow. I was going to remove that thing and stick it into her. I was not going to die. I was not going to lose my baby to this psychopath.

Unfortunately, I did all of that.

She reached the knife before I did and pulled it toward her, my left. “I’m going to take your baby and watch you bleed to death.” She laughed, as if she was surprised she hadn’t thought of it sooner. “And there’s not a damned thing you can do about it.”

Clenching my teeth against the pain that penetrated every cell of my body, I felt as if I were on fire and there was nothing I could do about it. Pushing up with a hand beneath my hips, I bore the weight of my body on my left hand and reached for the knife with my right. Breathing was next to impossible, and my chest burned with the need for air. I had to win, I had to win. This woman was going to kill me and steal my child. “No.” It’s all I could manage. “No.” She was not going to win. I would not let her win.

Digging deep into a place I didn’t know existed within me, I grabbed her hand on the knife and pushed with everything I had in me. Although I’d never hurt anyone before, I was going to kill this woman.

Somehow I got to my knees with her trying to shove the blade deeper into my side. In the movies there always seems to be a lot of noise in fight scenes, but it was eerily silent. Only the groans of pitting my strength against hers broke the night.

Abruptly, she let go, and stood, her breath coming in and out of her in harsh gasps. “You bitch!” Then, she kicked me in the stomach, and I crashed to the ground, the pain incapacitating me. Stars and bright lights swam in front of my eyes and seemed as though they came from all around us. Then she tackled me and straddled my body, her knees forcing my hands down, trapping them at my sides. My strength was fading. I knew it and so did she.

She grabbed the knife with both hands and pulled, spilling everything inside me out onto the ground. A scream echoed off the canyon walls, and I realized it was mine.

“Come here, little one. You’re so precious,” she said in a sweet voice as she searched for my baby.

“No.” Reaching up with one hand, I tried to save him, but I was too weak. My vision blurred, and I was certain shock was overtaking me. Shock isn’t such a bad thing. It keeps us from remembering the horrors that are happening to us, and at the moment I welcomed it.

She extricated the baby, and held it up. It wasn’t moving and it was purple. “Oh, that’s right. I have to cut the cord before it will breathe.” Talking to herself, she retrieved her knife, slicing through the umbilical cord. Blood spurted, then she looked at me, as if I had the answer to the stupid thing she had done. “It’s bleeding. Why won’t it stop bleeding?”

I looked at my limp baby that she held out. I could see that it was a boy, and tears pricked my eyes. It wouldn’t have mattered to me. I would have loved a girl just as much. She’d cut the cord close to the abdomen and hadn’t tied it off. Now there was nothing left. If the baby could have survived, it would surely now die. It was going to bleed to death, just like me. “Didn’t tie...the cord.” It was all I could manage as tears for him and for me closed off my throat.

She looked down at the baby and tears flooded her eyes. “Dammit! I worked so hard on this. And now, just look at the mess it is.”

My legs went numb, and I knew my end was near. I felt my breathing become labored.

She’d won after all. She laid the baby down beside me, wiped her hands on her jeans, got into my car and drove away, leaving us alone in the darkening desert. I had only moments left.

Pulling the baby toward me, I cuddled him as best I could, tucking the little head under my chin, and I let my tears flow. I sobbed and my baby fell out of my arms.

A light, the brightness of which I’ve never seen, appeared a few feet away. It wasn’t a person, or an angel, though it could have been. I knew I was dying, and who knew what was coming to get me? I wasn’t particularly religious. At least until that moment. For a second, I reconsidered what I knew about religion.

And then I took a breath, and it sighed out of me for the last time.

“Come, child.” The other-sider, for that’s what I have come to know it as, reached out to me. How I knew it was from beyond, I don’t know, but I realized it was trying to communicate with me, even though no words were spoken aloud. All I could hear was a loud ringing in my ears.