Gerald's Game - Stephen King [121]
Then, just as she was about to relax her aching arm, the cuff slid over the small protrusion which had held it for so long, flew off the ends of her fingers, and cracked against the bedpost. It all happened so fast that Jessie was at first unable to grasp that it had happened. Her hand no longer looked like the sort of equipment normally issued to human beings, but it was her hand, and it was free.
Free.
Jessie looked from the empty blood-smeared cuff to her mangled hand, her face slowly filling with comprehension. Looks like a bird that flew into a factory machine and then got spit out the other end, she thought, but that cuff's not on it anymore. It's really not.
'Can't believe it,' she croaked. 'Can't. Fucking. Believe it.'
Never mind, Jessie. You have to hurry.
She started like someone being shaken awake from a doze. Hurry? Yes indeed. She didn't know how much blood she had lost — a pint seemed a reasonable enough guess, judging from the sodden mattress and the streamlets running and dripping down the crossboards — but she knew that if she lost much more she was going to pass out, and the trip from unconsciousness to death would be a short one — just a quick ferry-ride across a narrow river.
Not going to happen, she thought. It was the tough-as-nails voice again, but this time it belonged to no one but her, and that made Jessie happy. I didn't go through all this nasty shit just to die passed out on the floor. I haven't seen the paperwork, hut I'm pretty sure that isn't in my contract.
All right, hut your legs —
it was a reminder she didn't really need. She hadn't been on her pins in over twenty-four hours, and despite her efforts to keep them waked up, it could be a bad mistake to depend on them too much, at least to begin with. They might cramp up; they might try to buckle under her; they might do both. But forewarned was forearmed . . . or so they said. Of course she had gotten a lot of advice like that in the course of her lifetime (advice most often ascribed to that mysterious, ubiquitous group known as 'they'), and nothing she had ever seen on Firing Line or read in the Reader's Digest had prepared her for what she had just done. Still, she would be as careful as she could. Jessie had an idea she might not have a lot of leeway in that regard, however.
She rolled left, her right arm trailing after her like the tail of a kite or the rusty exhaust-pipe of an old car. The only part of it that felt completely alive was the back of her hand, where the exposed packets of tendon burned and raved. The pain was bad, and that sense that her right arm wanted a divorce from the rest of her body was worse, but these things were all but lost in an uprush of mingled hope and triumph. She felt an almost divine joy in her ability to roll across the bed without being stopped by the cuff around her wrist. Another cramp struck her, slamming into her lower belly like the business end of a Louisville Slugger, but she ignored it. Had she called that feeling joy? Oh, that was much too mild a word. It was ecstasy. Full, flat-out ecsta —
Jessie! The edge of the bed! Jesus, stop!
It didn't look like the edge of the bed; it looked like the edge of the world on one of those old-fashioned maps from before the time of Columbus. Beyond here there be monsters and sarpents, she thought. Not to mention a fractured left wrist. Stop, Jess!
But her body ignored the command; it kept on rolling, cramps and all, and Jessie had just enough time to rotate her left hand inside the left cuff before she thumped onto her belly at the edge of the bed, then went off it entirely. Her toes hit the floor with a jarring smash, but her scream was not entirely one of pain. Her feet were, after all, on the floor again. They were actually on the floor.
She finished her clumsy escape from the bed with her left arm stuck stiffly off in the direction of the post to which it was still tethered and her right arm temporarily trapped between her chest and the side of the bed. She could feel warm blood pumping onto her skin and running