Red - Jack Ketchum [14]
“’Night, mom,” she said.
“’Night, Peg.”
When she was gone and Belle heard her bedroom door click shut and saw the shaft of light disappear from under her door she peered out the window again and heard the dogs barking and then went to where she and her daughter had sat upon the couch.
It was still warm.
SIX
She awakens before dawn, before the gulls and the terns. She hears only the gentle susurration of the waves. In the dim last moonlight she inspects her wounds. Her eyes need little light. The wounds are puckering, knitting, a wide purple bruise surrounding each and connecting at her side as one.
She stretches on all fours like a cat, tailbone high, working out the soreness the hastily fashioned browse-bed and damp night air have left throughout her body. The fire has fallen to ashes now. Beside them lie the blackened bones of wolf and fish.
She crouches down at the entrance to the cave. She studies the dawn. The graying sky. The first gull-cry.
It is time to depart this place. She is still not far enough away from where she left her family and the others cold and dead. She has cut a wide pouched sling from the pelt and in it she now places the wolf’s left rear thigh. All that is left of him. She drapes it over her shoulder. Across the other shoulder, the remainder of the pelt. It will be colder to the north.
She belts the knife and steps outside.
~ * ~
Cleek has drenched the net in water overnight and attached Brian‘s weights to the corners at either end. The net doesn’t so much drop over her as it plummets over her. The woman has fallen to her knees instinctively, twisting furiously inside it. Raging, howling.
He’s got to be fast.
He half-jumps, half-slides down the path from the grassy roof of the cave to the entrance, the Remington over his shoulder. The woman has her knife free and she’s standing, slashing. Had she not gotten so tangled up at first she’d be out by now. Free. And that’s a goddamn chilling thought.
She’s roaring something.
“Deamhan! Sainmahiniu liom fuil! Deamhan!”
Whatever the fuck that is.
~ * ~
The pelt has twisted in the net in front of her. To slash through to him it seems she must slash through the pelt. The man stands in front of her and she can smell his fear and can smell his excitement. The man wants to go to her. The man does not.
“Devil! I’ll drink your blood! Devil!”
Her arm rises, falls. Her arm speaks her desire.
Kill.
The man dares a single step closer. Her own legs are entangled in his web. She cannot free them without doing herself serious harm. She slashes forward instead through the pelt and through the net and feels her arm finally come free of him, this extension of him, this man-thing. She lurches forward.
Falls.
~ * ~
He sees murder in her eyes. Or worse.
“Deamhan!”
Cleek stands over her. Not too close. She’s still got that pig-sticker of a goddamn knife well in hand. And god, he thinks, look at those teeth! But she’s tangled up pretty good now. Only that one arm free. That’s free enough.
“I’m afraid I can’t understand a fucking thing you’re saying, lady.”
The butt-end of the Remington makes a satisfying thunk against her thrashing head. So that then she stops thrashing altogether.
Cleek allows himself to breathe.
~ * ~
The really hard, nervous part is untangling her. He has no choice but to do it right then and there in front of the cave because there’s no way in hell he’s going to drag a sodden net with eighty pounds of weights attached — not to mention the woman herself — all the way back to the Escalade. He uses her own knife. He tests it with his thumb and it’s far sharper than his own. Carbon steel honed to a feather-edge with a bolted wooden handle. His best guess was that it would date back to the 1930s or 40s. A real antique.
They made these things better then.
But he has to use both hands to cut her free, particularly her legs and that means putting the Remington aside and though he’d hit her pretty hard he doesn’t like to think what she’ll be wanting to do to him when she wakes. Even unconscious she looks formidable.