The Raven's Gift - Don Rearden [31]
“I wonder why I dreamt that. Even though I never saw your face, I think you were him, John. You were trying to make those men with the crosses leave. The Native man I saw was you. I remember the voice in the dream, too. It was your voice. Even though I never heard your voice before, I know it was you,” she said.
11
The girl’s screams filled him with the same dread Anna’s had when she realized no one was coming to rescue them.
“Get back!” he said. “You’ve got to move your hands!”
He tried to pull her hands away from the gap between the two doors. Her fingers tore at the metal. The girl stopped clawing and pressed her face to the crack, one milky white eye shooting her fear out toward him.
“John, get me out! I can’t be in here with them. Get me out …”
Her voice trailed off and she began a moan-like wail that sent shivers through him.
“Stand back. I’m coming in.”
He took the ice pick and slammed the sharp edge into the jamb. He slammed again and again. Sparks splintered into the dark gym. Nothing.
“We shouldn’t have come in here,” the girl gasped. “Please get me out … get me out! Get me out!”
He pulled the door open with his hands until the chain caught, and then he slid the blade of the pick against the space where the handle met the door.
He pushed the heavy bar in, then pulled it back and slammed it home. The handle gave. He hit it again and again. Each time he swung harder than the last, each hit opened the gap. He didn’t have the strength he once had.
He didn’t know how long he stood there slamming the pick, and he didn’t know that the girl had stopped screaming and crying, or that the angry cries that filled the hallway were his own until the pick crashed through and the chain clattered to the gym floor.
The girl burst through the opening and grabbed hold of him. She pressed her face against his chest and she held herself there. He leaned the pick against the wall and wiped his wet cheeks with the back of a hand. He put his arms around her and then dropped them.
“Please. Please get me out of here,” she begged.
In the darkness of the gym he could see them, hundreds of desiccated corpses, the bodies of the entire village.
ON ANNA AND JOHN’S first night in the village, they broke their house in, a personal ritual they did in all the new places they lived. They made love in each room. In their new accommodations, a little red aluminum-sided house behind the school, they didn’t have much breaking in to do. The bedroom barely fit a twin bed, and the kitchen and living area took up the rest of the twenty-by-twenty house. The toilet, a white five-gallon bucket complete with an almond-coloured toilet seat, sat in a closet-sized bathroom with an unplumbed vanity and sink. Anna loved that someone, perhaps the teachers who lived there the year prior, had written in black marker on the side of the bucket THE JOHN. A plastic gallon chocolate ice cream bucket sat beneath the sink’s drainpipe.
They tried a few positions in all the rooms, except for what Anna had coined the poop closet, and after some prodding, he even persuaded her to slip out into the plywood-enclosed foyer that covered the entryway.
As they stood there, her hand firmly holding the door closed, to keep anyone from seeing them, and with him standing behind her, they moved against each other, slowly, the cool, damp fall air raising their arms