Stories (2011) (27 page)

For a time she feared he would become paranoid enough to
imagine she was one of the "bad guys" and put a .357 round through
her chest. But now she was free of him, escaped from all that . . . only to be
threatened by another man; a moon-faced, silver-toothed monster with a knife.

She returned once again to the question, what would Bruce
do, outside of challenging Moon Face in hand to hand combat? Sneaking past him
would be the best bet, making it back to the Chevy. To do that Bruce would have
used guerrilla techniques. "Take advantage of what's at hand," he
always said.

Well, she had looked to see what was at hand, and that turned
out to be a couple of fingernail files, one of them lost up the mountain.

Then maybe she wasn't thinking about this in the right way.
She might not be able to outfight Moon Face, but perhaps she could outthink
him. She had outthought Bruce, and he had considered himself a master of
strategy and preparation.

She tried to put herself in Moon Face's head. What was he
thinking? For the moment he saw her as his prey, a frightened animal on the
run. He might be more cautious because of that trick with the limb, but he'd
most likely chalk that one up to accident -- which it was for the most part. .
. but what if the prey turned on him?

There was a sudden cracking sound, and Ellen crawled a few
feet in the direction of the noise, gently moved aside a limb. Some distance
away, discerned faintly through a tangle of limbs, she saw light and detected
movement, and knew it was Moon Face. The cracking sound must have been him
stepping on a limb.

He was standing with his head bent, looking at the ground,
flashing a little pocket flashlight, obviously examining the drag path she had
made with her hands and knees when she entered into the pine thicket.

She watched as his shape and the light bobbed and twisted
through the limbs and tree trunks, coming nearer. She wanted to run, but didn't
know where to.

"All right," she thought. "All right. Take it
easy. Think."

She made a quick decision. Removed the scissors from her
purse, took off her shoes and slipped off her panty hose and put her shoes on
again.

She quickly snipped three long strips of nylon from her
damaged panty hose and knotted them together, using the sailor knots Bruce had
taught her. She cut more thin strips from the hose -- all the while listening
for Moon Face's approach -- and used all but one of them to fasten her
fingernail file, point out, securely to the tapered end of one of the small,
flexible pine limbs, then she tied one end of the long nylon strip she had made
around the limb, just below the file, and crawled backwards, pulling the limb
with her, bending it deep. When she had it back as far as she could manage, she
took a death grip on the nylon strip, and using it to keep the limb's position
taut, crawled around the trunk of a small pine and curved the nylon strip about
it and made a loop knot at the base of a sapling that crossed her knee-drag
trail. She used her last strip of nylon to fasten to the loop of the knot, and
carefully stretched the remaining length across the trail and tied it to
another sapling. If it worked correctly, when he came crawling through the
thicket, following her, his hands or knees would hit the strip, pull the loop
free, and the limb would fly forward, the file stabbing him, in an eye if she
were lucky.

Pausing to look through the boughs again, she saw that Moon
Face was on his hands and knees, moving through the thick foliage toward her.
Only moments were left.

She shoved pine needles over the strip and moved away on her
belly, sliding under the cocked sapling, no longer concerned that she might
make noise, in fact hoping noise would bring Moon Face quickly.

Following the upward slope of the hill, she crawled until
the trees became thin again and she could stand. She cut two long strips of
nylon from her hose with the scissors, and stretched them between two trees
about ankle high.

That one would make him mad if it caught him, but the next
one would be the corker.

She went up the path, used the rest of the nylon to tie
between two saplings, then grabbed hold of a thin, short limb and yanked at it
until it cracked, worked it free so there was a point made from the break. She
snapped that over her knee to form a point at the opposite end. She made a
quick mental measurement, jammed one end of the stick into the soft ground,
leaving a point facing up.

At that moment came evidence her first snare had worked -- a
loud swishing sound as the limb popped forward and a cry of pain. This was
followed by a howl as Moon Face crawled out of the thicket and onto the trail.
He stood slowly, one hand to his face. He glared up at her, removed his hand.
The file had struck him in the cheek; it was covered with blood. Moon Face
pointed his blood-covered hand at her and let out an accusing shriek so
horrible she retreated rapidly up the trail. Behind her, she could hear Moon Face
running.

The trail curved upward and turned abruptly. She followed
the curve a ways, looked back as Moon Face tripped over her first strip and hit
the ground, came up madder, charged even more violently up the path. But the
second strip got him and he fell forward, throwing his hands out. The spike in
the trail hit him low in the throat.

She stood transfixed at the top of the trail as he did a
pushup and came to one knee and put a hand to his throat. Even from a distance,
and with only the moonlight to show it to her, she could see that the wound was
dreadful.

Good.

Moon Face looked up, stabbed her with a look, started to
rise. Ellen turned and ran. As she made the turns in the trail, the going
improved and she theorized that she was rushing up the trail she had originally
come down.

This hopeful notion was dispelled when the pines thinned and
the trail dropped, then leveled off, then tapered into nothing. Before she
could slow up, she discovered she was on a sort of peninsula that jutted out
from the mountain and resembled an irregular-shaped diving board from which you
could leap off into night-black eternity.

In place of the pines on the sides of the trail were
numerous scarecrows on poles, and out on the very tip of the peninsula,
somewhat dispelling the diving board image, was a shack made of sticks and mud
and brambles.

After pausing to suck in some deep breaths, Ellen discovered
on closer examination that it wasn't scarecrows bordering her path after all.
It was people.

Dead people. She could smell them.

There were at least a dozen on either side, placed upright
on poles, their feet touching the ground, their knees slightly bent. They were
all fully clothed, and in various states of deterioration. Holes had been poked
through the backs of their heads to correspond with the hollow sockets of their
eyes, and the moonlight came through the holes and shined through the sockets,
and Ellen noted, with a warm sort of horror, that one wore a white sun dress
and pink, plastic shoes, and through its head she could see stars. On the
corpse's finger was a wedding ring, and the finger had grown thin and withered
and the ring was trapped there by knuckle bone alone.

The man next to her was fresher. He too was eyeless and
holes had been drilled through the back of his skull, but he still wore glasses
and was fleshy. There was a pen and pencil set in his coat pocket. He wore only
one shoe.

There was a skeleton in overalls, a wilting cigar stuck
between his teeth. A fresh UPS man with his cap at a jaunty angle, the moon through
his head, and a clipboard tied to his hand with string. His legs had been
positioned in such a way it seemed as if he was walking. A housewife with a
crumpled, nearly disintegrated grocery bag under her arm, the contents having
long fallen through the worn, wet bottom to heap at her feet in a mass of
colorless boxes and broken glass. A withered corpse in a ballerina's tutu and
slippers, rotting grapefruits tied to her chest with cord to simulate breasts,
her legs arranged in such a way she seemed in mid-dance, up on her toes, about
to leap or whirl.

The real horror was the children. One pathetic little boy's
corpse, still full of flesh and with only his drilled eyes to show death, had
been arranged in such a way that a teddy bear drooped from the crook of his
elbow. A toy metal tractor and a plastic truck were at his feet.

There was a little girl wearing a red, rubber clown nose and
a propeller beenie. A green plastic purse hung from her shoulder by a strap and
a doll's legs had been taped to her palm with black electrician's tape. The
doll hung upside down, holes drilled through its plastic head so that it
matched its owner.

Things began to click. Ellen understood what Moon Face had
been doing down here in the first place. He hadn't been in the Buick when she
struck it. He was disposing of a body. He was a murderer who brought his
victims here and set them up on either side of the pathway, parodying the way
they were in life, cutting out their eyes and punching through the backs of
their heads to let the world in.

Ellen realized numbly that time was slipping away, and Moon
Face was coming, and she had to find the trail up to her car. But when she
turned to run, she froze.

Thirty feet away, where the trail met the last of the pines,
squatting dead center in it, arms on his knees, one hand loosely holding the
knife, was Moon Face. He looked calm, almost happy, in spite of the fact a
large swath of dried blood was on his cheek and the wound in his throat was
making a faint whistling sound as air escaped it.

He appeared to be gloating, savoring the moment when he
would set his knife to work on her eyes, the gray matter behind them, the bone
of her skull.

A vision of her corpse propped up next to the child with the
teddy bear, or perhaps the skeletal ballerina, came to mind; she could see
herself hanging there, the light of the moon falling through her empty head,
melting into the path.

Then she felt anger. It boiled inside her. She determined
she was not going to allow Moon Face his prize easily. He'd earn it.

Another line from Bruce's books came to her.

Consider your alternatives.

She did, in a flash. And they were grim. She could try
charging past Moon Face, or pretend to, then dart into the pines. But it seemed
unlikely she could make the trees before he overtook her. She could try going
over the side of the trail and climbing down, but it was much too steep there,
and she'd fall immediately. She could make for the shack and try and find
something she could fight with. The last idea struck her as the correct one,
the one Bruce would have pursued. What was his quote? "If you can't effect
an escape, fall back and fight with what's available to you."

She hurried to the hut, glancing behind her from time to
time to check on Moon Face. He hadn't moved. He was observing her calmly, as if
he had all the time in the world.

When she was about to go through the doorless entry way, she
looked back at him one last time. He was in the same spot, watching, the knife
held limply against his leg. She knew he thought he had her right where he
wanted her, and that's exactly what she wanted him to think. A surprise attack
was the only chance she had. She just hoped she could find something to
surprise him with.

She hastened inside and let out an involuntary rasp of
breath.

The place stank, and for good reason. In the center of the
little hut was a folding card table and some chairs, and seated in one of the
chairs was a woman, the flesh rotting and dripping off her skull like candle
wax, her eyes empty and holes in the back of her head. Her arm was resting on
the table and her hand was clamped around an open bottle of whiskey. Beside
her, also without eyes, suspended in a standing position by wires connected to
the roof, was a man. He was a fresh kill. Big, dressed in khaki pants and shirt
and work shoes. In one hand a doubled belt was taped, and wires were attached
in such a way that his arm was drawn back as if ready to strike. Wires were
secured to his lips and pulled tight behind his head so that he was smiling in
a ghoulish way. Foil gum wrappers were fixed to his teeth, and the moonlight
gleaming through the opening at the top of the hut fell on them and made them
resemble Moon Face's metal-tipped choppers.

Ellen felt queasy, but fought the sensation down. She had
more to worry about than corpses. She had to prevent herself from becoming one.

She gave the place a quick pan. To her left was a
rust-framed roll-away bed with a thin, dirty mattress, and against the far wall
was a baby crib, and next to that a camper stove with a small frying pan on it.

She glanced quickly out the door of the hut and saw that
Moon Face had moved onto the stretch of trail bordered by the bodies. He was
walking very slowly, looking up now and then as if to appreciate the stars.

Her heart pumped another beat.

She moved about the hut, looking for a weapon.

The frying pan.

She grabbed it, and as she did, she saw what was in the
crib. What belonged there. A baby. But dead. A few months old. Its skin thin as
plastic and stretched tight over pathetic, little rib bones. Eyes gone, holes
through its head. Burnt match stubs between blackened toes. It wore a diaper
and the stink of feces wafted from it and into her nostrils. A rattle lay at
the foot of the crib.

A horrible realization rushed through her. The baby had been
alive when taken by this mad man, and it had died here, starved and tortured.
She gripped the frying pan with such intensity her hand cramped.

Her foot touched something.

She looked down. Large bones were heaped there -- discarded
Mommies and Daddies, for it now occurred to her that was who the corpses
represented.