Part 23 (2/2)
She drew in a deep breath, opened her mouth to scream, then met his dark gaze again.
He was holding the gun. ”Lie down. Put that blanket all the way over you. We're going to cut engine, sit here in the dark, and let them go right on by. But if you move or make a sound ...”
Carolyn hesitated. The other boats drew nearer. Their lights did, anyway. But he was right: in the dark, those lights were the only thing visible. So his plan could easily work ...
Everything in her said scream. Scream and scream, until the world ends, until the stars fall out of the sky.
And the girls, all the dead girls ...
They said something, too. We love you, they sang.
But they'd been with her for a long time now. So she knew something important about them. Their darkest secret ...
They loved her, all right. So much that they wanted her with them.
Down there in the dark. But she wasn't dead yet; not like them. Not quite. So she lay down obediently on the deck, pulled the blanket up, and waited for her chance.
Or for the sweet-voiced girls to welcome her home.
CURLED UP IN A BALL AT THE BOTTOM OF THE SAND PIT, CHIP thought about dying. But he just couldn't seem to get his mind wrapped around the idea of actually doing it.
Right off the bat would have been one thing, he figured. But by some accident of fate that he still didn't understand, he wasn't injured enough. No, this was a long-term project, one that even here in the freezing cold would probably take hours.
A s.h.i.+ver went through him, then another. He felt like the meat in a refrigerated sandwich: cold ground, cold sky. A sound of teeth chattering came from somewhere.
After a moment he realized it was his own teeth making that sound. A low, sad laugh came out of him, then: G.o.d, what a mess. All that trying and failing to make something of himself for all those years, and now here he was.
Miserably, he felt around in his coat pocket. The kit he'd taken from Sam back when they were on the boat was still in there, and maybe he could at least build a warming fire with it. He'd noticed some dry branches earlier, fallen from the trees growing at the top of the pit.
Maybe he could use them. The old sentinel pine he'd seen as he'd walked to the pit, especially, had dropped a lot of burnable material. He felt around in the dark, hoping to come upon some of it.
His hand closed on some twigs, on what felt like a sc.r.a.p of old rope-he dropped it fast before realizing it wasn't a snake-then on a larger chunk, an entire pine branch. The dry needles clinging to it might make decent kindling, Chip thought.
Not that it was going to make a difference in the long run. No one would see his fire down here in this hole. But if it made him feel better for a little while, why not?
At least it was something to do. He opened Sam's emergency kit, unwrapped the packet of stick matches inside it, and struck one. Its sudden, bright flare was just about the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen, and when he touched it to the sticks and pine needles he'd gathered together, they didn't just burn.
They flared, the pine pitch still in the needles sizzling and popping like gasoline. A giddy laugh escaped him as he warmed his hands over the blaze, which small as it was lit up the whole bottom of the pit.
Which was when it hit him: gasoline. If he had some of that, maybe he could signal for help with a bigger fire. Or maybe if he used ...
Pine boughs. The sudden, vivid memory of the sentinel tree looming over the pit's edge came back to him once more. Tall, dead, and ... well, not quite dead. With all those live pine boughs still waving all the way up there at the top, the old tree was probably visible for miles in daylight.
And at night, if it were on fire ... At the thought Chip felt a surge of energy go through him. It made his pain explode back to life, too, as if somebody had just stuck a hot poker through his rib cage. But ...
The h.e.l.l with it. If he didn't do something, pain would soon be the least of his problems. He scrambled to gather more fallen pine boughs before his fire went out, grabbing any twig and stick he could find, especially ones with pine needles still on them.
By the time he had enough of them, he was gasping in agony, a slick of pain-sweat making his clothes stick to him. Sweat and a lot of blood, because now in addition to the pain in his ribs, he could feel a stealthy but steady pulse leaking warmly from his shoulder.
But before he could think too hard about that, he forced his bad arm out of his coat sleeve, letting himself groan aloud. Next he wrapped the coat around the pine boughs he'd collected and tied the sleeves in a tight knot. The boughs stuck bus.h.i.+ly out of the coat's top like a bouquet, just as he'd hoped they would.
A bouquet-or a torch. But another wave of serious weakness washed over him as he thought of this and he sat down hard, very frightened again suddenly. Because maybe this dying business was not quite as time-consuming a project as he'd thought.
Maybe he was going to do it now, or in the next few minutes. The blood-pulse seemed abruptly very convincing, and meanwhile Sam might very well still be down there on the beach.
Maybe even still alive. If the tide hadn't washed him away, if he wasn't already floating ...
So there was no time to waste. Tiredly, Chip got up, began feeling around the slope of the sand pit for the rope he'd seen dangling, back when there was light to see it with. He imagined it must be from where some out-of-work fisherman, long ago reduced to the grim labor of humping sand out of a pit, had built a pulley and hung it from a branch of the sentinel tree, so at least he wouldn't have to haul heavy bags of sand uphill on his back.
Chip tripped over a stone, landed hard on some more of them, flat on his face in the dark, and as he lay there found both ends of the pulley rope by accident.
When one end went down, the other would go up. With both rope ends in his hand, he sat again on the cold wet sand with his brush-filled coat in the crook of one arm, the match kit in his other hand. There were only six matches left. The kit did contain a flint and steel, but in this dampness he doubted he could do anything with them.
So: six matches, rope and pulley, and a bunch of pine boughs with his coat wrapped around them, instead of around himself. He s.h.i.+vered convulsively, gritting his teeth until the spasm had pa.s.sed. Now all he needed was a counterweight, something to make one end of the rope go down so the other would go ...
Up. Chip sighed heavily. All the activity was making blood pulse out of his shoulder thicker and faster; possibly that alone would kill him, especially if he tried climbing the pit's steep, unstable side yet again.
But what the h.e.l.l, he thought. Probably it would kill him anyway. That or the cold. Screw it, he thought, understanding on some deep level that he was thinking a lot less clearly now.
Feeling worse, too. But ... clumsily, he began to work, tying one end of the rope around his branch-stuffed coat. Then he struggled uphill through the s.h.i.+fting sand, gathering the slack in the rope as he went.
Sweating and bleeding, cursing and sometimes weeping, he fell several times and each time had to make up the ground he'd lost doing so. But he managed it. One step at a time. It was yet another of the lousy plat.i.tudes he'd inflicted on Sam, back in the city.
But to his surprise, it actually worked: step by step, he climbed the pit's side. After what felt like hours but was really only about twenty minutes, he reached the top.
Panic had made him fail earlier, he realized. The beliefs, simultaneously held, that he couldn't do it but that he had to. Plus Randy, shooting at him with a gun ...
The memory made Chip giggle, which scared him again quite a lot. It convinced him that he really had lost a lot of blood so he'd better get on with it. Because this next part would be the worst: Going back down into the pit again. Fast- Everything in him said that instead he should find Sam, then stand at the water's edge, yelling for help. But the truth was, n.o.body would hear him. It might make him feel good, or as good as he could feel while freezing and bleeding to death.
But that was all. That, he realized bleakly, was absolutely the only benefit he or Sam would ever get out of it.
Hauling on one end of the rope wouldn't work, either, to make the other end rise. It would have, earlier. But now his hurt shoulder had stiffened up so much, he could hardly move it. So: Climbing up the last few yards out of the pit, he took one end of the rope in both hands, letting the slack fall to the ground by his feet. Above, the rope hung over the pulley wheel; the other end was tied around his pine-brush-filled coat.
So when he went down, the coat would get hauled up to where the pulley wheel was bolted ... .
Hoping the pulley itself wouldn't just crash down on his head, he tied the rope's free end around his waist. His fingers felt thick and unwilling; his body was urging him to lie down.
In a minute, he thought, then wrapped the rope around himself a few more times and knotted it. Then you can rest.
Funny how your hands went on moving even after your mind had let go, he thought. And how after a while being ice cold made you feel warm ...
Oh, just get on with it. He pulled out Sam's emergency fire kit. Another giggle escaped him, but this time he didn't bother worrying about it. He was losing it, and he knew it.
At last he stood at the edge of the pit with his coat in his hands. One end of the rope was around it, the other around his waist. The middle still hung unseen, high above.
Where the pulley was ... where the pine boughs were. The very flammable pine boughs ... like the ones in his coat. A final task remained, but first Chip stood a moment looking down into the pit.
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