She stared into the dark empty space beyond the campfire. It only took her a moment to recall her plight. On the other side of the coral, the firelight danced with playful shadows across Rudy’s chest and face. He leaned against a post on a small pile of hay with his sweatshirt zipped and the hood pulled over his head. She noticed the smeared residue of a bloodstain, my blood, left from cleaning her clotted nose.
From the advanced gloom of the barn, she judged she had slept for several hours. The last thing she remembered was that she ate all the meat from a package of salami and washed the welcomed briny taste out of her mouth with a bottle of water. While she ate, she recalled the wind had waged a fierce battle against the walls of the barn. They shrieked and shuddered as if they fought in mortal combat to prolong the barn’s inevitable demise. Despite her fear that she would be buried alive and with Tony off to find a rat to nap with, she found a spot near the fire to plan another escape attempt. With her stomach filled and her thirst quenched for the first time since the motel two days ago, in the warmth where she hoped gain strength, she had succumbed to a deep, dreamless sleep.
Now awake, she realized her stomach had settled and the strength she needed for the coming fray had begun to creep its way back into her limbs. The fire popped again. This time it didn’t startle her and she watched orange sparks drift upwards, riding the thermals, and then burn out a few feet above the flames. She tracked the smoke as the languid gray billows folded and rolled their way to the rafters, and found an exit from the barn through gaps in the roof. By the fading light offered through those same fissures, she knew it wouldn’t be long before daylight would be gone and Tony would want to be on the move.
Her mind drew back to her dad’s farm. She remembered more than once he built a fire behind the barn to burn debris. She and her sister, Cindy, always helped keep it stoked and stirred. And then at the end of those days, there were always marshmallows to roast over the fading embers.
She would have lingered in nostalgia, but with the patter of the rain on the roof of this barn, and Tony’s terror always a breath away, she knew today wouldn’t end the same.
Now awake, every torturous thing done to her in the last three days came to mind—raped, pistol whipped, tied and gaged, starved, punched in the face, kicked, devalued—and she renewed her vow to get out of this alive. She glanced toward Rudy, cleared her throat just loud enough to get his attention but not with adequate volume to disturb the monster she knew lurked somewhere in the shadows.
“Where is he?” she whispered.
“Don’t know, don’t care,” Rudy said and turned his head up from a bag of potato chips.
Between them, the low fire burned and from what she could see, Rudy had busied himself while she slept building a supply of combustible material. The barn floor next to him was stacked with scrapes of wood and fence planks he had broken into right-sized pieces. With a couple of empty beer cans at his side, she wondered if he had tried over the last few hours to dull the sense of doom he must feel. She had tried to tell him that Tony couldn’t let him live to be a witness, but Rudy had explained, that if they got to his uncle’s hunting cabin, he knew he could hide both of them in the woods. She couldn’t see that happening, but as she had realized last night, this was Rudy’s pattern. Don’t fight, run.
She sat up and looked around the barn. In the dull light it was hard to make out distinct shapes, but the reflection of the fire caught something chrome on the front of the car.
“If he’s still asleep, we might be able to run,” she said and began to get to her feet.
The white nylon rope had been removed from her hands and feet, but she had no memory of it happening. As she stood, she realized her atrophied body might take her will captive if she indeed had to run. Since she had spent most of the last three days either entombed in a trunk or tied hand and foot, the muscles in the legs were unwilling to extend. She reached to her thighs and tried to massage feeling back into them. That not working, she stood first on one foot and then the other to flex her legs until they began to feel as if they might support her in a crisis.
“You really think we should try? He’ll hear us.”
“He might, but we can’t just sit around and wait for him to kill us.”
“But how? We can’t get out of here.”
Disappointed in his ability to think past his next breath, she didn’t mask her disgust. “The car! You hot wire the car and we can get out of here.”
Rudy twisted to glance over his left shoulder toward the Subaru and then stood.
“Oh … yeah, maybe I could. I just wish I knew where he was.”
Encouraged that he seemed to be reasoning out the probability of success, she said, “We’ve got to take the chance, what’s the worst that can happen? He plans to kills us both anyway.”
As Rudy started toward the car, he pointed the flashlight toward areas of the barn cloaked in shadow. He hoped the penetrating beam would reveal Tony’s roost. He didn’t spot him, so, being careful not to scuff his feet on the ground for fear the sound would stir Tony, he dared to think this could be the realization of his ultimate longing. He remembered what Natalie had said yesterday before Hank’s death, “Get me away from Tony and Hank, and I’m yours.” His heart rate began to accelerate as the adrenaline of anticipation surged through his veins. Maybe there was still a chance his will hadn’t been scuttled by the demonic spirit of that psychopath.
When he reached the driver’s door, he tugged on the handle. The door opened.
_____
©
Jearl Rugh 2012
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