Except for that brief break, they had driven through the day north on US 101and stopped for fuel only once. As far as she knew Tony had been awake for the better part of two and a half days. Since they left the motel, he had done all the driving and that had to be seventeen or eighteen hours ago. She had no reason to believe Hank or Rudy had spelled him at any juncture before that.
It was almost five o’clock in the evening and the sun, draped in a tapestry of orange and gray, sagged heavy in the western sky. They approached the outskirts of Lincoln City on the central Oregon coast. Natalie faced east and could see the reflection of the sunset in Rudy’s window. The otherwise white steel door frame next him to him had taken on an orange tint.
The only real relief she had realized through her second night of captivity had been sleep, but fitful dreams didn’t allow it to be very restful. Most of the night she fled in the darkness from an attacker who, even though he would seize her again and again, she intuited he had more than rape and murder on his mind. But one dream had saved her—being home in Iowa. In it she sat down to Sunday dinner around the scarred dining room table covered with that old bed sheet surrounded by family—Cindy, and her mom and dad.
By the sheer grit of her determination to survive, she had endured being entombed in the trunk of a car for more than twenty hours and had been able to sit on the uncomfortable and filthy floor of a van for the better part of a day. On the farm everything always seemed disheveled. She hated to feel unclean, yet even though she longed for a hot bath and her eyes wept for lack of sleep, her mind, still sharp, couldn’t think of anything except how to end this nightmare.
She was surprised at how strong she had grown since all this began. Resilience had never been one of her strengths. She grew up the “prissy” one as her mother put it. Playing dress up as a young girl, styling her hair, putting on makeup and talking on the telephone with what few friends she had as she got older were preferred activities. Yet, even though she hated creeping critters of all kinds, she had come to believe that life for every creature was sacred. Everything had its place in the cosmic scheme, even if it crawled or slithered.
Yet here, she was the nursemaid to man who bore the bullet she put in his chest. His scarred face with the long scratches she dug into his cheeks with her own fingernails taunted her in silence. She remembered her assessment of him when they first met two days ago in the warehouse—Not the brightest set of headlights on the highway to Hell. And now this non-violent girl had likely hastened his demise.
In her short years of life, she had never witnessed someone die. Her great grandmother who had been ill for several months had passed when Natalie, then Amy, was fourteen. Before death overtook her, Amy had spent some time at her bedside holding her grandfather’s hand while he watched his mother die. Each breath her great grandmother took sounded much like Hank’s labored struggle now, but when the end came, Amy had stepped out of the room. Natalie feared there would be no room to step out of when Hank succumbed to his injury.
She had continued her vigil throughout the day with Hank’s head in her lap and he was still alive. Even though her lower body had become numb from sitting in one position, the immobility seemed to aggravate the discomfort of the many wounds and bruises she had suffered over the last couple of days. Her head and jaw ached now as it had most of the day and the freshest wounds, her scrapped knees, which had become swollen and inflamed, stung whenever she shifted positions. She was happy to still be alive but with Hank’s life dangling over an unstable precipice, she had doubts about how much longer that would be true.
The bleeding had stopped in Hank’s chest. She had dressed the wound a couple of times with the diapers and masking tape, even though it had been difficult with her hands bound together. Hank’s injury had become distended. The flesh around it a mix of crimson, jaundice and black. The color in his face had gotten more sullen and in the last few hours his mouth had fallen fixed into an O shape.
His wheezing struggle for breath had deepened and often several seconds would pass between breaths. When he did inhale again, it sounded like someone had broken the surface after being submerged beneath the water too long. Over the last hour in the van, though, a new symptom had emerged. Hank had begun to cough up blood. She wiped it from his lips each time with a rag of disposable diaper, but she convinced herself that he had entered the last hours of life.
_____
©
Jearl Rugh 2012
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