Crawl(12)
“HELP ME!”
Much better. She repeated those two words a total of six times before her throat would have no more of it. Her voice retreated like a scared animal. No matter how hard she tried, the most she could produce was a mouse-like squeak. Could someone break their voice? She thought she had.
Her only choice—
(I suggest you crawl)
—was to carry on dragging her ass across the ground.
Her fingernails, caked with clay and throbbing, refused to dig anymore. Juliet pressed up on her elbows and army-crawled some more. Her legs seemed to have gained weight, especially from the knees down, and holding her feet up became an impossible chore. Her lower legs flopped down, striking the clay with such ferocity that her entire body convulsed. Juliet spat and shrieked, like a cat with its tail in a mousetrap, flopping from side to side. Her hands made to reach for her legs, but she willed against them. She wouldn’t even allow herself to look upon her ripped and crippled feet, didn’t want to know the extent of the damage. Though her mind conjured a rather nasty image, she refused to give credence to her thoughts by verifying the atrocity below.
When the pain became bearable again, Juliet used her elbows like climbing hooks. She laid her cheek against the cold clay, jabbed her elbows into the ground, and shoved up and forward. The resulting froggish leap landed her over a foot farther along than she had been. She judged this to be true because her left breast now rested in one of the last holes she’d dug with her tired hands.
When her subconscious registered the fact that she could no longer hear the thing in the woods gnaw-gnaw-gnawing on the teenager, her conscious mind told Mr. Subconscious to go fuck himself. She didn’t want to think about that right now. Being devoured by some corpse-ravaging monstrosity was last on her to-do list, which she treated like Colton’s Honey-Do Sheet—meaning, if it ever crossed her mind at all, it’d be a cold day in Hades.
Now if she could ignore the sensation of her feet being continuously dipped in concentrated acid she might make it out of this nightmare.
She creaked out another lackluster “Help me,” to whoever would listen, before elbow-launching forward again. This time she cracked her chin against the soft-packed ground and bit her tongue. The taste of pennies rolled around inside her mouth. She’d crushed her boobs, too, which was only slightly less agonizing than the lacerated tongue.
She hauled herself onto her elbows again. Not wanting to risk breaking a rib or cracking her sternum, she eased up, pushed forward, and rolled onto her forearms.
There, that’s better.
Her right elbow tore open as she moved from the clearing to the road. The fresh wound leaked thick blood onto the clay and spread, like ink on glass. Whimpering, Juliet rolled to her side and fingered the wound. It wasn’t more than an inch long and not too deep, but it bled as if she’d hit an artery. Superficial wounds always bleed the worst, she recalled reading in one magazine or another.
Juliet rested. Whether or not her weakness and lack of motivation stemmed from blood loss, she couldn’t have said, and didn’t really care, either. The world had become a blurred spectacle of muddy white light. It pulsed and thrummed. And behind it all, the wax and wane of someone’s car engine, set to idle, mocking her, driving her hazy mind mad with frustration.
“Come down here and get me or go the fuck away, you lousy shit,” Juliet croaked. She flopped over onto her back and laid her head back on the cool earth. She tried to find the stars through the boughs above, or maybe the first hint of approaching dawn seeping through the branches. Neither greeted her. The space between the entwined branches was dark; an unceasing, uncaring blackness. A void. Her hopes died there.
“Fuuuuuuuuuuck!” she wailed, drumming the balls of her fists at her sides. “I can’t die like this!”
Her head lolled to the side as she wept, wallowing in her own weakness. Blissfully aware that she no longer felt her split feet and sure that cold death now circulated through her veins instead of warm, life-sustaining blood, Juliet closed her eyes and prayed for the end.
“Just don’t lemme suffer, okay?” she asked God in a small, pitiful voice. “Lemme fall asleep and not wake up. Let it be like that”—her voice hitched with emotion—“okay, God? Okay? Please?”
The idling engine revved. Juliet heard the transmission shift with a clunk, and then tires crunching gravel.
They (who?) were coming. Juliet realized this in the middle of an inhalation of air. She choked on that breath as she rolled over and pushed up on her hands. A black shape blocked the lower half of the ball of light pouring in from the end of the tunnel of trees. No headlights. Not that they were needed, what with the grand illumination behind the wide-bodied car. The vehicle rolled along slowly, as if it still only idled, and a spike of fear drove into the space between Juliet’s breasts.
“It’s him,” she said, with the utmost certainty, not really seeing him but quite clearly picturing the red priest grinning over the Merc’s steering wheel.
The evil son of a bitch is coming back to see if I’m still alive. How nice of him. I wish I had a .357 Magnum and a shovel with which to properly thank him for being so attentive.
Another voice, this one sounding a lot like the husband she’d lost track of, entered her thoughts. Julie? Julie, babe? You think you might wanna hide? Maybe he’s coming back to finish what he started, and you shouldn’t be around to find out how he plans on doing that.