My Heart Is a Chainsaw (The Lake Witch Trilogy #1)(126)

But this tracks, too, doesn’t it? All of her armor’s been stripped away, is part of the lake already, but there’s still one fight to fight. Jade hates Proofrock through and through, doesn’t have enough fingers or toes or math to even count all the ways she hates it, but that doesn’t mean she can watch it burn, either.

She limps back to cabin 6, the one that was supposed to have been her own private Mausoleum, her high-altitude Mortuary, her American Burial Ground, and pries the loose floorboard up, stands with the shiny-new double-bit axe she stole once upon a childhood, to deal with anyone who ever followed her out here to her safe place.

Instead of dragging it behind like would look cool, she carries it low in front of her hips, runs for the bluff.

The lower ten feet are dotted with old rusted rebar hammered into the rock for a climbing patch. Jade tests that rebar, gives it her weight, her shoulder screaming for mercy, her fingers just screaming, and earns her climbing patch in her underwear, in a twenty-mile-per-hour wind.

From here on up, though, it’s all fingertips and toes, it’s all crumbling rock and untrustworthy roots, the axe hooked over her right shoulder from the front, its lower tip gouging into her back each time she has to reach farther than she can reach.

Letha Mondragon would make short work of a task like this, Jade knows, but Letha Mondragon is receiving medical attention in a tent right now, the reporters already carving her hero’s journey in stone.

It makes Jade jam her bloodied fingertips deeper into the crevices. It makes her scrape her knees harder against the face of the rock.

Finally she births over the top of the bluff, lies there on her back panting, the axe clutched tight to her chest.

It’s not over yet.

She rolls over, comes up to a knee, then three points, and then, because she doesn’t trust herself to stand all at once without wavering back off into the open space behind her, she’s running ahead as best she can, still holding the axe with both hands.

Ten, twelve minutes later, there’s the dam like a big toy dropped down from orbit, its top lip of concrete probably twenty feet tall. Meaning: that’s how high Jade can bring the water up, if she can just convince Jensen Banks, the dam keeper, to crank his controls that much.

Will he remember her from all the presentations he gave to the elementary classes? Presentations Jade groaned and squirmed through, not caring about the volume, the rate, any of that stupid stuff.

It matters now, though.

She runs harder, the smoke engulfing her for feet at a time, leaving her bent over and coughing from the absolute bottom of her lungs—it’s like inhaling a whole pack of cigarettes at once, and then, before you’ve got your breath, inhaling another pack.

The Girl with the Black Lungs pushes on.

The Girl with the Stubbly Head doesn’t stop.

Finally Jade crashes out onto the flat spine of the dam, her momentum plus the unwieldy axe nearly overbalancing her over the dry side, the long drop side.

She reins it in by swinging the axe back behind her, just holding on to the handle with one hand.

It works, but barely.

Jade makes herself walk the fifty yards to the control booth, her steps stiff and mechanical again, because Jensen’s probably watching her through the peephole of his door— watching this girl in her underwear make her way to his booth, left foot dragging.

She taps on the door with the side of the axe, and, when there’s no tap back, no anything, she knocks harder, with more insistence.

Still nothing.

Why didn’t she check for Jensen’s truck on the way in?

But… but of course: he’d have seen the emergency lights down in Proofrock, wouldn’t he have? He’d have seen and puttered down to see how he could help. Either that or he got a heads-up from the Forest Service about the fire headed his way, so he set the controls on the dam version of autopilot, abandoned his post.

Either way, Jade hauls the axe back behind her, swings it ahead with everything she’s got, fully intent on Jack Torrance’ing the door to splinters.

The axe hardly makes a dent.

The door’s metal, and thick, solid metal at that.

Jade swings at the doorknob now, misses, but connects on the second try.

The door handle clatters off, falls into the lake.

The door’s just as fast, just as solid.

“Shit shit shit! ” Jade says all around, to all the nature she’s also trying to save.

Hating having to do this, she sucks in, tightropes around to the other side of the control booth. The three sides that don’t have a door do have windows, but the one opposite the door is the only one you can actually do anything with, or to, as it’s the only one you can really stand by.

Halfway there, Jade’s bare foot jerks up all on its own from a sharp fleck of gravel or a rusty nail head or it doesn’t matter and she throws her arms out like to keep from falling, her hands completely forgetting about the axe.

It falls, falls, one of its two bits catching on the concrete lip between Jade’s feet instead of gouging into either of them like it should have, and that sends it cartwheeling out and back in what feels to Jade like the slowest motion ever—slow enough that even a nonathletic horror chick can plop down to her ass, her legs hanging out over the water so the top of her right foot can just cradle that axe head, guide it back up to her waiting hands.

The fall from here wouldn’t kill her, but there not being anywhere to beach for a quarter mile would.