The Chain(95)

Ginger smiles and drops her gun.

“I’m coming for you,” Rachel snarls and runs at her.

Ginger quickly assumes a self-defense stance, but Rachel’s momentum knocks them both to the ground.

Ginger springs to her feet and Rachel finds something metal on the floor and tosses it at her; it misses and thuds into the cinder-block wall.

Rachel gets up and throws a fist at Ginger but she’s far too slow and Ginger easily dodges it with a neat sidestep. Ginger’s blue eyes glint with pleasure as she head-butts a stunned Rachel in the face.

Rachel has never had her nose broken before, and the pain is so shocking that she is momentarily blinded. Ginger punches her in the ribs, stomach, and the left breast.

Rachel winces, collapses onto one knee, and then somehow gets up again.

“You liked that, bitch? You’ll love this,” Ginger says and she punches her in the throat, the left breast again, and then square on her bloody nose.

Heavy, well-placed, well-aimed blows that hurt.

Rachel goes down hard.

Ginger leaps on top of her and flips Rachel onto her back.

Ginger is so quick and efficient that Rachel has no chance.

“No, ugh.” Rachel gasps as Ginger’s hands wrap around her throat and squeeze.

“I knew you were trouble. Knew it right from the start,” Ginger says, her wild, ecstatic, crazy face leering above Rachel. Spittle is flying from her mouth. She’s grinning. She’s enjoying this. “I knew it!” Ginger says and squeezes harder. In FBI self-defense class, she learned how to choke someone out in a few seconds.

Rachel’s vision is tunneling.

Everything is becoming white.

“You’re going to die, bitch!” Ginger yells.

Tunnel.

Whiteness.

Nothingness.

Rachel knows she is disappearing forever now.

She can feel her life dribbling away onto the grimy concrete floor.

How to tell Kylie she loves her but that she isn’t going to make it?

Can’t tell her. Can’t talk. Can’t breathe.

Nothing anyone can do.

Rachel understands everything now.

The Chain is a cruel method of exploiting the most important human emotion—the capacity for love—to make money. It wouldn’t work in a world where there was no filial or sibling or romantic love, and only a sociopath who is without love or who doesn’t understand love could use it for her ends.

Love is what undid Ariadne and Theseus.

The Minotaur too, in the Borges story.

Love, or a fumbling attempt at love, is what nearly undid Ginger.

Rachel sees all that.

She understands.

The Chain is a metaphor for the ties that bind all of us to friends and family. It is the umbilical link between mother and child, the way or path that the hero must travel in a quest, and it is the thin clew of crimson thread that is the solution Ariadne comes up with to the problem of the labyrinth.

Rachel understands it all.

Knowledge is sorrow.

She closes her eyes and feels the darkness wrap around her.

The world is diminishing, fading, falling far away…

Then she feels something else.

Something sharp. Something that cuts. Something that hurts. A long, thin shard of glass.

Her thumb drags it across the floor and her hand wraps around it.

Her hands are bloody but her grip is strong.

Rachel Klein, avoider of mirrors, has tumbled through the looking glass and taken a piece of that glass with her.

She will give it to Ginger as a gift.

Yes.

And with the last breath in her body, she arcs the splinter of glass hard into Ginger’s throat.

Ginger screams and lets go of Rachel and claws at her neck.

She fumbles at the glass and tries to save herself but the carotid is severed and a fount of crimson arterial blood is already pouring from the wound.

Rachel rolls away from her and gulps air. Ginger’s eyes widen. “I knew you were…” she says and collapses to the floor, dead.

Rachel breathes and closes her eyes and opens them again.

And now it is only Kylie hugging her.

Hugging her for twenty seconds and then getting up and pressing a rag against the wound in Pete’s abdomen.

The bullet somehow missed the major blood vessels, but he needs medical attention. Quick.

Kylie finds her mom’s phone and dials 911. She tells the dispatcher that she needs the police and an ambulance.

Kylie hands the phone to Stuart and goes to help her dad.

Stuart tells the dispatcher exactly how to get to them from Route 1A. When he sees the house behind them is burning, he tells them to send the fire department too. “Stay on the line, honey, help is on the way,” the dispatcher says.

Kylie finds pieces of tarp and puts one over her uncle Pete and her dad and another around her mom and Stuart as protection against the wind and snow howling through the abattoir.

“Come here,” Rachel says to Kylie and Stuart, and she pulls the two kids close.

She tells them it’s going to be all right in the voice mothers have used to reassure their little ones for tens of thousands of years.

“How can I help?” Marty asks, crawling toward them.

“Help Uncle Pete. Keep pressure on his wound,” Kylie says to her dad.

Marty nods and presses the rag hard against Pete’s stomach. “Hang in there, big brother, I’m sure you’ve faced worse than this,” Marty says.