The Cabin at the End of the World(51)
Sabrina’s shovel blade clangs off the rear passenger window. The glass doesn’t break but there’s a gouge and crack dowsing a haphazard path to the window frame.
Hand over hand Andrew scrabbles over the middle of the backseat, where there is no headrest. It’s still a tight, awkward squeeze to pull his torso over the seat back so that he can hang into the trunk area. The side panel storage is to his right. He paws at two black plastic knobs, turns them clockwise to six o’clock, and pulls away the plastic hatch.
The window to his left disintegrates, and jagged little glass cubes sting his bare lower legs and a handful ricochet off the rear windshield and roll around in the trunk. Andrew spasms, ducks his head between his shoulders and behind raised arms. With the window gone, Sabrina’s rough and greedy gasps for air suffuse into the car. Andrew mule-kicks his left leg behind him. He yells and his body tenses up for another strike from Sabrina, anticipating the pain to come.
Within the opened side panel is his handgun safe. Less than a year old and not much bigger than an eight-hundred-page hardcover book, it’s a the-future-is-now, aluminum alloy silver gadget with a sleek, edgeless design. Eric joked that it looked like a panini maker and asked if it could make him a tuna melt. The newest, lightest model he could find at the time of purchase, it’s biometric, opening after the sensor on the top reads the owner’s palm or thumb print.
Andrew extracts the gunbox out of the interior darkness of the side panel, dumps it onto the trunk floor, and waves his palm over the sensor. The cover opens on its minihydraulic arms. Inside, splayed on the black neoprene lining, are his snub-nosed .38 special, loose bullets, and a small cardboard ammunition box, the top flap tattered and open, which must’ve happened during transport or as the unit was roughly jostled from the storage panel.
Sabrina has the car door open. “Leave whatever it is you’re going after. Get out of the car and come back inside. I don’t want to hurt you.”
Can she see the gunbox or the gun? Probably not from where she is standing and with his body likely blocking her view of the trunk. Andrew snatches the gun with his right hand. It’s compact but solid, fitting purposefully into the folds of palm and fingers, which have lost some of their stiffness from the fight with O’Bannon and a day of disuse. With one hand he presses a thumb piece forward and pushes down on the cylinder until it swings open to the left. He shakily begins loading bullets into the five chambers.
Sabrina jabs him in the left side, the rusty tip of metal digging under his ribs. Andrew yelps, twitches, and tries to curl away from the repurposed spade, but he’s bottled in by the adjacent rear headrest. He knocks the gunbox over, spilling the contents. The bullets scatter and roll to all corners madly eager for movement and to achieve their projectile apotheosis on their own. The jab from Sabrina hurts, but there isn’t much oomph behind it, as maybe she doesn’t have enough leverage given the constraints of the confined enclosing of the SUV interior or she’s hesitant and isn’t sure what to do to get him to come back inside the cabin and hasn’t fully committed to stabbing him with a bizarre, customized weapon as the solution.
Andrew yells as though he’s in more pain than he is and kicks out behind him, connecting only with the back of the front passenger seat. He plucks one last stray, teasing bullet from the trunk floor and fills the fifth and final chamber.
Sabrina says, “You have to come back inside, we don’t have time for this,” and jabs him again with the weapon and with more force, the tip prodding painfully between his ribs.
He closes the cylinder and pushes off the trunk floor with his left arm. With both arms outstretched over his head he sinks back onto his haunches, like a dive into water reversed, pulling his chest over the seat back. He twists and sags against the other rear passenger door. Sabrina is crouched within the opposite doorframe, her hands slid farther up the length of the wooden staff, a Little Leaguer choking up on a bat.
Andrew fires a wild, nominally aimed shot, the report ear-ringing loud. His aim is too high and the bullet chunks into the ceiling above the thicker metal of the SUV’s doorframe.
Andrew and Sabrina look at each other for a beat, sharing in the surprise, lunacy, and possibility of the moment. Sabrina cowers and then looks over her head, as though the missed shot might bring the sky crashing down on top of her.
Andrew points the gun and says, “Drop that thing and back the fuck up.”
She says, “Okay, I’m sorry. Okay . . .” She doesn’t drop the weapon. She shuffles backward, and too quickly, so she’s far enough away that his view of her is obscured by the SUV’s interior and frame.
Andrew shouts at her to stop moving and slides across the backseat, his bare legs scratched by bits of shattered window. His left side stings where he was jabbed twice and his shirt is warmly damp with blood. His swollen knee throbs with a low but constant ache and is already turning an inky, storm cloud purple. The pain is bearable, but he’s unsure if the leg will hold his weight. By the time he’s to the edge of the rear seat, his legs dangling over the gravel driveway, Sabrina is a blur, running away to the left.
He shouts, “Stop! Stop right now!” Using the open door, he pulls himself up so that he stands on his left leg. He lowers his right foot onto the ground and slowly adds weight. His knee holds.
Sabrina is twenty or so paces away, legs pumping, and her bulky weapon swaying side to side. She’s close to being able to duck around a corner of the cabin and out of his sight. He yells at her to stop again, and when she doesn’t, he steps to the right to avoid shooting over the car door or having to crouch to shoot through the smashed window. He takes a deep breath and aims low, for her legs, and as he unconsciously replants his right foot and fires a shot, his knee gives out, bowing outside his profile, insisting upon continuing in the lateral direction. The shot misses, the report echoing over the lake and within their little bowl of forest, and Andrew falls.