The Cabin at the End of the World(76)
We walk and we watch and we wait for Sabrina to tell us we are where they hid the truck keys. Rain falls tentatively. We hear the light patter of raindrops on the leaves before we feel it on our skin.
Andrew clears his throat and says, “Eric.” He clears his throat again, more loudly and protracted. “What about Wen?” His voice cracks and spills open on the rocks of her name.
“What do you mean?”
“On top of everything else, they expect us to believe Wen’s death isn’t—”
Sabrina shouts, “No! No!” and dashes into a graceless sprint, her twisting torso a poor substitute for free-swinging arms.
Andrew yells at her to stop where she is. He pulls out the handgun from his back pocket with his left hand and holds it out in front of him, as far away from his body as he can reach. She doesn’t stop or slow down. He doesn’t shoot, and he limps after her.
Sabrina’s and Andrew’s shouts, grunts, and their grinding, leaden footfalls are an overture to the end, their spastic movements an asymmetric ballet to the chaotic, atonal fuss. Eric doesn’t run or walk faster to keep up with them. He feels like a fool, a hopeless, helpless fool for ever believing we could survive this.
The rope tied around Sabrina’s hands and wrists does not unwind or unspool or turn slack and spaghettify and become an elongating white tail. Seemingly without effort on her part, as though the act of her running simply triggers release, the ball of rope slides off completely intact, keeping its shape and splatting onto the road like a wad of putty.
Sabrina alternates pumping her arms and covering her ears with her freed hands, yelling what might be, “I’m helping them!”
Andrew considers a warning shot in the air to keep her from growing the distance between them. Before he swaps hands with the gun and walking stick—he has never shot with his left—Sabrina veers into the woods. Only three or four steps away from the road, she drops to her knees in front of the broad knotted trunk of a pine tree. Grunting, she flips up a sizable flat stone and rotates it away to her left. She then roots around in the undergrowth with her hands.
Andrew staggers to the road’s edge. Eric is not far behind and quickly catches up. With Andrew on his left, Eric steps off the road and into the greenery. Sabrina, in profile, is crying and talking to herself. Eric is close enough to see her dirt-and-mud-smeared hands appearing and disappearing.
Andrew tucks the walking stick under his armpit and points the gun at Sabrina’s back. “What the fuck was that? You should’ve told us we’re here. You didn’t need”—he glances back at the plop of rope in the road—“you could’ve just shown us where the keys are. What are you doing? Are you digging? You didn’t say anything about digging. I want you to stand up and show me your hands.”
Sabrina stands and turns to face us. In her right hand she dangles car keys on a red keychain. She underhand-tosses them. The keys fly a brief arcing trajectory, passing between us, and they land with a muted jingle in the middle of the road. Her left arm up to the elbow has disappeared inside a dark blue vinyl drawstring bag.
Andrew shouts, “What’s that?” He raises the gun, but he hasn’t been able to bring himself to slide his finger over the trigger. He doesn’t want to feel it, doesn’t want to remember how it felt when it was last pulled. His finger is instead curled over the front of the guard. “Drop it, Sabrina. Hey, you said you were going to help us. Remember? This isn’t helping . . .”
She says, “The truck is only another mile or so down the road. Take the keys. You can make it.” Her rhythm and inflection is off, like she’s reading a statement presented to her without punctuation or proper form.
Eric wishes Sabrina would look at him instead of Andrew, though she’s not really looking at Andrew, either; her eyes are unfocused, somewhere beyond us. Eric needs to see the terrible light’s reflection in her eyes, and then he’ll be sure of what he has to do.
Sabrina pulls the bag away and drops it to the ground, revealing a handgun bigger than Andrew’s. The black brick of polymer filling her left hand appears to be a semiautomatic Glock. She says, “I didn’t know Redmond left this here. I swear to you both. It had to have been Redmond. Oh my God . . .”
“Come on, Sabrina. Open your hand and let it fall,” Andrew says.
“How did I not see him leave this here? I watched him hide the keys under the rock and that’s where they were and now this bag is here, too, buried underneath. I never saw the bag and I never saw the gun—”
“Put the gun down, now, Sabrina.”
“I would’ve seen Redmond carrying the bag here. I walked next to him the whole time down the road. Unless it was Leonard. Maybe Leonard buried it here first, before we got here. When we parked the truck, Leonard took off, running ahead of us so he could be the first one at the cabin. Like he was supposed to, right? Like he was supposed to . . .”
The gun being here makes perfect sense to Andrew. If everything went wrong at the cabin, the others would still have this hidden weapon, their trump card. Andrew slides his finger through the guard and over the trigger of his gun. He doesn’t know if he can do this. Any of this.
Sabrina finding the gun makes perfect sense to Eric, too. As she is the last of the four, this gun is her chance to make the final sacrifice if we don’t choose.
Sabrina’s gun is down by her hip, pointed at the ground. She reaches into her back pocket and pulls out a white mesh mask. She roughly pulls it over the top of her head with one hand. It goes on askew, tilted, and it only covers the top half of her head and face. An unfinished concession to ritual, her mouth and the tip of her nose remain uncovered.