The Girls She Left Behind (27 page)

It was a voice.
“Tara!”
someone screamed hoarsely, the sound as wildly ragged as the fire's crazed howl.
“Tara, are you here?”

Lizzie bent swiftly to the unconscious girl as the inferno shrieked. But the knots in the twine on Tara's arms were pulled rock-hard by her earlier struggles.

“Tara!”
The scream came again as Jane turned, fully exposed in the doorway, her weapon raised and her face flat with sudden, unwelcome knowledge: that someone really was out there.

She must still have been realizing it when in the next moment a sharp pop sounded from outside and a chunk the size of a silver dollar flew out of her head, sailing through the smoky gloom in an explosion of bright-red blood.

“T
ara?” Scrambling over Jane's body, Peg Wylie half fell into the shed, her face soot-smeared and her yellow hair a fire-crazed frizzle. She fell weeping by her daughter's unconscious body.

A slough of burnt skin sagged from her jaw, and her eyebrows were gone. But she'd found her lost child and the tears streaming down her face weren't from the searing smoke.

“Oh, honey,” she breathed. “Mommy's here now, it's okay…”

But it wasn't. Flames munched one corner of the shed and an ominous creaking sounded from above. The roof's far end sagged abruptly, releasing a sparkling shower of glowing embers.

“Tara,” Peg cried brokenly, trying to lift the girl. But the strands of twine that bound Tara's arms, still tied to a ringed iron spike set into the floor, were too short to stretch any more.

When Peg tried again, though, a bit of the floor moved, too. Lizzie shoved Peg aside, gritting her teeth against the misery of each labored breath.

“Try once more,” she gasped while her fingers scrabbled on the splintery wood for what must be there: a trapdoor.

Because why else would the floor move, why would a shed like this even have a wooden floor, unless—

Finally she found the edge, hooked her fingertips onto it, and pried upward. As the trapdoor rose at last, dank air gushed up from below like a blessing, smelling of cool earth.

“Go,” she told Peg just as the roof overhead sagged again with a sharp, splintering
crack!

Peg dropped her legs through the opening, shimmied down the rest of the way, and held her arms up for Tara. “You've got to cut that twine somehow, please!” she cried. “Hurry…”

Glancing around wildly, Lizzie saw no tools at all. And Jane had taken the jackknife she always carried from her duty belt. But then she spied her own weapon fallen beside Jane's body. And it was a crazy idea but maybe, just maybe, it would work.

Seizing the weapon she laid the barrel end at an angle against the twine, now stretched taut across the floor. Then she let her finger tighten on the trigger, felt the firing mechanism slip past the pressure point until…

The weapon's report was like a bomb going off, deafening her. But the rope's strands parted and Lizzie half dragged, half rolled Tara down through the trapdoor into her mother's arms.

Then as the roof dropped warningly with an agonized groan of burnt timbers, Lizzie looked back a last time at Jane Crimmins's motionless body. Sparks flared in her hair and a tide of dark blood spread around her.

“Hurry,” Peg cried again from below.

A
bove them in the burning shed, a row of beams let go with a sound like big bones snapping. Lizzie rushed to the open trapdoor Peg held up for her.

A rafter slammed down. A splinter daggered her arm. “Come
on,
” Peg urged as a wall ignited with a
whoosh.

Fire poured through the roof as Lizzie slung her legs hastily down into the hole and fell through it. The trapdoor dropped shut with a dull, final-sounding
thud.
Hitting the floor, she felt her teeth click together and her head snap forward with the impact.

“Ugh.” The agony in her chest was nauseating. She managed to haul herself up on her elbow, opening her eyes just as Peg's flashlight snapped on.

Then as she turned her head woozily she came suddenly face-to-face with the other occupant of the crawl space:

Short, dark hair, wide-open eyes, mouth sagging sideways in a lifeless yawn…

“Gah.” Lizzie scrambled back. Dead bodies were one thing…

“Who's that?” Peg Wylie stared.

…but
sudden
dead bodies were something else again.

“I'm not sure. But I'm guessing it's Cam Petry.” From above came a cascading crash: the rest of the roof falling in, Lizzie thought. Which meant…

“You know what, though?” she said as a new wave of dizziness swirled through her. “Never mind who that is. We've got—”

Other things to worry about,
she'd meant to say, but instead she passed out. When she came to again, Peg was bent over a blue plastic jerrican in the cellar's corner.

“What are you doing?” Lizzie whispered, the words coming out in little gusts on the tiny sips of air she could get.

“Opening up the stored water.” Peg had pushed the dead body into a far corner, laid burlap sacks over its face. Tara lay propped against the opposite wall.

Lizzie licked her parched lips. “I didn't know you had a gun.” She rose up on one elbow, felt a gritty crunch of something grating deep inside her, and coughed up a wad of blood.

“There's a lot you don't know about me,” said Peg. “But I've been waiting a long time for Henry to show up. Worrying, being afraid. So I took a few lessons. Gun safety and target shooting at the VFW range.”

The .22 pistol stuck out of her jeans pocket. “I never really believed I'd shoot anyone, though. Until I did.”

“Yeah. I felt that way the first time, too.” Lizzie squinted around, trying not to think about the pain in her chest and her shortness of breath. “What is this place, anyway?”

Above them, the shed went on thudding and shuddering as the rampaging fire devoured it like a ravenous beast that howled and stomped as it ate.

“Shepherd's hut,” Peg said. “That bathtub outside is a trough. Hauled water for the animals, someone got it up here in a pickup truck. This crawl space is to stash supplies in, animal feed and supplies for people, too, so no wild critters can get at it.”

A metal cup hung from the jerrican. Peg unscrewed the can's spout, removed a plastic plug from it, then reattached the spout and poured liquid into the cup.

“Up here in Maine, if a blizzard blows in and catches you by surprise you still have to take care of your livestock. You need shelters like this one.”

She brought the cup to Tara's side, lifted the girl's head tenderly, and dribbled a little water onto her lips.

“That's probably why it hasn't burned,” she went on calmly, “because sheep graze right down to the ground around these things, eat the roots and everything.”

She pushed the moisture into Tara's mouth with a finger. “Wrecks the grass, that's why cattlemen and sheep people always butt heads. Makes a kind of natural firebreak, though.”

She carried some water to Lizzie. “But now stuff is blowing, the fire doesn't need tinder on the ground to spread. Sparks fly through the air, and—”

Something large fell somewhere above. “Anyway, in bad weather the shepherd might have to hole up here awhile,” Peg said. “Get the animals under cover, then come down here and wait it out. So that's what the supplies are for.”

She put the cup to Lizzie's lips. “Drink if you can.”

The water tasted like blood; Lizzie repressed a gag while above the fire bellowed, crackling and snapping. At the time, coming down here had seemed like the right move.

The only one, in fact. But now they were trapped. A glowing crumb fell from between the floorboards over their heads, blazed for an instant, and went out.

Another bright invader fell. Struggling up, Lizzie got her feet underneath her. “Take my jacket off me.”

Peg looked disapproving. “You should keep still. You'll lose a lot less blood if you'll just—”

“Get over here and get this jacket off. There's a backpack underneath it, with a fire blanket in it.”

More embers sifted down, and the crackling sound they'd been hearing all along was much louder suddenly.

“Hurry.” The shed's floorboards were ablaze. Lizzie's knees sagged as Peg hauled the jacket off her shoulders; swaying, she spat another mess of dark red.

“Sorry,” she said, “but I think I'm—”

Bleeding. Suffocating. Dying.
Cold fright pierced her.

Peg bent and draped one of Lizzie's arms over her shoulder. The next moments were a blur of agony as Peg straightened with a sudden surge Lizzie recognized from her gym-rat days in Boston.

When the anguish cleared she was resting against the packed-earth wall. Peg pulled the fire blanket, like a gigantic sleeping bag made of shiny, silvery stuff, from its pouch.

“How come they issued you a big one?” Peg yanked the handles on the tightly folded item.

“Didn't. Got it from Chevrier.” Panic hit her as her air-hunger worsened.

No comment from Peg as she maneuvered the bag open, wrapped one side around Tara, then pulled it all over the three of them.

Suddenly they were in the dark. Lizzie felt the cool earthen wall through her hair. “We forgot the flashlight.”

“No we didn't.” Peg's voice seemed to come from a distance. “I don't want the batteries in here with us if it gets hot.”

Really hot, she meant. Battery-exploding hot. Lizzie nodded, not having the heart to comment on this possibility.

Above them all hell was breaking loose; she pressed her face into the cool earthen wall, letting it draw the heat that seemed to be boiling out of her skin.

“How'd you find us, anyway?” She felt Peg shrug beside her.

“Scanner. I've got one, remember? I heard the dispatch call to send someone out here. Just cops at first, not fire equipment. And when I heard it I had to come, in case…”

“Sure,” Lizzie said.

Then another bad thought hit her. “Peg, once the fire gets down here why won't it suck all the air out of the blanket?”

Peg shrugged again. “I don't know, maybe it will. I've never been in a situation like this before.”

Lizzie closed her eyes tiredly. “Yeah, me neither.”

Then without warning the fire-tent material was very hot. The gaggingly sweet smell, she knew suddenly, was the skin of her own forearm cooking where it touched the tent.

The air thickened further; she choked, then spat out a large volume of what she realized must be blood. A wave of nothingness went through her, a helpless feeling of everything flowing, of it all just…

Going away. Her life jumped up before her in bright freeze-frames, like flash cards:
Who's this? Where's that?

She knew the answers and then didn't, tried to cry out and couldn't, the breath stopped in her throat, torn raw by her own screams, and her ears full of Peg's shouts.

The fire tent disappeared, and Tara and Peg, too. Every voice Lizzie had ever heard was all at once in her head and gone.

Then, though she had never believed—
never could have
—the angels came, lifting her, and she felt the slow, deliberate beat of their heavy wings as they carried her.

Carried her away.

B
eat. Beat. Beat.

That's not right. That's not what…

“How are the others?” someone said.
Someone…

She lay on her back, white light all around, shining from above so brightly that it penetrated her closed eyelids.

Beat…beat…

“—okay. Not like this one, anyway. I'd have triaged her to Boston, but she's nowhere near stable enough for the trip.”

Something heavy pinned her. Heavy and cold, like a concrete block weighing down her rib cage.

I have a rib cage.
How odd. And that rhythmic sound was not the beating of rough wings at all, was it? But instead—

Beat. Beat.
A heart monitor. She was in a hospital, and the voices she heard belonged to…

She opened her eyes, forcing apart her lashes, which were sticky with something jelly-like.
Chevrier…

The stocky, silver-haired sheriff sat in a wheelchair with an IV pole attached, the needle taped to the back of his big hand running something into his vein. He wore a blue cotton hospital gown and a white woven hospital blanket was draped around his broad shoulders like a shawl.

“She going to be okay?” he asked.

There was a heavily padded bandage around the sheriff's left shoulder and his rugged face looked sunburnt, irregular patches of his short hair heat-frizzled and one of his eyebrows taped.

But he was alive. “Well, is she?” he demanded.

She peered sideways, not raising her head since doing so felt approximately as possible as lifting a ten-story building using only her pinkie finger. Clear fluid dripped from an IV bag on one side; dark-red liquid flowed from a plastic pouch on the other.

“I think so,” Emily Ektari replied judiciously. “Another few minutes, different story. But she never lost her blood pressure entirely. Good thing that helicopter showed up when it did.”

Fabulous,
Lizzie thought with an irreverence she realized was probably inappropriate for the seriousness of her situation.

On the other hand, she was almost surely stuffed with very strong painkillers so she should cut herself a little slack, she thought, repressing a giggle.

Then the first voice spoke again, hoarse sounding as if its owner had been shouting, and this time she recognized it.
Dylan…

The memory flapped up out of a nightmare: first the shots fired, then Dylan grunting with pain, falling.

But now she recalled the new body armor he'd told her he was trying, with the space-age nanoparticles and the…

Ouch.
Thinking made her head hurt. Also, not thinking. Then as she moved her neck slightly to try to ease the pain slamming through her skull with every heartbeat, she glimpsed the thick plastic tube sticking from between her ribs, running down to a—

Nope. Not gonna look.
But then she did look, curiosity overwhelming a lurch of nausea at the sight of her own blood bubbling into some kind of collecting system hanging off the bottom bed rail.

“Fortunately the broken bone end that pierced her lung also stuck in it like a plug,” said Emily Ektari. “If it had dislodged before we got her to the OR, she'd have—”

But the rest was way more information than even Lizzie's curiosity needed. Fortunately, Emily's beeper went off and she hurried away.

“All right,” said Chevrier when she had gone. “I'm getting out of here right now, one night in this joint is plenty.”

A night? I've been here a whole—

“Hudson, I want to see you this afternoon in my office,” Chevrier went on. “I still don't know what the hell all that was about, and you're going to—”

“Forget it.” Dylan sounded defiant. “You know as well as I do what happened. Those two New Haven women had some kind of a wacko revenge plot going, and it went even more haywire than it was when they first came up with it.”

How's he know that?
she wondered. The scrape of a metal chair being pulled up to Lizzie's bed was followed by his next comment.

“And I'm staying right here until further notice, so if you want to know more,” Dylan added to Chevrier, “you can just put the footrests up on that wheelchair of yours…”

A figure in a blue scrub suit appeared by the bed. Lizzie glimpsed a syringe of something being shot into her IV. Almost at once her pain eased, then floated away.

The beep of her heart rate slowed; she felt her neck muscles relax. Even the tube in her side no longer troubled her—or at any rate not much.

And I'm not afraid.
It was as if a sharp metal clamp around her heart had been removed.

Emily Ektari approached Lizzie's bed again, eyeing Lizzie's monitors judiciously.

“So what was the story with the dead woman from the shack?” Chevrier asked the ER physician.

“The medical examiner says she'd had big-time head surgery within the past couple of months,” Emily replied. “They put a shunt in her brain. Among other things, it was supposed to drain excess fluid.”

Emily adjusted Lizzie's IV, then made a note on a clipboard. “Then sometime within the past few days, she had another injury that started a slow brain bleed.”

She laid the clipboard down. “The shunt drained the blood for a while, but it wasn't meant for that, so it clotted off. And when it did—”

She snapped her fingers softly. “Lights out.”

Dylan nodded as if this was no more than he'd been expecting to hear. “Our girl Jane knew how to do people in, all right.”

“Bunch of damn goofballs.” Chevrier sounded fed up, as if he might just spin around and wheel right on out of there.

Wish I could.
Lizzie opened her eyes but the funhouse effect this brought on made her close them again, dizzily. She tried reaching for Dylan's hand, but didn't seem to have one of her own to do it with, her body dissolved somehow to a vaporous substance that was blessedly pain-free. But she could still hear.