Ridgeline - Part Fourteen: After

The flashlight was on the ground where he'd dropped it. She could see the beam — orange now, not the white it had been, the batteries dying, the cone of light aimed at a section of gravel six feet from her right hand. The light illuminated nothing useful. A patch of crusher run and the edge of a laurel branch and the dark beyond.

She didn't move for a long time. The three heartbeats continued — hers, Bree's against her stomach, the dog's against her spine — and the dark continued and the flashlight's orange cone slowly narrowed as the batteries gave up and Dana lay on the gravel watching the cone shrink the way you watch a candle burn toward its base, measuring the remaining light against the remaining dark and knowing the dark would win.

She reached for it.

The right arm — the one that still worked. Three feet of gravel between her hand and the flashlight. She stretched without lifting her body from the ground, the rib wound protesting the extension, the shoulder pulling, and her fingers found the barrel. Warm from the man's hand. She didn't think about the warmth. She pulled it toward her and held it against her chest next to Bree and the orange light hit the baby's face and Bree's eyes were closed and the lashes were wet and the skin was pale in the orange glow, paler than it should have been, the color of a baby sleeping in a room where someone has left a nightlight on the wrong setting.

She clicked the light off. The dark returned.

The calculation arrived the way the arithmetic had arrived earlier — without invitation, the mind running numbers it hadn't been asked to run. The flashlight had some battery left. Not much. The beam was orange and narrowing, which meant the voltage was dropping, which meant minutes or an hour but not hours. She could leave it on and have light until it died. Or she could turn it off and save it and use it in bursts — click on, look, click off — and make the remaining charge last longer. Longer for what, she didn't know. Nobody was coming. The light wouldn't bring anyone. But the light was the only thing she could control besides the heat flowing into Bree and the control mattered even if the outcome didn't.

She saved it.

She'd gotten used to the dark. The flashlight ruined that — now the dark was something she was choosing, and the choosing made it heavier. Before the flashlight, the dark was weather. Now the dark was a thing she permitted.

She lay on the gravel with the flashlight against her chest and Bree against her stomach and the dog against her back and the dark pressing in from every direction and she held the flashlight the way she held Bree — tight, too tight, the fingers cramping around the barrel, the aluminum warm against her palm.

Twenty minutes. Maybe more. The barrel was warm against her chest, warm from the wrong hands, and she held it anyway. The dog's breathing against her spine had slowed — still labored, still catching on the left side, but the intervals between breaths were longer and the intervals worried her because longer could mean the body was calming or longer could mean the body was failing and she couldn't tell which and the dark wouldn't let her see. She pressed her back harder against the dog's flank. The heat was still there. The heartbeat was still there. The contact was all she had.

She clicked the flashlight on.

The beam was dimmer. The orange deeper, approaching amber, the cone smaller — a circle of light the size of a dinner plate on the gravel in front of her. She aimed it at Bree. Eyes still closed. Breathing. The color still wrong but present, alive, the chest moving. She aimed it at the dog — swung the beam over her shoulder, twisting, the rib wound flaring. The dog's eye caught the light and reflected it back, a single point of amber on amber. The eye was open. Watching her. The body flat against the gravel, the breathing visible in the rise and fall of the damaged flank. Alive.

She clicked the light off. Waited. Clicked it on again. The beam was weaker — the amber thinning, the edges of the cone dissolving into the dark, the circle on the gravel no longer a circle but a smear. She was watching the light die. Each click took something the click couldn't return. She clicked it off.

She swept the beam back toward the trail on the next click. Not intentionally — the twist of her body carried the flashlight's cone in an arc and the arc went further than she meant it to go and the light, dim as it was, reached past the patch of gravel where she lay and past the trail edge and past the brush and for a fraction of a second the amber glow touched something forty yards up the trail.

A shape. Low. On the gravel. Not moving.

The beam didn't hold on it — the arc kept moving, the light sweeping past like a searchlight that doesn't stop, and the shape was in the peripheral glow for less than a second. Not clear. Not detailed. A mass on the trail that hadn't been there when Dana walked this section of the trail twelve hours ago. A shape that confirmed what the sounds had testified to and what the silence had confirmed and what Dana had been lying forty feet away from for the last twenty minutes knowing it was there without seeing it.

She clicked the light off.

The dark returned and the shape was still there, not in her vision but in the space behind her eyes where images persist after the light is gone — the afterimage of a low dark mass on pale gravel, forty yards away, motionless, the shape of a thing that had been a man and was now part of the trail the way the stumps and the gravel and the sawhorses were part of the trail.

She needed to be farther away.

The thought was practical, not emotional. The body on the trail was forty yards away and forty yards was not enough and the night was long and the thing that had made the body was gone but the body was still there and being near it was a cost she was paying with every breath, a tax on whatever resources she had left, the knowledge of its proximity a weight she could reduce by increasing the distance.

She moved.

With Bree in her right arm, the baby pressed against her chest, the left arm dragging — the forearm wound too damaged to bear weight, the elbow grinding against the gravel as she pulled herself sideways off the trail. The gravel pressed into her side through the torn t-shirt, the sharp edges of the crusher run cutting into the skin above her hip. Every inch cost. The rib wound reopened — she felt it go, the seep that had been holding suddenly warm again, the familiar trickle down her left side resuming. The forearm strip had soaked through hours ago and the forearm bled freely now, the blood on the gravel, on the leaves, on Bree's onesie.

She dragged herself six feet. Into the brush at the trail edge, where the laurel made a low canopy and the dirt was soft under dead leaves. Closer to the downed tree where she'd sat during the bonding. Closer to the dog. Away from the shape on the trail. Six feet was not far enough. But the muscles stopped and six feet was what they had.

She stopped because her body stopped. The muscles that had been moving her seized and locked and she lay in the leaves with Bree against her chest and the rib wound flaring and the forearm bleeding and the dark total around her and the exertion had cost what she couldn't afford and the breathing that came after was shallow and ragged and each breath caught on the left side and the catching was worse than it had been an hour ago.

The dog. She could hear it — the rasping, labored rhythm from three feet behind her. She'd moved away from it when she dragged herself off the trail. The contact was broken. She needed the contact. She needed the heat against her spine, the heartbeat that wasn't hers, the presence of another body in the dark that was alive and warm.

She reached backward with her right hand — the hand that wasn't holding Bree — and found the dog's muzzle. The nose. Wet. The dog's breath against her fingers, hot, the exhalation steady. The dog didn't flinch. The flinch-and-hold was gone — not overcome, not resolved, but absent, the way a reflex is absent when the body doesn't have the energy to fire it. The nose pressed into her palm. Warm. The contact held.

She pulled herself backward. Two inches. Three. Until her back touched the dog's chest and the heat came through the shirt again and the heartbeat came through the contact again and she lay in the leaves with Bree against her front and the dog against her back and the dark around all three of them.

She clicked the flashlight.

Nothing. The button depressed. The mechanism engaged. The bulb stayed dark. She clicked it again. Nothing. The batteries had died while she dragged herself across the trail, or in the minutes after, the last charge draining into the barrel while she lay in the leaves. The orange glow that had been a choice — on or off, light or dark, her decision — was gone. Before, the dark had been something she permitted. Now the dark was permanent and it wasn't hers to permit or prevent. The agency was gone. She was inside the dark the way she was inside the night, not by choice but by condition, and the flashlight was a dead cylinder in her fist.

She let it go. The barrel rolled off her palm into the leaves. The sound it made was the sound of a thing no longer useful settling into the place where useless things collect.

Bree made a sound.

Not the vibration from earlier. Not the keening. Not the cry. A single note — low, sustained, an octave below where Bree's voice had been operating an hour ago. The pitch of a four-month-old's voice dropping into a register that Dana hadn't heard before, a register below the register below the keening, the vocal cords producing a frequency that was almost subvocal, almost below the threshold of hearing. The sound a body makes when the body has gone through every higher register and there is nothing left above this one.

The sound dropped again. Lower. A vibration Dana felt in her chest more than she heard through her ears — the baby's body producing a frequency that traveled through the contact between them, sternum to sternum, the sound bypassing the air entirely and arriving through bone conduction.

Dana knew what that meant. She'd read it on one of the spiral nights — the 3 AM searches, the ones Scott said were paranoia, the ones that had taught her the temperature at which a baby dies and the symptoms of neonatal hypothermia and the stages of infant distress. The voice dropping meant the diaphragm was losing pressure. The diaphragm losing pressure meant the respiratory effort was failing. The respiratory effort failing meant the body was choosing to conserve energy by reducing the one output it could reduce — sound.

The baby was getting quieter because the baby was running out.

Dana held her tighter. The rib wound flared. She held her tighter anyway. The dark was permanent and Bree's voice was dropping and the dog's breathing was slowing and the night was long and the night was all there was.

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