Ridgeline - Part Three: The Cut

She didn't run.

She should have run. The Civic was sixty yards ahead and the stroller was built for jogging and her legs had been running twenty minutes ago and every calculation pointed at the same answer — run — but her body did something else. Her body stopped. Turned the stroller sideways across the trail and put itself between the stroller and the footsteps and planted both feet in the gravel and faced the direction the sound was coming from.

The fraction of a second before he came around the bend. Her arms on the stroller handle. Legs aching. No weapon. The phone in the cup holder. The car sixty yards ahead. She could hear the footsteps crunching, fast, thirty yards, twenty-five, and then he was around the bend and she could see him.

He was moving differently. The drift was gone. His shoulders were forward and his arms weren't in his pockets anymore and his right hand was at his side and there was something in it, small, metallic, catching the orange light through the canopy, and her brain said phone and then her brain said knife and she opened her mouth and nothing came out.

The sound Bree made.

Dana had cataloged Bree's cries — she'd spent four months learning the taxonomy, the hunger cry, the tired whine, the wet diaper, the bored escalation that started low and climbed — and the sound Bree made when the man grabbed the stroller handle was not in the catalog. It was a sound Dana had never heard from her daughter. A short, rising shriek that came from somewhere deeper than the diaphragm, from the base of the throat, from the place where the body stores the sound it makes when it understands for the first time that the world can do this.

He grabbed the stroller with his left hand. Jerked it. Dana held on and the force of the jerk pulled her forward and her feet went out from under her on the gravel and she was on one knee and still holding the handle and he was pulling the stroller toward him and she was pulling it back and the physics of it were simple and terrible — two people pulling on a twenty-pound object with a baby in it.

The knife came across her forearm. Left forearm, inside, the soft part above the wrist. She saw it before she felt it — a line of red opening in her skin, the flesh parting along a track that hadn't existed a second ago, and the pain arrived a half-beat after the visual, a bright, hot wrongness that was nothing like the pain she'd imagined a knife wound would be. She'd imagined deep and dull. This was shallow and electric. The nerve endings screaming at a frequency that made her vision contract to a tunnel.

She didn't let go of the stroller.

He cut again. Ribs, left side. Through the t-shirt. This one she felt immediately — a deeper wrongness, a punch that was also a burn, and the air went out of her and she couldn't get it back and her left arm was wet and her left side was wet and the gravel was under her knees, sharp edges pressing through her leggings into the skin, and she was still holding the stroller handle with her right hand and Bree was screaming that new scream, the one that wasn't in the catalog.

She kicked. Her right foot, the 2018 running shoe, caught him somewhere below the knee. Not hard. Not enough to do damage. But enough to make him step back and in the half-second of space that opened between them she wrenched the stroller sideways and it tipped — the whole thing going over on its side with Bree strapped in and Bree's scream changing pitch as the world rotated around her — and the water bottle launched from the cup holder and the diaper bag split open against the gravel, wipes and a loose diaper skidding across the crusher run, and Dana threw herself over the stroller frame, covering Bree with her body, and the gravel bit into her elbows and her hip and the blood from her forearm ran down her wrist and onto the pale stone.

He stood over her. Two seconds. She could see his trail shoes, the gray ones, newer than his clothes, and the knife in his right hand, folding blade, the kind you buy at the hardware store, and his breathing was fast and his hand was shaking and the hand with the knife made a motion that might have been a decision about whether to use it again.

He ran.

Back up the trail. The direction he'd come from. His footsteps on the gravel getting faster, not slower, the crunch of a man running, and then the bend in the trail took him and the sound thinned and broke apart and was gone.

The trail was empty.

She lay on the gravel with Bree underneath her and the stroller frame pressing into her shoulder and she waited for the footsteps to come back. They didn't come back. The quiet that replaced them was different from the quiet of the trail before — it was the quiet of a place that had heard a thing happen and had not recovered. No birds. There should have been birds — dusk was when the mockingbirds started, when the cardinals did their last call from the high branches — and there were none. No insects starting up. No creek sound from the valley below, or maybe the creek was still there and her ears couldn't find it underneath Bree's screaming, which was the only sound left, and underneath the screaming was a silence that felt like a room with the furniture taken out.

The shaking started in her hands. Not the adrenaline tremor she'd felt once after a near-miss on I-40 — that had been her whole body, a single full-system surge that crested and passed. This was local. Specific. Her hands vibrated against the stroller frame like something inside them had come loose and couldn't find its housing. She watched them shake. She told them to stop. They didn't stop. She looked away from them.

She tried to push herself up and her left arm wouldn't hold her weight. The forearm wound had done something to the mechanics of gripping — tendons not firing right, the signal from brain to fingers interrupted by the new geography of the cut. She looked at it. The cut was longer than she'd thought, six inches from wrist to mid-forearm, and the edges were parted and pale at the margins before the blood filled in, and the blood was coming in a steady sheet, not pumping, not arterial, but steady and insistent, the kind of bleeding that wouldn't stop without pressure and she had no free hand to apply pressure because both hands were needed to get Bree out of the overturned stroller.

Her right side still worked. She got to her knees. Got the stroller upright — the frame scraped against the gravel and the sound made her flinch, her whole body contracting around the rib wound, the flinch worse than the movement that caused it. Bree was still strapped in. Bree was still screaming — the new scream, the one that made Dana's vision pulse at the edges — and Dana's fingers were slippery and the five-point harness had a release button she'd pressed a thousand times and her thumb couldn't find it now. Blood on the buckle. Blood on the harness strap where it crossed Bree's chest. She wiped her thumb on her leggings. Tried again. The button clicked. Bree came free and Dana pulled her against her chest and stood up and the rib wound announced itself — a white flash behind her eyes, the air going solid, the left side of her body a place she was receiving bad news from.

She stood on the trail holding her daughter and bleeding onto the gravel and the light was failing and the trail went in two directions and her phone was in the stroller cup holder. She shifted Bree to one arm — Bree's weight against the rib wound, a fresh announcement — and reached for it with her right hand. The screen was shattered. Cracked across the center in a web that turned the lock screen into stained glass. She pressed the side button and nothing happened. Pressed again. Held it. The screen stayed black. He'd grabbed the stroller and the phone had been in the cup holder and the impact had killed it, and the phone was dead and the phone was everything — 911, Scott, her mother, the map that would have shown her which direction was the lot.

She put the phone back in the cup holder. Picked it up again. Pressed the button. Held it longer. Black. She was aware of how she looked — a woman pressing a dead button on a shattered phone, pressing it as though repetition could reverse what had already happened — and the awareness didn't stop her from pressing it a third time.

Black.

No phone. No other person on the trail. The sawhorses at the lot hadn't had an emergency number. She'd looked — she remembered looking, the way you notice things you don't think you'll need, the same way she'd noticed the price stickers on the landscape timbers and the spray paint over the city name. Details that belonged to a version of this afternoon that was already gone.

Bree was against her chest and Bree's screaming was subsiding into something worse — not quieter but thinner, a sound being squeezed through a smaller opening. Dana could feel her daughter's body shaking against her ribs and the vibration traveled through the rib wound and the wound sent back a pulse of heat that made her knees flex.

The trail. The gravel. Two directions. The lot was behind her — she thought it was behind her — but the trail had curves and she'd been turned around in the attack and dragged forward by the stroller and the light was wrong now, the sun lower than it should be, the shadows long and merged under the canopy, and she wasn't sure. She wasn't sure which direction was the lot. The trail looked the same in both directions — gravel, trees, the canopy closing overhead.

She breathed. Bree breathed against her. The shaking in her hands wouldn't stop.

Somewhere distant, south — the direction of the highway, the direction of town — a siren. Then another. The sound rising and falling in the warm air, carrying over the ridge, the particular pitch of emergency vehicles that she'd been hearing from the apartment for weeks now, nightly, the backdrop of whatever was happening downtown that she watched through the window of her phone from the couch while Bree slept against her. But this time the sirens were for her. Someone knew. Someone had heard. There was a road at the bottom of the ridge and someone had been driving past and heard the screaming or seen something through the trees and called 911 and the sirens were coming and she just had to stand here and hold Bree and keep bleeding on the gravel and wait.

The sirens didn't get closer. They held at the same distance, moving east to west along what must have been the highway, and then they faded. More joined from a different direction. She counted three, then four, all distant, all moving laterally, none of them turning toward the ridge, none of them coming up the two-lane county road that led to the parking lot with the landscape timbers and the sawhorses and her Civic sitting alone in the failing light.

They weren't coming for her.

She stood in the gravel with her daughter against her chest and her blood on the new-cut stone and listened to the sirens move across the valley toward whatever was burning downtown and she didn't know what was burning downtown and the sirens got quieter and the trail got darker and Bree shook against her ribs in a rhythm that felt like counting.

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https://www.abctales.com/story/soulfire77/ridgeline-part-four-wrong-dire...