She would not willingly leave me. On the other hand, she couldn’t really call in backup—her partner was dead, and she was technically doing something just a little bit outside department regulations and, for that matter, the Florida Penal Code. So what would she do?
I took another sip of water. The bottle was more than half-empty now, but it did seem to ease the pain in my head a bit—not that the pain went away, but hey—it wasn’t really so bad. I mean, pain meant I was alive, and who was it who said, “Where there’s life there’s hope”? Maybe Samantha knew—but as I opened my mouth to ask her she took the water bottle back and took a big sip and I remembered I was trying to think about what my sister would have done, and why that led to my being here.
I took the bottle back from Samantha and sipped the water. Deborah wouldn’t leave me like that. Of course not. Deborah loved me. And the realization flooded into me—I loved her, too. I took another swig of water. It’s a funny thing, love. I mean, to realize this at my age was weird, but I was actually surrounded by so much love—my whole life, from my adoptive parents, Harry and Doris; they didn’t have to love me—I wasn’t really their kid—but they did. They did love me, like so many others, all the way up to now, with Debs—and Rita, Cody, Astor, and Lily Anne. Beautiful, wonderful, miraculous Lily Anne, the ultimate bringer of love. But all those others, too, they all loved me in their own way—
Samantha took the water bottle and sipped, and it hit me with a tremendous rush of insight: Even Samantha had shown me so much love. She had proved it by risking everything that meant anything to her, everything she had always wanted, just to give me a chance to escape! Wasn’t that an act of pure love?
I took another sip of water and felt myself completely surrounded by all these wonderful people, people who loved me even though I had done some very bad things—but what the hell, I had stopped, hadn’t I? Wasn’t I now trying to live a life of love and responsibility, in a world that had suddenly blossomed into a place of wonder and joy?
Samantha grabbed the bottle and took a big swig. She handed it back and I finished it eagerly—delicious, the best water I’d ever tasted. Or maybe I was just appreciating things more. Yes. The world was really an amazing place after all, and I fit in perfectly. And so did Samantha. What a wonderful person she was. She had taken care of me, too, and she didn’t have to. And she was taking care of me now! Nurturing me and stroking my face with what could only be called love—what a wonderful girl she was! And if she wanted to be eaten—wow: I had an epiphany. Food is love—so wanting to be eaten was just another way to share love! And that was the way Samantha had chosen because she was so filled with love she couldn’t possibly hope to express it except in some ultimate form like this! Amazing!
I looked up at her face with a new appreciation. This was a wonderful, giving person. And even though it hurt my neck, I had to show her that I understood what she was doing and truly appreciated what a wonderful, beautiful person she was—so I raised my arm up and put my hand on her face. The skin felt soft, warm, vibrantly alive, and I rubbed the palm of my hand softly across her cheek for a moment. She looked back at me, smiling, and put her hand back on my face.
“You are so beautiful,” I said. “I mean, just saying the word, ‘beautiful’—that doesn’t really sum it up, except in a kind of superficial way that only talks about the outside and doesn’t really get at the true, absolute depths of what I mean by beautiful—especially in your case, because I think I just understood what it is you’re doing with this whole ‘eat me’ business—I mean, you’re beautiful on the outside, too; that’s not what I mean, not to take any of that away from you, because I know it’s important to a girl. A woman. You’re eighteen; you’re a woman, I know, because you’ve made a very adult choice with what to do with your life, and there’s no turning back from it, which makes it a really adult choice, and I’m sure you understand the consequences of your decision, and there can’t be a better definition of adulthood than that, to make a decision with ultimate consequences and know you can’t turn back from it, and I really admire you for that. And also because like I said you are really, really beautiful.”
Her hand rubbed my face and then slid down across my neck and through the collar of my shirt and she rubbed my chest. It felt good. “I know what you’re saying exactly and you are the first person who I think really understood what it means for me to go through all this—” She took her hand away from my chest to wave it in the air, indicating everything all around us, and I reached up and pulled it back down onto my chest because it felt really good and I wanted to keep touching her. She smiled and rubbed softly across my chest again. “Because it isn’t something that’s easy to understand, I know that, and that’s one reason why I never thought I could ever talk about it to anybody and why, you know, I’ve been so completely alone for most of my life, all of it really, because who could ever understand something like this? I mean, if I just say it to somebody, ‘I want to be eaten,’ then it’s gotta be like this whole, ‘Oh, my God, we’re getting you to a shrink’ thing and nobody ever looking at you like you’re normal ever again and I feel like this is totally normal, a totally normal expression of—”
“Love,” I said.
“You do understand!” she said, and she slid her hand lower, across my stomach, and then back up onto my chest again. “Oh, God, I knew you would get it, because even when we were in that refrigerator there was just something about you that was different from everybody else I have ever met in my whole life and I thought maybe just once before it happens I can talk to somebody who really gets it and they won’t look at me like I’m some kind of perverted sick twisted freak monster!”
“No, no, you’re just so beautiful,” I said. “Nobody could ever think that about you, just even your face is so amazing—”
“No, but that’s not it—”
“No, I know that, that’s not what I mean,” I said. “But it’s part of what makes you who you are, and to see that part really leads to understanding about the rest—I mean, if you’re not a total idiot, you can’t look at your face and not think, Wow, what an incredible person, and then to see that the insides are even more beautiful is just amazing.” And because mere words could not really express it completely and I really wanted her to understand what I meant, I pulled her face down to mine and kissed her. “You are beautiful inside and out,” I said.
She smiled with an incredible warmth and appreciation that just made me feel like everything would always be all right. “You are, too,” she said, and she lowered her face and kissed me again and this time the kiss was longer and it led into another kind of feeling that was new for me and I could tell that it was new for her, too, but neither one of us wanted to stop until she stretched out beside me on the floor as we kissed and after a long time of that she did stop, just for a second, and said, “I think they put something in the water.”
“I don’t think that matters,” I said. “Because what we have started to understand doesn’t really come from anything you can put in water because it comes from inside us, the real inside, and it is really true, which I know you can feel as well as I can.” I kissed her and she kissed back for a minute before she stopped and put both hands on my cheeks.
“In any case,” she said, “even if it is just something in the water it doesn’t matter because I always kind of thought that this is just so important—I mean love, and you know, I mean, not just the kind that you feel but the kind you do and I thought, I’m eighteen; I should do it at least once before I check out, don’t you think?”
“At least once,” I said, and she smiled and closed her eyes and brought her face back to mine and we did.
More than once.
THIRTY
“I’M THIRSTY,” SAMANTHA SAID. THERE WAS A WHINING NOTE in her voice. I found it irritating but I didn’t say anything. I was thirsty, too. What was the point to saying it again? We were both thirsty. We had been thirsty for some time. The water was all gone. There wasn’t a
ny more. That was the least of my problems: My head hurt, and I was trapped in a trailer in the Everglades, and I had just done something I couldn’t begin to understand. Oh, and somebody was coming to kill me, too.
“I feel sooooo stupid,” Samantha said. And again, there was very little to say in response. We both felt stupid, now that whatever was in the water had worn off, but she seemed to have more trouble accepting that we had acted under the influence of the drugs. As we had come back to our senses Samantha had gradually looked uncomfortable, then nervous, and then downright alarmed, scrabbling around the trailer for articles of clothing that had been enthusiastically misplaced. In spite of how awkward she made it look, I decided it was the right idea. I found and put on all my clothing, too.
And a small touch of intelligence returned to me with my pants. I got up and looked over the trailer from one end to the other. It didn’t take long. It was only around thirty feet long. All the windows were securely boarded with three-quarter-inch marine plywood. I thumped on them. I threw my full weight against them. They didn’t budge. They were reinforced from the outside.
There was only one door. Same story: Even when I ran my shoulder against it, I got nothing except more pain in my head. Now I had a matching pain in my shoulder. I sat down to nurse it for a few minutes. That was when Samantha had started whining. Apparently putting her clothes on made her feel she could complain about almost anything, because it didn’t end with the water. And through some mean-spirited trick of acoustics or plain bad luck, the pitch of her voice was in perfect resonance with the throbbing of my head. Every time she complained it sent an extra pulse of dull pain deep into the battered gray tissue in my cranium.
“It smells … funky in here,” she said.
It did actually smell funky, a combination of very old sweat, wet dog, and mold. But it was far beyond pointless to mention something when there was nothing we could do about it. “I’ll get my herbal sachet,” I said. “It’s out in the car.”
She looked away. “You don’t have to get sarcastic,” she said.
“No,” I said. “But I do have to get out of here.”
She didn’t look at me, and she didn’t have any response, which seemed like a small blessing. I closed my eyes and tried to will away the thumping anguish. It didn’t work, and after a minute Samantha interrupted again.
“I wish we hadn’t done that,” she said. I opened my eyes. She still looked away, over to a plain corner of the trailer. It was completely barren and blank, but apparently better to look at than me.
“Sorry,” I said.
She shrugged, still looking away. “It’s not your fault,” she said, which I thought very generous, though accurate. “I knew there was probably something in the water. They always put something in.” She shrugged again. “I never had ecstasy before, though.”
It took me a moment to realize she meant the drug. “Me either,” I said. “Is that what it was?”
“I’m pretty sure,” she said. “I mean, from what I heard. Tyler said—she takes it a lot—took it a lot.” She shook her head and then she actually started to blush. “Anyway. She said it makes you want to … I mean, touch everybody and … you know. Be touched.”
If that had indeed been ecstasy, I would have to agree. I would also have to say that either we had taken far too much, or it was a very powerful drug. I could nearly blush myself when I remembered what I had said and done. Trying to become a little more human was one thing—but this had been far over the edge into the sludge of dumb, yammer-headed personhood. Perhaps the stuff should be called excess-tasy. In retrospect, I was very glad there was a drug to blame. I did not like to think of myself as behaving like a cartoon.
“Anyway, I got to do it,” Samantha said, still blushing. “I won’t miss it much.” Another shrug. “It wasn’t that great.”
I don’t know an awful lot about what is popularly called “pillow talk,” but I rather thought that this kind of honesty was not considered proper form. From the little I did know, I was pretty sure you were supposed to make flattering remarks, even if you thought it was a mistake. You said things like, “It was wonderful—let’s not soil the memory by trying to equal that magic.” Or, “We’ll always have Paris.” In this case, “We’ll always have that horrible smelly trailer in the Everglades,” didn’t have quite the same ring, but at least she could have tried. Maybe Samantha was getting revenge for the massive discomfort she was feeling, or maybe it was true and she, as a callow youth, didn’t know she wasn’t supposed to say such things.
In any case, it combined with my headache and activated a mean streak I didn’t know I had. “No, it wasn’t that great,” I said. She looked at me now, with an expression that actually approached anger, but she didn’t say anything, and after a moment she looked away again, and I took a last stretch and rub at my neck muscles and stood up.
“There has to be a way out of here,” I said, more to myself than her, but of course she answered anyway.
“No, there doesn’t,” she said. “It’s secure. They keep people here all the time, and nobody ever gets out.”
“If they’re always drugged, did anyone ever try?”
She half closed her eyes and slowly shook her head to indicate that I was stupid, and looked away. And maybe I was stupid, but not enough to sit and wait for them to come and eat me—not without trying my best to get away.
I went once more through the trailer. There was nothing new to see, but I looked at everything a little more carefully. There was no furniture at all, but down at the far end there was one built-in bench that had obviously served as a bed. It had a thin strip of foam rubber on it, covered by a ratty gray sheet. I lifted the mattress onto the floor. Under it there was a square of plywood fitted into an opening. I pulled up the plywood. Underneath was something that was clearly a locker. There was a very flat pillow inside, covered with a case that matched the sheet. The locker seemed to run the whole width of the trailer, although I could not see into the darkness on either side.
I pulled out the pillow. There was nothing else inside except a short length of an old two-by-four, maybe a foot and a half long. One end of it was cut to a very dull, flat point and there was dirt all over the tapered part. At the other end there were notches cut into each side, and a groove worn into the wood, possibly by rope. The wood had been used as a stake for whatever arcane reason, hammered into the ground to hold something or other with rope tied to it. There was even an old and bent nail stuck in the top to tie off the rope. I took the stake out and laid it beside the pillow. I stuck my head into the locker as far as I could, but there was nothing else to see. I pushed on the bottom and felt a little bit of give, so I pushed harder and was rewarded with a whump-ah of flimsy metal bending.
Bingo. I pushed harder, and the metal visibly bent. I pulled my head out and stood up, stepping into the locker with both feet. I just barely fit into the opening, but it was enough, and I started to jump as hard as I could. It made a very loud booming sound, and after about the seventh boom! Samantha came to see what all the noise was.
“What are you doing?” she said, which struck me as silly as well as annoying.
“Escaping,” I said, and gave an extra hard jump. Boom!
She watched as I jumped several more times, and then shook her head and raised her voice, very thoughtfully, so I could hear her negativity over the noise. “I don’t think you can get out like that,” she said.
“The metal is thin here,” I said. “Not like the floor.”
“It’s the tensile strength,” she said in her loud voice. “Like surface cohesion in a cup of water. We did this in physics.”
I took a second to marvel at the kind of physics class that taught its students about the tensile strength of a trailer’s floor when one is escaping from a cannibal coven, and then I paused in midjump. Perhaps she was right—after all, Ransom Everglades was a very good school and they probably taught things that never made it into the public school curriculum. I stepped out of th
e locker and looked at what I had accomplished so far. It wasn’t much. There was a noticeable dent, but nothing that could really inspire hope.
“They’ll be here way before you get out like that,” she said, and somebody who lacked charity might have said she was gloating.
“Maybe so,” I said, and my eye fell on the two-by-four. I did not actually say, “Aha!” but I certainly had one of those moments when the lightbulb goes on. I picked up the chunk of wood and worried out the old nail. I wedged the head of it into a crack on the point of the stake, and placed the point in the center of the dent I had already made. Then, with a significant glance at Samantha, I pounded on the top of the stake as hard as I could.
It hurt. I counted three splinters in my hand.
“Ha,” Samantha said.
It has been said that behind every successful man there is a woman, and by extension we can say that behind every escaping Dexter is a really annoying Samantha, because her happiness at seeing me fail spurred me to new heights of inspiration. I took off my shoe and fitted it over the top of the stake and smacked it experimentally. It didn’t hurt nearly as much, and I was sure I could hammer it hard enough to make a hole in the locker’s floor.
“Ha yourself,” I said to Samantha.
“Whatever,” she said, and walked back to where she had been sitting in the middle section of the trailer.
I went right back to work, pounding on the sole of my shoe with all my strength. I paused after a couple of minutes and looked; the dent had gotten much deeper, and there were signs of stress at the edges. The point of the nail had gone into the metal, and a few more minutes could very well see a small hole; I went back at it with a will. After two more minutes, the tone of the thumping seemed to change, and I pulled out the stake and had another look.
There was a small hole all the way through, just large enough to see daylight under the trailer. With a little more time and effort, I was sure I could punch through, enlarge the hole, and be on my way.