The remains

Chapter 55

How long I was out, I have no idea. A minute, an hour. Who knows? Lying on my side on the soaked earth I had only a foggy memory of the head-on collision with a tree trunk. All I knew was this: one moment I was trying to run, bullets whizzing by my head, tearing off leaves and twigs, and the next I was opening my eyes onto a pain and a tight vice-grip pressure that began and ended in the center of my face. Like two separate sticks that had lodged themselves up inside my nasal passages, the tightness throbbing and stinging, making eyes fill up, my head ring.

Lifting my right hand I extended the index finger, gently touching the crest of my nose. I felt the surface sting where the cartilage had fractured, the skin split down the middle. I could breathe, but only through my mouth.

My nose was broken.

Blood combined with the rain, running thick onto my lips and tongue. It tasted of salt and water. There was a sick, inside-out sensation in my stomach. I heard another shriek coming through the trees, not far behind me. Whalen knew these woods like he must have known his own face. His thirty year absence from them would make no difference. He must have recreated them a thousand times before in the solitary confines of his prison cell. I heard the rustling of leaves and branches. Still, I could not see him. His presence was invisible to me. He was a small, wiry man. But the noise sounded like a bear crashing through the forest.

That’s when I felt them on my legs.

The snakes.

Maybe I couldn’t see, hear or smell them, but I could feel their thick rubbery, legless bodies slithering over my lower legs, one after the other as if I were laid out atop a nest.

The garden snakes frightened me almost as much as Whalen. All that rain must have forced them out of their holes; out from their havens in between the rocks. They were crawling on me and I could not move. I was immobile, catatonic.

I had to move. I had to get out of there, get away from the devil, away from the snakes. Inhaling a breath, I issued a near-silent shriek and forced myself up.

A pair of snakes fell to the ground. I felt and heard the sound of their rubbery bodies coiling against the leaves and the pine needles. With the powerless flashlight gripped in my right hand, I shuffled through the thick woods. Not in any specific direction, but away from the snakes; away from the devil monster crashing through the trees.

Without warning, I fell.