Foreign Body Reaction
Alan McNeill
Chapter 5 Scene 5
Ben swam up towards conciousness. Darlene's SKS beat a staccato rhythm against his head. Louder and louder and louder until he jerked awake.
“You all right there?” asked Mark. “Your head was sort of bouncing of the window. Sorry about this road.”
Ben realized the wack, wack, wack was not the SKS but this head striking the driver side glass in time with the pot holes in the old logging road.
“Still the dreams?”
“Every time I close my eyes,” replied Ben. “Where are we?”
“Almost back to the camp.”
It was three days since the slaughter, as Ben thought of it. Odd, he thought, it felt like one second ago, and ten years ago at the same time. A lot had happened in three days.
Mark turned left onto a needle carpeted road. The weather was damp again, and Mark didn't want to leave tracks, but it was becoming more difficult. Each time they used the road to get in to the basin, the path became more obvious.”
“Well this is the last load, right?” asked Ben.
“I'm going back one more time, but I'll go on foot.”
The barely discernible path wound around and over a rock face and they began a descent along the edge of second growth on the north and much older timber on the right. They were skirting the edge of the wilderness area, about twenty five miles from the campground that none of them would ever forget.
Ben saw Bea step out from the trees, nearly invisible in a loose dark sweatshirt with a hood. She glanced at Ben and Mark and walked up and over the rocky path. She had cedar limb with her and dusted the road as she walked. Ben noticed that the scabs along her temple where falling off now and her long black hair was hidden beneath the sweatshirt.
The truck rumbled to stop in front of a southeast facing rock overhang. Mark looked in amazement at how much had been down in the six hours they had been gone. The overhang was not deep enough to call a cave, but it had provided shelter that first night. That horrible first night, thought Mark, as he looked at Ben.
Ben was lost somewhere in thought or memory. Mark didn't understand that, but he did know that most people had trouble with doing things and sometimes even more trouble with letting those necessary things be right. Ben had still got them out of there, but it wasn't the Ben he had known before. Well hell, he thought, neither was Darlene.
Despite the sorrow, grief that everyone had been moving through and under for the last three days Mark did notice the work on the front of the overhang. On the first night they had simply thrown sleeping bags on the slope leading up to the rear of the overhang. It was damp there but drier than further out. The southwest facing exposure had kept the light rain off of them and they had fallen into the bags and slept.
Now, with three days work there was debris from the clear cut completely obscuring the overhang, the slope had been flattened to the back, creating a thirty foot long shallow cave of about ten feet. Fir trees grew tight to the southern end of the overhang and below a fire pit had been built of rock, and as long as they kept the fire hot, there was little smoke and what there was was dispersed in the branches of the trees.
Good idea on the fire Ben.”
Darlene had removed the rear tarp of the truck and was picking through the last load from the, the, killing park. That was how she thought of it.
“You could do one more load, there are still things you didn't bring,” she said without rancor.
Ben came around and put a hand on her shoulder, you flinched away from him. He shrugged and stepped away from her. She had not looked straight at him since the killings.
“No, we can't go back. It's too dangerous.”
“No one is looking for us, not here!” she snapped.
“I'm sorry Darlene, I'm sorry for what we had to do.”
“Well I'm sorry too, and I'm god damned sorry that we didn't kill them all.”
Mark turned and embraced the older woman. “I tried honey, I tried. I only found the one man in the woods, and didn't know until later that there was another. It's my fault, not Ben's.”
Darlene leaned into Mark accepting the warmth and then leaned back, her face wet with the light cold rain and tears. She reached back and slapped Mark hard across the face.
“Yes, your fault, my fault, Ben's fault and all I see is that little girl and that man raping her, and I can only hear the sound of the gun shuddering against my shoulder and the bits and pieces of the men flying off,” she said her voice starting to rise. Mark reached out and pulled her close. She sobbed against his chest.
“There was nothing else to do Darlene.” said Ben. “I was mad at Mark for deciding for all of us on his own, but I've been thinking about that for the last three days. Each of us would have made the same decision eventually. But we would have been too late to save Bea and Jasper. Once we saw them kill Benny and start raping Jasper, what else could we do? We didn't have a choice.”
Darlene couldn't face Ben. He had put that gun in her hand and that sound in her head.
“But we had a choice of that to do then. We should have called the cops, not run up here.” There, she said she thought. It was was Bea thought too.
“If there were any cops to call, or do you mean the soldiers? Do you think they would have come up and told, OK, justified shooting, go about your business? And what about the fucking flu Darlene, you'd kill us all to give the responsibility of what we had to do to some father figure, the “authorities.” Ben's voice was angry now.
“What the fuck would you have done, condemned us all to death? I'm sorry Darlene but we didn't abduct Benny, his sister Bea or her child. We don't “party” with them, didn't rape Jasper, we didn't rape Bea, and we didn't kill Benny.”
Darlene gasped. “How did you know that Bea was raped too?”
“She told me!” he shouted back at her.
At that moment Bea walked up past the truck. She looked at all of them, one after another. She stood, her five foot seven in frame solid, her feet planted at shoulder width, he weight centered on the balls of her feet.
“Yes Darlene, Mark, I was raped too. Before we got to the camp, and they made my brother watch. Then they started groping Jasper. I begged them to leave her alone, that I would do anything they wanted. They just kept drinking and the fat one, the leader said he guessed that they would do whatever the fuck they wanted with us, and yes I would do everything and when the boys were done with me, I could watch them fuck my daughter.
“Jesus Christ you assholes. Are you feeling sorry for those fuckers. Have you looked at Jasper? You look in her eyes. Nobody's fucking home. Here you are deciding some philosophical bullshit and how awful you feel about what you did. Fuck you all. I just wished you had killed every one of them. But you should be thanking Mark Darlene and thanking Ben, because I do. I have my daughter, I have my life, and if I have my way, I'll find and kill that last one too. because he raped us both in the van. I will find him and I will gut him.
Bea's face was on fire. She had perfect white teeth in a tanned strong face. Ben watched her explode and realized that however tortured he was by killing a person, it was not an exercise in civilization. It was survival, and it was good that they killed them and it was good that Bea was alive. She had a strong face that affected Ben deeply. He imagined that Helen of Troy had that sort of face. He simply stared at her, as did Mark and Darlene.
Darlene stepped forward and reached for Bea, “I'm so sorry honey, I didn't think.”
Bea stepped back and slapped her hand away.
“I appreciate you cleaning me up, and how tender you've been with Jasper, but so help me Darlene, I hear you making these men any more upset about what they had to do, what you had to do, I'll slap you until you finally get through that big hair, cheap waitress act of yours that this isn't the world of a week ago any more. If my daughter is going to survive I can't, we can't, afford to have you second guessing decisions that keep us alive.
“Fuck, none of us know if what will happen, but I'm god damned glad that Mark killed that fucker, and if I hadn't been so fucked up afterwards I would have cut his balls off and stuck them in his mouth for the cops to find.”
Darlene stepped back, “I'm sorry, sorry.” At that moment all three of them suddenly saw Jasper standing off to the side of Bea, between the shelter and Bea.
The turned to her, she had pulled her clothes off again and was standing naked in the rain, her eyes vacant.
Both women turned away from the men and clustered around the young girl, sheparding her back towards the shelter.
“Let's go get you cleaned up honey,” said Darlene with her arm around her shoulder, and Bea held her and let the girl who walked lifelessly between them.
“You think she'll come back?” asked Mark.
“I don't know, but this is a problem when and if we have to move again. I hope so, but then I can't imagine.”
It had taken the big truck three trips for Mark and Ben to clean up the campground. Mark and Ben and driven the van, two trucks, with the motorcycles loaded in back, and the quad runners further up the road to another campground. The quad runners had turned out to be the best vehicles for moving the bodies. They siphoned the gas out of the motorcycles and most of the gas from the quad runners and had filled Mark's truck tank and a few cans. They took the food, ammunition and weapons.
The hardest part was using Benny body. Ben was insistent that there be no connection between Benny's van and the gang. They took the van much farther almost five miles, to steep bank, and poured a gallon of gas over Benny's body, put him at the wheel and pushed the minivan over the side down to the edge of the creek below. The van crashed but did not catch fire until Mark climbed down and lit it by hand. The fireball was enormous in the early evening and they left the area quickly in the truck.
They loaded all the supplies, tents, food and cooking utensils they had cached at the campground and left some of the weapons scattered among the dead men. They hoped that with the flu, the military and all the problems out in the larger world, that the scene might be passed off as a bunch of drunk assholes who finally shot the hell out of themselves. Ben doubted it, but it did put some confusion into the mess and helped to separate Benny's group from the outlaw group.
Mark had let them off of the the camping road, along the Rogue river for about twenty miles, and then up a gated private timber section to where current overhang camp.
Ben had been impressed with how simple it was to get through the locked and chained gates. They swung out, painted bright yellow. The posts were ten inch pipes set in concrete and the pivoting arm that actually blocked the road was four in steel The padlocks where hidden up in side the pipe so that you couldn't get a bold cutter up there. Mark had simply cut the heavy chain with a four foot bolt cutter and replace one of the links with a repair link. He had a collection of rusted repair links that you could slide open and closed that matched most of the gate chains they saw.
Ben new that these replanted sections saw the owners or management companies once per year if that, and with all the flu, there wasn't going to be thinning, or logging going on right now. The gates kept drunks out. They had gone through two of the gates and the overhang was back on BLM property from what they could understand from the maps.
“So what if those guy's had the flu?” Mark had asked on one of the trips.
“I guess we'll know in a week, if any of us get sick. Seems that Darlene recognized the fat leader from the diner. She hadn't seen him in a while so maybe his group hadn't been into town since the first flu showed up in Grant's Pass.”
“I hope you're right, it would just be too much for Bea if Jasper also got the flu from that pig.”
Darlene and Bea had cleaned up Jasper and redressed her. Ben had seen the bruises on her breasts, neck and thighs when she was standing in the rain. The vision competed with his dreams of the actually killing. It didn't make it all right, but it made it bearable. At least Ben thought, he could put it aside while they got rested, fed, and out of the rain for a few days. Then they would have to decide what to do.
Ben also realized that Bea's outburst had pleased him in some deep way. Maybe they would be OK and maybe Jasper would come around in a few days.
Two weeks later, well into December they got snow. Darlene was standing outside of the shelter watching the flakes drift down, smoking.
“You think they're still after us?”
Mark had just come back checking traps along the creek that ran below them. It was a small seasonal stream, probably dried up in the winter. Mark had set a line of Conibear kill traps along the stream to take rabbits and beaver if they were here. He also had set a perimeter circle of larger conibear 300 traps in a circle around the camp about three hundred yards out. He had two rabbits hung from his belt and had stopped to share the new snow with Darlene.
“Won't last long.”
“Still pretty.”
Later that afternoon Mark and Ben called a meeting, and got everyone dressed and out to walk a perimeter line around the camp.
In the past two weeks Jasper's bruises had faded and she had stopped wetting herself. But her eyes remained focused on something far away. She didn't talk, except sometimes she shouted at night in dreams.
Two days after they were settled in the shelter, she had disappeared and it had taken Mark about forty five minutes to track her. She was walking through the woods avoiding the poison oak and black berries but still when Mark looked in her eyes, there was just nobody home.
After that, Bea and Darlene had taken to tying Jasper to themselves with a ten foot cord when they went out. She would follow along passively and Bea thought she was happier for it, though no one else could see any difference. To Mark, it seemed that Jasper was farther away from reality every day.
Mark had want to put larger traps that he had in the truck around the perimeter, but Ben had vetoed the idea. There was a chance of people who worked in the woods stumbling into the traps, and Ben wasn't willing to use maiming as a warning. Mark made the point that they where only five people.
“Do you think that guy made it out?”
“I'm sure he did, but I'm not sure he would tell anyone,” said Ben. “I mean how would he explain what they were doing. No, I think he's running like a rabbit, far away from here.”
“I hope you're right.”
The day after the snow, Bea was the first to wake. They had put dry fir on the fire last night and it had heated the rock wall providing pleasant warmth throughout the night. That coupled with the sleeping bag and exhaustion of getting used to a new and physical life style, had provided the deep and recuperative sleep.
Bea thought that it was probably the sleep more than anything that had allowed them to heal and recover. She was not sure about herself though. The rape was back there in her mind, over there, and she was not sure she could go near it. She only hoped that she and Jasper weren't pregnant. Jasper had just started her periods this year, a late bloomer in her class.
Bea's heart sank as she looked over at Jasper's bag and it was empty. The string laid cut between their two bags.
“Jasper's gone she screamed,” waking the others.
Foreign Body Reaction
Alan McNeill
Chapter 5 Scene 6
“Wait,” shouted Ben at Mark, “I'll come too.”
Mark hesitated and shook his head no. “We don't know how long she has been gone. You're needed here.” He nodded towards Bea who was getting dressed frantically.
Ben hesitated and was interrupted by another scream from Bea. “She's got my knife!”
“What knife?” asked Ben.
“I took it from the man who, who . . I took it, it's a long hunting knife. I've been keeping it tucked under the sleeping bags. It's gone.”
Mark pulled on a down vest, and took the binoculars hanging from the shelf they had built near the fire pit. He took the SKS rife too and checked the magazine. Ben had cleaned it and reloaded it. Mark threw it over his shoulder and left. The snow was mostly gone and packed down by their own foot traffic. Mark went out about fifty yards and cut a semi circle around the camp. He crossed Jasper's tracks headed east just south of the granite outcrop that formed their home. He began to follow her tracks at a jog, thankful that she wasn't barefoot at least.
Mark was not the only one following Jasper. For days mother and baby had been watching this one who hung back when the humans were out. The weak one. The noise and too many others had disturbed game and while she and her cub were in no distress, they were hungry.
She had left the cub hidden to wait for her, and had worked along the creek bed, smelling the traps the humans had left, her nose curling in contempt and revulsion at the smell of the steel.
Now she padded along behind the girl, letting her stay ahead for a while. It was not time yet.
Jasper reached the top of a hill at sunrise. She had no idea how long she had been walking, indeed if she was aware at all, it was just that the sun came over the hill to the east and bathed her in light. Her limbic old brain reacted to the light and warmth by turning toward it. The snow had stopped, and the air was clear. She had come out of the older fir forest behind her into a burn area. She could see all the way down to the stream below and up the other side of the valley to the exposed red-orange earth of the mountain, all the way to a road. Her eyes were not focused, not really seeing, but something in her struggled and smelled the water down below. She was cold, the sun warm, and that she did feel.
She began to shake and run down the hill. The light glowed in the mist rising from the soil around her. All around her plants and seedlings were erupting from the earth. Despite it being winter in southwest Oregon, the ground seemed alive and growing, and she could somehow feel that too. She could feel the hillside's energy suffuse through her.
Deep in that place that she had been driven during the attack, fear rose as a wall in her and pushed her down like a choking hand, but the sun fought through that and like a song's beat she could feel herself become aware to the terror that was those men in that horrible van, hurting her and watching her mother. She slid away from the pain. She needed to stop it, stop that pain.
There was something else pushing at her inside too, there in that place of self loathing and disgust, something foreign but familier. But the push was not like that man's penis cutting into her, killing her, this was clean, and strong and had claws to fight back. She felt it, and it surged within her. But her pain and loathing were too great and she retreated down again.
She stopped near the stream her chest heaving from the run down the mountain. She gulped at the air. Pain washed through her. She couldn't bear it, it was unthinkable what they had done and no one would every want her, she was disgusted with herself, and, no, stop, stop. She had to get it out. The long hard knife appeared in her hand, the blade glinting in the morning sun. She offered the insides of her arm to the morning sky.
Again the other push, clear strength, the acceptance of the world as is came from outside, all around. It was warm and she could feel her claws dig into dirt below the forest floor. She saw herself from above. She could see her arms raised in supplication to sun, to be let free of this pain that ate her like a malignant cancer. To be free of this man, these men, who had raped her and hurt her and scared her away, so deep and far away that the world was the surface of the ocean to Jasper. Too far above her head to ever reach. She and this other saw her put the knife along side her arm and bend the sharp blade against her skin.
She began to slice, and she could feel it and then she felt her claws push the soil, and she stopped to wonder at the power that pulsed through her thighs and the fear of that man, the other men, their hands hurting her where she should be loved but instead it hurt, hurt, hurt.
Her awareness burst forth and struggled to reach the sun. Power coursed through her and she could see through four eyes, and felt the heart of the mountain lion, and she could see the man who stood across the stream, laughing at her. Her voice found itself and she screamed in terror, anger, defiance, for he was one of the ones that forced his hand up beneath her and broke her and hurt her and now, he stood there laughing.
He looked over his shoulder up to the road on the other side of the creek.at the black SUV parked there. Beside it stood a woman and man.The woman nodded yes to the man. The woman saw the knife in the girls hand, cutting down the length of her arm, tiny rivulets of blood had begun to flow and the woman above saw that. He licked her lips and felt a moistening, her breath caught.
“So you little cunt, you came back for a little more? I knew you would, you little girls always want more don't you.” His beard glistened with spittle and he rubbed his crotch lewdly with one hand, the other holding some sort of weapon.
“First things first you little bitch.”
He raised the weapon and she could see herself through the cougar's eyes, she could see him and she brought the knife away from her arm. A voice roared in her head, close, “Down baby, down now.”
Mark crested the hill above, his lungs bursting. For the last hundred yards cougar's tracks lay on top of Jasper's. The mountain lion was hunting the girl. He unslung the weapon as he ran. He saw a tawny blur of motion behind the girl. He dropped to his knee and sighted down the rifle. Too far, but he had to try, he waited until the cat gathered for her leap at the girl's back and he pulled the trigger.
NOTHING, fuck nothing, the safety is on. Shit, too late thought Mark.
Jasper dropped. The man found not a young girl who he had raped before him but the springing form of an in prime female mountain lion rocketing toward him. He could see the yellow of her eyes and he had just enough time for urine to drench the front of his pants before the big cat struck him full in the chest. He bowled over as she spun around to take his head in her jaws, crush it.
But the big cat stopped, she stood still and watched the man. He couldn't believe she didn't simply snap his neck. He stumbled backwards into and across the stream to where the girl laid. Perhaps, oh yes, thank you God of fucking little girls, perhaps he would still give that fucking Patrica woman what she wanted. And what she wanted was that sweet little girl lying on the ground behind him.
As the cat waited and watched Mark pounded down the hill trying to get close enough to do what? Certainly the man and the cat were both dangerous, he had heard Jasper scream when she saw him. Mark was stunned and confused by what was happening below him.
Mark skidded to a halt. He laid the rifle barrel across a burned stump and sighted on the man advancing on Jasper. He clicked the safety off and put his face along the stock. It felt warm and he knew that he would kill this man, and that the bullet would not miss. He felt the rightness of it and he began to squeeze the trigger.
Suddenly Jasper stood. Mark cursed. She was directly in the line of fire. He released the trigger. He was back on his feet running down the hill.
Jasper was calm. Her fear that had consumed her and buried her under its weight was like a fire around her, her pain became a screaming wall of sound surrounded her then concentrated to single point of fury. She moved closer to the man, one of the men, one of the many men. The cougars eyes found her and the pain, the sound, the fury formed into a liquid thing and flowed into her hand.
The man spun around and foundthat Jasper was no longer on the ground. She was right there, inches away, her eyes opaque and focused on the past. She brought her left hand up and blocked the gun out and away. She stepped tight to the man, as to embrace him, as a mother would embrace her son. She pushed the knife into him just above his pubic bone and gutted him straight up to the ribs. The ball of fury, the terror, flowed out her arm into the man's guts. She angled the knife up and sliced through the heart, right where the lion told her.
Jasper stood back and the man looked down in amazement as his intestines spilled, steaming, to the ground. He looked up and began to sink, his knees buckling. He had reached his knees when a wicked sound of crushing bone cut the morning air. The mother cougar effortlessly twisted until a rifle shot snap of the vertebrae echoed in the cool morning mist and bright sunshine.
Mark raised the rifle, but Jasper turned and smiled at him, caught his eye, shaking her head, no. Mark looked back to the cougar, but she and the man where gone. Only a bloody track that led toward the stream remained.
High above on the logging road, Patricia sagged against the side of the SUV, her slacks soaked through.
“Oh my god, Arthur, did you see that?”
Arthur looked at Patricia, watching her faced flushed in excitement and opened the drivers side door and slid in. He knew he needed her to find Ben, but she was a seriously fucked up woman, he thought as he started the SUV. In a few moments there was nothing left in the burn area except a young girl smiling in the sun. They climbed back up the hill, Mark glancing nervously behind every few steps. He couldn't believe the change in her.
Jasper was aware of every twig that crunched under foot, the smells of the soil and the blue of the sky. A gentle roaring moan filled her mind and she looked to see if Mark heard it. No, he was focused somewhere else right now, but she would see for him and the others now. She came in close to Mark's side and reached out for his hand.
Thinking she sought comfort he looked down and gently took her hand. A warmth suffused through him, a feeling of enormous resilience. timeless patience. He simply stared down at her wondering what he had just witnessed.
Jasper laughed and felt the lion, fill her belly. She was hungry too!
“Let's go Mark, let's run" she shouted. Mark heard her beautiful young voice for the first time and marveled. The sun was bright but this morning, at least this morning thought Mark of the dark weeks that had passed, at least this morning, something was done, something had changed, and it was good.
