Then both this horror and the growing feeling of heat and pressure in her wounded hand were overwhelmed as a fresh cramp moved into her side like a storm-front. It dug at her mercilessly, trying to tear her out of her twisted position, and Jessie fought back with terrified fury. She couldn’t move now. She would almost certainly knock her improvised cutting tool to the floor if she did.
“No you don’t,” she muttered through her clenched teeth. “No, you bastard-get out of Dodge.”
She held herself rigidly in position, trying to keep from bearing down on the fragile glass blade any harder than she already was, not wanting to snap it off and have to try finishing with some less apt tool. But if the cramp spread from her side to her right arm, as it was apparently trying to-
“No,” she moaned. “Go away, do you hear? just go the fuck away!”
She waited, knowing she could not afford to wait, also knowing she could do nothing else; she waited and listened to the sound of her life’s blood pattering to the floor from the bottom of the headboard. She watched more blood run off the shelf in little streamlets. Tiny sparkles of glass gleamed in some of these. She had begun to feel like a victim in a slasher movie.
You can’t wait any longer, Jessie! Ruth rapped at her. You’re allout of time!
What I’m really out of is luck, and I never had that goddam muchto start with, she told Ruth.
At that moment she either felt the cramp loosen a little or was able to kid herself that she did. Jessie revolved her hand inside the cuff, screaming with pain as the cramp pounced once more, sinking its hot claws into her midsection, trying to set it on fire again. She kept on moving just the same, however, and now it was the back of her wrist that she impaled. The soft inner part was turned up and Jessie watched, fascinated, as the deep gash across her Bracelets of Fortune opened its black-red mouth wide and appeared to laugh at her. She drove the glass as deeply into the back of her hand as she dared, still fighting the cramp in her midriff and lower chest, then yanked her hand back toward her, spraying a fine mist of backspatter across her forehead, her cheeks, and the bridge of her nose. The broken chunk of glass with which she had performed this rudimentary surgery went spinning to the floor, and there the pixie-blade shattered. Jessie spared it not a single thought; its job was done. Meantime, there was one more step to be taken, one more thing to see: whether the cuff would maintain its jealous hold on her, or if flesh and blood might not at last conspire to make it let go.
The cramp in her side gave a final deep pinch and then began to loosen. Jessie noted its departure no more than she had noted the loss of her primitive glass scalpel. She could feel the force of her concentration-her mind seemed to burn with it, like a torch coated with pine resin-and all of it was fixed on her right hand. She held it up, examining it, in the golden sunlight of late afternoon. The fingers were thickly streaked with gore. Her forearm appeared to have been daubed with slobbers of bright red latex paint. The handcuff was little more than a curved shape rising out of the general flood, and Jessie knew it was as good as it was going to be. She cocked her arm and then pulled downward, as she had twice before. The handcuff slid… slid some more… and then bound up again. It had been stopped once more by the obdurate outcrop of bone below the thumb.
“No!” she shrieked, and yanked harder. “I refuse to die this way!
Do you hear me? I REFUSE TO DIE THIS WAY!”
The handcuff bit in deep, and for a moment Jessie was sickeningly sure that it would not move so much as another millimeter, that the next time it moved would be when some cigar-chomping cop unlocked it and took it off her dead body. She could not move it, no power on earth could move it, and neither the princes of heaven nor the potentates of hell would move it.
Then there was a sensation in the back of her wrist that felt like heat-lightning, and the handcuff jerked upward a little. It stopped, then began to move again. That hot, electrical tingle began to spread as it did, quickly becoming a dark burning which first spread all the way around her hand like a bracelet and then bit it like a battalion of hungry red ants.
The cuff was moving because the skin it rested on was moving, sliding the way a heavy object on a rug will slide if someone pulls the rug. The ragged, circular cut she had inscribed about her wrist widened, pulling wet strands of tendon across the gap and creating a red bracelet. The skin on the back of her hand began to wrinkle and bunch ahead of the cuff, and now what she thought of was how the coverlet had looked when she had pushed it down to the bottom of the bed with her pedaling feet.
I’m peeling my hand, she thought. Oh dear Jesus, I’m peeling it likean orange.
“Let go!” she screamed at the handcuff, suddenly infuriated beyond all reason. In that moment it became a live thing to her, some hateful clinging creature with many teeth, like a lamprey eel or a rabid weasel. “Oh, won’t you ever let me go?”
The cuff had slid much further than it had on her previous attempts to slip out of it, but still it clung, stubbornly refusing to give her that last quarter (or perhaps it was now only an eighth) of an inch. The bleary, blood-greased circle of steel now lay across a hand partially stripped of skin, baring a shiny meshwork of tendons the color of fresh plums. The back of her hand looked like a turkey drumstick from which the crispy outer skin had been removed. The steady downward pressure she was exerting had yanked the wound across her inner wrist even wider, creating a blood-caked chasm. Jessie wondered if she might not yank her hand right off in this final effort to free herself. And now the handcuff, which had still been moving a little-at least she thought it had been-stopped again. And this time it stopped cold.
Of course it has, Jessie! Punkin screamed. Look at it! It’s all crooked! If you could straighten it out again-
Jessie pistoned her arm forward, snapping the handcuff chain back onto her wrist. Then, before her arm could even think of cramping, she pulled downward again, using every bit of strength she had left. A red mist of pain engulfed her hand as the cuff tore across the raw meat between her wrist and the middle of her hand. All the skin which had been pulled away was puddled loosely here, on a diagonal running from the base of her pinky to the base of her thumb. For a moment this loose mass of skin held the cuff back, and then it rolled under the steel with a tiny squelch. That left only that last outcrop of bone, but that was enough to stop her progress. Jessie pulled harder. Nothing happened.
That’s it, she thought. Everybody out of the pool.
Then, just as she was about to relax her aching arm, the cuff slid over the small protrusion which had held it for so long, flew off the ends of her fingers, and cracked against the bedpost. It all happened so fast that Jessie was at first unable to grasp that it had happened. Her hand no longer looked like the sort of equipment normally issued to human beings, but it was her hand, and it was free.
Free.
Jessie looked from the empty blood-smeared cuff to her mangled hand, her face slowly filling with comprehension. Looks like a birdthat flew into a factory machine and then got spit out the other end, she thought, but that cuff’s not on it anymore. It’s really not.
“Can’t believe it,” she croaked. “Can’t. Fucking. Believe it.”
Never mind, Jessie. You have to hurry.
She started like someone being shaken awake from a doze. Hurry? Yes indeed. She didn’t know how much blood she had lost-a pint seemed a reasonable enough guess, judging from the sodden mattress and the streamlets running and dripping down the crossboards-but she knew that if she lost much more she was going to pass out, and the trip from unconsciousness to death would be a short one-just a quick ferry-ride across a narrow river.