“I said to dig, goddamnit,” he shouted in his rasping voice. “If I have to tell you again, I’m just going to shoot.”
She was still grasping the handle of the shovel when she looked him in the eye. “Well, then go ahead and shoot me. I know who you are, and it’ll be easier if you just kill me now.”
“Ah,” he grinned. “My fame precedes me. Still, wouldn’t you like the chance to survive? What if I change my mind? What if you manage to scratch your way out of the box? What if someone comes along in time to discover you? If I just shoot you now, you’ll never know, will you? You willing to take a chance like that?”
Begrudgingly, she knew he was right. There was always a possibility of escape, a chance that he might let his guard down for long enough to get away. Somehow, she knew that this was how he got his rocks off, the gamble that one of his victims would manage to escape. He probably sat in the bed of that truck on a lawn chair and just waited, watching the newly-dug grave, hoping one of those women would actually manage to get out.
And she didn’t want to die. As long as there was some fighting chance, no matter how absurd the odds, she was going to fight for her life. Maura had always been a fighter. Orphaned at a young age, she had been passed from foster family to foster family, each becoming successively worse in its abuse of her. Her body was a roadmap of scars, belying her past injuries at the hands of her so-called families. Still. She had maintained good grades in school, and she soon found herself in college on a full scholarship, where she had met the man of her dreams. Soon after college, she was a woman in a top position at her law firm, respected by her peers and desperately loved by her adoring husband.
She had endured the worst that men had been able to throw at her, physical and sexual abuse that endured for years, misogynistic remarks from other lawyers, the toughest tests her chauvinistic professors could give her. She’d passed through them all, and no single man with a shotgun was going to beat her now. No psycho bastard would manage what so many others had failed at accomplishing.
“Now...” he said. “Dig.”
“What if I scream?”
“Go ahead,” he said, sitting down. “Scream all you want. Nobody’ll hear you out here.”
“It’s a National Park. Someone might.”
“Baby, there ain’t nobody out here but me, you, and the bears. By the way, don’t feed them. There’s signs posted all over the place.”
Indignantly, holding the shovel in both hands, she began to dig a hole, the earth fairly soft beneath the steel blade. The sun was very hot, and she had to stop several times to wipe the sweat out of her eyes. All the while, the bastard sat on a stump, the shotgun aimed at her, a half-smile on his perfectly formed lips.
Determination gripped her, and she began to dig faster. All those years of working out at the gym were going to pay off. In college, she’d started working out to get rid of the tension that always gripped her around the neck and shoulders. Afterwards, Maura had paid a top personal trainer to whip her body into the kind of shape that women desired and men ogled, a very useful tool in a courtroom. She could feel the muscles in her arms, already tired, straining to keep up, burning with the same intensity that she strived to attain with dumbbells. She was strong, and she was going to use this to her advantage.
She would dig the grave and let herself be buried. Inside a box that size, there was probably at least two hours of air left to breathe, and she was sure she was strong enough to rip open the cardboard and paw her way through four or five feet of loose dirt.
She would survive this ordeal.
And when she got out, she was going to make the bastard pay.
“All those signs about the bears,” he muttered, more to himself than for her advantage. “And I read somewhere that the bears were starving out here, that they’d relied on people to feed them for so long, they didn’t know how to hunt. You ever heard about that?”
She had heard about it, read something in Discover magazine, but she refused to answer him. He grinned, unable to sulk on such a pretty day.
The sun moved its position, but The Digger never once budged an inch. He watched her, sometimes asking her stupid questions, which she ignored.
“You feeling that sun?”
“Damn it’s hot! You going to faint? You look like you’re going to faint.”
“Those blisters bleeding yet? Yep, looks like they are.”
Her hands had erupted into blisters ten minutes after she’d started digging the hole, and now they had burst, oozing blood and pus down her arms. The shovel was growing slippery.
She wondered how long it had been since she’d started. By the looks of the sun’s position in the sky, it was probably at least three hours. Shoveling out more dirt, she saw that she was standing more than waist deep in the grave she was creating. When had she done all of that? Where had those piles of earth come from? Had she been at it for that long?
She focused on her task, channeling her hatred into thoughts of revenge, of all the pain she would heap upon this son of a bitch when she got out of this grave. And she would get out. The thoughts of her escape fuelled her weary arms, and she stopped thinking about the ache in her arms and back for a while.
“That’s enough,” he said, rising and walking to his truck. His eyes never left her, and the sights of the shotgun didn’t waver for a second.
She was breathing hard, her lungs searing. Now that she had stopped, she could really feel the throbbing of her muscles, the terrible pounding of her heart in her ears. Faltering, she fell against the side of the newly-dug grave. It took every ounce of her concentration just to keep her eyes open and lean against the side of the hole. It would be so easy to simply fall, to let the exhaustion possess her entirely. It would be so easy to give in.
But, she knew that she would never give in to the pain or the weariness. Her heart, pounding so loudly now, was hardened with disgust for this man, for the things he had done to her and to those other women. How many had there been? Twelve? Thirteen? All buried in state parks, all discovered too late. Idly, she wondered if any of them had found this hatred inside themselves, this desire to live and to kill this freak who had tortured them.
They probably had felt as she did.
And they had been able to do nothing about it.
They had all died, slowly and horribly.
Just as she was going to.
Goosebumps raised on her arms, as though a cold breeze had blown over her. It was really the first time she had been afraid since The Digger had kidnapped her, and she sank to her knees, bowing her head into the soft, cool earth wall of the grave. Her bloody hands lay useless in her lap, her arms too tired to support them.
Of course those other women had wanted to escape. Of course, they’d wanted to live, to get revenge. They had been motivated by the same riotous anger that had propelled her into digging her own grave. And they had all perished, suffocated.
Hearing a noise, she glanced up at the edge of the hole. It seemed to be miles away from her. The Digger was standing there, towering over her like some wicked giant in a fairy tale. In his left hand, he held the huge cardboard box. In his right, he pointed the shotgun at her.
“You did a good job,” he said. “A nice squared grave. Now, it’s time.”
Pooling all of her resolve, she grunted back at him, “You’ll have to come down here and get me, you bastard. I’m not fucking helping you anymore.” He laughed, and shot her through her left leg. The buckshot sprayed, penetrating her flesh in more than a dozen areas, more than a dozen receptacles of pain. She cried out, falling backwards, and she heard the shotgun go off again, heard his high-pitched laughing. Although she didn’t feel anymore pain this time, she still felt something dig into her other leg. Then, there was only merciful blackness.