Between a Bear and a Hard Place(46)

Suddenly, the scarf, the whistling, the weird questions about death, they all made a little more sense.





-14-


“Panic never, ever does any good. But for some reason, I keep doing it.”


-Claire


They touched down at half past three, which was about an hour after the mystery wound appeared in Jacques’s shoulder. Dawn was nothing more than an imaginary gray streak on the horizon as the helicopter settled with a heavy groan of metal. Until the second they landed, Claire could not in any way understand how she kept her shit together.

All the blood, the panic, the terror, and embarrassingly, worst of all, the horrible sinking feeling that leaving her bears behind inflicted, haunted her. But, she managed to choke it back, to keep the bile in her throat instead of her mouth.

But once they wheeled the Cajun off and took him off to do something or other, it all caught up at once. She started shaking, her eyes went hazy, and the entire inside of her mouth turned to cotton.

“You have to calm the hell down,” Jill hissed, pulling Claire aside and into the vending machine room on floor six. “I know you’re scared, I understand it. I’ve been in a pretty similar place. But if you keep acting like this, you’re going to kill yourself with a heart attack.”

The only other company in the room was a frumpy man in an untucked flannel shirt who seemed so absorbed in the newspaper he was glaring at that neither of them even considered his presence. Whatever was on page 2-B must have been really amazing.

Claire chewed hard on her bottom lip, which was tucked neatly behind her small, square, straight teeth. From the look on her face, she wasn’t paying a lick of attention to anything Jill was telling her. “Do you have a dollar?”

“Huh? Oh you’re probably starving, aren’t you? Here.”

The dollar slid into the machine with a slow whirring sound.

“Need another one. If they don’t screw you with the doctor bill, they’ll gouge you to death paying for a Snickers bar.”

Jill clunked a pair of quarters into the machine. “Is it at least king size? Well either way, we’re splitting this thing.”

The two of them sat in silence, their absurd meal of Diet Coke and half of a regular sized Snickers bar laying on napkins that fluttered in the stale air circulating through the room courtesy of an overhead fan with ball bearings that desperately needed to be replaced.

Claire mashed down the first half inch of her share of the candy bar with the first two fingers on her left hand. She scooped the wounded food along the napkin and then scraped it off with her bottom teeth. “I never thought I’d say this, but this is the first time a Snickers hasn’t done a damn thing for me.”

She stared very intently at the mooshed-up nougat and caramel on her fingertips, and snipped another peanut off with her teeth. “How did you deal with it?”

Jill had already finished her candy bar, and had sucked down about half her Coke. “Which part?”

Claire pursed her lips and arched an eyebrow, tilting her head slightly toward the stranger behind them who had actually moved for the first time, but was then just as absorbed in page 3-A as he was 2-B a few minutes before.

“Oh, calm down,” Jill said. “Jacques was right. No one’s going to bother looking for you. Just don’t worry about it.”

The phone, which had miraculously been in low-power mode for almost a week at that point, buzzed from the table where they’d left it to charge before beginning their feast. Sighing, Claire got to her feet and poked at the phone.

“Oh holy shit, how did I forget?”

It was Jill’s turn to quirk an eyebrow.

“This guy, Nick, a waiter from this bar I go to, I was supposed to go out with him on Monday. Christ, I feel awful. I gotta call him back.”

Thinking quick, Jill hopped up, snatched the phone out of Claire’s hand and threw it violently to the floor. The tiny electronic guts spilled all over the floor with a glorious crashing sound at exactly the same second that Claire’s eyes took on a fury that looked vaguely like a bear about to pounce. “The fuck was that?” she hissed. “What are you doing?”

Red fury pulsed in her temples. I don’t know this woman. I don’t know any of them. Why am I here? Why am I listening to all this shit? They’re gonna get me. They’re all out to hunt me down.

Her head pounded. The palms of her hands went all clammy and cold when she clenched her fists.

“Claire?” Jill asked, reaching out to put a hand on the woman’s shoulder, but recoiled when Claire actually hissed at her.

As she looked at her, Jill saw Claire’s eyes began to vibrate.

Vibrate.

“This isn’t right,” she said, reaching out again. This time, Claire kept hissing, but Jill didn’t pull away, instead grabbing her shoulder and squeezing to try and ground her. “Are you in there?”