Chapter 4 - The Night Shift
Nightfall in the dirt is a completely different kind of terror.
When the sun dips below the jagged ridgeline of the western hills, the temperature plummets with brutal speed. The warm, damp mud turns into a freezing, iron-hard cast that locks around my neck like a frozen collar.
The crickets fall silent, replaced by the distant, haunting yips of coyotes prowling along the dry creek bed at the edge of our property.
Up on the porch, the floodlights click on, casting long, eerie shadows across the lawn. Julian and Mara have pulled up two folding chairs near the edge of the patio, cracking open a six-pack of imported beer.
“She’s really holding out,” Mara laughs, taking a sip from her bottle. “Honestly, Julian, I didn't think she had this much stubbornness in her. You should have used duct tape on her mouth instead of a straw; it would have saved us three days of listening to her breathing.”
“Let her breathe,” Julian replies, his voice slurring slightly with alcohol. “When the sun comes up tomorrow, Miller will be back with that warrant. Before the cops get here, we’re going to pull her out, clean her up, put her in the guest bed, and tell the sheriff she had a psychotic break and crawled into a garden trench herself.”
“And the bank documents?” Eleanor asks from the doorway, her voice sharp.
“I’ve already forged her signature on the final transfer authorization,” Julian says smugly. “By tomorrow afternoon, the trust funds will be entirely in our corporate holding account. Once the money clears, Clara’s ‘medical condition’ can become permanent. We’ll commit her to a private sanitarium upstate where nobody will ever hear her complain again.”
Every word drops into the microphone of my hidden phone like molten lead.
My right hand, buried deep in the cold earth, begins to cramp violently. The circulation is failing. My fingers are stiff, blue, unresponsive.
Move, I tell myself. Move your finger.
If I lose mobility in my hand now, the phone is just a useless brick of glass and metal.
Beside me in the dark, my baby gives a fierce, heavy kick against my uterine wall—as if reminding me that we are in this together, that giving up is not an option.
I close my eyes, channeling every ounce of remaining thermal energy into my right hand. I flex my index finger once. Twice.
Click.
I check the battery percentage on the widget displayed through the cloudy plastic of the Ziploc bag.
Battery: 41%.
It’s enough.
The night stretches out like an endless eternity. Above me, the stars wheel slowly across the velvet sky, indifferent to the nightmare playing out in the dark earth beneath their light. I breathe through the straw, counting the seconds, measuring my life in the rhythm of my heartbeats.
May you like
Julian and Mara eventually finish their beer and head inside, locking the sliding glass door behind them. The house goes dark, save for the porch security light casting a sickly yellow glow over my buried head.
I am alone with the dirt, the cold, and the quiet fury burning deep inside my soul.
