Chapter 54
Why was it little dogs always made so much noise? Was it the canine equivalent of Little Man Syndrome—they were small and neurotic, so they got loud and annoying to be noticed?
The big dog sitting in the passenger seat beside Conor was as silent as mourners standing around an open grave. Trident didn’t have anything to prove.
As Conor pulled around to the back of the house, his headlights illuminated Jojo’s truck, parked next to what looked like a small tool shed. Conor’s mouth went suddenly dry. No doubt now. She was here … and there’d been a gunshot.
Just as abruptly as before, the grumbling, clunking sound erupted again in the bottom of the silo and corn stopped draining out. He felt the presence of the dog then, looked down and Trident was sitting in front of him, staring, as if willing Conor to tell him what to do.
“Look, I don’t know what the commands are,” he said softly, “but I need your help to locate Jojo.” He paused.
“Trident, find Jojo!” The dog pivoted on the spot, darted around the metal legs supporting the silo and raced to the steps angling up to the open doorway on the back side.
He sniffed the ground briefly, then stood on his hind legs and put his front paws on a step that was higher than his head on the stairs.
He hopped with his back feet onto a lower step and then repeated the movement. The dog was climbing the stairs!
Jojo had to be up in the silo with Jason.
Conor pulled the flashlight off his belt, clipped it to his rifle barrel, turned it on and flashed the beam into the open silo doorway above him.
“Jason, this is Lieutenant McCaffrey. You remember me. I need to talk to you—just talk. If you’re armed, you need to put your weapon down now.”
The only response was silence.
Jojo’s eyes are reflexively squeezed tight shut. She feels the weight of the corn kernels pressing against her eyelids and the light dims to utter darkness. She relaxes the muscles so her eyes are merely closed. At rest. Relaxed.
Every muscle movement, no matter how small, uses oxygen she needs to survive.
Silence, the airplane-takeoff sensation that her ears are stopped up—because they are. Literally stopped up. She can feel the corn kernels filling in around her ears, sliding down into the ear canals.
The kernels of corn invade her every space, down her shirt, between her toes. She wonders idly why one foot is bare. What happened to her shoe? She releases the thought and it flutters away.
Pressure.
There’s pressure crushing her from all sides, but not from above. There’s no corn on the top of her head. The tiny cavity in front of her nose and mouth holds against the pressure. Her heartbeat booms, she can feel but not hear it. She concentrates, slows the beats.
Liam’s voice speaks in her head. If you stay in control, you get to decide.
Jojo decides: “I’m not going to breathe right now.”
Her body disagrees. It tells her that she needs to breathe, screams at her that she has to breathe, or she’ll die.
Jojo decides: I’m not going to listen to my body. I’m going to listen to my brain, and my brain is telling me that I do not have to breathe if I choose not to. And I do choose not to.
She greets the overwhelming sensation of terror that floods through her as an old friend, an almost daily companion for more than two decades.
She hears panic’s fists hammering at the door of her mind as they’ve hammered so many times before.
Her body’s physical reaction to too little oxygen and too much carbon dioxide, even as accustomed to the imbalance as she is, is always the same.
The combination births terror and his nasty friend panic.
She knows them well. The same physical reaction happens every time. The dependability is reassuring.
But …
No, wait.
Wait!
This time is different. This time, she can’t just stop the exercise if she feels overwhelmed. This time, she can’t breathe, really can’t breathe. If she does, she’ll?—
No!
She grabs her mind in an iron grip and refuses to allow it to go out there beyond the three inches around her face to what else is happening in the world.
This is her world, the corn crushing against every inch of her. She is here, now.
A brief image of Conor’s face flashes across her consciousness like a comet and then it’s gone.
She refuses to let her mind venture out into the future beyond the next heartbeat.
And the next.
And the next.
Conor stepped behind the edge of the small tool shed and noticed ragged splinters—recent bullet holes in the wood. Jason had fired at Jojo from the silo as she stood here.
Conor leveled his rifle at the open silo doorway, sighted in on it, then called out, “Jason, drop your weapon—now—and come out with your hands?—”
Jason stepped out into the doorway with the scope of his .30-06 to his eye.
And Conor pulled the trigger.
Jason screamed and fell sideways.
Conor dropped the rifle, pulled his service weapon, raced to the bottom of the front stairs and began climbing, taking three steps at a time.
He could hear Jason wailing all the way up.
At the top, Conor burst into the silo pistol drawn, eyes raking the catwalk, but the only person he found was Jason, rolling around, moaning, cradling his mangled, bleeding hand.
“You shot me,” the boy screamed indignantly, “tore up my hand. Help me, I need a doctor … the pain … It hurts!” He began making a mewling, whining sound, like crying and screaming at the same time.
Conor knelt beside him, grabbed the collar of his shirt and shook him. “Where’s Jojo?”
“It hurts … I’m bleeding, help me!”
“Tell me where Jojo is, or I’ll let you bleed to death.”
The wound wasn’t serious enough for him to bleed out, but obviously the boy didn’t know that. His sniveling and whining turned Conor’s stomach. The seven people this boy had murdered had been in pain, but the boy had shown no mercy. Conor would show none either.
“Where’s Jojo?” He shook the boy roughly. “Tell me.”
“You’re too late. She’s dead.” The boy glared up at him with a look of triumph in his red, wet eyes. “I killed her!”
An iron fist punched Conor in the gut.
Too late.
Dead.
Jojo was gone?
“Where … Where is she?” The words came out airless and hollow. Conor let go of the boy’s collar, and the kid’s head banged down on the metal catwalk.
He caught movement in the corner of his eye and whirled to see Trident in the doorway on the other side of the silo. The dog had kept at it, had climbed all the way up. Trident went to the catwalk railing, barked once, and sat.
Conor turned back to the boy and was surprised at how gravelly and unsteady his own voice sounded in his ears. “Tell me where she is!” he demanded.
The boy almost smiled. “No.”
As Conor leveled his pistol at the boy’s face, it was like he was outside his own body, a surprised observer. “Tell me where she is, or I’ll kill you.”
“No, you won’t,” the boy taunted. “You can’t. You’re not like that.”
Conor sat back on his heels, then raised his own cold eyes to meet the boy’s. “You’re right. I won’t.” He took a breath, then gestured with his chin toward Trident, where he sat motionless on the other side of the silo. “But he will.” He paused. “Trident, come!”
The dog covered the distance between them in three bounds, then sat, looking down at Jason with cold eyes.
“You have to the count of three to tell me where Jojo is, or as God is my witness, I will order her dog to rip your throat out.” He forced himself to smile. “Hey … They can’t charge you with murder if all you do is watch.”
“Get that dog away from me … Get him?—”
“One.”
The boy struggled to scoot away from the dog, but there was nowhere to go. “Make that dog leave me?—”
“Two.”
“Okay, okay!” With his good hand he gestured out into the silo. “She’s here, right here.”
Conor turned. “Where? There’s nobody?—”
“Down there!”
Conor looked down at the corn … and gasped. In the center of the pile of corn in the silo below them he could see … something dark … black hair.
A fan of shiny black hair was spread out across the yellow kernels.
Jojo was buried in the corn!
He staggered to his feet, made some kind of animal sound.
Oh, dear God, no …
He wanted to leap into the corn and dig her … It was too late. She was gone. Rage and grief and despair welled up in his chest. He couldn’t just leave her there.
“Out …” He yelled at the boy. “Get her … Get her body out!”
The boy didn’t move.
“Trident …” He snarled the name as a threat.
The dog growled low in his throat.
“There!” The boy pointed to a switch on the wall. “That opens the discharge gate at the bottom.”
Conor slammed his hand into the switch, kicked the boy’s rifle off into the corn, leapt out the door and down the stairs.
Jojo can hear muffled sounds, a gunshot maybe and somebody screaming.
She hears, but doesn’t listen, doesn’t attend to any of them, doesn’t concentrate, trying to make out what the sounds are.
The sounds are out there in the wide world and Jojo is here, only here, controlling the universe that exists in the three inches of open space between her cupped hands and her nose and mouth.
Her smashed fingers throb. Good! She allows herself to feel a wave of dizziness, too. All of that exists here in her world.
She lets her mind review the exercises.
Hold your breath. Breathe.
Hold your breath. Breathe.
Hold your breath. Breathe.
After a set of three, she shortens the breathing periods, lengthens the breath-holding time for another set of three, training her body to function with low oxygen levels, and high CO2.
The carbon dioxide is the Boogie Man. He and his monster friends roar through her mind now on custom Harleys, spreading terror, tightening her chest in an overwhelming need for air.
She ignores them but faces the reality that she has come to the end of all things. She’s done, has used all of her endurance and strength. It’s over.
The 40% Rule: When your mind tells you you’re done, you’re really only forty percent done. You still have sixty percent remaining, but you have to push for it.
Jojo pushes for it.
Conor leapt off the steps and fell to his knees on the ground beneath the corn silo.
Jojo was dead.
The words echoed in a vast abyss in his soul.
The image of her beautiful face filled his mind, her eyes so bright blue, her husky alto voice?—
It was his fault. If he’d been sharper, quicker, if he’d figured it out sooner, or driven faster or … He fought desperately to keep from imagining what her death must have been like—the horror of suffocation.
Corn was pouring again from the bottom of the silo, growing the conical pile that was left the first time. Conor stumbled toward it.
When Jojo’s body slid down through the funnel and out into the pile, he wanted to be there to catch her, to pull her out and away.
Then he saw a dark shadow in the corn, spotted one bare foot coming through the discharge gate, and he slogged through the pile, holding out his arms so that when her body fell free, he caught her.
Thrown off balance, he staggered, fell backward into the pile of corn, cradling her in his lap. He tenderly brushed the corn off her face.
Jojo opened her eyes.
The world is growing dark. Jojo is sliding into unconsciousness. She will let go then, she will gasp and?—
The corn around her begins to move.
She’s suddenly falling, the corn beneath her disappearing.
With every speck of her will, Jojo clamps down on the muscles of her diaphragm, holds on for one more second. And one more.
Her foot falls free, her body drops on top of something. She feels … arms holding her. Something brushes across her face.
Jojo opens her eyes.
And gasps!
Air.
Air!
She can breathe!