Free After James by Michael Helm

ravine—“and there.” He pointed to the ridge just west of the house. “I opened the stream to make more time. Now it’s closed.” Without moving he seemed to set himself more squarely. “We need to leave. Go pack your things.”
    For the flint of a second his mouth tightened slightly, unreadable, a faint half smile or not. Then he nodded once in a short, sure movement and walked off. She felt calmer now than when he’d arrived. She had not panicked, she had seen what to do. She detected an interference in her reasoning—Denise was there in the works, telling her to run—but suppressed the thought. Denise had seen evil, but real evil was of the world, not of murder stories, pretended horrors. He’d not hesitated when she’d mentioned the Dahls by name.
    From behind the house she watched him through the bank of back windows, through the front ones. He started his truck, turned it around in three movements, and positioned its rear bumper in front of her car. He took the chains from his truck bed and crouched between the vehicles. Of course she would not run, though yes, whether she ran or left with this man, the terms of her leaving would not be entirely her own. But it was hard to know what exactly was her own anymore, other than her body, her half-exposed, marked-up self, its bondings and reactions.
    Then she remembered the fort. There was a child’s fort upstream set into the embankment. Crooner had found it under some brush and snow, the bones of a small animal inside that she hadn’t been able to make heads or tails of, so to speak. Something the size of a raccoon or opossum had died or been eaten there. The bones would still be inside, of course. Denise would have her run there, now, run and hide, but Ali couldn’t imagine herself running through the woods, not really, and in so failing to imagine, revealed her position. Denise was credulous. Ali was not.
    She walked to the house and this time left her boots on and tracked the mud inside. She packed her computer and stuffed what clothes she could into her bag without folding them and threw in her running shoes. She tucked the bag of Alph under the clothes. In the back bedroom she drew open the plastic sheeting and stared at the stacks of cardboard boxes. She recognized Denise’s writing on them.
Fabrics
—
Israel. Soaps. Old Books
, numbered one through seven.
Winter Clothes.
Leaning against a wall behind the boxes was a large rectangular package wrapped in paper and string, marked
My Paintings
. Ali carried the package by the string out into the house and placed it by the doorway with her bag and computer case.
    Shoad was up at the truck smoking a cigarette, looking to the west as if to see the water he’d promised her cresting the far hills. He’d struck an odd posture, resting his jaw in the inward-turned palm of his hand, as if he were going to shot-put his head. She pictured him turning and seeing her in the doorway, throwing his cigarette into the gravel and starting toward her. She saw it as clearly as though it were already happening. Thefeeling had a disturbing pitch to it, and then, as if she had to burn them off, a series of still images came to her. Her car abandoned in trees, Crooner’s dog tags hanging from the mirror in a truck cab, a badly done oil painting of a blond woman, Irina, standing next to the truck with the rust-red hood. Her brain would not be offering fantasies now if it knew she was in real danger. It would be trying to save her. But it might be doing it indirectly, through suggestion rather than direct analysis. It might, in fact, be trying to relax her analytical regions to enable itself to perform the revelatory leap required for difficult problem-solving. He’d opened the stream to make more time. Time was slowing, as she needed it to slow. Her brain, recognizing duress, was processing at higher than normal speed.
    Maybe the scenarios she imagined were being produced by the drug, a manifestation of the Daffy effect so