A Maidens Grave

on.” Melanie’s hands stabbed the air. “No time!” She slapped the woman, tried to pull her to her feet; the teacher was dead weight.
    Melanie grimaced in disgust. “Come on. Or I’ll have to leave you!”
    The teacher shook her head and closed her eyes. Melanieput the knife, still open, into the pocket of her skirt and, pulling Emily by the hand, slipped out of the doorway. They stepped into the door leading to the back of the slaughterhouse and vanished through the dim corridors.
     
    Lou Handy looked at the cash, a surprisingly small pile for that much money, and said, “We should’ve thought of this before. Every little bit helps.”
    Wilcox looked out the window. “How many snipers you think they got on us?”
    “Oh . . . lessee . . . ’bout a hundred. And with us nailing that trooper of theirs, they’ve probably got one’r two ready to shoot away and pretend they didn’t hear the order not to.”
    “I always thought you’d be a good sniper, Lou.”
    “Me? Naw, I’m too, you know, impatient. I knew some of ’em in the service. You know what you do mosta the time? You gotta lie on your belly for a couple, three days ’fore you can make one shot. Not move a muscle. What’s the fun of that?”
    He flashed back to his days in the military. They seemed both easier and harder than life on the run, and very similar to life in prison.
    “The shooting’d be fun, though.”
    “I’ll give you that . . . . Oh, fucking hell!”
    He’d glanced at the back of the slaughterhouse and saw bloody footprints leading out of the room where the girls had been.
    “Shit,” Wilcox spat out.
    Lou Handy was a man driven by positive forces, he truly believed. He rarely lost his temper and, yes, he was a murderer but when he killed he killed for expediency but hardly ever from rage.
    Yet, a few times in his life, a fierce anger bubbled up from his soul and he became the cruelest man on earth. Unstoppably cruel.
    “That cunt,” he whispered, his voice cracking. “That cocksucking cunt.”
    They ran to the doorway, where the bloody prints disappeared.
    Handy said, “Stay here.”
    “Lou—”
    “Stay the fuck here!” Handy raged. “I’m gonna fix her clock like I shoulda done a long time ago.” He plunged into the murky bowels of the slaughterhouse, the knife in his hand, held low, with the blade up, as he’d been taught not in the army but on the streets of Minneapolis.

10:27 P.M.
    Sight is a miracle and it’s the foremost of our senses. But we are as often informed by the adjunct perception, sound.
    The sight of a river tells us what it is but the sound of water also can explain its character: placid or deadly or dying itself. For Melanie Charrol, deprived of this sense, smell had taken over. River rapids were airy and electric. Still water smelled stale. Here the Arkansas River smelled ominous—pungent and deep and decaying, as if it were the grave of many bottom feeders.
    Still, it said, Come to me, come to me, I’m your way out.
    Melanie followed its call unerringly. Through the maze of the deserted slaughterhouse she led the little girl in the hopeless Laura Ashley dress. The floorboards were rotting through in many places, but the bare bulbs from the main portion of the slaughterhouse were so bright that even back here enough light filtered into these reaches to illuminate their path. Occasionally she paused, lifted her nose, and breathed the air to make certain they were headed in the right direction. Then she’d turn once more toward the river, spinning around and looking behind her when the panic got to be too much.
    Smell has not replaced sound as our primitive warning system.
    But Brutus and Stoat didn’t seem to have noticed the escape yet.
    The teacher and student continued through theincreasing gloom, pausing often and feeling their way along. The thin shafts of light were Melanie’s only salvation, and now she glanced up at them. The upper part of the walls had rotted away and it was from there that the faint heavenly glow filled the murky underworld sky of this part of the slaughterhouse.
    Then there it was, in front of them! A narrow door below a sign that said Dock. Melanie tightened her grip on Emily’s hand and tugged the little girl along behind her. They pushed through the door and found a large loading-dock area. It was mostly empty but there were some oil drums that looked like they might still float. But the large door opening onto the outside was raised only