Intensity

vertebrae and internal bleeding.
         Squeak-squeak-squeak.
        One of the dogs clawed at the window glass.
         Squeak-squeak.
        Chyna wasn't free yet. She was still chained to the upper half of the chair.
        The four spindles between the headrail and the seat were thinner than the stretcher bars between the legs, so they ought to break more easily than those bars had broken. She hadn't been able to keep the chair legs from mercilessly hammering the backs of her knees and her thighs, but for this part of the operation, the tie-on foam cushion between her and the spindles should provide her with some protection.
        A pair of floor-to-ceiling rock pilasters flanked the firebox and supported the six-inch slab of laminated maple that served as the mantel. They were curved, and it seemed to Chyna that the radius would help focus the impact on one or two spindles at a time instead of spreading, it across the four.
        She moved the heavy andiron out of the way. She pushed aside a brass rack of fireplace tools. The lifting and shoving made her head spin and her stomach churn, and a hundred agonies assailed her.
        She no longer dared to think about what she was doing. She just did it, past courage now, past consideration and calculation, driven by a blind animal determination to be free.
        This time, she didn't hunch over; as far as she was able, she stood straight and rammed backward into the pilaster. The cushion did provide protection, but not enough. She was suffering so many contusions, wrenched muscles, and battered bones that the jarring blow would have been devastating even if it had been twice as well padded, like the tap of a dentist's rubber hammer on a rotten tooth in need of a root-canal job. Right now every joint in her body seemed to be a rotten tooth. She didn't pause, because she was afraid that all of those pains, pulsing at once, would soon shake her to the floor, shake her apart, so she would never be able to pull herself together and get up. She was rapidly running out of resources, and with a black tide lapping at the edges of her vision, she was also running out of time. Howling with misery in expectation of the pain, she rammed backward and screamed when the blow rattled her bones like dice in a cup. Agony. But immediately she threw herself into the pilaster again, chains jangling, and again, wood splintering, and again, screaming, Jesus , unable to stop screaming and frightened by her own cries, while the vigilant dogs made that needful keening at the window, and yet once more backward, hammering herself into the rock.
        Then she was again facedown on the floor without remembering how she had gotten there, racked by dry heaves because there was nothing in her stomach to throw up, gagging on a vile taste in the back of her mouth, hands clenched against the very thought of defeat, feeling small and weak and pitiful, shuddering, shuddering.
        The shudders gradually diminished, however, and the carpet began to undulate, pleasantly cool beneath her, and she was a cloud shadow on fast-moving waters. The sun-haloed shadow and the fathomless water moved in the same direction, always in the same direction, onward and forever, swift and silken, toward the edge of the world and then off into a void, flowing still, so dark.

9
        
        Expecting dogs, Chyna woke from red dreams of refrigerator-chilled guns and exploding heads, but there were no dogs. She was alone in the living room, and all was quiet. The Dobermans were not padding back and forth on the porch, and when she was finally able to lift her head, she saw no dogs at the undraped window.
        They were outside, calmer now because they realized that their time would come. Watching the door and windows. Waiting to see her face. Alert for the snick of a latch, the rasp of a hinge.
        She was in so much pain that she was surprised to have regained consciousness. She was more surprised that her head was clear.
        One pain was separate from and more urgent than all her other distresses. Unlike the agonies of tortured bones and muscles, this painful pressure could be relieved easily, and she wouldn't even have to put herself through the gruesome ordeal of moving from where she lay.
        "Hell no," she mumbled, and slowly she sat up.
        Getting to her feet, she disturbed deep hurts that had slept as long as she had been lying on the floor but woke as soon as