In Laymon's Terms

William D. Carl

IG.”

The word was like a bullet to her head. It was strange how a single word could affect her, make her break into a cold sweat in the middle of a July heat wave. Still, here she was, shovel in hand, and he’d just told her to “Dig.”

If only her car hadn’t broken down. If only she hadn’t thumbed a ride with this particular man, a character the newspapers had labeled “The Digger.” If only she’d not been looking out the window when she should have been watching him, when he’d whacked her over the head with something.

There were a hell of a lot of “if only”s.

She’d read about The Digger in all the newspapers. Who hadn’t heard about him since the first body had turned up in Yosemite nearly a year ago? The M.O. was always the same. Young women who had been reported as missing were discovered buried in five-foot graves trapped within cardboard refrigerator boxes. Upon closer examination, the coroners had discovered huge, broken blisters on their hands, and the police had come to the conclusion that these women had been forced to dig their own graves, then buried alive. They had been left to suffocate in cardboard boxes. In all, twelve bodies had been discovered by various park rangers and tourists in the past year, all of them young, beautiful women. Women who had once had lives filled with promise. Women who had gasped their final breaths, lungs full of dirt and dust, their broken hands pounding against the earthen walls that surrounded them. No clues had been found as to the identity of the “The Digger,” the man who now held a shotgun on Maura Kennedy. If they ever got to ask her, though, she could supply plenty of details.

He had brown hair, softened by prolonged exposure to sunlight, that swept down over his eyes in a rakish fashion. The nose on his face seemed large, Roman, but it didn’t dominate his other features. His eyes were a deep blue, as though someone had picked a piece of sky and hidden it behind them. In fact, his eyes were what had first attracted Maura to him, what had given her the courage to accept a ride from a stranger. With eyes like that, he couldn’t be dangerous. Could he?

“I said to dig, goddamnit,” he shouted in his rasping voice. “If I have to tell you again, I’m just going to shoot.”

She was still grasping the handle of the shovel when she looked him in the eye. “Well, then go ahead and shoot me. I know who you are, and it’ll be easier if you just kill me now.”

“Ah,” he grinned. “My fame precedes me. Still, wouldn’t you like the chance to survive? What if I change my mind? What if you manage to scratch your way out of the box? What if someone comes along in time to discover you? If I just shoot you now, you’ll never know, will you? You willing to take a chance like that?”

Begrudgingly, she knew he was right. There was always a possibility of escape, a chance that he might let his guard down for long enough to get away. Somehow, she knew that this was how he got his rocks off, the gamble that one of his victims would manage to escape. He probably sat in the bed of that truck on a lawn chair and just waited, watching the newly-dug grave, hoping one of those women would actually manage to get out.

And she didn’t want to die. As long as there was some fighting chance, no matter how absurd the odds, she was going to fight for her life. Maura had always been a fighter. Orphaned at a young age, she had been passed from foster family to foster family, each becoming successively worse in its abuse of her. Her body was a roadmap of scars, belying her past injuries at the hands of her so-called families. Still. She had maintained good grades in school, and she soon found herself in college on a full scholarship, where she had met the man of her dreams. Soon after college, she was a woman in a top position at her law firm, respected by her peers and desperately loved by her adoring husband.

She had endured the worst that men had been able to throw at her, physical and sexual abuse that endured for years, misogynistic remarks from other lawyers, the toughest tests her chauvinistic professors could give her. She’d passed through them all, and no single man with a shotgun was going to beat her now. No psycho bastard would manage what so many others had failed at accomplishing.

“Now...” he said. “Dig.”

“What if I scream?”

“Go ahead,” he said, sitting down. “Scream all you want. Nobody’ll hear you out here.”

“It’s a National Park. Someone might.”

“Baby, there ain’t nobody out here but me, you, and the bears. By the way, don’t feed them. There’s signs posted all over the place.”

Indignantly, holding the shovel in both hands, she began to dig a hole, the earth fairly soft beneath the steel blade. The sun was very hot, and she had to stop several times to wipe the sweat out of her eyes. All the while, the bastard sat on a stump, the shotgun aimed at her, a half-smile on his perfectly formed lips.

Determination gripped her, and she began to dig faster. All those years of working out at the gym were going to pay off. In college, she’d started working out to get rid of the tension that always gripped her around the neck and shoulders. Afterwards, Maura had paid a top personal trainer to whip her body into the kind of shape that women desired and men ogled, a very useful tool in a courtroom. She could feel the muscles in her arms, already tired, straining to keep up, burning with the same intensity that she strived to attain with dumbbells. She was strong, and she was going to use this to her advantage.

She would dig the grave and let herself be buried. Inside a box that size, there was probably at least two hours of air left to breathe, and she was sure she was strong enough to rip open the cardboard and paw her way through four or five feet of loose dirt.

She would survive this ordeal.

And when she got out, she was going to make the bastard pay.

“All those signs about the bears,” he muttered, more to himself than for her advantage. “And I read somewhere that the bears were starving out here, that they’d relied on people to feed them for so long, they didn’t know how to hunt. You ever heard about that?”

She had heard about it, read something in Discover magazine, but she refused to answer him. He grinned, unable to sulk on such a pretty day.

The sun moved its position, but The Digger never once budged an inch. He watched her, sometimes asking her stupid questions, which she ignored.

“You feeling that sun?”

“Damn it’s hot! You going to faint? You look like you’re going to faint.”

“Those blisters bleeding yet? Yep, looks like they are.”

Her hands had erupted into blisters ten minutes after she’d started digging the hole, and now they had burst, oozing blood and pus down her arms. The shovel was growing slippery.

She wondered how long it had been since she’d started. By the looks of the sun’s position in the sky, it was probably at least three hours. Shoveling out more dirt, she saw that she was standing more than waist deep in the grave she was creating. When had she done all of that? Where had those piles of earth come from? Had she been at it for that long?

She focused on her task, channeling her hatred into thoughts of revenge, of all the pain she would heap upon this son of a bitch when she got out of this grave. And she would get out. The thoughts of her escape fuelled her weary arms, and she stopped thinking about the ache in her arms and back for a while.

“That’s enough,” he said, rising and walking to his truck. His eyes never left her, and the sights of the shotgun didn’t waver for a second.

She was breathing hard, her lungs searing. Now that she had stopped, she could really feel the throbbing of her muscles, the terrible pounding of her heart in her ears. Faltering, she fell against the side of the newly-dug grave. It took every ounce of her concentration just to keep her eyes open and lean against the side of the hole. It would be so easy to simply fall, to let the exhaustion possess her entirely. It would be so easy to give in.

But, she knew that she would never give in to the pain or the weariness. Her heart, pounding so loudly now, was hardened with disgust for this man, for the things he had done to her and to those other women. How many had there been? Twelve? Thirteen? All buried in state parks, all discovered too late. Idly, she wondered if any of them had found this hatred inside themselves, this desire to live and to kill this freak who had tortured them.

They probably had felt as she did.

And they had been able to do nothing about it.

They had all died, slowly and horribly.

Just as she was going to.

Goosebumps raised on her arms, as though a cold breeze had blown over her. It was really the first time she had been afraid since The Digger had kidnapped her, and she sank to her knees, bowing her head into the soft, cool earth wall of the grave. Her bloody hands lay useless in her lap, her arms too tired to support them.

Of course those other women had wanted to escape. Of course, they’d wanted to live, to get revenge. They had been motivated by the same riotous anger that had propelled her into digging her own grave. And they had all perished, suffocated.

Hearing a noise, she glanced up at the edge of the hole. It seemed to be miles away from her. The Digger was standing there, towering over her like some wicked giant in a fairy tale. In his left hand, he held the huge cardboard box. In his right, he pointed the shotgun at her.

“You did a good job,” he said. “A nice squared grave. Now, it’s time.”

Pooling all of her resolve, she grunted back at him, “You’ll have to come down here and get me, you bastard. I’m not fucking helping you anymore.” He laughed, and shot her through her left leg. The buckshot sprayed, penetrating her flesh in more than a dozen areas, more than a dozen receptacles of pain. She cried out, falling backwards, and she heard the shotgun go off again, heard his high-pitched laughing. Although she didn’t feel anymore pain this time, she still felt something dig into her other leg. Then, there was only merciful blackness.

She awoke with a scream of agony, and the realization that some time had passed. Blinded by darkness, she pushed her hands against the walls of her coffin, felt the smoothness of the cardboard beneath her fingers. She choked back a cry, tried to move her legs. Lightning pain shot through her right leg, and she knew that it was broken, useless. Her left leg hurt like a motherfucker, but it moved with relative ease compared to her right one. Shoving with that foot, she felt the barrier of the box and the solidness of the dirt behind it. There was a sticky wet pool beneath her entire body, and she knew that she was lying in her own blood.

How long had she been there? How much blood had she lost? How much air remained for her to attempt her escape?

Moving around, she discovered that the box was a very tight fit. He’d had to bend her legs to fit her inside of it, and she kicked a bit with her good leg to see just how solid the walls were with the dirt piled around her. It seemed like she was kicking rock, not loose soil.

The darkness was almost overwhelming. It made her want to scream out, to curse at the total lack of any kind of light.

She thought she felt something move on her arm, insects or worms, and she imagined her entire body covered with crawling bugs. She brushed at her arms, feeling a piece of skin tear away from the palm of her right hand. The hand was so numb that she wasn’t sure if she felt something on her or not. It would be just like The Digger to toss in a bagful of maggots when he buried her.

She hoped he had blisters the size of quarters on his hands from the shoveling he would have had to do to bury her.

She hoped that his truck would be spotted by the police, and that they would haul him in, and that he would be sentenced to life in prison with a serial rapist for a cellmate.

She hoped that he would howl in agony as he was repeatedly penetrated by the imaginary cellmate, the tissue of his anus torn and bloody.

And she suddenly remembered that she had to escape, to claw her way out of this cardboard prison so that she could stand and accuse the bastard in court. She had to be the one to put him away before he did this to another woman.

All those years working out in the gym...the personal trainer...

Choking on sobs, she pushed her fingernails at the cardboard until they punched through the top of the box. She changed the angle of the fingernails and mentally thanked her manicurist, who had suggested coating them with a strengthening liquid. Pulling towards herself, she stripped away a few small teardrops of the box. Loose dirt fell into her mouth and eyes, and she spat, sobbed some more.

She thought that she heard something, a noise from above her. Was it The Digger? Was he still lurking around, waiting for her last breath to die on her lips?

She’d have to take the chance that it was someone else, someone who’d spotted them or had seen the freshly-dug grave site. She screamed, “Hey! I’m in here! I’m still alive!”

She felt a fingernail break as she tore more of the cardboard away. Dirt was sifting into the box at a fairly steady rate now. She stopped for a moment, heard the noise again...a very distinct digging sound.

Someone was digging their way down.

She knew that her oxygen was going fast, so she gulped a very deep breath and pulled against the top of the box as hard as she could. Then, she raised her arms above her head as the dirt poured down around her body. It was heavy, much heavier than she had thought, but with her arms in position, she crooked her fingers and began to pull her way to the surface.

All the while, the digging sounds continued.

Praying to a God she’d nearly forgotten, she pulled herself up inch by inch, aiming for the same place where she heard the other scuffling sounds. She kept her mouth tightly closed, knowing that if she opened it, the dirt would pour into her throat and fill her lungs. She just had to reach the person who was digging on the other side.

Her fingers broke the surface, curled down, and shoved the dirt away from her. The digging sounds had ceased, but she heard a “Humph” sound, the sound of satisfaction. No hands reached for her to help in any way, and she was almost angry at this savior who had dug down at least two feet towards her, saving her half of the distance that she needed to crawl.

Wriggling, she moved the dirt from her face, seeing her blood-encrusted hands in the sunlight. Opening her mouth, she filled her lungs with good, clean air, and it had never tasted so good. Her sobs were coming, despite the sunlight that warmed her shoulders.

She was alive. She was alive, goddamit, and The Digger was going to pay.

She turned to thank her savior.

All she saw was the gaping maw of the grizzly bear, the strings of saliva dripping from its jaws, before its teeth crushed her skull and sank into her brain. As it pulled her from the earth like a weed from a garden, her last ironic thought was that today, at least, despite all the signs, she would be feeding the bears.