Now the pain from the bullet hits. She wills the Regulator to pump up the adrenaline and the endorphins to numb the pain. She pants and concentrates on the fight for her life.
He tries to flip her over with his superior mass, to pin her down, but she clamps her hands around his neck and squeezes hard. Men have always underestimated her at the beginning of a fight, and she has to take advantage of it. She knows that her grip feels like iron clamps around him, with all the implanted energy cells in her arms and hands activated and on full power. He winces, grabs her hands to try to pry them off. After a few seconds, realizing the futility of it, he ceases to struggle.
He’s trying to talk, but can’t get any air into his lungs. Ruth lets up a little, and he chokes out, “You got me.”
Ruth increases the pressure again, choking off his supply of air. She turns to Carrie, who’s at the foot of the bed, frozen. “Call the police. Now.”
She complies. As she continues to hold the phone against her ear as the 911 dispatcher has instructed her to do, she tells Ruth, “They’re on their way.”
The man goes limp with his eyes closed. Ruth lets go of his neck. She doesn’t want to kill him, so she clamps her hands around his wrists while she sits on his legs, holding him still on the floor.
He revives and starts to moan. “You’re breaking my fucking arms!”
Ruth lets up the pressure a bit to conserve her power. The man’s nose is bleeding from the fall against the floor when she tackled him. He inhales loudly, swallows, and says, “I’m going to drown if you don’t let me sit up.”
Ruth considers this. She lets up the pressure further and pulls him into a sitting position.
She can feel the energy cells in her arms depleting. She won’t have the physical upper hand much longer if she has to keep on restraining him this way.
She calls out to Carrie. “Come over here and tie his hands together.”
Carrie puts down the phone and comes over gingerly. “What do I use?”
“Don’t you have any rope? You know, for your clients?”
“I don’t do that kind of thing.”
Ruth thinks. “You can use stockings.”
As Carrie ties the man’s hands and feet together in front of him, he coughs. Some of the blood has gone down the wrong pipe. Ruth is unmoved and doesn’t ease up on the pressure, and he winces. “Goddamn it. You’re one psycho robo bitch.”
Ruth ignores him. The stockings are too stretchy and won’t hold him for long. But it should last long enough for her to get the gun and point it at him.
Carrie retreats to the other side of the room. Ruth lets the man go and backs away from him toward the gun on the floor a few yards away, keeping her eyes on him. If he makes any sudden movements, she’ll be back on him in a flash.
He stays limp and unmoving as she steps backward. She begins to relax. The Regulator is trying to calm her down now, to filter the adrenaline out of her system.
When she’s about halfway to the gun, the man suddenly reaches into his jacket with his hands still tied together. Ruth hesitates for only a second before pushing out with her legs to jump backward to the gun.
As she lands, the man locates something inside his jacket, and suddenly Ruth feels her legs and arms go limp, and she falls to the ground, stunned.
Carrie is screaming. “My eye! Oh God, I can’t see out of my left eye!”
Ruth can’t seem to feel her legs at all, and her arms feel like rubber. Worst of all, she’s panicking. It seems she’s never been this scared or in this much pain. She tries to feel the presence of the Regulator and there’s nothing, just emptiness. She can smell the sweet, sickly smell of burned electronics in the air. The clock on the nightstand is dark.
She’s the one who had underestimated him. Despair floods through her, and there’s nothing to hold it back.
Ruth can hear the man stagger up off the floor. She wills herself to turn over, to move, to reach for the gun. She crawls. One foot, another foot. She seems to be moving through molasses because she’s so weak. She can feel every one of her forty-nine years. She feels every sharp stab of pain in her shoulder.
She reaches the gun, grabs it, and sits up against the wall, pointing it back into the center of the room.
The man has gotten out of Carrie’s ineffective knots. He’s now holding Carrie, blind in one eye, shielding his body with hers. He holds a scalpel against her throat. He’s already broken the skin, and a thin stream of blood flows down her neck.
He backs toward the bedroom door, dragging Carrie with him. Ruth knows that if he gets to the bedroom door and disappears around the corner, she’ll never be able to catch him. Her legs are simply useless.
Carrie sees Ruth’s gun and screams, “I don’t want to die! Oh God. Oh God.”
“I’ll let her go once I’m safe,” he says, keeping his head hidden behind hers.
Ruth’s hands are shaking as she holds the gun. Through the waves of nausea and the pounding of her pulse in her ears, she struggles to think through what will happen next. The police are on their way and will probably be here in five minutes. Isn’t it likely that he’ll let her go as soon as possible to give himself some extra time to escape?
The man backs up another two steps; Carrie is no longer kicking or struggling but trying to find purchase on the smooth floor in her stockinged feet, trying to cooperate with him. But she can’t stop crying.
Mom, don’t shoot! Please don’t shoot!
Or is it more likely that once the man has left the room, he will slit Carrie’s throat and cut out her implant? He knows there’s a recording of him inside, and he can’t afford to leave that behind.
Ruth’s hands are shaking too much. She wants to curse at herself. She cannot get a clear shot at the man with Carrie in front of him. She cannot.
Ruth wants to evaluate the chances rationally, to make a decision, but regret and grief and rage, hidden and held down by the Regulator until they could be endured, rise now all the sharper, kept fresh by the effort at forgetting. The universe has shrunken down to the wavering spot at the end of the barrel of the gun: a young woman, a killer, and time slipping irrevocably away.
She has nothing to turn to, to trust, to lean on but herself; her angry, frightened, trembling self. She is naked and alone, as she has always known she is, as we all are.
The man is almost at the door. Carrie’s cries are now incoherent sobs.
It has always been the regular state of things. There is no clarity, no relief. At the end of all rationality, there is simply the need to decide and the faith to live through, to endure.
Ruth’s first shot slams into Carrie’s thigh. The bullet plunges through skin, muscle, and fat, and exits out the back, shattering the man’s knee.
The man screams and drops the scalpel. Carrie falls, a spray of blood blossoming from her wounded leg.
Ruth’s second shot catches the man in the chest. He collapses to the floor.
Mom, Mom!
She drops the gun and crawls over to Carrie, cradling her and tending to her wound. She’s crying, but she’ll be fine.
A deep pain floods through her like forgiveness, like hard rain after a long drought. She does not know if she will be granted relief, but she experiences this moment fully, and she’s thankful.
“It’s okay,” she says, stroking Carrie as she lies in her lap. “It’s okay.”
? ? ?
AUTHOR’S NOTE: The EchoSense technology described in this story is a loose and liberal extrapolation of the principles behind the technology described in Qifan Pu et al, “Whole-Home Gesture Recognition Using Wireless Signals” (Nineteenth Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking, MobiCom 2013), available at wisee.cs.washington.edu/wisee_paper.pdf. There is no intent to suggest that the technology described in the paper resembles the fictional one portrayed here.
THE PAPER MENAGERIE
One of my earliest memories starts with me sobbing. I refused to be soothed no matter what Mom and Dad tried.