Growing Grounds

Chapter 5: Carried Away

Confused, cold and wet, Tammy tried to pull completely out of her state of unconsciousness without success. No matter how hard she concentrated on waking up and gathering her wits, she just could not accomplish the task. Darkness crept up and gently pulled her back into a delusional dream-state where trees spoke to her and grappled at her bare, aching skin. Sometimes she was suspended high above the ground and other times she was lying flat on the ground but she could never get her feet under her body to move.

Once, she thought she had fallen asleep in the shower and the water had gotten cold. Then she worried that she had fallen while Matt was asleep and was lying unconscious outside where she would be exposed to the elements and animals.

Violent tremors shook her chilled body as she listened to the dream voices talk about gods, a caretaker (have I injured myself so badly that I'm in a nursing home?), progeny (strange word) and resurrection. She thought it useless to try making sense out of the tidbits she heard but the tidbits remained with her even when the voices disappeared.

At one point, she heard someone, maybe Matt, maybe not, calling her name at what seemed to be a great distance, and she tried to answer. Something cold and hard pressed against her lips and cheeks preventing her attempts until she fell into blackness and silence again.

The next time her eyelids fluttered and stuttered open, the whole world was dark. A pain ripped through her abdomen and she clutched at it and began rolling on the ground in wet leaves and mud. She could feel the wound. Immediately deciding she had been stabbed and left for dead, Tammy willed herself to be silent as possible.

Using a tree as a makeshift brace, she gained her feet. The world yawed and her stomach lurched. Several deep breaths later, she stood without support and inspected the wound as best she could with only the light from a faint, faraway moon weaving through the canopy of bare branches above.

Her nightgown was intact as were her underwear all except for a hole about the size of her thumb in the lower left side of the gown. Underneath was a matching hole in her skin. Blood had leaked out, soaking into the gown and coating her belly. The pain eased as she began moving forward and she was shocked to find that she could walk without much trouble.

Mud squished up between her toes and forest debris poked into the tender soles of her feet, raking and scraping away at the skin there. The cold numbed the worst of the pain but she had to wonder how much damage had been done that she would feel once she warmed up again. She moved forward using only pure instinct for a compass, as she did not have the slightest clue as to her location. A forest. That was all she could determine. A very dark, very cold forest, at that.

Fearing that whoever had stabbed her would hear, Tammy walked in silence instead of calling out for Matt. The last clear memory she had was of unlocking her front door so she could move that ugly chair out of the house. She could not even begin to determine how long she had been in the woods. Could have been hours or it could have been days. She simply did not know. Her body let her know that she was hungry, very thirsty and somewhat weak from whatever ordeal she had endured and she wanted to get home, get clean and get warm so her wound could be properly analyzed.

Keeping with the snail's pace, she plodded forward. One foot in front of the other, moving from one tree to the next. After what felt like a hundred years, the sun began to rise and with it, heat streamed into the forest, winnowing through the vastness of trees to warm her cold-numbed body. With no other way to set her course, she kept using her instinct, feeling more like a homing pigeon by the minute. She knew without confirmation that she was close to home. Smiling, she pushed forward.

The daunting task of explaining what had happened lay ahead and she thought about it as little as she could while she walked. Time later for trying to figure out who had taken her and why. Why that someone had stabbed her and left her in the woods. And, how much did any of that matter if she just made it home safely?

Tammy could barely believe her eyes when she saw her side yard come into view. Staggering on wobbly legs, she ventured into the openness. The sheriff's car sat by the other side of the house and for a moment, Tammy wondered why the sheriff would be at her house.

Realizing too late that the concrete sidewalk was higher than she remembered, Tammy tripped and fell. Sprawled was more like it. She sprawled right there. Fifteen feet from her front door. Her scream was from the shock of the fall more than from pain. Adrenaline had rushed into her veins and flooded her system with its own kind of Novocain as soon as she had seen her house.

The front door slammed open and Matt ran out followed closely by Sheriff Green and his deputy. Never in a million years would she have guessed she could be so happy and relieved to see Matt.

* * * *

Matt was in the foyer showing the officers the scratches on the floor and door when he heard a noise outside. Tammy lay on the sidewalk, sprawled and dirty in the early morning sun.

Sprinting to her side, Matt could only repeat, "Oh God, oh God, oh God." She was sopping wet, muddy and looked terrified as she reached for him. He grabbed her around the waist and without thinking, hauled her up and into a standing position. He crushed her against himself, stroked her hair and face, and cried all at the same time.

"What happened, where have you been, oh God, I've been so worried." Holding her upper arms, Matt pushed her away long enough to look her over and he spotted the blood. His heart skipped a beat and then he had her in his arms, rushing toward the front door, the officers forgotten in his panic.

"Mr. Milner, I need to talk to your wife; take her statement." Sheriff Green stopped in the doorway to the living room, avoiding stepping on the carefully marked scratches on the floor there.

"She needs a doctor first, she's bleeding." Matt lay her down on the sofa and picked up the phone to dial for an ambulance.

"That's taken care of, Mr. Milner. Deputy Roberts called it in already." Sheriff Green moved toward the sofa, pulling a small leather-bound tablet from his shirt pocket as he walked.

Matt put down the phone and rushed into the kitchen to get a bottle of water and a wet cloth. He stopped at the linen closet long enough to grab a blanket that caused an avalanche of folded sheets to block the door.

"Mr. Milner, you really shouldn't clean her up just yet. We need the evidence to be collected first. It won't take too long; the ambulance and the detective are on the way."

Nodding absently, Matt opened the bottle of water and helped Tammy take a few small sips. She began shivering. "Can she at least cover up?"

Sheriff Green nodded. "Now, Mrs. Milner, I know you've been through a traumatic experience, but I need you to tell me exactly what happened here. No detail is too small. Tell me everything you can remember." He poised his pen over the small pad of paper.

"I can't remember much after I unlocked the front door to take out the chair." Her eyes had a glassy, far-off sheen as she spoke and the shivering became more pronounced.

Matt sat on the edge of the sofa and put his arm around Tammy's shoulders.

Sheriff Green scribbled, the sound of his pen scratching the paper much louder than seemed possible. "You unlocked the front door. When was this?"

"I'm not sure. How long was I gone?"

Matt spoke up, "I got out of bed and showered this morning and came down to find the house open and empty. That was around six-thirty or seven this morning." He looked at his watch. "It's eleven now."

Tammy turned to him, looking confused. "I was only gone a few hours?"

"Longest few hours of my life." Matt hugged her and planted a solid kiss on her temple, barely holding back the tears that wanted desperately to fall.

"It feels like I was gone for days."

"Mrs. Milner, did someone force you out of the house?"

She shook her head. "I don't know. Someone must have, right?" She held up her dirty hands and looked down at her filthy, bloodstained gown. This drew Matt's attention back to the wound.

"Sheriff, could you give me just a second of privacy so I can see how badly she's injured?" Matt moved so that his body blocked the Sheriff's view and began moving the blanket aside.

"Are you in a lot of pain, Mrs. Milner?"

"Not really. I think it looks worse than it really is."

Matt carefully moved the nightgown up until the wound was in view. In horror, he watched as the jagged edges of the round wound pulsed once, twice, three times and then seemed to draw closer over the hole. It was closing up as he watched. He dropped the fabric he had pinched between his forefinger and thumb and stood up. He felt the blood drain from his face and his skin tightened over his entire body.

Tammy and the Sheriff looked quizzically at him and he quickly pulled the cover back into place over his oddly injured wife.

"How bad is it, Mr. Milner?"

Shrugging, he stepped back and away from Tammy. "Don't know. It's not bleeding but it looks infected."

"How did you get injured, Mrs. Milner?"

Again, she shook her head. "I don't remember. It happened when I was out there in the woods. It was wet and cold and I thought I was dreaming. Then I thought I'd fallen in the shower. I could hear voices but I can't remember what they were saying." Her eyes glossed over again and her words trailed off as she stared out the window behind the scribbling sheriff.

"Voices. Was there more than one person involved, then?"

"I think so. I heard a man and a woman with a hoarse, scratchy voice, like she had just gotten out of bed after a long hard sleep."

"A man and a woman. Anyone else?"

"I don't know."

"Do you know where you were in the woods? Was there a house, tent, cave? Did you hear any animals--dogs, maybe?"

"I only remember the ground and the trees and hard hands clamping down on my face when I tried to yell out for Matt." Her voice broke and she sobbed.

Matt sat down with her and cradled her head against his chest. The image of the pulsing wound haunting his mind's eye. An involuntary shiver ran through his body. It's the stress, that's all. The wound didn't pulse, didn't move, didn't anything. "Do we have to do this right now?" He looked up at the sheriff, feeling his anger rise like bile.

"I need to get all the information I can while it's still fresh. Before she sleeps especially. There may be some small detail she'll recall right now that will be forgotten when shock sets in later. That one small detail could mean the difference in finding who did this and never knowing, Mr. Milner."

The sobs subsided and Tammy straightened up against the back of the sofa, sitting rigidly with her hands pressed into the cushion on either side of her hips. "It's okay. I'm okay. More scared than anything."

"Mrs. Milner, I need to know if whoever took you, uhm, violated you."

Matt felt his jaw unhinge. The thought had not crossed his mind. A cold nasty sweat slicked his skin as he waited for Tammy's answer.

"If by violated you mean r***d, then no. I don't remember anything like that. I was in a dream-like state almost all the time but I think I would remember being raped." The ashen color of her cheeks turned ruddy as she held the sheriff's gaze.

She avoided eye contact with Matt, which made his gut roil with suspicion. A violent beast awakened within his being. A thing that was perfectly capable of acts of evil against another human being. Clenching his jaws, he fought to keep control of this new thing, this monster inside. If he ever found out that someone had violated his wife, he knew without doubt that he would hunt that person down and kill him. This newly awakened part of him seemed to have bloodlust.

"Did you see the face of either the man or the woman? This is important, Mrs. Milner."

"No."

"What about their hands, clothes, hair, any part of them?"

"No." Tammy's hand rested on the blanket over the wound.

"Did you smell anything?"

"Water and black dirt."

The sheriff looked up, brows creasing together. "Black dirt, you say?"

"Yes. The kind of rich black dirt where things grow."

He nodded but still looked uncertain. "What sorts of things?"

"All kinds of things. Lots of things." Her voice took on a dreamy quality and the ruddy color turned ashen gray again.

"Did you see something growing where you were? Is that what you're trying to say?"

"No." She was staring off into some other galaxy and her voice was a whisper above silent.

"Mr. Milner, you sit there with your wife and try to get her to drink more water and keep her talking. I think the shock is setting in. I'm going to find out where that ambulance is." The sheriff turned on his heel and walked out.