Mackenzie - Working Title

She hated waking up with a song in her head. Mostly because if she woke with one there, that meant she’d been dreaming the song too, which meant it was pretty much stuck in her brain for the rest of the day.

She wouldn’t mind if it was a good song, but it never was. It was usually something lame like a kid’s song or something by the Carpenters, (today it was Rainy Days and Mondays) which drove her bat shit crazy. A week ago she would have reached for the radio and found something a little more to her taste to drown out the offending song. Something like The Cure, or maybe some David Bowie. That’s what she would have done two weeks ago, but not today. Today there were no radio stations. At least none that she could pick up on the transistor she’d lifted from Wal-Mart. Every stop on the dial was “all static, all the time.”

Licking her lips, she tasted the gritty remains of the percocet she’d chewed and swallowed the night before. She had almost gagged it back up when the bitter, chemical taste hit the back of her throat, but she chased it with water and not long after that passed out.

Chewing the tablets was an old exstasy trick. Chew it up and swallow it and it hits you harder and faster. Same rules apply for any pill, including percocet.
She sat up, took in a deep breath of cool morning mountain air. She then looked down and remembered the reason for the desperate way she took the perc’s. Her purple throbbing ankle.

“You moron,” she whispered.

She knew she shouldn’t have listened to that pipsqueak, Tyler. Through the lingering percocet fog that hung in her brain like the mist covering the mountain she was on, she wondered where Tyler was. Hiking in the dark had been his idea. Come to think of it, she knew she shouldn’t have hooked up with that little jerk in the first place. She hadn’t wanted to, but he had been the only other person around.

“Tyler?” The word sent her into a coughing fit, and pushed blood through her swollen ankle, created a sensation that the skin around the break would rip. She curled into a ball and continued to cough until she managed to gather enough saliva in her mouth to swallow and sooth her parched throat. The coughing stopped and she searched the leaf littered ground for her water bottle. She dragged her hand around in the leaves, feeling the damp earth below. The plastic bottle wasn’t where she remembered dropping it. Maybe she had imagined dropping it. Percocet had a funny effect on her. But now as she looked around, she didn’t see her water bottle or her bag, which had several other water bottles, the rest of her percs, the other pharmaceuticals, her radio and everything else she’d lifted from the Wal-Mart.

She closed her eyes and tried to remember the previous night. The chorus of “Rainy Days and Mondays” invaded her mind again and suddenly she wished she could bring Karen Carpenter back to life for the sole purpose of strangling her to death.

“Tyler?” She elongated the name so it sounded like when Timmy used to call Lassie.

A cardinal answered her with a sharp, quick chirp.

“What’s that birdy? You say Tyler fell down a well?” She laughed to herself as she continued to search the rotting autumn leaves for her belongings. “Well, if he did fall down a well, hopefully he can bottle me up some water. Where the hell did that little dumbass…oh shit.”

She stopped her searching as she remembered what happened the night before. Or what she thought was the night before. Maybe it was two nights ago. Either way, Tyler was probably dead.

Filling her lungs with cool air and her nose with the smell of damp wet earth, she sat back against the fallen oak tree Tyler had decided was a good place to set up camp.

“It’s huge. We can’t miss it,” he’d said. “It’s a good landmark.”

Of course it looked like every other fallen oak tree in the forest and there were plenty.

She knew Tyler wasn’t going to last long from the moment she met him in the
Wal-Mart. Sometimes you just know these things.

After she got out of the asylum, the Wal-Mart was the first place she’d gone. She knew she’d have to lay low for a while, maybe forever, and she couldn’t think of anywhere better to Wal-Mart to get a whole slew of stuff. Food, water, clothes, a tent, and every bottle of Percocet, OxyContin, Valium, Adderall, and Vicodin she could carry. The only thing the Wal-Mart pharmacy didn’t have was some good old-fashioned marijuana. Oh well, beggars couldn’t be choosers.

The Percocets actually came in handy after she’d broken her ankle. She’d tried some of the others just for fun. Of course, now they were all gone.

She stood up slowly and let out a yelp when she felt lightning go from her heel to her hip.

“Goddammit, Tyler! Where the hell are you!” Her voice was absorbed by the ancient trees the leaves that coated the ground. “If I find you, you’d better have my drugs!”
The exertion of shouting brought back the pain as sweat coated her skin. There was no way out of this. Whether or not he was dead was irrelevant. She had to look for him, if for no other reason to find her stash. He must have taken it.

Forcing a sigh from her lips she gingerly stood, walking her hands up the fallen log and trying to keep all of her weight on the good foot. She looked around for something to use as a crutch. It didn’t take her long to find a solid branch that was just at the right height to be used as a cane. The broken end of it poked into her hand when she put her weight on it, so she peeled the sock off of her damaged foot and slipped it over the top of the stick. It wasn’t perfect, but it would do, it was nice and strong. Besides, if Tyler wasn’t dead, she’d further her use of the fallen branch by beating Tyler’s ass with it.

Her movement with the makeshift cane was awkward at first, but soon she got a rhythm going and moved quite efficiently through the woods. She decided to just look for Tyler and not call for him anymore. When Richard had gotten her out of the asylum, he indicated that they might be looking for her or any others who may have made it out.

Richard. She wondered where he was now. He said he was going to leave with his wife, but she wondered if he really did. Richard was a good guy. She wondered how he had become a guard at a juvenile mental hospital. Then again, he had wondered how she’d gotten in there too. When he’d asked, she’d just been honest.

“My mom wants me here and I’m bored with school. Besides, I like drugs and they hand them out like candy here.”

Richard had gotten a laugh out of that one. “That they do, Mackenzie, that they do. But you don’t seem like you need the ones in here.”

“I don’t, but they’re not exactly offering up any pot or meth.”

“No, I reckon they don’t. You really do all those drugs or are you just talking.”

Mackenzie ran her thumb across a frayed spot of her green jumpsuit. It wasn’t glamorous, but damn it was comfortable. “Nah, I’ve done a lot of drugs.”

“How come?”

She grinned. She enjoyed these little chats she and Richard had through the bars on her cell door when he was on patrol at night. She wasn’t much of a sleeper so it was a nice way to pass the time. “Because they were there.”

“You weren’t good in school or something?”

“Nah, I was plenty good, straight A’s. Just bored as shit. Let me tell you, dissecting a fetal pig in biology class is pretty ho-hum stuff. But it’s a riot when you’re on two hits of acid.”

She could hear him try to stifle a loud guffaw through the metal door. When he got it under control, he said, “You know, I wish I had done better in school. I worked like the dickens and here you are telling me you went to school high as a kite and still got good grades. That’s some kind of strange gift you got there.”

“Something like that.”

When her mom had her committed, Mackenzie had thought it sounded like a great way to spend a few days, but as the days stretched into weeks, she realized she didn’t belong there. She wasn’t so sure she belonged on the outside either, but she didn’t know what she could do. The only thing that kept her going were her nightly visits from Richard. He’d gotten to bringing his IPOD to her and letting her listen to a few songs while he finished his patrol. He even snuck her a mini-DVD player and a movie one night.

Mackenzie started to live for these late-night visits. Partly because she longed for normal human interaction and partly because she thrived on the danger of getting caught.

One night, she sat with her ear pressed to the door of her cell waiting for Richard to pass by on his patrol, hungry for conversation with somebody who wasn’t actually insane. When she heard footsteps inching closer, she whispered his name. There was no response.

“Richard, it’s me. You gotta second?”

The footsteps continued and when they were right outside her door, an ear splitting whack sent her scuttling to the far wall of her cell. Her pulse pounded so loud in her ears she barely heard the voice that told her, “Richard’s off this shift. You won’t be seeing him again and don’t try to sucker me into bringing you anything, Mac.”

“Mac?” She stood up and stomped to the door. “Mac? My name’s Mackenzie, asshole! Who the hell do you think you are?”

Expecting another whack of the nightstick against the door, she was surprised when she heard a key inserted into the lock. The door slowly opened and there stood a huge monster of a man. Or at least part of him. She couldn’t see his face because he had to duck down to enter the room. In his right hand he held the nightstick.

“I’ll be the worst experience of your life if you don’t shut your smart mouth.”

The more tactful part of her told her to do just that. The part of her that had gotten her kicked out of school gave him the finger and spit in his face.

The big guy stepped toward her, grabbed the front of her jumpsuit and pulled her forward, off of her feet so her ankles dragged on the ground.

“What are you going to do to me?” Mackenzie clutched at the collar of her jumpsuit, realizing she had to get herself out of this situation now. “I know they video tape these rooms, you can’t hurt me. Worst you can do is go get the straight jacket.”

“Is that so?”

She hoped it was, but got the feeling that this guy, like Richard, but in a different way, didn’t always follow the rules. She was right.

He dragged her by her collar out of her room and down the hall. Unable to get her feet under her to stand, she tried digging her heels in, but it was pointless. The guy was built like Conan the Barbarian, nothing she could have done would stop him.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“No you’re not.” He hefted her up, got a better grip on her jumpsuit and continued dragging her down the corridor.

He was right, but she figured she should give it a shot anyway. Finally, they stopped. Mackenzie looked up and saw that they were at the supplies closet.

“They don’t video tape in here, missy.” He dragged her inside and shut the door behind them. When it was locked, he tossed her backward, sent her crashing into a pile of cleaning products. Some of them must of spilled because the antiseptic smell that filled the air was sickening after the first five seconds of being high from it wore off.

She tried to shake it off, but he was on top of her, clawing at her jumpsuit. Panic set in as she realized that this guy wasn’t just trying to scare her. She kicked and punched as hard as she could, but landed nothing. On one attempt, her wrist landed right in his grip, and he pinned it above her head, grabbed her other wrist and pinned that one too. He was big enough that he could hold both of her arms down with one hand and she was powerless to stop him. Putting extra effort into her kicks, she tagged him once maybe in the shin, she didn’t know, but it must have hurt because he flipped her over to her belly, pinned her arms behind her back and put his weight on the back of her knees.

She writhed on the ground with all of her might, but it made no difference. She stretched and flexed her legs in a frantic crawling motion, the weight of him made it impossible for her to get any traction. “Get off me, you bastard!”

She heard the distinct click of a switchblade and bit down on her lower lip.

“I dare you to make one more sound, missy. Go on, I dare you.”

She didn’t. She thought to beg him to stop as she heard the switchblade cut through the crotch of her jumpsuit, but she knew it wouldn’t work. He had a mission and he would carry it out. Struggling and begging would only feed his pleasure. So rather than fight him, she went limp. She tried to ignore the slicing pain that went through her body when he entered her. Instead she rehearsed the smart ass line she’d say to him when he was finished. She tried to focus on the lingering high from the cleaning chemicals rather than the pungent smell of his sweat and sound of his frenzied grunts.

She had no way of telling how long the act went on, but experience told her it probably wasn’t very long. When he was done he rolled off of her and stood. He pulled her to her feet by the back of the collar and brought her face up to meet his. His light blue eyes held no remorse, instead they searched her face as if asking for acceptance. She gathered that most of his sexual experiences ended this way. Short, messy, disappointing. He couldn’t have been that much older than she was. Maybe twenty-three, tops.

Slowly, he seemed to register what she thought was her best “who-gives-a-shit” face. His eyes went from pleading to expecting. Expecting her to cry, expecting her to apologize and say she’d never give him lip again.

Instead, she shrugged and said, “I’ve had better.”

The next thing she remembered after the sharp, blinding pain to the back of her head was waking up in her cell in the straight jacket.

Mackenzie realized she’d stopped limping around the forest and was now sitting on a stump and crying. Not just crying a little, but sobbing into her hands.

The sobbing came to a halt when she heard twigs snapping behind her. Mackenzie whipped around just quickly enough to see a deer bounding away from her.

“Dammit,” she whispered and wiped at her eyes with her palms. Her ankle throbbed as she scanned the area around her for any sign of Tyler.

Bingo. A pill bottle.

She nearly dove from her seat on the stump for the small plastic cylinder, but when picked it up, the lightness of it caused her to curse again. The lid was gone and the tube was empty. She clawed around in the leaf litter and dirt hoping to find a pill, hell, even half of one. When she found nothing, she looked at the bottle. Valium. It might have calmed her nerves, but it wouldn’t have done much for the ankle.

She shoved the empty bottle in her pocket and gathered up her makeshift cane. Humming the chorus to “Rainy Days and Mondays,” she continued to hobble through the forest on her search for Tyler.