A Wager Lost

"...you're guilty for being a dumb cunt...."

The words of the assassin rang hollow in Krissy's ears as she stood upon the rapidly melting block of ice that served as her fragile perch against certain death, the thick hangman's knot behind her head biting into her scalp as the noose grew tighter in tension against her throat. She was now straining to breathe, as the noose slowly began to lose its slack. The tide was rapidly starting to rise around the sandbar where the centuries-old gibbeting pole stood rotting a mile from the beach as the sunset. Soon, the ocean would cover up the sand, but the ice block that was her precarious footing between her and a horrible death would surely dissolve first unless Krissy could free herself from the hemp rope that tightly bound her wrists behind her back.

The pit of dread in her stomach reminded Krissy of a time once when she once thought she was in big trouble, back when she was still not yet eighteen; a tomboy clad in a backwards baseball hat and her older brother's rugby shirt who got picked up by the police for underage drinking at a party. Krissy would not name who had bought her and her friends beer, and for that the lady cop that detained her had secured her with a set of hinged handcuffs and placed her in the back of her patrol car in front of her friends. As they drove her to the jail, they hectored her about hanging out with the wrong crowd and the direction that Krissy, an honors student with a promising collegiate future while she sat slumped in her seat trying hard to be stoic in facing the uncertainty of her situation. She ended up having to pay a fine and attend a few alcohol subversion classes by the court, but Krissy didn't know that until the whole ordeal concluded.

All she could remember afterward was the knot in her stomach, the feeling that restriction of her precious freedom had felt and that the whole experience which tried its best to terrify actually excited her. Fast-forward some thirteen years later through a rather exciting and unconventional life that took her down some dangerous roads and fearsome places when she met "Aiden," if that was even his real name. What seemed like an exciting functional marriage replete with kinky interludes while learning a martial art specialized by assassins and maybe an occasional theft or three which now lead her to her current predicament: Being executed by mysterious international criminals that her husband-who she thought she knew-had surrendered her to to save his own skin. The events of her wayward life raced through her head as Krissy struggled to keep her balance.

"...high tide comes in in about forty minutes. This sandbar will be underwater in an hour and a half, but that block of ice will be dissolved by then..."

The noose went ever tighter upon Krissy's slender neck as the ice block under her feet began to lose its integrity, putting her not quite on her tiptoes yet as she somewhat frantically continued to chafe her bindings where they were fraying from contact with her diamond wedding ring. The wind was whipping up around her as the sun sank, causing her to shiver. Her satin baseball jacket had become soaked with sweat and seaspray, no longer keeping her warm. "I'm not going to die here," she said to herself out loud, grunting through her gag and concentrating only on getting her hands free. The sun was now about to set. No one walking the beach or in the houses on the shore would be able to see her now, clad in black and nearly a half-mile away in this light, teetering for her dear life upon a rapidly melting block of ice with her head in a noose.

She hoped desperately that someone would rescue her. For years, she spent so much time trying to avoid being rescued by learning how to defend and save herself, even though she also welcomed the idea sometimes by fantasizing that she could somehow turn the tables on her captors. Now, the fear of the possible finality of her situation was making Krissy's knees knock together, though she fought hard to concentrate on freeing herself by working the diamond of the ring against the hemp rope that bound her wrists behind her while wishing someone would come along and free her before it was too late. She had made some progress whenever she could, but she also lost whatever time she had to escape trying to conceal her effort. Now, she vigorously applied that diamond to scratch the fray she had spent two hours chafing and concealing hoping to cheat death and beat the devil from claiming her soul.

No sooner did she feel a release of the tension binding her wrists behind her that the ice block finally broke with an audible pop, causing Krissy to lose her footing. Her bound, rigid form dropped a foot, and the rope snapped taut, cinching the thick noose to its extremity around her throat and holding her aloft while suddenly strangling her. Krissy kicked her feet wildly in a panic, gasping for breath while her feet tried to find purchase with anything she could hold on to. She tried to scream, as her hands struggled to pull free from the loops securing her wrists, instinctively trying to reach towards the noose crushing her throat. One of the loops had slackened considerably, just as an icy feeling began to creep up her toes. She swung as she kicked, fighting for breath as she tried to roll the slackened loop over her wrist and knuckles. Krissy's vision began to darken as she finally popped her hand free and immediately got her hands in front of her to get her fingers underneath the rope around her throat. Krissy managed to get hold of the noose and pulled frantically to get relief from the strangling, kicking her feet furiously as her vision became blurred by her tears.

Krissy began to tire, her lungs feeling like they were on fire. The gloom began to overcome her. As her body began to tire at last and her fingers began to feel so cold and her arms began to feel heavy and limp did Krissy finally put her all into a single, final kick with both feet. A sudden groan and shudder emanated from the gibbeting pole structure. The crossbeam, rotted from the centuries of exposure to the elements collapsed, dropping Krissy to the sand, now moist and softened from the sandbar vanishing into the incoming tide. She had landed on her feet, but had dropped onto her knees and pitched forward gasping for air. With her remaining strength, she pulled the wet cloth that had gagged her for the past two hours and tore the noose loose off her neck, before collapsing on her belly. The surf began to lap up and around her, before a wave crested on top of her unconscious body as the ocean began to swallow the sand. All Krissy could hear was the pounding of the encroaching surf, and in the darkness of that moment she was warm and at peace.

Another wave collapsed on her moments later, rousing her wide awake and causing her to gasp for breath. Krissy took it in in a great loud gulp, even as her lungs felt like they were on fire and seawater had found its way up her nose. Her neck and wrists stung, rubbed raw and chafed by the ropes that had bound them and then exposed to the dampness of the saltwater. The pain helped bring Krissy's thoughts back into focus, yet all she could do at that moment was scream once she had caught her breath, a long pained and hurt scream drowned out by the strong wind and heard by no one.

She was up to her shins in seawater, a mile off the beach with a rapidly encroaching high tide, yet Krissy remembered that the tide would cover her footprints. She started to see the lights of the beachfront properties in the distance and began running as best as she could towards them with her waterlogged footwear weighing her down. When she finally lost the light and the tide began to rise to her knees, she trod the water as if in a daze. When Krissy finally made it to the beach, she collapsed in the sand and lay there for another hour crying in the dark. By the time the rain started falling, she had recovered enough to return back on her feet and begin walking again, heading away from where she was taken and towards an area where she knew were beach cottages boarded up for the season. There was one in particular she knew of, where she had worked as the groundskeeper's assistant a few summers back. Krissy thought that if she could gain entry, she could hide out for the night and perhaps have enough time to think about what she could do next.

She approached the cottage by the beach and skirted up the stairway going up the seawall careful to not trigger any motion sensors for floodlights. She spent a half-hour crouched in the darkness in the corner of the little garden by the rear entrance tossing pebbles to see if there was anyone nearby that would be alerted to her presence, then silently made her way to the rear porch where she located a door key in the transom of a porchlight and quietly let herself in.

The cottage was as Krissy remembered it when she was here last: A sparse, simple bungalow with a shower and bedroom. It was warm inside despite the electricity being turned off. Krissy sat down on a shower stool, glad at last to be sitting somewhere warm. Exhausted, she slowly popped the snaps loose off her soaked satin baseball jacket, removing it and hanging it over the shower curtain rod along with her tanktop and stretchy pants. Krissy dried herself with some towels and dabbed the chafing ropeburn on her neck and wrists with some calamine lotion she found in the medicine cabinet before hastily changing into the only dry clothes she could find in the house that seemed to fit-an old black pilled half-zip fleece pullover from the 1980's, a pair of jeans and a denim jacket. Donning these, Krissy took the top cover off the bed and put herself under the blanket, succumbing at last to the exhaustion of her ordeal and falling immediately into a very deep sleep.

Krissy snapped awake to the sound of a helicopter circling overhead, the room illuminated dimly by the passing searchlight. Instinctively, Krissy rolled off the bed to the floor, and darted towards the corner beside the bay window facing the ocean. She peered from the edge of the blinds and saw the helicopter circle towards the direction of where she was taken to die, the searchlights scanning for someone. Filled with alarm, Krissy realized that the house was no longer safe and that she needed to get out of the area while she still had a headstart. She grabbed her damp shoes and a baseball hat that hung on a doorknob and put as much of her hair into the baseball cap as she could as she put it on. Krissy pulled the collar of the old fleece up to obscure part of her face and then quietly slipped out of the house. She locked the door with the key she had found in the porchlight and replaced it, then scurried as quietly as she could off the property, keeping to the shadows of the scrub pine that bordered the property while somewhere in the pre-dawn sky behind her she could hear the chopper that circled the beach and the tidal flats.

Krissy did her utmost to silently navigate her way off the property as the sound of the chopper faded and soon was replaced by the foghorns a few miles away. A mist began to permeate amongst the trees as the morning light strove with the coming fog, and for this Krissy was thankful. She buttoned the denim jacket up her chest to keep it from flapping and once she approached the highway she immediately bolted across from it into the woods, her focus on putting as much distance between her and her pursuers while the cover of fog held out. Though the woods offered cover from the chopper, Krissy knew she would have to either find help or find some way to arm herself for when they did come for her. She could not go back to the house she shared with Aiden, knowing that he or the assassins cleaned out their money and guns and that she'd likely be reacquired there. She never stayed anywhere long enough to make friends, her whole world encapsulated by Aiden teaching her how to fight and survive, so no one in the area could really help her. With a sigh, Krissy realized she needed to find a payphone and began to head in that direction, keeping to the woods close to the highway but away from its sight. The ropeburns on her wrists, neck and throat inflicted during her captivity and attempted hanging chafed terribly and stung whenever the breeze or a bead of moisture touched them.

Krissy emerged from the woods to the edge of a parking lot of a supermarket, where she espied a payphone near the entrance. She summoned as much calm as she could muster and began to walk towards the phone, her hands in her jacket pockets. Krissy scanned the parking lot as she walked, trying to blend in as an arriving shopper while keeping on the lookout for anyone suspicious. She arrived at the phone, took a breath between gritted teeth and made a collect call using number that she had memorized since she was a teenager. The call was answered by a familiar voice, though immediately Krissy suspected a rather dusky rasp accompanied that familiarity. Krissy didn't immediately respond, and the caller repeated again its hello.

The tears could no longer be fought and started to fall and the familiar voice repeated its hello again, to which Krissy stifled a sob.

"...Krissy? Is that you?"

Krissy wiped a streaming tear with her sleeve.

"...yeah, Molly. It's me."