He seems momentarily surprised, his eyes flashing to the blood splashed across her dirty cream polo shirt, soaked into her cream shorts, drying into the skin of her hands and splattered across her set face.
Maria wonders if perhaps this is the moment the man on the rocks realizes that he might have to try a little harder than he’d thought; or if perhaps he thinks nothing at all.
Either way it doesn’t matter—she is going to die and she is angry as hell and whatever happens she is going to take it all out on him.
Maria’s walk turns into a run. She is running directly toward the man on the rocks at full speed. The man seems unsure about what is happening and though he raises the crackling stick and prepares himself for her attack he is somehow back-footed and that appears ever so slightly to unnerve him: after all he has the weapon, he is taller, stronger, not covered in his own and other people’s blood. He surely has the upper hand.
Except he doesn’t.
Because while Maria might not have seen a Taser in real life, she has witnessed the medical treatment of tasered patients in the hospital at Cornell. She knows that the short five-second bursts of electricity Tasers deploy intermittently are not enough to cause injury in and of themselves. As soon as the five-second burst lapses faculties are resumed. You are only in danger of dying during that loss of control. If people end up in the ER after being tased then it is due to a secondary injury. Falling, drowning, choking. Tasers stun the nervous system, and apparently hurt like hell, but they can’t kill you. The only way you can actually kill someone with a Taser burst itself is to apply the pulse directly to the heart and keep going over and over again.
Maria knows that. All she needs to do is not die in the five-second increments that freeze her nervous system.
As she reaches the rocks, she dips to grab a fist full of hard wet sand and scrambles up to standing six feet from the man. He is big and she is small, but she reasons that this means he has farther to fall, and falling from higher up causes more damage.
Her bare feet cling to the rocks as the two face each other, their bodies instinctively crouched, their centers of gravity low. He is farther out, nearer the water, waves crashing sporadically into the rocks behind him, clearly forcing the issue. As the next massive wave crashes behind him, she flings the contents of her hand at his eyes, his hands flying up to protect himself. His vision must momentarily blur because, fearful of attack, he lunges forward toward her, stick crackling. Maria dodges to the side but even her reflexes adapted over the last six days cannot quite escape it in time, the edge of the stick making brief contact with her upper arm as she pulls away. The sharp stab and tug of white-hot pain grab at her skin like a claw and pulse through her as if trying to hold on to her indefinitely as she slips past it. And that was only a glancing blow.
The man pulls back hastily and regroups, wiping his face, the lunge having cost him his footing.
Maria sucks in a sharp involuntary inhale as the charge dissipates and she focuses. That was probably a one-second shock. She will need to withstand five seconds. It’s doable, she can easily remain conscious, it will hurt like all hell but as long as she doesn’t fall, she’ll be fine. And that is when the plan forms.
Maria can pull the goalie.
She backs up, feet clinging to the jagged rocks as she puts distance between herself and the man. He duly advances, cautious, alive to her unpredictability, his weapon raised. A brief glance tells her she has reached the edge of the rocks and she leaps back down onto the wet sand, eyes still set on the man and his weapon.
She needs to get somewhere flat and far enough from the water that there can be no risk of drowning. Luckily, she has a whole wide flat empty stretch of beach to choose from. As the man becomes occupied in making his own labored descent from the rocks, Maria spins and sprints out to a section of dry beach and lies down and waits, limbs stretched out on the warm soft sand.
Every fiber in her body tells her not to do what she is doing. Every cell yells at her to stand, to run, to move. But she refuses to listen. She has a plan. She is pulling the goalie.
She knows the strategy from ice hockey. It is only ever employed in the final stages of a losing game. You remove all your defense and switch it to offense to gain an advantage. The goal is wide open, but you have an extra man on the ice.
And right here and now, the facts are the facts: you cannot die from a Taser—unless it is repeatedly applied to your heart, all it can do to you is shock your nervous system into falling, choking, or drowning. Well, now she is lying down so she can’t fall, or drown, or choke unless the man carries her somewhere. And if he carries her, he can’t shock her at the same time—she can fight, claw, bite, struggle, and all the while he keeps hold of that weapon, he will have only one hand to fend her off.
Each Taser burst lasts only five seconds and then the stick recharges before sparking again. If she can stay calm, if she can count out five, knowing how much it hurts but how little damage it’s doing, if she can save her energy for that break—then she can get his weapon.
It makes sense in her mind but not in her body. Every muscle in her shudders to move as he tentatively approaches her. Maria wonders if he knows what she is doing. Even as the fear courses through her she thinks that he looks wary, but perhaps that’s just her wishful thinking.
But when he stops near her, he keeps as much distance as he can between them, only the tip of his stick reaching her abdomen. And as it lowers toward her flesh, she squeezes her eyes gently shut and tries to relax every muscle in her body. She will not fight it until she knows it will matter. She takes a deep breath but does not get to finish it before the pain shocks through her. White light fills the darkness behind her closed eyes.
One.
Her body curves and arches beneath her and she lets the stabbing lashes of it roll through every muscle.
Two.
Her palms clench and release unbidden. She feels her bladder empty, warm and slow under her.
Three.
The stick is pushed deeper into her skin, the current running deeper, to her bones almost, as her spine flicks and spasms like a frog in a science lab.
Four.
It’s almost over. Thoughts impossible to keep ahold of and meaning intermittent. She clings to the arrival of the next number.
Five.
And her body slacks into the sand. Now is her chance. Thought and the world are bleary but she knows she has only a moment before it begins again. And she knows beyond a shadow of a doubt where on her body the stick rests. She grabs for it, eyes flashing open, and tugs with all her strength.
