The Girl with the Black Lungs pushes on.
The Girl with the Stubbly Head doesn’t stop.
Finally Jade crashes out onto the flat spine of the dam, her momentum plus the unwieldy axe nearly overbalancing her over the dry side, the long drop side.
She reins it in by swinging the axe back behind her, just holding on to the handle with one hand.
It works, but barely.
Jade makes herself walk the fifty yards to the control booth, her steps stiff and mechanical again, because Jensen’s probably watching her through the peephole of his door— watching this girl in her underwear make her way to his booth, left foot dragging.
She taps on the door with the side of the axe, and, when there’s no tap back, no anything, she knocks harder, with more insistence.
Still nothing.
Why didn’t she check for Jensen’s truck on the way in?
But… but of course: he’d have seen the emergency lights down in Proofrock, wouldn’t he have? He’d have seen and puttered down to see how he could help. Either that or he got a heads-up from the Forest Service about the fire headed his way, so he set the controls on the dam version of autopilot, abandoned his post.
Either way, Jade hauls the axe back behind her, swings it ahead with everything she’s got, fully intent on Jack Torrance’ing the door to splinters.
The axe hardly makes a dent.
The door’s metal, and thick, solid metal at that.
Jade swings at the doorknob now, misses, but connects on the second try.
The door handle clatters off, falls into the lake.
The door’s just as fast, just as solid.
“Shit shit shit! ” Jade says all around, to all the nature she’s also trying to save.
Hating having to do this, she sucks in, tightropes around to the other side of the control booth. The three sides that don’t have a door do have windows, but the one opposite the door is the only one you can actually do anything with, or to, as it’s the only one you can really stand by.
Halfway there, Jade’s bare foot jerks up all on its own from a sharp fleck of gravel or a rusty nail head or it doesn’t matter and she throws her arms out like to keep from falling, her hands completely forgetting about the axe.
It falls, falls, one of its two bits catching on the concrete lip between Jade’s feet instead of gouging into either of them like it should have, and that sends it cartwheeling out and back in what feels to Jade like the slowest motion ever—slow enough that even a nonathletic horror chick can plop down to her ass, her legs hanging out over the water so the top of her right foot can just cradle that axe head, guide it back up to her waiting hands.
The fall from here wouldn’t kill her, but there not being anywhere to beach for a quarter mile would.
Slowly, carefully, the top of her right foot cracked open like an egg, she stands again, this time paranoid about keeping a grip on the axe, trying with each step to will her back adhesive, prehensile, whatever it takes.
It works— just.
She steps around the corner onto the comparatively wide spine of the dam, knocks on the glass with the axe.
Jensen’s not home.
“I’m sorry,” she says to the idea of him, and tries to wait this next breath of campfire smoke out to swing, but the smoke’s like from a train in a tunnel, now. Just coming and coming, thicker and thicker.
It doesn’t do anything to help Jade’s balance.
Whenever Doc Wilson gave her a physical in elementary, before she stopped going in for them—for reasons—the portion of the test she always failed was when he’d tell her to stand on one foot and close her eyes.
Each time, she’d waver, almost fall.
Like now. She might as well have her eyes closed.
She taps on the glass with the axe, not swinging it, just expecting the big window to shatter because it knows this is an axe, she guesses.
Stupid.
She hauls back again, isn’t sure about proper form or anything, but what she does have is a whole childhood of anger to swing, six years of the other kids’ parents sneering at her, of teachers sending her to the principal for being sick—all of it. And then having to go home to Tab Daniels and his dirty dishes.
Jade opens her mouth in a scream she didn’t know she had and swings forward with all of her weight, and, and— The axe bounces off, bounces hard enough that it comes straight back for her face. She dodges it, watches it twirl past, then spin down the dry side of the dam, maybe never even hitting, it’s so far down there.
“What?” Jade says.
But of course: since this is glass that got shot out once, and because the woods on the Proofrock side fill with hunters, these windows are all reinforced, aren’t they?