Beasts of the Field: The Recovery
Episode VI
Click here for the Beasts of the Field Navigation Page.
← In Episode V: The Pinch, Judith asked one too many questions about the suspicious results of Samantha Scott’s autopsy.
While Beasts of the Field can be read as a standalone story, you may appreciate the characters and their interactions more if you are familiar with Judith’s first adventure, Down in the Holler, in which she investigated a cold case in rural Kentucky. Click here to read Down in the Holler.
There was a light somewhere far off, casting a dim, ambient glow on the tangled trees and slick, chilled grass. Nearby, a woman’s voice spoke, the words meaningless, mumbling sounds in Judith’s ears.
Straining her eyelids until finally they opened fully, Judith blinked at the thick, black sky and the choking woods and the strange gleam in the distance. Why had she taken a nap on the ground? She didn’t like lying down in cold, wet, dirty places.
The voice beside her localized to a face, a stranger’s face with a fretful mouth and a line burrowing between her eyebrows.
“Help is on the way, honey. Bless your heart.”
Judith’s memory ticked like a broken projector. Headlights behind her. Dark road. A truck pulling up beside her – to pass her? What had happened?
Pain pierced her temple as she turned her head, and Judith caught a glimpse of mangled metal – her little car, crumpled around the trunk of a tree. She remembered that. She had dragged herself out through the shattered, jagged windshield, had crawled on the damp, frigid grass…and now she was lying on the ground, staring up at treetops and a starless sky.
Stabbing beams of red and blue flashed in the edge of Judith’s vision, and she closed her eyes against them. She was tired, so tired. It was late. She’d close her eyes, sleep, just until someone else decided what to do.
A bright white light glowed through her eyelids, and she winced. There was a man’s voice from somewhere above, perhaps the road, and an unintelligible answer from the nervous woman beside her. There were footsteps, cautious at first on the steep hill, and then suddenly fast and sliding, pounding closer.
“Judith? Judith!”
Opening her eyes to the familiar voice, Judith found Tim kneeling over her, red and blue flashing across his face, a glare of light behind him.
Judith held up her hand to shield her eyes from the white light that hurt almost as much as the distraught look on Tim’s face and started to sit up.
“Whoa, hey,” Tim said, stopping her with a hand on her shoulder. “What’re you doing?”
A sharp, seizing pain stabbed into her side, and she let out a wheezing gasp. Judith’s tongue was heavy, and she had to concentrate to work the words out of her mouth. “I think I’m going to need a ride home.”
“Just lie down. You might have a head or neck injury.”
Everything, the whole world around her, was off-kilter, tilted. Nausea coiled in her stomach, and Judith let Tim guide her back to the ground. “I climbed out of the car,” she mumbled. “My spinal cord is fine.”
Tim let out a ragged breath that was almost a laugh. Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out what looked like a bandana and held it to the warm, throbbing spot on Judith’s head. “Just stay still. The ambulance is on its way.”
“But I’m cold.”
Tim looked back over his shoulder. “Could you keep pressure on this for a minute while I run up to my car?”
A different face appeared beside Judith, the face of the stranger with the worried mouth. A soft face with tight, graying curls, mint green scrubs poking out from beneath her thick jacket.
Judith closed her eyes. Faces were too much sometimes, took too much mental energy to decode.
Time turned soft as jelly, and it seemed only moments later that hands were tucking something thin and crinkling around her, and someone was tapping her, gently at first and then more firmly. “Don’t fall asleep. Judith, you’ve gotta stay awake.”
Begrudgingly Judith opened her eyes. Wrapped around her, a Mylar blanket shimmered in the headlights of the sheriff’s car. Tim was beside her again, holding his bandana to her head, and from a distance came the faint, approaching whine of a siren.
“That’s the ambulance,” Tim said. “Just stay awake until the doctors see you. You’ve gotta stay awake.
“There was a truck,” Judith said, whispering through the needling pain in her lungs. “It ran me off the road.”
Tim was silent for so long that Judith started to repeat herself, then gave up and lapsed into hazy quiet. She’d tell him later, after she’d had some sleep.
A hand tapped her face again. “Wake up, stay awake. We’re gonna figure out what happened, okay? We’ll find them. But you’ve got to stay awake.”
“Didn’t see any hemorrhaging, hematomas, contusions, or skull fractures on your CT scan. So good news! You likely only have a mild traumatic brain injury.”
The doctor’s chirpy voice, the glaring hospital lights, and the foam collar that held her neck in place coalesced into an exhausted, tremulous knot within Judith. Her skin prickled and her head ached and the stabbing pain in her chest made each breath a battle and why did this man sound so happy at this ungodly hour on the worst night of her life?
Judith took a shallow breath and whispered around the razors in her chest. “Traumatic brain injury still sounds alarming, even when you put the word mild in front of it.” Nothing about this felt mild. A deep pain throbbed in her head, broken like the watermelons her cousins used to throw in the summertime, dropping them on the ground until they split open and burst out in frosty red flesh.
“A mild TBI can still have serious effects.” His cheeriness unflagging, the doctor leaned his elbow on the edge of Judith’s bed. “Headaches, dizziness, memory loss, brain fog, nausea, that kind of thing. With time, they should all resolve on their own. But really, considering the state of your car, you got lucky. And the Good Samaritan out there in the middle of nowhere, calling 9-1-1 – you got real lucky tonight. Those meds should start kickin’ in soon, and you’ll feel better. But anyway, rest is the best treatment. Same for those broken ribs of yours. Rest and ice should take care of those within six weeks, and you can lose the neck collar after ten days.”
“Perhaps I should start that now.”
“Start what now?”
“You said rest was the best treatment. Would you please turn off the light on your way out?”
The doctor glanced over his shoulder at the door. “Actually, I think you’ve got some visitors.”
“I’d rather sleep.”
“I don’t think these are optional visitors.”
There was a quiet knock on the open door. Tim stood in the doorway with weary shoulders and a small smile. “How’s it going?”
As the doctor slipped out the door with a nonchalant wave, a stocky man pushed past Tim and strode to the foot of Judith’s bed. A vague rush of recognition brought with it a crisp autumn morning weeks earlier, the barrel-chested McFerrin police officer who’d tried to shoo her away from Tim’s search party.
“Sheriff says you claim someone ran you off the road.” The officer pulled a notebook from a slot on his belt. “Description of the car?”
Tim was suddenly beside the head of Judith’s bed, his face tight, his arms crossed, and his eyes on Officer Bowen.
“It was a truck,” Judith said. “I think it was black.”
“Didn’t get the plate?”
Judith blinked. “No.”
Officer Bowen grunted. “Any description of the driver?”
“I couldn’t see. It was too dark.”
“Sure you’re remeberin’ right?” Officer Bowen said. “Heard you got a brain injury.”
“A mild traumatic brain injury.”
“Sure you didn’t fall asleep at the wheel?”
“Of course I’m sure.”
“Maybe your memory’s fillin’ in the gaps. Hittin’ your head can do stuff to your memory.”
“I don’t remember the crash itself,” Judith said. Pain squeezed her head again, making her eyes water. “But I remember the truck. Maybe some of its paint got scratched off when it hit me. Can’t you trace residue to figure out its paint color, or something like that?”
“Not when your car looks like a crushed soda can.” Officer Bowen closed his notebook, clipped his pen onto it, and reattached it to his belt before looking back up at Judith. “You’re the psychic, right?”
“That’s correct.”
“But you didn’t see this comin’?”
Judith stared. The sudden, leering hostility sent a flurry of panic through her body, and her mind short-circuited, her words evaporating into the ether with nothing to replace them.
“Don’t you have a report to file?” Tim’s voice was sharp as cracked ice.
Officer Bowen chuckled with a skin-deep humor. “Just makin’ a joke. We’ll do our due diligence.” Jutting his chin in a cursory goodbye, he brushed back out the door.
“Unbelievable,” Tim said under his breath.
Judith fidgeted with the scratchy hospital blanket. With the neck collar blocking her from turning her head, Judith couldn’t get a good look at Tim’s face, but his voice was livid. Through the numb weight of exhaustion and painkillers bearing down on her, Judith realized with a faint jolt that she’d never before seen Tim angry. Serious, with the intensity of a soldier, yes. But not truly angry.
Letting out a rough breath, Tim rubbed a hand over his face. “Sorry about him.”
“Plenty of people are skeptical about what I do.”
“He had no call to act like that.” Tim shifted closer to the foot of her bed so that Judith didn’t have to turn her entire torso to make eye contact. “How’re you holding up?”
“The pain medicine is kicking in.” Judith pushed back against the encroaching, enveloping warmth and tried to harness her thoughts. “Orwell. My neighbor thinks I’m coming home tonight.”
“What’s her name? I’ll call her in the morning.”
“Shirley Ritchens. My notebook –”
“I don’t think anyone’s found it yet. I did find your phone, though, and I called your sister.”
“You called Constance?” Judith said, her words turning slow and clumsy against the thick heaviness of the drugs seeping into her body. “How did you get into my phone?”
“I’ve watched you enter your password. Lots of times.”
“You were spying on me?”
Tim laughed, and the sound nudged Judith with a sleepy relief. “Not intentionally. I do it with lots of things. Just remember tidbits and file them away. Constance is coming as soon as she can, by the way.”
Judith leaned further back into the thin hospital mattress, which seemed to exert a stronger gravity than the average bed. There had been something on her mind, something important, before that truck had appeared behind her. What was it? “There was something I needed to tell you. I was going to email you.”
“Something from your notebook?”
“Tierney. It was, um, her dad.”
“Rob? Rob Tierney?”
“Did he know Samantha?” Words tangled on Judith’s tongue, caught between her mind and her mouth until their meaning turned wobbly.
“Maybe? I don’t know. I can check.”
“Her dad and her um…incest.”
“Incest?”
Tim sounded shocked. That must be the wrong word. “No, no. Nepo baby.”
“Nepo…Nepotism? You’re talking about Rob Tierney?”
“I’m –” Pointing at her pillow, Judith drifted back and let the sinking softness drag her under.
“Right, yeah. I’ll come by in the morning, and we can –”
From somewhere far away came Tim’s voice, its words drifting in an eddy around Judith’s consciousness, swirling through the air without catching in her mind.
The light flicked off, and the painful brightness of the fluorescent hospital lights finally darkened as Judith slept.
Thank you so much for taking time to read Beasts of the Field!
→ Keep reading! Episode VII: The Investigation
Beasts of the Field Navigation Page
Ooh, Officer Bowen made Tim mad. Not good.
I had to laugh at the 'wrong word" line.
Also, I'm really worried about how this is going to affect her psychic abilities. I'm not psychic myself (I wish, lol) but I've had brain surgery and it affects you, mood-wise and memory loss and words and all. Is she still psychic? Is she a more powerful psychic? What'll happen the first time she tries to use her abilities again?
Poor Judith, but also, I could not wipe a grin off my face for this whole episode.