Misery

Paul had watched her plant the cross and then read the Bible over the grave by the light of a new-risen spring moon.
Now she was holding the cross like a spear, the dirt darkened point of its vertical post pointed squarely at the trooper’s back.
“Behind you! Look out!” Paul shrieked, knowing he was too late but shouting anyway.
With a thin warbling cry, Annie plunged Bossie’s cross, into the trooper’s back.
“AG!” the cop said, and walked slowly onto the lawn, his pierced back arched and his gut sticking out. His face was the face of a man either trying to pass a kidney stone or having a terrible gas attack. The cross began to droop toward the ground as the trooper approached the window in which Paul sat, his gray invalid’s face framed by jags of broken glass. The cop reached slowly over his shoulders with both hands. He looked to Paul like a man trying very hard to scratch that one itch you can never quite reach.
Annie had dismounted the Lawnboy and had been standing frozen, her tented fingers pressed against the peaks of her breasts. Now she lunged forward and snatched the cross out of the trooper’s back.
He turned toward her, groping for his service pistol, and Annie drove the cross point-first into his belly.
“OG!” the cop said this time, and dropped to his knees, clutching his stomach. As he bent over Paul could see the slit in his brown uniform shirt where the first blow had gone home.
Annie pulled the cross free again — its sharpened point had broken off, leaving a jagged, splintery stump — and drove it into his back between the shoulderblades. She looked like a woman trying to kill a vampire. The first two blows had perhaps not gone deep enough to do much damage, but this time the cross’s support post went at least three inches into the kneeling trooper’s back, driving him flat.
“THERE!” Annie cried, wrenching Bossie’s memorial marker out of his back. “HOW DO YOU LIKE THAT, YOU DIRTY OLD BIRD?”
“Annie, stop it!” Paul shouted.
She looked up at him, her dark eyes momentarily as shi ay as coins, her hair fungus-frowzy around her face, the corners of her mouth drawn up in the jolly grin of a lunatic who has, at least for the moment, cast aside all restraints. Then she looked back down at the state trooper.
“THERE!” she cried, and drove the cross into his back again. And his buttocks. And the upper thigh of one leg. And his neck. And his crotch. She stabbed him with it half a dozen times, screaming “THERE!” every time she brought it down again. Then the cross’s upright split.
“There,” she said, almost conversationally, and walked away m the direction from which she had come running. Just before she passed from Paul’s view she tossed the bloody cross aside as if it no longer interested her.

Paul put his hands on the wheels of the chair, not at all sure where he intended to go or what, if anything, he meant to do when he got there — to the kitchen for a knife, perhaps? Not to try to kill her with, oh no; she would take one look at the knife in his hand and step back into the shed for her.30-30. Not to kill her but to defend himself from her revenge by cutting his wrists open. He didn’t know if that had been his intention or not, but it surely did seem like a hell of a good idea, because if there had ever been a time to exeunt stage left, this was it. He was tired of losing pieces of himself to her fury.
Then he saw something which froze him in place. The cop.
The cop was still alive.
He raised his head. His sunglasses had fallen off. Now Paul could see his eyes. Now he could see how young the cop was, how young and hurt and scared. Blood ran down his face in streams. He managed to get to his hands and knees, fell forward, and then got painfully back up again. He began to crawl toward his cruiser.
He worked his way halfway down the mild slope of grass between the house and the driveway, then overbalanced and fell on his back. For a moment he lay there with his legs drawn up, looking as helpless as a turtle on its shell. Then he slowly rolled over on his side and began the terrible job of getting to his knees again. His uniform shirt and pants were darkening with blood — small patches were slowly spreading, meeting other patches, growing bigger still.
The Smokey reached the driveway.
Suddenly the noise of the riding lawnmower was louder.
“Look out!” Paul screamed. “Look out, she’s coming!” The cop turned his head. Groggy alarm surfaced on his face, and he grappled for his gun once more. He got it out something big and black with a long barrel and brown woodgrips — and then Annie reappeared, sitting tall in the saddle and driving the Lawnboy as fast as it would