by James Grady
“He saw them everyday.” Zane nodded to the map. “Up there.”
Zane shrugged. “There’s always more road than time.”
Creak! Metal and wood, floor and chair.
We whirled: Cari bent over the desk, tethered hands cupping her face as we heard: “Ha-choo!”
She saw us, said: “Excuse me.”
I jerked her chair so fast inertia flipped her tethered feet off the hardwood floor.
“Wee!” she said. “Thanks for the ride, but after someone sneezes, you’re supposed to say ‘God bless you’ or—”
“Stand up!”
The empty chair rolled across the floor.
I grabbed her cuffed hands—still locked, the belt line still tight. My foot pushed the tether between her ankles (still tied) and she stumbled forward, would have fallen into me but my rigid palm on her thorax kept her away from my gun. I stuck my fingers in the pockets of her dead man’s shirt, felt soft swelling—nothing in there.
Cari drilled me with her green eyes. “You’re supposed to ask first.”
I ran my fingers along the front of her waistband, felt her belly flex.
Zane told her: “We heard the chair creak.”
“When you moved.” I scanned the desk, the paper piles: nothing looked changed.
“When I sneezed,” she said behind my back. “Or OK, maybe before. It’s an old chair. Old things creak—you ought to know that, Zane.”
“But they creak for a reason.”
“Shoot me. Maybe I fidgeted. Maybe I flinched before the sneeze actually blew—it’s an involuntary neural reaction, the only thing like it is—”
“We’re done here,” I said, directing her to shuffle out of the room, following behind her with Zane, no wiser then than I was before she sneezed.
We had that one day to live together in a real home. We did laundry. Ate tuna fish sandwiches for lunch. Took turns napping and standing guard. Zane sat in every chair. Stood in every room. Hailey admired our host’s lack of a computer: “What good would have plugging in done him?” she said, nodding to the garage door beyond which Russell and Eric banged metal and a dead man knelt with his forehead on an oil case.
Even when it wasn’t my job, I vibrated close to Cari.
Our family ate dinner at the kitchen table. We had knives with our metal forks and spoons. Plates that could break. Glasses that were glass, not non-lethal plastic. Eric cooked us defrosted chicken thighs, white rice Russell insisted on eating with ketchup, canned corn, and a cherry pie from the freezer. A dozen storm candles flickered in the dark kitchen and washed the six of us at the table with a soft white glow.
“You can see there’s light in here from outside,” said Cari as she lowered the fork in her cuffed and tethered hands. “People out there will know someone’s here.”
“People assume that things are how they’re supposed to be,” I said. “Stand on your hometown street at night. Look at houses or apartment windows with lights on. You realize you don’t have a clue what’s happening in there.”
“Houses are full of dead people,” said Russell. “Even when the lights are on.”
“Not fair,” said Hailey. “But there are houses full of people nobody notices.”
“Old people,” said Eric.
Cari said: “Teenagers.”
We looked at her in surprise. She wasn’t that young anymore.
She blushed. “I know: teenagers are loudly everywhere, but that’s because they’re always looking for a way to not feel so lost. And some kids are frantically trying to make ordinary life something… something…”
Zane said: “Something special.”
Cari concentrated on chewing rice so words didn’t fall out of her mouth.
Russell smiled at her: “So, turns out you do think about stuff like that.”
“Why wouldn’t I?” said Cari. “I’m normal.”
The five of us tightened.
Russell leaned over the table towards Cari, ignored my glare to back off, to let her be, to let us eat at least one dinner in peace.
“So,” he told our witness, “since you’re normal and an expert on what’s going on in other people’s houses… What goes on in the houses of people like us? People who aren’t so young and aren’t so old.”
Cari’s emerald gaze hit everybody: “People like us don’t get to live in houses.”
Metal forks and real knives clinked on our dinner plates.
Leftover chicken thighs smelled cold.
Later, the midnight hour when Hailey said: “All I need to be is lucky.”
All six of us, dressed for the road, stood staring at the phone on the rolltop desk.
“Worked before,” said Eric.
“But now Kyle Russo’s had five days to clean up,” I said. “Cover up.”
Russell said: “Maybe he’s figured that any move equals added exposure, that the safer risk is to let things ride, let nature take its course and let Blondie here and her bands of gunners do his work for him. After all, we’re still just a bunch of maniacs.”
“Mad dogs,” corrected Eric.
“Yeah,” said Russell. “We kinda helped him out with that one.”
Hailey picked up the phone. Dialed a number gleaned from the brown matrice cards for Nurse Death as Russell ran to stand sentry at the dark living room’s window.
Her call connected. She listened to the computer voice pronounce her options. Hailey pushed one button. Listened to another list. Pushed another button. Listened.
Zane whispered: “I hate having to wait while a machine tells me what I can do.”
Hailey pushed another button—or rather, a button required her to push it.
“Call trace or caller I.D. won’t have kicked in yet,” said Eric.
Cari watched us.
Hailey punched in the ten digit number of Nurse Death’s cell phone.
Eric said: “Now we’re hot. If we’re hot.”
The room heard me say: “I’ve never felt cool.”
Hailey said: “Push ZERO to speak to a human being. How appropriate.”
Our hearts beat out time we dared not waste.
“Yes, hi, I’m calling from my father’s house out of town,” said Hailey, knowing that her “in town” was not Bombay or Belfast or wherever this American cell phone company had out-sourced its Accounts Processing factory. “I need to give you his address so you can send a duplicate bill here and I can pay on time.”
Hailey read off our dead man’s address that would confirm the factory’s caller I.D. “So that’s two bills to send. Let’s double check both addresses.”
Zane steadied a yellow pad for her to write while she held the phone.
“OK,” said Hailey, “like they say in the army—tanks.”
She hung up, told us: “The way she laughed, she’s either a great actress or she doesn’t know about any trace/trap.”
“We’re still gone,” I said. “Machines are in charge, not her. They could have reported this location 70 seconds ago.”
“Or not,” said Hailey, as we hurried to the garage. “But just like I got trained, Nurse Death or whoever bought her mission cell phone in a company name to protect her identity—and now we’ve got that address.”
“Berlow Services, Inc.,” said Zane. “In Wheaton, Maryland.”
“Suburb of Washington,” I said as we left the study. “Near the Beltway.”
Russell ran from the front windows to join us. He snapped off lights as he came.
Cari argued: “So the nurse who you—the nurse you say killed the doctor, so what if she’s got a cell phone registered to a company? Could be a dozen reasons.”
“Only one that counts,” I said, opening the door from the house to the garage. “And it says we’ve been going the right way.”
Zane said: “Now we
’ll know when we get there.”
“Lucky you,” said Russell, nudging Cari into the garage: “You’re on our bus.”
All the lights glowed in that cavern. We closed the door to the house behind us. Stared at the dead man slumped over the oil case.
“I forgot his name,” said Hailey.
“I don’t want to know his name,” said Russell.
“No,” said Zane. “We need to remember.”
“Harry Martin,” I said. “His name was Harry Martin.”
“Tanks,” Eric told the body.
Cari said: “He’s starting to smell.”
Our stolen BMW sat jacked onto racks five feet above the cement floor. Its hood gaped open, its wheels were stacked in the corner, and its two front doors—with absent windows—leaned on the BMW’s removed front seat. Stolen license plates from that stolen car were nailed on the wall amidst other crucified metal tags.
“Leave blanks for the cops to fill in,” I said. “But show them the easiest answer.”
Nowhere in the house would cops find ownership papers to the BMW awaiting its repairs. Nor would they find Harry Martin’s driver’s license, which nestled in Zane’s wallet. That driver’s license photo resembled Zane only because its image showed a man with white hair: looking old can be a sufficiently confirmed identity. Zane wore the same windbreaker as the old man in the driver’s license photo. That jacket hid a full shoulder holster once held by the now-stored weapons’ vest. And finally, Harry Martin’s house held no papers proving he’d ever owned a 1959 Cadillac.
The Caddy glistened in the garage lights. Long and white. Shiny and bright. Swooping fins with red taillights. Four perfect black tires and a full gas tank. Our GODS and booty from the road filled the trunk.
Three people filled the back seat built for four: Zane sat beside the driver’s side rear door, then next to him came witness Cari, feet still tethered, hands belted and cuffed in her lap. He told her: “I’ll be the one to get you.” She probably knew that he was messing with her mind, forcing her to fight concentrating on him in order to be aware of danger from all of us if. She said nothing. Eric rode by the curbside rear door.
We didn’t need to vote: I drove. Hailey sat beside me with Harry Martin’s maps on her lap. On the roof above the windshield and the rear view mirror, she taped the white matrice card black lettered: KYLE RUSSO.
“In case we start to ramble,” she said.
Oh-oh, I thought: Are you starting to lose it, too?
At the wall by the dead man, Russell flipped switches to kill the overhead lights, leaving only the Caddy’s dome light to glow in the darkness. Russell climbed in the front seat and slammed the door shut with a clunk that dropped us and the white beast into total blackness.
Where we sat for one long, deep breath.
Russell said: “Put on your sunglasses.”
Cari’s voice came from the backseat. “It’s pitch dark in here, night out there!”
“So?” said Russell. “This time, we’re going to start out cool.”
We heard Eric obey, clip onto his regular glasses the pair of sunglasses we’d picked for him from the shoebox.
Cari inhaled to protest Zane groping to fit her with eye-doctor oversized glasses, but she re-thought that and heeded the four magic words.
Hailey shifted beside me and didn’t need to say she was ready.
“We’re cool,” said Zane from the back seat.
Cyber-wraparounds slid over my eyes.
The key turned my fingers. The Caddy rumbled to life.
And I said: “Hit it.”
Russell thumbed the remote garage door opener at the windshield.
Clanking and groaning, a plane of blackness rose from in front of our growling Caddy’s silver grill. Cold suburban night flowed into the garage with shimmers of streetlights and rainbow ghosts of neighbors’ TVs and twinkling stars.
Russell said: “Now this is a road trip.”
41
Cari escaped in the morning mist of Day Six.
We took off our sunglasses after blasting out of the garage, followed the dead man’s maps, found a state road with no roadblocks of state trooper cruisers and steel boyz in civilian coats they never zipped. We stayed off the Interstate with its traffic control eyes. Gassed up at a Mom & Pop store too deep into yesterday to have surveillance cameras. Followed the road into a wilderness called the Pine Barrens.
Night fog swirled in our headlights. The highway ran straight as a bullet. We saw no other cars. Nobody said much. Nobody dozed in the great white beast.
The out there we raced through faded from black to gray. Fog floated amidst scruffy pine and oak and black cherry trees crowding the highway. As we drove in that time zone between night and day, Zane said: “I need to… stop.”
“Again?” said Russell.
“Too much coffee.” Zane sighed. Confessed: “Too many miles.”
“That’s OK,” said Hailey. “I’ve got to, too.”
The white Caddy muscled off the highway, onto a bumpy side road. Gravel crunched under our tires. We stopped. Dust settled outside our windows.
My shoulders burned, my spine felt compressed, my right foot ached. I groaned as I stepped from the car. The others climbed out to stretch. Zane helped cuffed & tethered Cari slide from the back seat, put her dead man’s white sneakers on the gravel road.
Quiet covered everything like the pale fog hiding the treetops. Cool air felt good to inhale. Smelled of pine and wet bark.
“Can’t see more than thirty, forty feet off into the woods,” said Russell.
“Don’t worry,” said Zane. “Out here, we’re alone.”
He told me: “I’ll be right back.”
“I’m going with you,” said Hailey.
Cari said: “As long as she’s going… I have to go, too. My guess is, this is the last best place you guys will let me do it.”
“I’ll come,” I said.
Zane’s poker face didn’t change as he watched me shrug.
“Russell,” I said, “key’s in the ignition.”
“Eric and I are cool,” said Russell. “But get it done and let’s get out of here.”
We faced a forest jumbled on scrubby marshland.
Hailey said: “Which way?”
“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “It’s all trees until you hit a road.”
We left the gravel for packed wet earth, cushions of dead brown leaves and jarring rocks. Every footfall freed odors of mud and snapped branches. Tendrils of white mist snaked around our ankles. We could barely see through the bars of trees and floating gray walls you couldn’t touch. The fog thickened as it rose from damp earth until the tops of 20-foot green pine or winter-naked trees disappeared in currents of pale. Somewhere above that sea of clouds had to be the sky and a rising sun.
Invisible fluttering wings rushed overhead.
I led the others on what looked like an easy path—with her feet tethered, Cari had a difficult journey over rough ground or through trees. We’d zig-zagged sixty steps beyond our last sight of the white Caddy when urgency tightened Zane’s voice:
“Any time now.”
“Have to find the perfect—there!”
The forest widened to a glen the size of a tennis court. Lightning had split an oak so it lay like a propped Y. Each fork of the Y-ed tree made a ledge on which to sit.
“That’s ours,” said Hailey.
Zane fidgeted as he and I watched her lead the tethered woman to the Y-ed tree.
Cari inched around to the far side of the split tree’s furthest fork. Haley stood behind her and to her right in the gap of the ‘Y’. Their backs were to us.
Both women glared at us over their shoulders.
“Look away! Do your own thing!” ordered Hailey.
Zane and I turned to face a forest of qu
iet trees and drifting fog. I heard his zipper descend as—why not—I lowered mine. We heard the sound of Hailey and Cari dropping their slacks, sitting on the tree forks.
Liquid trickled onto the forest floor.
“Ahh,” sighed Zane. I joined him as he said: “When you got to, you got to.”
Behind us, Hailey knew that Cari’d finished that business quickly, was taking her time standing up from bent-over-sitting-on-the-tree-branch as Hailey herself filled the morning with a long stream of sound. Finally finished, Hailey bent down like Cari had to—obviously—pull up her clothing, stood and fastened her—whirling blur!
Cari—Hands free! Feet free!—right palm on the tree as she vaulted over it with a 180° turn that spun her to face Hailey. Cari used the torque of her vault to pivot on her left foot, spin another circle that closed the gap between her and the astonished Black woman, a spin that whipped Cari’s right leg through a high crescent kick and slammed her oversized dead man’s sneaker smack into Hailey’s face.
The kick snapped Hailey around in her own half circle, would have dropped her even if she hadn’t stumbled over the tree limb.
Something deep in Hailey refused to just fall. Call it guts. Call it street smarts. Call it the caliber of her soul. As she crashed towards the brutal earth, Hailey ripped the pistol from her waistband, tossed it towards us as she screamed.
Zane and I jerked around fumbling our hands to fix ourselves and fill them with something more functional than what we held in that scream moment.
Saw Cari crouched in the Y of the downed tree. Saw free hands. Saw her glare at Hailey who’d denied her a gun. Saw Cari whirl and charge away feet free into the trees.
Go! Don’t shoot her can’t shoot her run!
I knocked saplings out of my way. Leapt over logs. Slipped on a boulder—didn’t stop as I charged through the forest, heard Zane racing behind me to my right, caught glimpses of Cari’s blue shirt dodging through the trees and currents of fog, heard her pant and snap branches and crack through brush.
Leaves slapped my eyes. Thorns slashed my forehead. I bounced off a tree. Ran. My stomach heaved gasps of wet forest into my burning lungs. Cari… in great shape! Don’t think. Don’t stop. Run. Get her. Got to get her.
