Kindred Intentions

by Rita Carla Francesca Monticelli

  Except for a beaten path extending from the open space, there wasn’t the slightest sign of civilisation. A distant road, at least? She started listening. Maybe there was one, only it was hidden by the plants. She would hear the sound of the engines. But no. Only twittering birds.

  Her chest deflated and she felt herself almost collapsing, while her enthusiasm slipped away. She remembered well the time spent in the boot, as it travelled on a country road. Never-ending minutes. On foot, moreover without shoes, they would turn into hours.

  Disconsolate, she looked in the direction of the pathway. Its track got lost as the terrain twisted.

  “Bugger,” she murmured.

  She had the feeling that she had been walking for days, but considering that the length of her shadow looked just the same, not even half an hour must have passed. The sun was quite high and she was checking her shadow to understand whether it was shortening or lengthening, in other words whether it was morning or afternoon. But until now, it had been a useless exercise.

  She drank the last sip of water from the small bottle. She had returned to the cottage to take it before venturing along the pathway. She was still thirsty, though.

  She threw it away. Yes, she knew, as a policewoman she certainly wasn’t setting a good example. But there was nobody able to see her in the middle of nowhere.

  She shook her head in the attempt to restart her thoughts. Under the scorching sun of that unusually hot summer, the gears of her brain had resumed turning slowly. And so they forced her to linger on old memories.

  The last time such a hot July had been recorded was some years earlier. She, Gavin, and Joseph had gone for a trip by the sea. Joseph’s skin was so delicate, like his father’s. She’d had to rub into him half a bottle of sun cream, fearing that he would get sunburn. The memory of the cream’s smell was so vivid in her mind. It was like she could smell it even now. She would’ve never thought it had been last summer of her son, and of her marriage. On the other hand, Gavin always ended up with some bad burns, because he refused to use anything. He used to say that for one day by the sea he didn’t really need any. The problem was that the sun was everywhere, not only by the sea. He got burnt even just walking on the street.

  Amelia laughed at the thought of her ex. They had first met at university, and had been going steady ever since. Getting married and having children had seemed to them like the logical consequence of their relationship. Sometimes she missed him a bit; not that she was really missing him, but rather the idea she had in her mind of their family. It was so reassuring. When he had left her, at first she had wondered how he could have done that, after all the years spent together. How could he have abandoned the woman he loved, his wife, in such a terrible moment? For better or for worse, that was the wedding vow. Only later on she had understood; she had realised that the feeling that had united them had been less deep than what they had both let on. It had been consumed with the passing of time. All that had kept them bonded had been Joseph. With his death, nothing had remained. Staying together would’ve been a lie.

  However, she was angry with him. He had disappeared overnight. What she missed was the friend, more than the husband. She’d never had a friend like him since. She hadn’t been able to have a profound relationship with anyone else. She could not trust. She didn’t want to trust.

  As she returned to reality, she realised that the pathway had widened, transforming into a proper dirt road. Its surface was dusty and, luckily, sprinkled with just a few stones. Her feet were thankful. She was climbing a slope, when she caught sight from afar of a coloured object in motion. And it was moving pretty fast.

  She quickened her stride. Beyond the top, the road became paved, although it still looked abandoned. That object, however, was halfway on the following hill. It disappeared behind a group of trees in no time. But there again, another one popped out from the same point, this time a white one, proceeding briskly in the opposite direction.

  They were cars and there, perhaps a mile away, was a real road.

  She reached the tarmac and immediately she regretted it. It was burning! She leaped to the side, returning amongst creeping plants. The road was surrounded by flowering bushes, which were very overgrown, invading it. The country landscape wasn’t actually bad. Only now that she could see her salvation close at hand, Amelia started to appreciate it. The fact that the road over there seemed quite busy with traffic cheered her up. Now she just had to get there.

  She proceeded with calmness, complaining as she saw every car pass, each a potential means to return to the city, disappearing behind a bend. Cursing, she finally came closer to her destination. But it wasn’t really so. It was there, two steps away, but at least four or five metres above her. She literally had to climb to reach the roadside.

  She saw a motorbike passing close to the guardrail. “Hey, help! This way!” she shouted, waving her arms about.

  The biker kept going.

  No way. She had to go up there so that someone would see her. The incline wasn’t excessive, but she had to walk on all fours, to avoid falling backwards.

  Once there, she was breathless. She sat on the tarmac. It didn’t feel too hot through her skirt. There was no one in sight. Turning her back to the carriageway, she leant her shoulders against the guardrail, and only then it occurred to her that she was dripping with sweat. Why hadn’t she taken off her jacket? Feeling stiff, she slipped out of it slowly, also because it now felt glued to the blouse she was wearing under it. The latter was white, but being wet, had become transparent, revealing a matching white bra. Well, it would turn out useful to snag a lift.

  With her luck, she would get into the car of a maniac, who would rape, kill, and throw her in a ditch. She laughed.

  A distant noise pulled her out of her black humour and made her turn to the left. A car was coming.

  With an agility she didn’t remember she owned, she snapped up on her feet, climbed over the guardrail, and leapt to the middle of the carriageway, waving her arms. The tarmac was burning, if possible, even more than before, but she had learnt how to ignore the pain at her feet. She had a future as a guru walking on red-hot coals.

  “This way!” Her shouts were broken by the returning of her laughter.

  The car kept moving. She could’ve sworn it wasn’t slowing down at all. However, she kept waving her arms. It would surely stop.

  After a few seconds her certainty turned into doubt, then certainty again, this time that it would run over her.

  The deafening sound of a horn split the air and Amelia threw herself against the guardrail, while the car proceeded undisturbed.

  “Fucking bastard! This is failure in duty of care!” she shouted to it. Her trained eyes deciphered the number plate and memorised it. Oh, yes, they would pay for this.

  Then she was caught by a flash of inspiration. Her badge. She returned to her jacket, abandoned on the roadside, and searched through her pockets. But they were empty, save for a small packet with sugar-free sweets, the sight of which only caused another grumble from her stomach. “For fuck’s sake…” She tossed them away. No trace of her badge. She had a fleeting memory of the last time she’d seen it. When she’d climbed on the van, she had put it somewhere. It was still there.

  “My usual good luck.” She was already talking to herself like a lunatic.

  She’d been so engrossed in her thoughts that only now she realised that a car was arriving from the other direction. She rose at the same moment as it passed in front of her, and went on. She didn’t even have the strength to try to draw the driver’s attention. They wouldn’t hear her.

  The car screeched to a halt. It remained still.

  Amelia didn’t know whether to hope it would reverse. Okay, she probably looked like someone needing help, but she hadn’t gestured to it, and a car stopping without a reason before a woman along a road recalled insistently to her mind the hypothesis of the maniacal rapist.

  The car made a U-turn and resumed moving towards her. It
was a high-performance saloon, with a shiny new bodywork. At least it wasn’t a poor devil, but it could be a rich maniac. As the vehicle came closer, she made out the outline of the driver’s face, despite the glare on the windshield. He was wearing a pair of sunglasses, but his look was vaguely familiar to her.

  The saloon stopped beside her; she was looking at it as if she was hypnotised.

  It couldn’t be true.

  The window lowered. The driver had a perplexed air. He took off his glasses, revealing a pair of ocean-blue eyes that she had already seen more closely.

  “Amelia?”

  “Mike?”

  3

  “It’s a crazy story!” Mike exclaimed, after listening to the account of what had happened to her. “I grasped something had happened, because all at once they lost any interest in me, and there was a lot of movement.” He tapped the steering wheel in an amused manner. “As soon as they told me they didn’t need me anymore, I left; I had other things to do.”

  “And for sure I didn’t expect to find you here.” At last Amelia was relaxing. She had met Mike for the first time only that morning and had spent no more than ten minutes with him, but he was no doubt the best she could expect as a casual driver. Actually, more than the best. “By the way, where are we?” She looked at the boundless countryside all around them, only interrupted by the electricity pylons, as well as by the road they were travelling on. It was an isolated place, but there was a sort of comforting poetry in all that greenery lit by the sun on a lovely day.

  “I’d say in the middle of nowhere.” And he laughed. “Which makes everything even more surreal. I’ll head on the same way, because there’s a village nearby with a police station.” He turned slightly to her, offering a sly smile. His eyes were hidden again under his dark glasses. “It seems to me the more suitable place.”

  “Yeah, thank you.” Amelia set her safety belt to the side of her shoulder, because it had ended up on her neck. In vain she tried to adjust its height, then she gave up. She was still dazed. All that she wished for was a shower and some clean clothes. Maybe before that, she would accept something to eat with pleasure. She stole a glance at the digital clock on the dashboard. Ten past two in the afternoon. That explained the heat. She reached out to the sunshield and lowered it. Under the little flap was a mirror, which reflected her appearance mercilessly. She tried to arrange her tousled hair. She felt ill at ease to be with a man in such an awful condition. Then she looked at her blouse, which once had been white, her jacket, now turned into a rag abandoned at her feet and stained by sweat and dust, and at last her skirt, whose seam had been torn in a few points. And she was worrying about her hair? She closed the flap and the sunshield with a slap.

  “Everything all right?” Mike asked, keeping his face aimed at the road.

  “Hm, let’s say so. Can I borrow your phone?” She should have informed Monroe, at least.

  Mike inserted a hand in the front door storage pocket and then gave her a smartphone that looked like it had come straight from space. Amelia took it with a certain amount of reverence. But from a man with a car like that, she couldn’t expect a phone for paupers like hers. Well, the one that was now smashed up on the tarmac somewhere in the City, probably under the tyres of another vehicle.

  “Disable the Bluetooth, if you want to have a private conversation.”

  She looked at him, bewildered, for a second. A private conversation? Ah, yeah, right, he’d thought she wanted to speak to a relative, certainly not to her chief. Anyway excluding the hands-free wasn’t a bad idea. “Let’s see if I get how to do that.”

  “There’s an icon …” He gestured.

  Amelia found the way to recall the settings, touched the Bluetooth symbol, and disabled it. Then she stopped. “And who remembers Monroe’s number …?”

  Mike laughed. “These contraptions should simplify your life, instead they break your habit of using your memory. Call 112.”

  Right, she just had to identify and ask to be connected to the headquarters in the City. She turned on the virtual keypad of the phone and was about to type the number, when the barred battery symbol started blinking, accompanied by a far from reassuring sound. “The battery is low.”

  “Damn it, it doesn’t last longer than a fucking couple of hours,” the man complained, perhaps in an excessive way.

  But what did she know? Maybe a long-lasting dispute was taking place between Mike and his phone battery. Amelia smiled at her frivolous thoughts.

  “In there, in the glove compartment, there’s the charger that you can plug into the cigarette lighter socket. You’d better use it. When it goes like that, it may shut down any moment.” He barely turned to look at her. “What are you laughing at?”

  “Nothing, nothing,” she said, opening the cover in front of her and inserting a hand. There it was. It was stuck amongst a ton of other bits and pieces, including empty chocolate bar wrappers she couldn’t identify. The condition of the compartment was the exact opposite of the remainder of the car. It was like it had been tidied up in a hurry, by throwing in there all the stuff that was around. This time it was she who stole a glance at him.

  He was absorbed. From time to time he moved his head, as if he was checking the rear-view mirror.

  Amelia decided to stop staring at him. He would catch her, they always caught her, and it would be embarrassing. Embarrassing? More embarrassing than this? She let a snort escape and then took out the charger. She plugged it into the cigarette lighter socket and tried to make the mini-USB plug match the mobile phone port. Her hands were numb and she got the side wrong four times. It was a record even for her. Finally the smartphone beeped, confirming it was charging.

  “Hm,” Mike muttered.

  “What’s up?”

  “That black car.” He was keeping his head raised again towards the mirror.

  She turned to see. Her safety belt slipped from her shoulder and ended up on her neck. Her abrupt movement triggered the pretensioner, and soon after, the band was choking her. “Fuck!” She let the phone drop to her lap and stretched out the belt, so that she could turn. A black car with darkened windows was travelling at a certain distance from their vehicle. It didn’t give what could be defined as a reassuring impression.

  “I saw it pop out from a side road not far from the point where I picked you up.”

  The expression ‘picked you up’ made her feel even more helpless than she really was, but she had to admit it was appropriate to the circumstances. “Are you sure?”

  He chuckled, as if she had asked something funny. “Of course. It’s remained on our heels all the time, but now it’s getting closer, now that the bends are coming.”

  Amelia turned forward. There was a hill in front of them and the road followed its outline. She looked back again. This time she kept the safety belt away from her neck with a hand. The black car was even closer. She sensed a shiver down her spine as she remembered that presence watching her in the cottage, when she’d been tied up and hooded. The same person who had drugged her. Who was it? She still couldn’t understand why they had freed her. She had the annoying sensation that she had somehow ended up in the middle of someone’s depraved game and that this was just the beginning.

  “I don’t get it. I was in their hands. Why have they freed me, if they are trying to take me again now?”

  “Wanna stop and ask them?”

  The black car became closer; the distance wasn’t exactly safe.

  “I’d say no!”

  Mike sped up. Amelia’s body flattened against her seat, but since she was sitting sideways, it wasn’t a pleasant sensation. “Ouch!” She straightened and checked her neck, where a moment later her belt ended up again. “For fuck’s sake …” She moved it to her arm, but with great difficulty, given that it stopped at any movement.

  “I suggest you keep it there, you could need it.”

  She looked in the wing mirror. The other car was so close that she couldn’t glimpse its headlights. It coul
dn’t be coincidence. The road was going up, with a curve on the right. Mike’s car revved down, but he immediately changed gear and stepped on the gas, moving a bit away from his pursuer. The latter gained on them again, but didn’t really seem interested in reaching or overtaking them. What did they want? If their intention was to freak them out, they were succeeding. Or at least they were succeeding with Amelia.

  The man beside her, instead, looked almost relaxed. As the bends became tighter, Mike started taking them at high speed, braking at the last moment, before accelerating again as he exited them.

  During the whole manoeuvre she was flipped left and right. Aghast, she kept staring in front of her, avoiding looking at the precipice at her left, which was becoming deeper and deeper, as they gained altitude.

  An impact from the back and her body was pushed forward, but the safety belt stopped, keeping her firmly against the seat. Amelia shouted.

  “Son of a bitch …” were Mike’s words. How could he keep so calm?

  The engine roared and the car gained some advantage over the chaser. Right after, they found themselves taking a hairpin bend. Mike slowed down; the centrifugal force would have taken them right off the road otherwise.

  The black car pulled up alongside them on the right, occupying the other lane, then it steered against them.

  The violent contact made them swerve. Their car’s front left side ended up against the low guardrail while still travelling at high speed. And as it reared up a bit, it bent enough to exceed the height of the protection on the edge of the road.

  Amelia’s world turned sideways again and went upside down, then sideways to the opposite side. For a second she had the sensation she was flying, together with the one of churning guts. Then there was another impact, followed by her world returning straight, but heading down, with trunks and branches coming against her. With a series of violent jolts, the car made its way into the wood clinging to the hill, slowing down and down. At last it stopped with a crash. A bang, and then a big white balloon hit her chest and face. Breathless, she waited until everything stopped, while her airbag deflated and her safety belt kept her tied to the seat, preventing her from falling forward.