by Alan Marble
Shaking her head, the woman was trying her best to stay calm as the children were beginning to grow agitated. “Please. Come with us.”
Jonah could feel the pit of his stomach sinking. He longed to be able to do what she asked; longed to be able to follow them down and to safety, but knew that he could not. “You know I can’t do that. I’ve got to lead them away from here. Don’t worry, I know what I’m doing; I’ll be all right.” As if to make his point, he started loading a couple of the shells into the shotgun.
“Please,” she asked one more time, stepping forward and resting a hand on his shoulder.
“You know I can’t,” he repeated, shaking his head. Setting the weapon down on a desk at the side, he gently but firmly guided the woman toward the opening in the wall, briefly tousling the young boy’s hair. “I’ll meet up with you in Vegas. Just like we planned. Now go.”
Doing her best to look stoic, the woman took a few steps into the stairway, turning around to look at him with wide eyes. “I love you …”
“I love you too. Three days,” he repeated, then waited until the three of them had disappeared beyond the heavy door below, hearing it latch shut behind them. “Guess Khrushchev was good for something after all,” he murmured. Pushing the bookcase back where it belonged, he took a second to make sure nothing looked out of order and then made his way to the front door.
A loud banging could be heard on the other side, and Jonah frowned grimly, knowing who was on the other side. “Time to play,” he huffed, cocking the weapon before reaching out to unlatch the door and kick it open.
On the other side was a creature, scaly and terrifying, jaws agape and breathing hot, fetid air against him, the force of the dragon’s roar pushing him back a bit as he fought to bring the shotgun up to level.
“Holy shit!” The very ground beneath his feet lurched back and forth, threatening to pitch him down, and when he tried to catch his balance he realized that he was no longer standing but was seated. His flailing hands latched not on to the hard surface of the mantle but grasped something smooth, curved and plasticky feeling. The scene out the window changed as his vision sharpened. Rolling green hills rose up in the distance, but in the foreground was a building of some sort, surrounded by asphalt; a parking lot.
“Decided to join the land of the living, at last?”
Turning around, Jonah had to shake a little confusion from his mind as his eyes settled on the redheaded woman sitting next to him, flashing something of a smirk in his direction. She was sitting in front of a steering wheel, he was sitting in the cab of a truck. The events of the night before came rushing back to his conscious thought, everything that he had wished were a nightmare making itself ugly reality once again.
Reaching up to hold a hand over his eyes and rub at his temples, Jonah groaned. “Christ. I was dreaming … a nightmare ...”
“I guess so,” she said with a little shrug, pushing the door open and stepping out into the sunlight. “Was beginning to wonder if you’d ever wake up. Come on, let’s get a bite to eat. I don’t know about you but I’m starving.”
A deep rumble in his stomach agreed with her assessment, and he merely nodded with a weary sigh. Pushing the door open and stepping out onto a somewhat gravelly parking lot, he squinted into the sky and noticed the sun was already high overhead. “How long was I out?”
“Ten, twelve hours?” She merely shrugged as she turned toward the building where they had stopped, a small roadside cafe of some sort.
“Twelve hours?” He blinked incredulously at the thought. He’d never been one to sleep very well in a moving car, and the idea that he could have been out for that long seemed ridiculous on its face, even in light of the events that had unfolded the night before. “Where the hell are we?”
Before she answered he looked around again, trying to get his bearings. The landscape was all wrong - far too hilly to have been anywhere near Southern Florida. It had the feel of a small town along the side of some highway, or perhaps the outskirts of some larger town, but he couldn’t quite be sure. As he looked around, a small platoon of motorcycles rumbled their way down the highway, heading in the direction of the hills. “Ever hear of Deal’s Gap?”
Turning to look at her with a frown, Jonah sputtered. “Deal’s Gap? The Dragon’s Tail?”
“Tail of the Dragon,” she corrected with a smirk. “Thought you were mister sport bike enthusiast.”
Deal’s Gap - otherwise known as the Tail of the Dragon - was a stretch of highway that twisted and turned its way through the Great Smoky Mountains. It was also a world famous destination for motorcycling enthusiasts who regularly descended upon the location to test their skill and mettle against the numerous hairpin corners. A few of the guys in the riding group back home even sported little decals on their bikes proclaiming that they’d made the run a few times, themselves.
Still, it was supposed to have been up in the mountains, not in some small town. Jonah shook his head a little. “This doesn’t look anything like the pictures I’ve seen …”
“Haven’t been there yourself? That’s a shame. Technically you’re right, though,” she said, pointing up the highway with her thumb. “It was about half an hour back that way. You slept through the entire thing. Don’t know how you managed that.”
“So you mean to tell me that we’re in Tennessee,” he said, flatly.
She nodded with an overly perky smile, probably just to irritate him, as she held the door to the little diner open. “Yup. Come on, enough of the chitchat. I’m starving.”
Begrudging and bewildered, Jonah followed in with a little shake of his head. The last time he’d so much as left the state of Florida was to visit his grandparents in New York, and that had been the first year of college. The thought that they could have driven to Tennessee, that he had slept the entire time, was a difficult one for him to process.
A waitress wearing too much makeup guided them over to an empty table that abutted the front windows where he could see outside and watch the stream of motorcycles continuing to come and go, seeming to corroborate her story that they were only just down the highway from Deal’s Gap after all. They were provided with a couple of dingy menus that looked like they hadn’t been changed for years, and a pair of tall glasses of water. Jonah realized that he was every bit as thirsty as he was hungry, and attacked his own glass with abandon.
It didn’t take long for them to place their orders. Jonah had opted for a large omelet with sausage, his body hungering for breakfast in spite of the fact that it was apparently into the afternoon. His companion, Rebekah, had hardly looked at the menu and had decided to order a twenty ounce steak, rare. The waitress had asked her if she was sure about that and she’d only responded with a cheery nod of her head.
Neither bothered speaking while they waited for their order to arrive. Jonah spent the whole time looking back and forth from the scene outside the window to his companion. None of it made any sense, of course; he was still quite convinced that this was either some strange dream or someone’s sick sense of humor.
Rebekah herself was a sort of contradiction in his mind. At once playful and serious, he didn’t know how seriously he could take her. Even now as he turned to look in her direction she flashed him a strange sort of smile, one that he couldn’t read. Was she being friendly? Was she mocking him? He didn’t know if he could tell the difference. If she was part of a weird conspiracy to make him look stupid then of course it was all a front. If she was a figment of his imagination, it would be even more confusing - he had no idea why he would imagine her of all people.
He was equally conflicted about what he thought of her. She was not what he would describe as his type, between the unruly red hair, the outdated flannel shirt that she was wearing, and the carefree, unserious manner in which she presented herself. Yet he could not help but to find something oddly infectious about her, something that threatened to draw him in. Jonah was becoming aware that he was attracted to her on some curious level, a r
ealization that was making him slightly uncomfortable.
Their meal arrived, mercifully in time to derail that train of thought. The food in front of him instead commanded his attention, his stomach instantly rumbling at the smell of it. An enormous cylinder of eggs drizzled in some kind of cheese sauce and topped with mushrooms, it spoke to his hunger and left him incapable of thinking of anything else while he dug in, assisted by a healthy use of the Tabasco bottle.
Unsurprisingly, not a word was spoke the entire time they ate, either. Halfway through the oversized omelet he began to realize just how much food had been plunked down in front of him. Pausing to sit back and let his stomach settle a little, he was shocked when he looked up at Rebekah’s plate. She had been served a rather massive chunk of beef to begin with, and while he’d not been paying any attention to her she had managed to down almost the entire thing. Little more than a few bites of meat were left on her plate, a bloody mess from the rare steak left behind.
Part of him wanted to be disturbed or disgusted at the sight, but he found that instead he was simply amazed, staring. “Don’t you think you’re taking this whole ‘dragon’ thing a little far?”
She stopped to look up at him with a briefly confused stare, her jaw pausing in mid-bite, and then she simply furrowed her eyebrows at him. “Not sure what you are talking about,” she murmured around the piece of meat, chasing it down with a swig of her water.
“Come on. Dragging me on up here through the Tail of the Dragon. Mowing down a slab of beef so rare that it’s practically still mooing at you. Yeah, I get it. You’re a dragon. So you’ve said. You think this little show is going to convince me of something?”
“No,” she responded innocently enough, sitting up and dabbing at the corners of her mouth and continuing to look at him in a way that was either genuinely confused or mocking, he couldn’t tell. “For one thing I happen to like my steak rare, and I haven’t eaten since yesterday, so I’m a little hungry. Pardon me if it doesn’t seem ladylike to you.”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean it that way,” he muttered.
Shrugging it off, she continued. “Anyway, I didn’t bring you through here to convince you of anything. I just happen to have been by this way a few times and just happen to like the food here, and it’s only just a little detour from our route, anyway.”
“Just where the hell are you taking me, anyway? You still haven’t even bothered telling me that.”
“I haven’t?” She shrugged a little and took her time in responding, stabbing another bit of her steak with a fork and looking at it thoughtfully. “I thought I had. Well, anyway. We’re heading to Detroit.”
Jonah gaped at her openly at that, looking around him as if he expected someone to jump out at that very moment and announce that he was on camera. “Detroit? As in, Michigan?”
Chewing on the little bit of meat, she leveled a humorless look at him. “Do you know of any other Detroits?”
“Well, no …”
“Then that’s where we are headed,” she deadpanned.
It was too much for him. He couldn’t fathom why he had put up with the situation for as long as he had; but to be told that he was going to have to follow her all the way up to Detroit was beyond ridiculous. “All right, all right. I think I’ve had enough of this … nonsense. Whatever you want to call it. There’s no way I am going with you to Detroit.”
With a vague sort of shrug, Rebekah continued to stab at her food a little absentmindedly. “No? Why not?”
“Because … because it’s insane. I don’t even know what the hell I am doing here, right now. I should be back at home. Hell, I should be at work. Do you realize that the cops are probably out looking for me right now? God,” he said with a pause, shaking his head. “The freakin' police are looking for me. I’m some kind of fugitive.”
“You’re probably right about that,” she responded rather nonchalantly.
Once again he gaped at her openly, leaning forward in his seat some. “Are you serious? Like it’s no big deal or something? Do you even realize what kind of trouble I could be in … what kind of trouble I will be in? I’m pretty sure that transporting a fugitive is a crime, too, you know. What do they call it? Aiding and abetting?”
“Something like that.” Using a bit of bread that had been forgotten at the side of her plate, Rebekah swabbed up some of the ruddy juice that the steak had left behind, stuffing it in her mouth and swallowing it loudly. “But, hey, what are you gonna do about it?”
“What am I going to do about it? What am I going to do about it?” Jonah repeated himself with emphasis, glancing around the little diner again, growing flushed with frustration. “I’m going to do what I should have done a while ago. I’m going to get off this crazy train before things get any worse. I’m going to turn myself in to the cops, let them throw me in jail. Maybe they’ll believe me when I say that I ran because I was scared. Doesn’t matter, at least I don’t have to worry about being chased down or getting in any deeper shit than I already am.”
“Suit yourself. Payphone is over by the restrooms.”
Her response caught him a bit flatfooted, and he sputtered angrily in his seat for a moment. Once again she was a contradiction to him; she had fought so hard to pull him from the clutches of the weird man who had attacked him, had done her damnedest to convince him to come along, yet now seemed rather unconcerned with his threat to call the cops, turn himself in and make it all for naught. Her blithe dismissal of his concerns seemed unfair.
“You don’t even care, do you?”
Licking a bit of her food from her fingertips, she looked up and stared right back at him, her bright green eyes seeming to flare up for a second - but her voice remained calm and almost detached. “Look, Jonah, let me explain something to you. I have a pretty simple job to do here. Keep your ass safe and get you up to Detroit. No more, no less. I can keep you safe from the cops, I can try my best to keep you safe from bull drakes or whatever else gets thrown at us, but I’m sure not going to baby you.”
She paused a moment before going on, her tone growing more firm as she went. “You’re a grown man. You make your own decisions. Strange woman shows up demanding to take you to Detroit, and what do you do? Make your own decision. I’m not going to tie you up and drag you along kicking and screaming. If you are that intent on getting yourself in trouble with the cops, getting thrown in jail where there’s nothing I can do to help you anymore, well, be my guest. I’m not going to stand in your way.”
Jonah turned to look back at the payphone, just where she had said it was. She once again did not seem to be paying much attention to him, her own gaze turned back to a pile of mashed potatoes that accompanied her steak. Her indifference made him seethe. Clenching his fists, he pushed back from the table and began to march his way across the restaurant and toward the phones.
He didn't know what would happen, when he called them. They'd probably contact their local counterparts who would show up, detain him at a local police station until he could be extradited back down to Florida. Once there he'd probably rot in a cell until he could be put on trial. The evidence linking him to the murder was circumstantial at best, but his flight to Tennessee certainly wasn't helping make the case for his innocence. He'd probably be sentenced to at least some time in jail.
Still, he thought to himself. It had to be better than putting up with this nonsense. One last glance was cast over his shoulder, where he could see Rebekah seated by the window, plowing through her food as if he didn't even exist. Reaching into his pocket and pulling out his wallet, Jonah fished out the business card he had been given back at the police station, scowling at the numbers, before he picked up the handset.
He hadn't used a payphone in ages. It took him a moment to find where the rate for long distance was posted, digging around in his pocket once more to withdraw enough quarters to feed the machine. Settled in amongst them was the damned silver coin. The sight of it made his mood darken, and he contemplated stuffing it into the coi
n slot along with the quarters. Once more he looked at the digits printed on the little business card, and he sighed.
“Shit,” he growled under his breath. “What the hell am I supposed to do?” Reaching up he let his fingers move across the buttons, punching them in one by one. He felt a knot form up in his throat as the phone began to rang, and finally it picked up.
“Hi! You've reached Donna and Mike,” a pleasant feminine voice answered. “We're sorry we missed your call but we're not in at the moment. Please leave us a message and we'll get back to you soon. God bless!”
Jonah closed his eyes as he stuffed his wallet back in his pocket, letting the business card flutter to the floor. “Hi, mom. It's me, Jonah. Things have been kind of crazy over here, but I wanted to call and let you know I'm ok. I'll call you again soon. I love you.” Setting the handset back on the receiver, he stumbled his way back to the table to sit down heavily.
Rebekah, who had been sitting there the whole time, her plate nearly clean, looked up at him with a slight smirk. “You know, you aren't half bad, Jonah.”
“What do you mean?” He frowned a little at the statement, not quite sure what to make of it.
“Calling your mom like that. That was a nice thing of you to do.”
Her voice was surprisingly gentle and sincere, a rather abrupt shift from the nonchalant and unserious behavior from only moments before. In a strange way it helped to defuse Jonah's growing anger, leaving him feeling deflated, defenseless, and unable to fight against her. He wanted nothing more than for the situation to end, to go home and pretend that none of this ever happened.
He didn't even stop to consider how she had known; there was no way that she could have overheard him across the restaurant. Running a hand over his face, he shook his head. “You know, this whole thing would be a lot easier if you could do something to convince me that you're not all crazy. That this story of yours is even remotely possible.”
“Do something to convince you? You don’t seem very open to what I have to say, Jonah.”
