by Ray Garton
She closed the phone and dropped it onto the seat. Two minutes later, she drove her Nissan Sentra into the radio station’s parking lot. Once she’d parked and killed the engine, she couldn’t get out of the car fast enough and became clumsy in her rush. She dropped her purse, bent over to pick it up, then dropped her keys. She kicked the door shut and jogged through the choking, windy heat to the employee entrance as she dug her cardkey out of her purse. After slipping the card into the slot, she pushed the door open, walked into the air-conditioned corridor and ran for her office.
Russ Campbell’s voice came over the speakers inside the station. He was in the middle of another of his rants, blaming everything from the war to the weather on the left.
In her office, Chloe snatched a folder full of papers off her desk. She spun around, went back into the corridor, and jogged toward the studio.
Russ would be a problem. He would not sit still for an interruption during his show, especially by Chloe, and especially for something as unprofessional as a personal message to a single listener in a car somewhere in the city, whether it was an emergency or not. She hoped Albert Frost was running the board. He was young and sweet and had a bit of a crush on her.
The only possible problem she might encounter other than Russ would be Kevin. If he were already in the news booth, he would ask questions. He could always tell when she was lying.
Chloe rounded the corner, raced down the hall, and stumbled to a halt outside the windows that looked in on the studios. Through the window on the right, she saw Russ standing at his mic, gesticulating as he talked. On the left, she saw Albert at the board, and beyond him, she could see through another window into the smaller news studio. It was empty—Kevin wasn’t there. She looked up and down the corridor. No one else was in sight.
She looked at Albert again. He was in his late twenties, a geek who’d been working in radio since he was in high school. As Russ continued to yammer on over the speakers, she went into the main studio and closed the door behind her. Albert looked up from the board and smiled at her.
“Hi, Chloe,” he said, a nervous quaver in his voice.
She smiled and said, “Hello, Al,” then held up the folder as she headed for the news booth without pausing. “I’ve got to break in with a new update.” She did not identify what kind of update, knowing Albert would assume she was talking about the fires and new evacuation announcements.
“Oh, okay. I’ll tell Russ to wrap and give you an intro.”
As Albert turned to his board, Chloe went into the news booth and closed the door. She sat down at the board, placed the folder in front of her and opened it. She briefly thought about what she wanted to say.
She put on her headset, adjusted the microphone and listened as Russ said, “We’re going to take a break now for a new update on new evacuations. The wildfires are only getting worse, folks, so listen up for details. After a commercial, I’ll come back and take your calls.”
Through the window, Chloe watched Albert pot her up on his board then give her a nod.
“This is Chloe Selaski in the KNWS newsroom,” she said into the mic, turning her eyes down to the board. She spoke faster than usual, but clearly and crisply. “If you are taking the prescription antidepressant Paaxone, you’ve been unable to refill your prescription lately. That’s because the manufacturer, Braxton-Carville, has diverted shipments of the drug from this market and it is unavailable here. We don’t know why yet, but we do know that stopping the drug abruptly can cause deadly side effects, including violent and/or suicidal behavior. And we know that Braxton-Carville has diverted these shipments knowing full well that some users will suffer from severe and dangerous withdrawals. If you’ve had to stop this drug because of its unavailability, you need to get to a doctor immediately before you begin experiencing these dangerous side effects, which we believe have already caused violent incidents in the Santa Vermelha area.”
Albert was staring at her, mouth hanging open, eyes a little wider than normal.
Beyond the window in the next studio, Russ was frowning through the glass at her.
She spoke a little faster as she said, “Eli? Eli, it’s Chloe. I know you’re in the car listening. What I just said applies to you. You need help. You’re ill. You’re having a withdrawal reaction to Paaxone, and you need to get help before you hurt yourself or someone else. You have to pull over and call me. Please pull over and call me!”
Through the glass, Russ’s eyes widened in anger and his mouth began moving rapidly. He pointed a rigid finger at her, then clenched his hand into a fist, mouth still moving.
Chloe only spoke faster.
2.
It occurred to Officer Randy Shaw of the Santa Vermelha Police Department that he’d just about had his fill of smoke. It seemed like it had been thick in the air forever, day and night, and he was sick of it. He wanted all the fires to be put out and the smoke to go away so he could see a blue sky again. It had been so long since the sky had been blue, it was hard to remember what it looked like. Shaw drove his cruiser down Wyeth Street with his partner, Officer Ashley Monk at his side. The crackling voice of the dispatcher occasionally sounded over the radio.
Monk was eating a burrito because she’d spent her lunch hour on the phone with her little sister Amy, who’d needed talking down from a crying jag brought on by the fact that her boyfriend had left her again. Shaw thought Amy was crazier than a bag of cats, but he kept that to himself because he liked Monk and didn’t want to offend her. But it hadn’t been the first lunch hour she’d spent talking Amy down from a crying jag and it probably wouldn’t be the last. Monk had a husband, two kids, friends, and her job on the force. Her sister had problems, nothing but problems.
“When did they start stuffing burritos with rice?” Monk asked as she wiped her mouth with a napkin.
“When did who start stuffing burritos with rice?”
“The burrito people. The people who make burritos. They all do it now. Remember when burritos had meat in them?”
“What, there’s not much meat in there?”
“There’s more meat in a hermit crab. It’s all rice. It’s a cheap filler, so they stuff them with rice and drop in just a little meat and then raise the price.”
“Maybe the government should bail out burrito stands.”
“Maybe I should start packing my own lunch.” She took another bite and chewed for awhile, then said, “Nobody packs their own lunch anymore. Except you, I mean, because you always bring your own lunch. But nobody else does. You ever notice that?”
“Yeah. They all eat fast food. That’s why most people in America look like a Far Side cartoon.”
“Are you saying I’m fat?”
He chuckled. “No, I’m not saying you’re fat. You look great. Everybody else is fat.”
“You’re fat, but you never eat fast food.”
“Yeah, well, I’m fat for other reasons.”
Shaw turned on to Palace Street just in time to see a silver Honda Accord up ahead veer left into oncoming traffic. Other cars honked their horns and squealed to swerving stops and one collided with the back end of another with a muffled crunch. The Accord sped across the lane, bumped up over the curb and onto the sidewalk. It cut through a barrier of low shrubbery into a public parking lot between a bank and a mortgage company. Bumping into the back end of a parked car on the way, it drove through the lot without slowing until it exited on the other side onto Beacham Street and turned left.
“Not so fast, my friend,” Shaw said as he increased his speed along Palace and turned on his blinker prior to turning left on Beacham.
“Hey, hey,” Monk said, dropping her half-eaten burrito into its white paper sack, “that’s our BOLO!”
3.
Chloe’s voice was so unexpected and startling that Eli became confused and even frightened and lost control of the car for a moment.
He’d been driving along, unsure of where he was going, with KNWS playing on the radio. Russ Campbell’s ranting
had been an aural blur outside the chaos that roiled inside Eli’s head. He’d forgotten, once again, that he had a passenger and was unaware of Carrie’s unconscious form in the passenger seat as he kept his eyes locked on the road.
Eli had the inexplicable sensation that his mind—not his body, only his mind—was falling off a cliff and plunging into bottomless nothingness. But there was no finality to it, the sensation never ended. Instead, it repeated like a tape rewinding and replaying again and again. When he tried to think about it and stop it, his thoughts zapped through his mind like needles of electricity. He kept flinching with the zaps, then shaking his head in jerks, trying to clear it.
Russ’s show broke for a commercial and an annoying jingle for a local carpet cleaning service began to play, but Eli hardly noticed. He clutched the wheel as if for life and stared straight ahead with an intense frown cutting lines in his brow. He still had no destination and simply drove. He felt more like he was driving away from something rather than to something, but he didn’t know from what, or why. Then, out of nowhere:
“Eli? Eli, it’s Chloe. I know you’re in the car listening.”
His reaction and the result of that reaction took place within an instant. His back stiffened and his eyes widened and he jerked his head to the right, half expecting to see Chloe seated beside him. Instead, he saw a strange woman slumped in the passenger seat with her head cocked to one side, her mouth hanging open, and blood from her nose dribbling over her lips, and he had no time to remember who she was or how she’d gotten there because when he jerked his head to the right, his concentration was distracted from his driving, and his hands absently steered to the left.
Chloe again: “What I just said applies to you.”
He snapped his head to face front again, and saw a blue Ford Taurus heading straight for him. The Taurus braked with a shriek and sounded its horn as Eli’s foot reflexively slammed down on the accelerator and he steered the wheel more sharply to the left to avoid the oncoming car. His car veered across the opposing lane as other cars stopped suddenly. The car quaked when he hit the curb and he heard the crunch of shrubbery under his tires.
“You’re ill. You need help.”
Eli realized her voice was coming from the radio. He was accustomed to hearing her on the radio, but now she was talking directly to him, and that never happened, not on the radio, not when she was supposed to be reporting the news, and especially during Russ Campbell’s show when Kevin Stamp always did the news. Was he imagining it? Was some kind of trick being played on him?
As if the havoc taking place inside his head had suddenly been projected on the entire world, everything outside spun around the car as he tried to regain control. The front of his car glanced off the back end of a parked Toyota and he steered to the right, away from it, then to the left again to avoid hitting any of the other parked cars. Once he got the car under control, he spotted the exit from the parking lot onto Beacham and he headed for it.
“You’re having a reaction to Paaxone, and you need to get help before you hurt yourself or someone else,” Chloe said.
Eli heard a gurgling sound beside him and turned to see the woman sitting up sluggishly. She leaned forward, resting a hand heavily against the dashboard with her elbow locked. She slowly turned to him with half-open eyes.
Eli struggled through the confusion in his head to remember who she was.
I know her name, I know it, I know—Carrie! That’s it! And I met her... where? In a... a bar! Yes. The Hen House!
The thoughts punished him with piercing razors of pain that cut trenches through the inside of his head.
He faced front again as he came to the parking lot exit.
“You have to pull over and call me,” Chloe said, her voice reaching him through all the chaos. “Please pull over and call me!”
“My head,” Carrie said hoarsely. “Oh, god. What do you want? What’re you gonna do to me?”
Eli ignored her and turned left onto Beacham. Things became okay again—on the outside of his head, anyway. He was in the flow of traffic and had control of the wheel and things seemed to be going smoothly. He tried to remember where Beacham went, where it would take him if he continued to follow it, when a sharp sound cut through his head. At first, he thought it was more of the electrical pain triggered by his thoughts, but that wasn’t it.
It was a siren.
Feeling a cold rush of panic, he looked in the rearview mirror and saw a police car behind him with its overhead lights flashing.
“Oh Jesus Jesus Jesus,” Eli said, and panic made the words coming out of his mouth sounded like gibberish to his own ears.
Beside him, Carrie turned to her left in the seat to look back through the rear window at the police car.
“Help!” she shouted, her voice shrill and deafening in the confined space. “Help me!” She turned toward the door then and hit the button to roll down the window.
“Oh no don’t please don’t do that don’t don’t,” Eli said, clutching the wheel desperately, not wanting to lose control again.
“Eli, it’s the withdrawal from Paaxone that’s making you feel the way you do,” Chloe went on, talking faster and faster. “Just like you suspected, just like you told Roger. You need to pull over, Eli, I’m serious, you need to get help before something terrible happens.”
Once the window was down, Carrie stuck her head out. Clutching the window’s bottom edge, she pulled herself through until she was hanging out of the car from the belly up.
“Help meee!” she screamed. “He’s crazy! He’s gonna hurt me! Please help meee!”
Panic and terror detonated in Eli’s chest. His heart seemed to be trying to pound its way through his ribs as he drove, and he pushed his foot down hard on the gas pedal without realizing he was doing it. He just wanted it to stop, all of it—the painful storm inside his head and all the confusing sound and movement outside—so he could think, that’s all, just think, just find some peace, a little stillness, if only for a moment.
A blurry, jerky picture formed inside his head. Butter Creek. The quiet, the calm, the stability. The beauty, the familiarity, the soothing sound of the water.
He tried to figure out where he was so he would know which way to go to get where he wanted to be.
Butter Creek.
As Carrie hung out of the window screaming, the siren behind him continued to wail.
4.
“Somebody’s not gonna be too happy with Chloe,” Roger said, laughing as he dropped into an enormous beanbag chair by the fireplace, head bandaged, eyes tired, but grinning like a kid.
KNWS played over the speakers that were placed out of sight throughout the house. Chloe had just started speaking to Eli over the air.
Everett listened to the radio as he walked over to the windows in the rear of the room that looked out on the back yard. It was brown outside. Again. Still. Always. Brown and smoky and dim. Even the wind that had been blowing all day could not sweep away the smoke; it only made it swirl and shift with agitation. The section of the yard outside the window was heavily shaded with a couple of willows, a huge tree he couldn’t identify that had leaves as big as his head, and a silk tree that had littered the grass around it with its droppings. He slipped his hands into his pockets, feeling weighed down with fatigue. His shirt was still splotched with caked blood from the violence in his waiting room earlier that day—it seemed like an eternity ago. He thought about how good it would feel to lie down in a bed with fresh, crisp sheets. But he knew he wouldn’t sleep. Not for awhile.
They were in an enormous room with a high ceiling. Roger called it the rec room. Everett turned away from the window and took his time looking everything over. He was impressed. He’d always wanted to live in a house that had such a room.
A beautiful, pristine pool table stood at the center beneath an authentic rectangular billiard lamp hanging over it, with glossy cues on a rack on the wall. A dozen vintage pinball machines and arcade video games stood against the walls
around the room, along with a Wack-A-Mole game, a couple of skeeball lanes, and a small shooting gallery. At the far end of the room were two bowling lanes with pins standing neatly at attention at the ends. High on one wall was a basketball hoop. It would have looked like an arcade if it weren’t for all the expensive dark wood and earth tones, the plush carpeting, and the fancy oak bar in the corner.
Falczek walked silent, nervous circles around the pool table, head bowed. Everett could tell he was thinking, and he was about to start talking. Any minute now.
In the beanbag, Roger listened intently to the radio, then tipped his head back and laughed. “Oh, boy, Russ Campbell is gonna be so pissed!” He laughed some more. “He hates Chloe. Always has. Especially since she developed a drinking problem. Even after she got help and dealt with it. He’s such a prick.” He stood and turned toward Everett and Falczek. “You ever listen to Russ Campbell?”
They didn’t respond.
“He’s a pompous windbag, a real panderer. He makes Limbaugh and Hannity and all the rest sound like Stephen Hawking. I listen to him sometimes just because it’s such a freakshow, and I’ve actually met the ass—”
”We’re gonna have to move fast on this,” Falczek said, still circling the pool table.
Roger stopped talking and looked at Falczek, alert and listening. “What do you think we should do?”
Falczek stopped walking and turned his back to Everett so he could face Roger. Everett walked away from the window and went around the pool table so he could see Falczek’s face.
Falczek looked at no one in particular as he spoke, just stared down at the top of the pool table. “Chloe already got the word out on the radio, but it wasn’t very complete. Just enough to make people pay attention. If they get to me... to us... they’ll want to bury all this if they can, and a few words from Chloe over the radio won’t be much of an obstacle for them. We can’t let them do that. There’s somebody out there looking for me, and if he finds me, he’s gonna shut me up for good. Maybe all of us. The chances of that happening drop as soon as a record is made of everything we know. I could go to the Journal right now with this, and they’d laugh so hard, they’d probably puke. If I were still at the Post... nah, that train left the station long ago.” He lifted his head and looked at Roger. “You’re the rich guy. You’ve got funds. Resources. Any suggestions?”
