Pressure (Book 1): Fall

by Thomson, Jeff

  Dani had woken to find herself zip-tied to a stanchion that held a small, rectangular table. Her head hurt, in front and on the side. Her breast hurt. Her stomach felt queasy, like she could throw up at the slightest provocation. She hadn’t tried to stand.

  The motor home had been moving. She could feel it bounce along the contours of a road, leaning crazily as it sped around some unknown curve. The Animal sat at the steering wheel cursing to himself: “Shit! Shit!” she could hear him saying, over and over again, while he pounded the wheel as if for emphasis.

  Please let whoever it was to have called the cops, she thought, squinting through tear-stained eyes at her surroundings.

  She heard a moan off to her left. At first, she thought it came from inside her own throat, but that hadn’t made any sense. Her throat hadn’t been to her left. It hadn’t been more than a dozen feet away at the back of the motor home.

  I’m not alone.

  Her mind registered the thought and fought its way through the pain, but couldn’t quite grasp the concept. It had hung there in the mists of her consciousness - close, but always just out of reach, like a memory she knew was there, but stubbornly refused recollection.

  And then with a bounce and a jolt, the motor home came to an abrupt stop. She’d seen the Animal jam the gearshift up into park, and then he’d leapt out of the seat and had been on her, dragging her to her feet, after cutting the zip-tie and - in his haste - the outside of her wrist.

  He’d slammed her forward over the table and onto her belly, tying her hands underneath, stuffing her mouth with a gag. Her pants and underwear had come down, and then had come his fingers.

  “This pussy is mine, bitch,” he’d hissed. “All mine. It belongs to me. I get to do whatever I want with it, whenever I want. Get it?” When she hadn’t responded, he’d yanked her head back by her hair, shaking it from side to side. “Do you understand?”

  She had tried to nod, but the asshole wouldn’t let go of her hair. And so she had gone inside, down deep in that part of her mind where no one could touch her, where no one could hurt her. And she waited for it to be over.

  “I’m going to give you the fucking of your life.”

  He’d sounded as if he’d meant it, as if he’d be granting her the favor of his sexual prowess. He hadn’t been the first.

  Men (clients, more to the point), fell into four categories: the eager, but shy neophyte, fumbling and nervous and apologetic; the wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am, man on a mission, looking for a quick release, caring nothing for her pleasure; the Good Man, like Jake, lonely and seeking a connection, the sex starting as an afterthought, but once started, becoming an adventure in pleasurable things; and, finally, God’s Gift to Women, thinking that a grudge-fuck equaled the best sex of her life. One out of four were terrible odds.

  The realization struck her like a foam ball filled with razor blades. All this time she’d been making her living in bed, she’d never tallied up the score, never clued into the fact that three out of four “lovers” couldn’t have cared less about her.

  Somewhere in the back of her mind, in that place where uneasy thoughts went to hide, she’d known it all along, of course, but she’d rationalized it away. What was it Jeff Goldblum had said about rationalizations in The Big Chill? Try going a single day without a juicy one?

  She provided a service - a needed, compassionate, honorable service that gave lonely people respite from an empty life. And so any down side could be put away for the Greater Good.

  What a load of bullshit! She chided herself as the Animal continued pounding away, one hand wrapped in her hair, the other squeezing the flesh of her hip like a stress ball: self-delusion wrapped in self-importance, and served up on a silver platter of pseudo-psychological justification to help her get through the day. And all it took was one single animal raping her to pull the scales from her eyes.

  The walls come tumbling down . . .

  NO! She screamed at herself. I will NOT let this happen! The walls will NOT come down! They will NEVER come down! I will FIGHT!

  With a deftness born of having done it dozens of times, regardless of what position she found herself being screwed in, she slipped off her sneaker and pulled her right foot out of the restraining jeans and underwear. The Animal didn’t notice. Most men never did. The rhythm of his groin slapping her backside didn’t change as she slid her freed foot back, searching for his toes. And when she found them, she stomped.

  He howled in pain, released her hair, released the vice-grip on her hip and stumbled back. She couldn’t see, but heard him slam against the far wall, the Venetian blinds crinkling with the impact. “Bitch!” He roared.

  Using her tied arms beneath the table as a fulcrum, she kicked back with both feet, hoping against hope that her internal radar would paint a bull’s-eye on his balls.

  She missed.

  And then the beating began.

  Nine

  “Ye shall know the truth and

  the truth shall make you mad.”

  Aldous Huxley

  1

  Geyser Basin

  Yellowstone National Park

  The Park’s road network looked like a figure-eight drawn by a first-grader, with one circle atop the other, rather than a single line crossing back on itself. Four artery roads spread out from it in the four cardinal directions: North, South, East and West, giving name to the four gates of the park. The Park Headquarters, where Maggie’s evacuation bus originated, sat just to the east of the North Gate, but US 89, the road north, had been blocked, so the driver headed south, along the western perimeter road, toward the West Gate.

  During the summer, this presented a scenic and winding, but relatively easy drive over well-maintained roads, but this was not summer. A blanket of snow had drifted over the asphalt, under the influence of the chilling winter winds, and drifts of up to four feet in spots had to be negotiated carefully, lest the bus get stuck, or go plummeting off one of the many cliffs along its side. And like the eastern perimeter road out to Yellowstone Lake, the asphalt had buckled in several places. So the bus crept and bounced, crept and bounced along the twenty-one-mile length to where the first crudely-drawn circle met the second, at the Norris Geyser Basin. The trip, which normally took a leisurely forty minutes, had taken nearly three times that long, and the bouncing ride had not done Maggie’s bladder any good at all.

  “I have to pee,” she confessed to Doctor Shintake, with whom she shared a seat.

  He waved his elegant hand at what she at first thought was the great outdoors, which at the moment consisted of the pungently sulphuric Geyser Basin, but then he pointed to an understated, yet ornate, wood and stone building: The Visitor’s Center. “Perhaps we can get the driver to stop,” he said in his mild voice.

  And then the Basin erupted.

  It began with a rumble, deep and distant at first, as if from a far off herd of bison. But then the rumble turned into a roar, and the ground beneath their feet jumped, as if they’d just hit the mother of all potholes. Great clouds of steam came jetting up from the many geysers, as if Mother Nature had flipped a switch and turned them all on at once. When they exploded, Maggie had to pee no more.

  2

  Las Vegas, Nevada

  With the sobering thought that they were venturing into a world of chaos filled with desperate people thinking only for themselves, Jake urged, cajoled and pushed Mary into his SUV and headed for Gunter’s Gap. But first, he stopped at the grocery store.

  “What are we doing here?” she asked. Molly Noodle stuck her face between them to offer her two cents in the form of a snort. She seemed to be saying, Don’t forget the dog food.

  Jake scratched her golden, furry chin, and replied: “We need supplies, Mommy Dearest.”

  “Why don’t we just pick up fast food along the way?”

  “The supplies we need are of a more long-term nature.”

  Having watched the bad news all through the night, and having spent a week in New Orleans after Katrina,
he understood what kind of disaster they were driving into, and the many things ordinarily taken for granted that simply aren’t to be had for love nor money in a disaster area. Obvious stuff like food and water were a given, and easily explained, but things like vitamins, coffee, diapers and baby wipes, toilet paper, coffee, toothpaste, soap, shampoo, and good dear God COFFEE were just as important, if not more so, because they were usually forgotten in the wake of all Hell breaking loose.

  He knew these things, but he also knew it would take far too long to explain it to her, so he simply said, “Ian and Frank will need stuff, Mom. No telling how long it’ll be before things get back to normal enough for the stores up there to be fully stocked again.” Frank was his cousin, Ian’s daughter, Francine.

  “You’re exaggerating.”

  “Am I? Let’s go inside and see.”

  3

  Grocery Store

  Las Vegas, Nevada

  They weren’t the first people in there - not by a long shot. The massed and chaotic effort to clear the shelves of anything and everything hadn’t yet begun, but Jake could tell by the frantic way people were stuffing their shopping carts, the melee was not far off.

  There were only two, one-gallon bottles of drinking water hiding at the back of a lower shelf. Jake took them both and added a half-dozen bottles of distilled water to his cart. The cases of single bottles were all gone.

  In the Baby-aisle, all the baby food was gone, but he managed to find a bag of diapers. Mary eyed him as he stuck it on the rack underneath.

  “Something you’re not telling me?”

  “Yes, Mother. I’m pregnant,” he said without missing a beat. He tossed the two remaining canisters of baby wipes in as well.

  “Very funny.”

  “I thought so.” He added four bottles of baby vitamins and two of baby shampoo, as she backhanded him in the chest. “Ow!” he said. “Knock it off.”

  “The beatings will continue until you explain what you’re doing,” she demanded, stepping in front of the cart.

  “You’re awfully violent for a midget.” This was an old jibe, guaranteed to get her goat. Ever since he’d grown taller than her five-foot, three-inch frame, he’d called her his “favorite midget,” and her response had always been the same one she gave him then.

  “The advantage of being a midget is that I’m closer to where it really hurts,” she said, meaning his nether regions. “Best you remember that.” She gave him an evil smile. “Now, spill. What’s going on?”

  “Look around you, Mother,” he said, indicating the quickly-emptying shelves with a wave of his hand. “If it’s like this when we’re not in an actual disaster area, what do you think it’ll be like when we are?”

  She looked around, saw what he meant, gave him an annoyed stink-eye, then nodded once and got out of his way. Subject closed.

  They found and then added a couple dozen cans of soup, vegetables and some pretty disgusting chili, along with four large bottles of multivitamins. And then his olfactory senses picked up the pungent and delightful aroma of coffee.

  He turned the already-laden cart into the coffee and tea aisle and marveled at the plenty before his eyes. None of the other panic-shoppers had thought to hit it yet. Dozens of brands and hundreds of containers lined the shelves: medium roast, dark roast, French and Italian roast, ground and whole bean, decaf and instant; anything anyone could possibly want or desire in terms of legal speed. God Bless America. He filled the rest of his cart, heaping the middle into a precarious hill of caffeine.

  How long would this abundance last? With the road network smashed, relief going mainly to those areas most affected, and shortages of everything, including the fuel required to transport it all, how long would this aisle of plenty remain? He didn’t know, couldn’t know. All he could do was grab as much as the cart would hold, and then go. So he did.

  He and the unwieldy load in his cart made it almost all the way to the checkout line before he remembered Miss Molly Noodle. He left Mary holding their place in line and went to grab a couple bags of dog food.

  He pulled the max amount of cash out of the ATM and added it to the wad he’d pulled out the night before. He would have stopped off and picked up more ammo, but number one, it was too damned early, and two, he wasn’t quite ready to let Mary know he’d taken her gun.

  4

  Truck Stop

  Winnemucca, Nevada

  “...No, Stan, the word on the news is that Reno is a disaster area,” Charlie said into his cellular phone. “And the last damned thing I wanna do is bring a truckload of guns into a disaster area.”

  “You’ll do what you’re told to do, Rhodes,” Stan Grabowski replied. He was Charlie’s Driver Manager, and aside from the fact that the guy was a blithering idiot, a total dickhead, and had no clue what he was doing, he was exactly the man Charlie would have picked for the job. “Or you’ll find yourself unemployed.”

  Charlie sat parked at yet another truck stop - this one in the bustling metropolis of Winnemucca, Nevada. He’d been listening to the radio for the last several hours and all of the news had been bad. He’d stopped for exactly the reason he’d told Stan: driving into a disaster area with a load of weapons was an intensely bad idea. So he’d checked in to see if - hope against hope - the Powers that Be at his trucking company had an alternate plan. Clearly, his hopes had been dashed.

  The man’s threat was idle, at best. Not that the fuck-nut wouldn’t fire him. Charlie was under no illusion as to that. But unlike most other professions in most other industries, in this economy (that had recovered from the crash quite nicely, provided you were a rich bastard Wall Street asshole or banker or heavy contributor to either political party, but not for the common shmuck who actually needed to work, just to make ends meet) the trucking industry was an employees market. Every single trucking company was hiring, since the industry as a whole was short fifty thousand drivers, or more, depending upon which report one might read. All Charlie had to do was stand still and he’d get two or three job offers. So the threat of sudden unemployment didn’t carry the same weight as it might, were he not a driver.

  Part of him wanted to tell Stan to pound the job up his ass with a jackhammer, but another part – a more reasonable part – thought it might be less-than wise. Still, he had no intention of driving into Reno, not now, and if the news from Yellowstone got worse, not ever. So Charlie just hung up on him, turned his phone off, and satisfied his frustration by calling the phone an asshole.

  Once the word got out that the Governor of Wyoming had called for evacuation, the rumors on the radio had been both rampant and hysterical. Some said it would be catastrophic, some blamed the Liberals, others said it was God’s Wrath, and a few had even suggested it might be a terrorist plot. Ordinarily, Charlie found these call-in show wingnuts to be rather entertaining - at least insofar as it gave him an excuse to yell fucking moron at his radio. But this time, something, some kernel of doubt or paranoia or clairvoyance, or whatever the Hell it was, nagged at the back of his skull, and he found himself unable to discount them out of hand.

  Not the real wombats, of course - not the conspiracy theorists, or the ones who saw terrorists hiding under every third bush. Those people Charlie had no problem discounting. But the ones who talked of catastrophe seemed, if not entirely sane, at least somewhat reasonable. And having seen all the documentaries on the supervolcano phenomenon, he couldn’t rule out the possibility.

  Things were going to get bad.

  5

  US-95

  Beginning of Nowhere, Nevada

  There were three ways to drive between Vegas and Gunter’s Gap. The first was not to do it at all. That’s the one Jake liked, but since the only flights into either Klamath Falls or Medford (the nearest airports) connected through either San Francisco (which had been demolished), or Portland (which was worse, if the reports were to be believed), flying had not seemed a viable option. The second was to go through Reno, which while not as ruined as some of the
cities nearer to the coast, was still fairly wrecked, so it didn’t seem like the best idea in the world, either.

  The third was to drive through the middle of freaking nowhere from Lost Wages to Tonopah, Battle Mountain, and Winnemucca (and those were the highlights of the four-hundred and sixty-five some-odd mile trip through Nevada), and thence to Lakeview, Oregon, and on to Klamath Falls. From there it was only an hour of sometimes bone-jarring driving over crappy roads to get to the bustling metropolis of Gunter’s Gap.

  Either driving option took about twelve hours. Jake could do it in one shot, provided he had enough coffee and the occasional fast food joint along the way. But with a woman and a dog in the truck needing to stop every two hours like clockwork, it would make the run a shade over sixteen hours. With that same woman bitching and that same dog barking and a .357 tucked under his seat, a straight run didn’t sound like a good plan.

  At first, the trip progressed in companionable silence. This may have had something (or everything) to do with Mary being sound asleep and quietly snoring in the passenger seat. Jake took the opportunity to plug headphones into his MP3 player and rock out as the miles flew by. But after about an hour of listening to a mix of everything from Alanis Morissette’s Head Over Feet, through Green Day’s American Idiot, and to ZZ Top’s Jesus Just Left Chicago, he started to zone out and his eyes became hypnotized by the empty road stretching out before him into seeming infinity, so he turned off the tunes and just thought. What he thought about was the person snoring and mildly drooling in the seat next to him.

  His mother used to call him her “favorite accident,” until he finally got too tired of hearing it and told her she needed some new material. She had, of course, ignored the suggestion, but in any case, the often-repeated phrase meant he was not the result of a planned pregnancy. She had just turned seventeen, tired of the tedium of small town life, sick of what she thought of as her brother’s oppressive overprotectiveness, and ready for something more; in short, a rebel without a clue. And then she met Mick Fincham, Sperm Donor, and Jake’s so-called father.