“We call them these things—swings and hops and dips—to remind us that they always reverse,” Hammond was saying. “When it gets hot, it’s gonna get cold again eventually. Just like what goes up must come down. And what goes down, must come up.”
Taylor was lifted from reverie. “I’m sorry, Captain. What was that last part?”
“I said, what goes down must come back up.”
“Can you elaborate?”
“What?”
“I mean, can you give me an example, Captain? Something other than the temperature.”
“It only has one meaning, boy,” Hammond said with a half-hearted scowl. “You go outside and stand on the road and jump up in the air, and you’ll come right back down. Don’t matter if you jump two feet or two hundred feet, you come back down. You go out and dive into that ocean and you’ll come back up, I guarantee it. Don’t matter if you dive down two feet or two hundred feet, you come back up.”
Taylor shuddered involuntarily at the suggestion. When he was a small child, he’d witnessed two men fighting at a café. A woman had tried to get between them, but one of them pushed her down and the other grabbed the first and flung him over the side rail. Taylor’s mother tried to restrain him, to hide his eyes, but he was too quick for her and he squirmed his way through the crowd that suddenly congealed at the railing to gape into the wet churn below. Hammond was right in that the man had gone down below the reddening surface and then soon came back up, but what came back up was not human any more. The form was pink and white and soundless, and the woman screamed painfully on his behalf.
He chased this memory away with another memory of childhood, one where he and the other children would toss rocks into the water to see what would happen to them. “But what about a stone, Captain?”
“What? Are you a stone? I know I’m not.”
“No, I just mean…” Taylor started. He found these conversations to be a challenge. Though they spoke the same language, there were what he could only describe as conflicts of perspective.
“While you’re yammering, I’m getting hungry,” Hammond said. “Can you get me some dinner and ask stupid questions at the same time?”
Taylor reached back for the refrigeration compartment and pulled out a packaged meal. He tore it open and began to prep it. The heating unit was also in the back, so he faced away from Hammond the whole time, glancing over his shoulder to continue the conversation.
“I just mean to say that heavy objects have been known to sink into the ocean and never come back up.”
“And some folk have told me that they seen birds go so high up into the sky they couldn’t see them no more. I’ll tell you what I told them: eventually, they come back down. And your rocks come back up.”
“Eventually,” Taylor said quietly.
He came back forward with the warmed tray of mushy stuff that passed for food on the road. As Hammond took it, he switched control over to Taylor’s side so he could drive while his captain slurped greedily.
Taylor glanced at his map, folded up on the seat just to his side. It was good that he was documenting the world; that’s what they’d told him at Napis. Then they gave him information on the next few towns, but told him not to document them until he reached them on his own. As he listened to Hammond eat, Taylor’s stomach burned and he rubbed it involuntarily before realizing the sensation was entirely imaginary.
“What goes up must come down and what goes down must come up,” Hammond said between bites. “Otherwise what goes is what’s lost.”
*
The next day, Taylor could see there was something wrong with Hammond. He was quiet and his eyelids sagged. The captain drove a shorter shift than usual before switching control of the truck over to the right side so Taylor could drive.
The day after that, it got worse. Hammond wouldn’t talk about it, but Taylor could see the pain on his face. He tried to keep his hands on the wheel, but once in awhile he would involuntarily reach for his side and betray an abdominal pain he was trying to hide.
“Tell me where it hurts,” Taylor said when he could no longer pretend that nothing was wrong.
“Don’t worry about it,” Hammond said without looking at him. His jaw clenched.
“I can drive if you want to lay down.”
Hammond didn’t respond right away. After a few minutes, he grabbed his left ribcage with his right hand and sucked in a short breath through his teeth.
“Shit. Okay, boy. I need you to drive.”
Taylor wasn’t sure what was more painful: the disturbance in Hammond’s midsection or the admission that he couldn’t drive. Taylor took control of the truck and watched over his shoulder as the captain hiked himself up the ladder to the bunk above.
He wondered if his captain felt any fear. Fear of an unknown pain. The human body’s warning system sounding the alarms. Appendicitis. Kidney failure. Liver failure. Hammond never took any drugs, never drank a drop of alcohol as far as Taylor could see. That was one of the rules of the road: substance abuse was a violation of trust. But the cleanest person in the world can still suffer from an inflamed appendix. Or stomach cancer. Or food poisoning. An unplanned foreign invasion.
He held his breath for a moment and listened; was Hammond moaning in the bunk above his head? No. He could hear nothing but the road sliding underneath his truck and the other trucks around him.
A few hours later Hammond came back down and took over the drive, but he only lasted an hour before he started clutching his ribcage again.
“Taylor,” he said quietly. “You’re going to have to keep moving. Don’t stop. And don’t sleep.”
“Of course, Captain.”
Taylor drove on through the night. They were a few days away from the next town. He had been driving for nearly eighteen hours straight, with only an hour break in the middle when Hammond last tried to drive. There was no stopping on the highway, and he wondered how long he could keep it up. His fingers itched for the quadrant, to rectify the lack of measurements, but it was impossible to use while driving. Instead, he watched the sun disappear and the stars fade in. Watched the road roll out before his headlights, watched it melt away in his mirrors.
A shape came out of the darkness to his right. It was a hole in the night, a black form against the black road. He blinked and squinted. It was a vehicle, but it was so dark, so black. It hovered on his right side for a few minutes and then slid forward on the road like a raindrop sliding down glass. Just a bump in the darkness of the road. It had no lights, and Taylor wanted to get behind it so his truck’s headlights would illuminate the thing, but suddenly the form decelerated, flying past him on the right and disappearing behind him.
Taylor looked in his mirrors but he could see nothing except a few headlights in the distance. They were truck headlights, he could tell by their shape and placement. What he’d seen was much too low to the ground to be a truck.
*
In the morning, Taylor got about two hours of sleep in his driver’s seat while Hammond fought through the pain to steer the truck.
“Boy. Wake up.”
Taylor yawned and rubbed his forehead where it had pressed against the glass. “How are you feeling?”
“Like shit.” The older man frowned. “I’m sorry, Taylor.”
He looked at Hammond as he tried to rub some consciousness into his eyes. “You need a doctor.”
“We need to keep driving.” After a few short breaths, he said in a low voice, “It must have been that damned whore.”
“What?”
Hammond sighed as hard as he could and still bear the pain. “Back in Napis. I brought her back to my room. She was gone in the morning.”
“You think,” Taylor started, and then stopped. “What, exactly?”
“The bitch poisoned me is what.”
“Why would she do that?” Taylor coughed to hide the nervous quivering of his voice. “So she could rob you?”
“Untrustworthy,” Hammond muttered. “Slow poison.
I’ve heard of it happening to other drivers. Some sicko gives you a slow poison and then knows you’ll be long gone before it hits. Long gone and never coming back to town.”
“But why?”
“Just for fucking kicks, I guess.”
They were silent for a while.
“I saw a black cruiser,” Taylor said.
“What?”
“Last night. I saw it, just like you described it. A hole in the road.”
Hammond almost laughed but held back with a short cough. “You didn’t see nothin’, boy. You’re off sleep for how long now? You’re seeing shit that ain’t there.” Taylor replayed the words in his mind in the silence that followed. He pictured the face that Hammond made when he said them, and he listened to Hammond’s voice. There was fear hidden beneath the arrogance.
*
It was late in the evening when the cruiser came back. The sun was low, and the sky and the ocean were orange, sinking into red. The matte black vehicle pulled up along their right side and for the first time, Taylor got a good look at it. It was not unheard of for drivers to take non-hauling vehicles onto the highway, but it was extremely rare, and in all the years that he spent watching the traffic roll past his home town of Greco, he never saw anything that small.
The car had four wheels and no joints. The shape of it was like a wedge, with a point at the front that grew in a curve toward the back. There were two seats up front and a space behind them, in the same cabin but separated by a barrier. Two figures sat in the front, wearing goggles and black helmets that curved down far enough to cover their ears. The back was empty.
Hammond didn’t have the strength—or possibly the will—to climb up into the bunk any more, so he dozed in his seat. Taylor reached across the cab and shook the older man awake.
“The cruiser is back, Captain.”
Hammond blinked and looked around for a few minutes. The cruiser pulled forward and merged into their lane and his eyes followed it. Taylor imagined that his captain was trying to decide whether or not he was dreaming.
“Keep away from it,” he said weakly, and then cleared his throat. “Get behind that truck over here to the left. See the blue carrier two lanes over?”
Taylor slowed down just enough and checked his mirrors and jumped two lanes across as fast as he dared to move the truck. The cruiser dropped back and disappeared somewhere behind them.
“We gotta get cover. Pull out to the right again and get in front of this one.”He complied, taking their truck back into the lane he just crossed over and speeding up. As they came even with the blue carrier, Hammond looked out and motioned to the assistant in the right side of its cab. The other truck slowed and Taylor pulled to the left.
“Okay, good.” The distraction from his pain seemed to give Hammond new life. “Now let’s just hope these fellas stay with us. Speed up and close the gap between us and that brown hauler up ahead.”
The truck he was referring to was another two hundred meters up the lane. Taylor accelerated and the blue carrier behind them kept pace. As they got close to the brown truck, it pulled off into the right lane.
“No, dammit!” Hammond looked in his mirror, prompting Taylor to do the same. The blue carrier was also pulling to the left, revealing the black cruiser sitting just behind them.
“Go right. Go between them, and to the right. Shake this bastard loose.”
So it went for nearly an hour. Other trucks on the road were usually compliant with Hammond’s gesturing requests, but would eventually peel away once they spotted the black cruiser. The traffic thinned around them, opening up a full view of the deadly storm-blue water split by the empty black road.
“Weren’t that whore,” Hammond said.
Taylor could feel his heart-rate spike as adrenaline shot through his body like electricity. “What do you mean?”
“It’s like what I was sayin’ before. What goes up, gotta come back down. What goes down gotta come back up. If you think what goes just goes, then you’re just lying to yourself.”
“Captain?” Taylor gripped the wheel hard to keep his hands from shaking.
“What I mean is, I got what was comin’ to me.” Hammond put up a hand before Taylor could respond. “Just shut up and listen now, boy. I drove with the same captain for fifteen years. Captain Jonesey. He taught me everything I know. But he was slow. You only have so many years in this life, so many years on this road. I wanted to get back.”
“Back?”
“Back home. Back around. I know I said it ain’t a loop, and I mean it. It is and it isn’t. I’ve seen some towns two or three times. But some places, I only seen once.”
Taylor blinked his drying eyes, itching to reach for his notebook. His measurements, his numbers, his map; his budding collection of indisputable facts. “How can that be,” he said, the question coming out flat.
Hammond pinched his side between his thumb and fingers and sucked in air. “This is how Jonesey went out too. Poison. I watched his pain carry him out of this world and into the next. When he was weak, I dropped him in. I watched the ocean eat him like fire burning away oil.”
“I’m not sure I understand.” Taylor watched the black cruiser crawl closer in the rear view mirror. They’d told him about Hammond’s crime, but not the details.
“I want to tell you this so that you know, boy. So you see that I never got away with it. It weren’t that whore that poisoned me. It was you, wasn’t it, boy? You want my truck.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Taylor said softly.
“I just wanted to get back home,” Hammond said airily, as though not speaking to Taylor but to some unseen entity. “But it’s gone.”
“Maybe it’s time for you to go,” Taylor said.
“Yeah, it’s time. Time for me. But someday, it will be time for you. This road will get you. And then the Law gets you.”
Fire spread through Taylor’s chest. For all his tirades and rules, Hammond was a lowly murderer. Not just a murderer, but had taken the life of his own captain, wilting him with poison and dumping him into the seething ocean.
“And what about trust?” Taylor felt strength in his voice. “I thought we didn’t need the Law, thanks to trust?”
“Well, that’s just bullshit, ain’t it, boy?” He laughed, a short and unamused sound, and looked out his window. “I kinda wish you threw me in that ocean, like I did to Jonesey. After fifteen years of being afraid of something, I just want to go out there and let it burn me right up.”
The cruiser had a lock on them. All the other trucks vanished from the road, pulling ahead or falling behind until none were in sight for hundreds of meters. The cruiser pulled up along the right side until it drifted into Taylor’s blind spot. There was a clanging sound from somewhere behind the cab of the truck.
“They hooked us,” Hammond said. “Unlock the rear access door. Might as well let them in. They’ll cut it open if they have to.”
Taylor unlocked the door and a moment later it opened. He took his eyes off the road long enough to look back and see one of the troopers standing on the joint between the truck and the load. He had a gun drawn.
“Kenton Hammond. You are under the arrest for the murder of Carl Jones. Do not resist or I will use force.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Hammond said loud enough to be heard over the rush of the road coming through the open door. “I surrender. Ya got me.”
The trooper stepped in as Hammond got up and held his hands up over his head. Stooping in the cabin, he winced and picked his way to the rear door.
The captain turned one last time to face Taylor. “I guess you’re captain now. Captain Taylor. Well, good luck out there, Captain. There’s gonna come a day when you wish you could see home again. And you’ll figure in that smart head of yours, with your numbers and your drawings, you’ll figure that the whole road loops around. You’ll figure that if you keep going, you’ll get back home. Maybe you will. Or maybe you won’t. Maybe it won’t be there any more. Jone
sey tried to teach me the same thing. But I didn’t believe him. And I threw him into the goddamn waves.”
The images of that day from Taylor’s childhood flooded into his mind unwelcome. The bloody churn as the once-man boiled away into the hungry ocean. Her screams, the wrenching sounds he never knew were possible to come out of a human throat. She was Taylor’s favorite teacher, the one who’d gifted him the old coin.
His eyes grew wet with the pain of the memory, the vision of her leaping into that terrible frothing maw, a desperate, futile attempt to save the love of her life. As his mother pulled him away, Taylor knew in that moment that someday he would grow up and leave that place forever.
“Not everything that goes down comes back up.” Taylor said softly to himself. “Some things are just lost.”
Hammond huffed once, then again, turning it into a short painful laugh. “Old Jonesey must’ve come back up. That’s how come they come to get me. That right, Lawman?”
The trooper didn’t respond. He silently led Kenton Hammond out of the truck and off the joint. Taylor turned his mirror at an angle so he could see the cruiser hooked to the side of their truck. His truck. The other trooper was still in the driver’s seat of the cruiser. The first one led Hammond through a hatch on the top-left side of the vehicle and into the back area, then closed the hatch. He came back onto the truck.
Taylor looked back at the rear door and saw the trooper come in just far enough to be heard.
“Thank you for your assistance, Mr. Taylor.”
“Are you the same one from Napis?” Taylor asked. He couldn’t see the trooper’s face.
“No. But I heard about you. Heard you’re making a map.”
“Yeah,” Taylor said absently. “That’s allowed, isn’t it? I’ve never seen a map of the highway and I always wondered why.”
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