by N. M. Brown
Suzy glanced up to see her friend proudly holding a pink plastic speedboat with white seats and some neon coloured stickers decorating the sides. Tina was grinning as she turned the toy over and displayed it like a miniature TV game show hostess.
‘It’s a proper Barbie Wet n Wild boat! I’ve seen these before in Toys R Us, but my mom always said they were too expensive. She always says that,’ Tina sighed in resignation. ‘Hey, we could put both of our dolls into it and sail them around.’ In her mind she imagined the two dolls sitting side by side in the boat as it skipped over crystal waves.
‘I already thought about that,’ Suzy said with a small shrug of her shoulders, ‘but my mom’s cleaning the upstairs of the house, and she’s put bleach down in the bathtub.’
Tina frowned and thought for a moment. She didn’t have a tub in her own home, only an erratic shower that went from freezing to burning in a matter of seconds. After chewing on her bottom lip for a moment, she formed an idea.
‘What about your blow-up pool,’ she suggested, ‘the red one you had out in the yard at Easter?’
Suzy shook her head. ‘That got snagged on a nail in the cellar and ripped along one side. My dad tried to patch it with some sticky black stuff but it didn’t work and all the air came out again just slower.’
Tina sighed and turned the boat over in her hands for a moment. It seemed like the alluring fantasy of the dolls sailing over the ocean waves was slipping away from her. Then she had a sudden flash of inspiration.
‘I know!’ Tina said. ‘We could go across the road to the creek. It rained last week and so there’s probably still some water there.’ The creek in question was a small dusty gully not too far from the girls’ homes. Tina was, however, mistaken in her recollection. What she had thought had been rain tapping on her bedroom window the previous week had only been spray from her mother’s garden hose as she washed the thick grime off her car.
‘Sure,’ Suzy shrugged, ‘but we can only go across there for a little while – my mom’s still to fix lunch some.’
Having hastily gathered the dolls, boat and a matching plastic picnic table together, the two girls left Suzy’s yard and wandered amiably along the roadside. The sun was even hotter as the small pair drifted away from the protective shadow of the houses, towards the small area of colourless trees.
The girls’ journey was a brief one. About a quarter of a mile along the baked road was an unofficial parking area. It was generally only used by contractors stopping for lunch, or occasionally by teenagers looking for somewhere quiet to make out. The ground in that location was littered with crushed fast food wrappers. In a few places, fragments of smashed beer bottles glinted on the ground like emeralds. Tina and Suzy stepped carefully through this minefield and crossed to the narrow dirt track, which wound like a serpent down into the small valley. This was little more than a deep gash in the landscape where the runoff from occasional rainfall would collect, creating a temporary stream, until it eventually drained away into the sandy earth. On that particular afternoon it had been five months since the last rainfall, and despite Tina’s hopes the creek was arid and lifeless.
As the two girls knelt on the edge of the dry riverbed poking sticks in the cracked mud, they were both startled by a strange voice coming from behind and above them.
‘Why, hello there.’
The girls turned to see a tall stranger standing on the rise of ground overlooking the creek. He was dressed in jeans and a faded T-shirt which hung on his scrawny frame like clothes on a scarecrow. As he picked his way down towards them, his feet kicked up small clouds of dust like puffs of smoke.
Eventually, he arrived by the side of the two small girls and crouched down to their level. Although she was too young to articulate it, Tina sensed that he was too close.
‘Wow, you two girls are certainly having a good time,’ he grinned at them, looking gleefully from one small face to another. ‘Is this a new game, you guys are playing?’ the stranger asked.
‘No, we play this all the time,’ Suzy said as she squinted to see a face in the silhouetted figure. The stranger wore metal glasses that reminded Suzy of the ones her great-grandma had worn before she died. He was also wearing a red baseball cap from which tufts of blond hair poked out. Something about the hair seemed familiar to Suzy.
Grinning widely, he shifted his legs and sat fully down on the dusty ground beside the two of them.
‘What are you doing?’ Tina asked. It didn’t seem right for a grown-up to suddenly be there interfering in their game of Barbie dolls, but the stranger seemed unfazed by her question, he just smiled at her. There was something familiar about the stranger too, as if he had somehow been there before.
‘I just thought I could join in your game. I love to play,’ he said. ‘When I was a kid my sister had such an amazing doll’s house - with electric lights and everything. But she never let me play with it, or with any of the dolls.’
‘That’s not fair!’ Suzy said. ‘My brother is like that with all his Sega games.’
‘Yeah, it made me feel really sad and left out.’ The stranger’s shoulders slumped down as he looked in sad recollection at the dusty ground. He reminded Tina of a stray dog she had once seen, hanging around the trash cans on collection day. Despite her mom’s instruction to stay away from the dog, Tina had snuck out through the screen door and tried to give some Oreo cookies to the scrawny animal. She had crouched down nearby and held out a small hand, but the dog had snarled at her revealing curled teeth that were long and sharp.
‘Hey,’ he said, suddenly brightening up. ‘It’s a pity I don’t have my own doll, that way I could play with you guys properly.’
Both girls nodded solemnly.
‘By the way, I like your tattoo,’ he said, looking at the cracked Tinkerbell on the back of Tina’s hand.
There was a moment of silence, in which the stranger held his chin and frowned as if deep in thought. Then eventually his eyes widened in excitement.
‘I don’t suppose… No that would be silly.’ He shook his head and looked his feet.
‘What?’ Suzy asked with a note of concern in her voice.
‘I don’t suppose either of you two ladies has an extra doll at home?’ he asked with a hopeful expression.
‘I’ve only got one,’ Tina said, softly. It wasn’t true but at some level she could not yet comprehend, she was uncomfortable in the presence of this unusual and dominating stranger. Part of her hoped that if there were no spare dolls to entertain him, the man would simply go away and they could both continue playing as usual. She felt that once he had gone the world would return to the familiar one she understood.
However, Suzy – who was six months younger than Tina – was not as sophisticated in her thoughts; she simply wanted to help the stranger. She chewed on her bottom lip for a moment, and then smiled as she found a possible solution.
‘I’ve got a box of other dolls in my yard at home. I just got them from my cousin Emma cos she’s twelve and her mom thinks that’s too old for dolls,’ Suzy said. ‘I could get one from there maybe – or I could get one from my room and you could play with that?’
Even then – without fully understanding why – Tina wanted to tell Suzy to shut up. She wanted to remind her that the stranger didn’t belong in their game of Barbie dolls, plastic boats and toys in the dust, but it was too late.
‘Wow,’ the stranger’s face lit up suddenly, ‘that would be awesome. I mean I don’t want you to go to any trouble just for me. No,’ he shook his head emphatically, ‘that would be too nice of you.’
‘It’s fine,’ Suzy said as she got to her feet and dusted down her knees, ‘I’ll just be a minute.’
‘You sure it’s okay?’ the stranger asked.
‘Of course,’ Suzy said, cheerfully, and then, whilst Tina looked around with a growing sense of confusion, her friend scrambled back up the crumbling track to the parking area. As she reached the top of the track, Suzy was so preoccupied with her task that
she didn’t notice something was different. There was now a dusty brown car sitting in a corner of the parking area that had not been parked there before.
When Suzy stepped out of her yard on to the dusty street, she felt the full heat of the afternoon sun. For a moment, she considered going back into the house to fetch her pink baseball cap, but it had already taken her fifteen minutes to rummage around for a discarded doll. Eventually, she found it lodged in the narrow space between her small mattress and her bedroom wall.
When Suzy returned, skipping carelessly through the needle grass, she arrived at the edge of the creek and stopped dead. A look of confusion crossed her sun-cream streaked face. There was no sign of either her friend or the stranger. Suzy brushed strands of hair from her small face and then frowned. She had not been away very long so she estimated that even if Tina and the stranger had moved around to play elsewhere, they should’ve been nearby.
After peering all around and swinging the doll by its golden hair, Suzy carefully descended the crumbling slope leading down to the dry stream.
‘Tina!’ she called, ‘I’m back! I brought the extra doll for the man.’ As she navigated the serpentine track, Suzy got no answer from the silent wilderness other than the creaky chirrup of crickets in the shadows of the sun-baked trees.
Yet the situation seemed impossible – there was nowhere that Tina and the stranger could have gone, so Suzy pushed on.
When she reached the exact place where they had been playing, Suzy discovered the two abandoned Barbie figures lying sprawled with their limbs at unnatural angles on the parched ground. The Wet n Wild boat lay slightly further away as if it had been displaced by some freak wave. The entire scene looked like the sight of some recent miniature tragedy.
From somewhere nearby, Suzy could hear a regular and high-pitched sound. The small girl cocked her head and listened to the noise carefully. It was then, after a moment, that she recognised the noise; it was the distant sound of Tina’s mother standing on the sun-bleached steps of her porch, calling on her only child.
Chapter One
The kid had to be dead, at least that was what Leighton Jones thought as he pulled up his black Explorer behind the mangled wreck of the red Fiat, which was sitting upside down on the edge of the Oceanside Highway.
Leighton suspected that few people could survive that level of impact, which had left the vehicle looking like a crushed soda can. The collision had apparently occurred less than thirty minutes earlier on a busy stretch of the hot highway, which ran along the southern side of the city. A shaken young trucker had called the accident in, stating that some young guy in front of him on the highway just had a blow-out, causing his car to skid sideways and flip like a scene out of a big budget action movie. Leighton and his partner – Teddy Leach – had arrived in a glossy black Ford Explorer which now sat an angle protecting the scene from further damage.
Racing out of the vehicle, Leighton waved the pale-faced trucker back from the debris, then dropped quickly into a crouching position amongst the diamonds of broken glass on the asphalt. The crunch of the fragments beneath his shoes sounded like tiny bones breaking. Whilst his partner quickly laid yellow cones in a wide barrier around the scene, Leighton peered into a triangular gap in the top of the mangled metal. He could see no obvious sign of life. However, there was an opening in the twisted wreckage lower down where it touched the tarmac. Leighton grunted as he shifted himself on to his belly, and then crawled towards the crushed opening.
‘Shit,’ he whispered. Glancing over his shoulder, he called to his partner. ‘Teddy, tell dispatch to hurry that ambulance up!’
Returning his attention back to the wreck, Leighton could see the driver – a young man – tangled in the crushed remains of his car. He was lying curled in a foetal position on what had previously been the interior roof of the car. There were bloody stripes across the driver’s face and the misshaped arm closest to Leighton looked as if it had probably snapped on impact. A green Magic Tree air-freshener was stuck to the kid’s forehead, as if it was a strange fashion statement. Although the driver had been thrown out of the upside-down seat, he still had a seatbelt wrapped tightly around his lower body like a flat black snake.
Having spent ten years working in the traffic division of Oceanside P.D. Leighton knew from experience that he had to get the kid out of the wreckage quickly. The surface of the road was blistering hot, which meant that the gasoline seeping from the gas tank was already evaporating. Any spark might blow the whole thing up like a cherry bomb.
‘Can you hear me, kid?’ Leighton called to the young man.
For a moment there was nothing but the roar of the nearby traffic in the two lanes that were still operational.
‘Can you hear me, in there?’ he tried again.
In response to this second attempt, the passenger groaned and gradually opened his eyes for brief moment before slowly closing them again.
‘I’m going to get you out of here, okay?’ Leighton said assertively.
The young man’s eyes did not open again.
Wriggling into the tight space was trickier than Leighton had expected. The cramped cavity stank of blood, engine coolant and urine. Grimacing, Leighton reached into a compartment on his belt and produced a folding knife. After squirming in alongside the unconscious driver, Leighton used the blade to cut the seatbelt, releasing the kid’s lifeless legs.
‘Okay, buddy,’ Leighton said as he folded the knife away, ‘I’m going to have to drag you out the car. Might hurt a little bit.’
Wriggling backwards out of the vehicle, Leighton reached forward and gripped the young man by his damp shoulders. He then began to pull. He had expected a scream of pain from the casualty as his broken arm brushed upon the twisted remains of his vehicle, but thankfully he remained unconscious throughout the manoeuvre. Leighton groaned as he inched out of the wreck. The force of dragging the young man sent a burning pain along both of his arms, but there was little room – or time – to do anything else.
Thankfully, when he was about halfway clear, he felt somebody reach a hand in beside him and help with the pulling.
‘That you, Teddy?’ Leighton asked, breathlessly.
‘Yep,’ his partner – Ted Leach – replied. ‘Dispatch just confirmed that the ambulance is five minutes from here. The tailback on the boulevard might delay them. Is he alive?’
‘I think so,’ Leighton said. ‘Don’t know for how much longer though.’
Both officers eventually worked the young man free from the vehicle and carried him carefully to the dusty roadside. Once he had laid the kid on a police blanket, Leighton knelt by the casualty and began checking for vital signs. In addition to the broken arm the driver had a dark purple bruise on the top of his head – probably from where it had collided with the shattered windshield. But more alarming to Leighton was the blood from somewhere on the driver’s back, which was seeping into the blanket.
Leighton put his ear to the young man’s mouth and waited for a moment. He then slid two fingers onto his neck and checked for a pulse.
‘Shit!’ he said and suddenly pinched the man’s nose, tilted his chin and covered his mouth with his own. Leighton breathed into him, trying to ignore that the young man’s lips felt cool. Leighton then sat up and locked his hands together. As he began chest compressions, he glanced over his shoulder to see his partner using pink spray paint to mark out the skid marks on the tarmac.
‘Teddy!’ he yelled, ‘get back down here – he’s fading away!’
Teddy ran to the scene and dropped to his knees. Both officers fell into a well-rehearsed rhythm as they attempted to keep the heart beating and lungs inflating.
After a few minutes of CPR, they stopped and Leighton checked again for a pulse. Teddy raised his eyebrows hopefully, but Leighton shook his head. Despite this, he was undeterred from his mission.
‘Let’s keep going,’ he said.
‘C’mon, Jonesy,’ Teddy sighed, ‘the guy’s not coming back. Nobody cou
ld survive that crash.’
‘That’s not our call to make,’ Leighton said while continuing with the cycle of chest compressions and breaths. Teddy stood up and shook his head.
Finally, as Leighton’s shoulders were starting to ache, he heard the swelling sound of an ambulance whining increasingly closer to him. The sound was reassuring, but it didn’t distract Leighton from his purpose; he continued pressing on the young man’s chest, and eventually only stopped working on the kid when the paramedics knelt by his side and took over.
Getting slowly to his feet, Leighton stepped back away from the casualty. He was breathing heavily and sweat was trickling down the neck of his uniform. At that moment, his partner stepped over to him with a frown creasing his forehead.
‘You do realise that didn’t need to keep going so long?’ Teddy asked.
‘Yes I did,’ Leighton said and wandered towards the police car to write down the details of the incident in his notebook.
‘It probably didn’t make any difference,’ Teddy called weakly after him. When that didn’t get a response he tried something stronger.
‘We’re meant to be a team; it’s no wonder nobody wants to work with you!’
Leighton turned around and glanced across the hot roadside at the younger officer, who –with six months experience on the job – felt confident enough to call out a more experienced cop’s decisions. At this stage in his career Leighton had fifteen years of experience on the roads of Oceanside, but he wasn’t about to get into a public pissing contest with a rookie. However, he wasn’t about to let the shiny little officer get the last word on whether or not anybody else has a right to life.
‘Well maybe that’s true, but I promised the kid that I’d get him to safety,’ Leighton said, resolutely, ‘I owed it to him to try to keep my word. I reckon his life was worth more than my need to end my shift on time.’
Teddy opened his mouth to say something more but by the time he had formulated a response, Leighton had already walked towards the car. A few feet away, the driver – now strapped to a gurney - was wheeled into the waiting ambulance.
