by E. R. FALLON
I gasped at the sight of such rawness, mixed with my own dread. They had killed him. Right in front of me. If I had any doubt about my fate and what they would do to me I no longer had any doubt now. But I couldn’t escape. Because I was a murderer too. My eyes were damp with tears. For some reason, the wife looked straight at me inside the truck but not at Joyce or Albert.
Albert shrugged without remorse at my horror, and he continued to speed away. Soon the man and his wife were small and distant to my watery eyes and then they were just an awful memory.
“You fucking psychopath,” I shouted and hit at him with my hands.
I didn’t think about what Albert and Joyce might and could do to me for beating him. Tears wet my face and burned my cheeks.
He took one hand off the wheel to push me away and Joyce slapped the back of my neck very hard.
“You witch, stop hurting him,” she said. Then she seemed to notice how shaken I was. “We’re not bad people really.”
“Really?” I snapped. “Your brother just killed someone in cold blood in front of me.”
“You told her we’re related?” Albert shouted.
If he hadn’t been in such a hurry he would have slammed on the brake. But he continued driving fast and Joyce sat silently with the gun aimed at me like she wanted to shoot me right there out of spite. Albert gave me a merciless glare, and if I had been a man he would have punched me in the face. Eventually he seemed to recall they were on the run from the law and he slowed down the pickup truck.
“She was bound to find out eventually,” Joyce said after a long period of silence.
“Doesn’t matter. I thought we agreed to keep that to ourselves, no matter what happened.” Albert appeared uncomfortable discussing it in front of me. He avoided looking at me and gave Joyce a side-eye glance.
“I’m sorry, Albert,” she murmured.
“That’s okay, Joycee.”
Joyce’s face turned red at his using the nickname. I noticed for the first time how beautiful her green eyes were.
“They’ll find the car we left back there, you know,” she mused aloud. “I bet they’re already looking for it. They’ll know we’re headed this way.”
Albert shrugged. “Even if we had run it off into a ditch somewhere, they would’ve found it eventually. It’s not like there’s a body of water around here to submerge it in like we did with your car and the farm pond. We’ll get off this road soon and go on another to throw them off.”
Had they changed their plan? Did they not care if the police found them and were on a suicide mission? Part of me wanted the police to find us. I’d rather have been in jail than with them. But that was an easy thing to say but not an easy thing to accept if it did happen.
“The highway?” Joyce said. “Surely, that’s a stupid idea?”
“No, not the highway. One of these little roads off of this road. I’ve driven the route to the airplane hangar as practice many times before and know it by heart. Trust me, all of those smaller roads lead to that direction.” Albert sounded confident.
“Okay,” Joyce said.
Albert fiddled with the radio button. The pickup truck had a great sound system and he enjoyed playing with it.
Albert’s veering the pickup truck onto one of the roads he’d mentioned jerked me in my seat and I held onto the armrest for support. He and Joyce had started wearing their seatbelts. I’d kept mine off but Joyce buckled it in for me.
“We wouldn’t want to lose you,” she said with a wink.
It became night once again and Albert would switch off the headlights whenever we, very rarely, passed another car or, even more rare, a house, as though he didn’t want to draw attention to us.
After I witnessed them commit the second killing my situation seemed more perilous and dire than before, so I stayed awake and sacrificed sleep, and paid attention to all going on around me, at all times.
Something burned bright ahead on the lane opposite us. I heard a whining sound outside. Sirens? It can’t have been. But was it? I sat up and leaned forward in my seat to get a better look out the windshield. My body vibrated with excitement, then I remembered the salesman I’d killed. I still had the flashbacks of blood and the knife and the man screaming. I remembered the killing so well I had to have done it. I’d been having the memories of slick, bright blood and shining knife throughout the whole trip.
“Don’t turn off the lights,” Joyce said to Albert. “Or that cop will know something’s wrong. Act like everything’s fine and they’ll think everything is fine. That’s how these kinds of things work.”
The police car, glowing white in the moonlight with its lights burning red, slowed down. I felt something squeezing my arm and looked down and saw Joyce’s hand.
Even in the darkness of the car she gave me a glare that could have frightened even the hardest of men. “Don’t try anything stupid,” she said.
“What the heck is he doing all the way out here?” Joyce remarked to Albert.
I assumed the police were headed to the home of the poor man Albert had slaughtered in front of his house.
“Taking a shortcut probably,” Albert said. “I would imagine the locals around these parts know these backroads well. I wouldn’t worry, he’s probably in a hurry to get to where I shot that guy.”
Maybe I should still just try to get to the police. If I had killed someone innocent I deserved to be punished. I needed to remember the code of honor from the military. And if I hadn’t killed someone innocent, well … The police would help me figure it out.
I contemplated pushing past Joyce in the seat next to me with her gun now dug deep into my side, out of the cop’s view, and opening the door, jumping out onto the road. I’d get hurt because the truck was high off the road, but Albert wasn’t driving that fast and I didn’t think the impact from the fall would kill me. It was night, but that cop – I think it was a woman – might be looking through their rearview and see me tumbling out. Then they would pull Albert over and if the law had identified them – I didn’t know if they had because I hadn’t seen a newspaper in a while and Joyce and Albert never listened to the news on the radio – they would arrest them.
Then it was too late. I’d waited too long. The cop car moved faster and soon had already sped past, onto whatever tragedy or crime had happened. They would never see me if I jumped from the pickup truck now. I tensed and ached inside with disappointment at myself. Then I turned numb from defeat. Had the man’s wife seen Albert well enough to get a decent description of him? Once again, I felt conflicted: I wanted to be rescued but what if I was a killer, too?
Chapter Seven
Emboldened by the cop car sighting and encouraged that it could happen again, I stayed awake for the entire night drive. Joyce and Albert had stopped taking turns and mostly Albert drove now. The cop car seemed to have spooked them enough that their pulling over to the side of the road became less and less frequent. They became stingier with what remained of the cold fast food and water, which they seemed to have carefully rationed out for the course of the trip. If that was any indication, we couldn’t have been too far from the airport Joyce had talked about.
The owner of the pickup truck had left a red down jacket inside and Joyce gave it to me to wear. Albert had started to drive a little faster ever since the cop car had been out of sight for a while.
As dawn approached, Albert said, “What’s that noise?”
I didn’t hear anything.
“What are you talking about?” Joyce sounded more exasperated than she should have been.
“That,” Albert said.
I listened closely and it sounded as if a metal or rubber piece of the truck was scrapping against the rock-strewn dirt road in a way it shouldn’t have been.
Joyce sat up straighter in the seat next to mine and listened. “What the heck is that?” she said after a moment.
“I think it’s the tire,” he said. “I can feel it. I think the damn tire’s busted from running over one of
the rocks on this road. Has this guy got a spare tire in the back? I have to pull over and change it. Damn it.” Albert hit the steering wheel with his fist in exasperation.
Joyce peered through the window behind us at the back of the truck. “I can’t tell if there’s a tire under that cover, but I think I remember there being one when I put our stuff inside. I’m pretty sure I saw one then.”
I could tell that neither of them liked the idea of stopping to do something as involved and prolonged as changing a tire. The cop had startled them that much.
“If I don’t pull over soon the wheel might get damaged permanently,” Albert said. “We can’t be without a vehicle, Joycee.”
It would probably be less than an hour until full daylight hit us. The sun was already starting to make the leftover rainwater sparkle on the road. Albert slowed down and parked the truck at the side of the road, closer to the woods than the road. He shut off the engine and got out.
Joyce stayed with me inside the pickup truck. Her hand that held the gun quivered. I glanced at her door and wondered if I could crawl fast over her and open it, get outside. I hadn’t seen any ammunition on them and reasoned they couldn’t have had more than two or three bullets left in the gun after the auction robbery and killing the man in the driveway. With my military training, I knew how to be shot at, how to sprint and duck and sprint and duck. They’d shoot at me of course, but they’d run out of bullets fast if they kept shooting. If I managed to avoid the two or three shots they’d fire, I could escape unharmed. I’d gotten a little lucky because the pickup truck had a gun rack on top of the hood but no gun there.
“Don’t even think about it,” Joyce said like she’d read my mind.
“I wasn’t,” I lied.
My gaze roamed to the door lock. Something was different about it than the one in my car.
Albert had walked around the front to the back of the pickup truck and lifted the back cover to look for that spare tire Joyce remembered seeing. I breathed with a little more relief because I didn’t remember seeing an extra tire. Without a tire, they eventually wouldn’t be able to drive. But then they’d probably just find another vehicle to steal and kill another innocent person doing so.
Part of me wanted to flee from Joyce and have her shoot me because that would mean no more innocent people would die because of me. Albert and Joyce wouldn’t have their ticket to freedom without me. And hopefully they’d get caught and arrested before they could hurt another soul.
Gradually, I saw a man in the distance … a man jogging on what looked like a farm road that was an offshoot of the smaller road we were on. Given my circumstances it was a once-in-a-lifetime chance.
They hadn’t messed with the door lock on my side of the truck like they had with my car they’d taken from my garage. That was what was different. I wouldn’t need to crawl over Joyce to escape.
Screw it, I thought. If I was a murderer, then what did I have to lose if I ran from them? Maybe I’d get frostbite. But either way, I was screwed. I could die by remaining there with them, or I could get frostbite and die in the cold after I fled, and if I did that, eventually the police would find me and maybe if I lived my punishment for my crime would mean death. Either way I looked at it, I was out of luck.
I discreetly put my hand near the door lock at my side and pulled it up to open it. I winced at the little sound it made and glanced at Joyce, who was busy watching Albert digging around the back and rolling her eyes at what seemed like his ineptness. Maybe she was wrong and there wasn’t a spare tire, or maybe she was right.
I leaned over close to the driver’s side seat that Albert had vacated and I set my hand over the door handle, readying to pull it open so that I could jump out and flee. Joyce took in a short breath. She’d just seen the jogger. I glimpsed at Joyce out of the corner of my eye and, seeing her still distracted at the sight of the man jogging, I pulled open the door.
The cold air hit my face and got Joyce’s attention. She grabbed at me from behind. Her nails, although short, still felt like claws against my back through my shirt and the dead man’s jacket. I took a risk and guessed that not only would Joyce want to save bullets and me, their ticket to freedom, but she also wouldn’t fire the gun at me inside the truck while someone, the jogger, was within earshot. I elbowed her hard in the jaw. She tried to smack the gun against my head but missed and ended up hitting my neck. I shrugged her off me and jumped out onto the dirt road, which was frozen and cracked with frost. My bare toes felt soft and useless with the cold, rough earth under them.
“Hey!” Albert shouted at me. Then he called for Joyce, who had tumbled out of the truck after me.
I didn’t know where he was in the process of changing the tire because I didn’t look at him. I kept running. I could hear my breathing, like short, quick heaves and see my desperation in the form of clouds of breath in front of me. And I could hear the sound my naked feet made on the hard, bitter cold ground, a constant, whisking sound as my feet kicked up some small stones that were mixed in with the frozen-solid dirt and mud. Desperate, I needed to see a piece of myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming, so horrible was the situation. I looked down at my hands, red and chapped from the cold.
I heard a truck start and looked over my shoulder at Albert and Joyce with the gun sticking out of the passenger side window, chasing after me. I’d been in some genuinely terrible situations during the war but I’d never been in a situation more terrifying than that moment, and I felt as if I’d never come closer to death than at that moment.
I had to reach the jogger.
“Help me. Help me! They’re driving after me. They’re going to kill me!”
I kept shouting at the man jogging, who I know could see was an older-looking, white-haired man in a red sweat suit that looked expensive. I could have sworn he heard me because he turned his head slightly as if to look at me. He ignored me and ran off in another direction and I couldn’t keep up with him. Asshole.
Joyce fired the gun twice when the man wasn’t in sight anymore. I glanced over my shoulder as I continued to flee. She was readying to take a third shot and looked like she would take another right after if need be. I’d guessed wrong, and they had more bullets than I’d thought. Still, the man jogging couldn’t have made it that far by then and he had to have heard the gunshots. But I knew I was alone. It was just me, alone and barefoot, wearing a dead man’s jacket, out on the desolate, frozen mud road, with Albert and Joyce in the rumbling pickup, getting nearer and nearer to me.
The truck charged at me like a roaring beast and I leapt out of the way toward the woods. They swerved the pickup toward me and the bumper almost touched my ankles. Then the metal bumper did touch me, knocked against the backs of my knees. I fell, with my hands reaching up, desperately trying to grab onto something to help pull me up, but finding only air.
Mercifully, Albert hit the brake and stopped before he could run me over with the truck’s huge wheels, and I landed in the dirt near the tree-line with my hands pressed against the ice and mud ground and supporting me in a crouch-like position. The backs of my knees throbbed with pain from the scrapes the bumper had made on my skin through my pants. My palms stung, and when I took one of them off the ground and looked, I saw a few lines of cuts there, bright red from bleeding.
I heard the engine roaring behind me and looked back at Joyce and Albert through the windshield. Albert glared at me, with his hands tightly around the steering wheel and his face crimson from anger. Then I didn’t see Joyce anymore. I heard a door open and saw her jumping down from the truck.
She yelled and screamed many profanities at me.
“You sneaky witch. Damn you!”
She clawed at me with her strange little nails and grabbed a fistful of my hair and swung my head left and right and then right and left, so hard that I thought she might break my neck. I felt the side of the metal gun smashing against my face as she hit me with it over and over again. With each smack of the hard object against my cheek bone
the more my flesh split open and my bone throbbed with pain. I moaned and groped at my face and couldn’t feel bone but did feel an open wound and the warm wetness of blood. Joyce beat me like she didn’t care anybody might be watching, and it sunk in then that I didn’t have a single friend out there. I was alone on the road with this brutal pair. She struck the gun against my eye and then I could barely see my hands, now covering my face and trying to protect my eyes from further harm.
As far as I knew, Albert watched me get pistol-whipped from inside the truck. When I glanced at him he just stared at Joyce beating me, like he couldn’t have cared less, his eyes as cold as the bitter ground I knelt on. The emerging sunlight sent a sparkle across the road and reflected off the truck’s silver bumper behind me: such beauty in a moment of ugliness. Joyce gave me one final smack across my mouth that almost knocked the wind out of me. It took me a couple of seconds to regain my bearings. I spat out something metallic-tasting and blood dripped from my mouth onto the ground. I staunched the lip wound, which stung viciously, with the side of my arm.
Joyce tucked the gun into her waistband and called for Albert to come outside and help bring me into the truck. I sighed in relief that the beating was over. She grabbed me by the hair again. I used my tongue to feel around my mouth to check that I still had all my teeth, and I spat on the ground and foamy blood and spit appeared like a scarlet stain on the brown earth.
Joyce let go of me and I started to crawl away. Then I heard the pickup truck door open and saw Albert’s large shoes appear at my side. He pressed the tip of his boot against my forehead and he had what smelled like old animal crap caked on his sole. He ran the edge of his boot against my face, smearing the crap on my wounded side. The cuts stung and I reached to touch them, to soothe them, but Joyce grabbed my hand. Albert took his boot off me and grabbed my other hand.
