The Midnight Road

by Tom Piccirilli

  They made a series of lefts and rights and eventually came out of the snowy retreat of suburban side roads and into the quaint township of Port Jackson. They were doing sixty on icy streets that would’ve been unsafe at forty on a June day. He kept hoping to find a cop or a sander or a snowplow driver or somebody who might call it in, but no one else was on the road.

  A traffic circle opened up in the middle of the Port Jack pier, a flagpole dead center, some kind of snow-covered statue pointing a cutlass. Flynn knew this was going to be bad. They were too close to the water. If Christina rocked them from behind again—

  But she didn’t. She was nuttier than that, this lady. She swung out to the other side of the traffic circle and came up hard on his left. It was suicide. He saw her face closing in from the shadows, an expression of pained purpose distorting her features. The SUV looked like the beautiful fury of heaven. The cars smashed into each other hard and the ice took them and they slid over the jetty together.

  Nuddin going, Wah wah wah.

  “Hold on!” Flynn shouted.

  And here came the punchline. So this mook spins out of control, hits the mooring where the ferry takes off from in the summer, blasts through the retaining wall and crashes into the ice upside down! He was going to die pretty much like his own brother did, and get this—in the same car!

  Flynn just didn’t get the joke.

  He came to with Danny’s voice loud in his mind but the words were unrecognizable. He’d been out for no more than half a minute. He saw stars because the bulldog had bounced off the back of his skull.

  The Charger was on its roof down on the frozen surface of the Long Island Sound. The ice had been thick but four tons of Detroit production line had cracked it wide, and the noise was like a splitting glacier. Sixty feet of water lay beneath them.

  The tires were still turning and creaking. Freezing water had started to seep into the car. Flynn tried the door but it had buckled. The window was busted but he realized now they were lying at a forty-five-degree angle, the driver’s side facing down. There was nothing but ice here. He couldn’t get free this way.

  Through the windshield he could just make out the tail end of the Caddy about ten yards in front. It was rightside up. Christina Shepard had the driver’s door open but she was hung up in the seat belt. She was still holding the gun. He’d never seen anyone look so damn resolute. A wet thunderclap rumbled and the SUV started sluicing down, dragging Christina Shepard along as she frantically tried to get free of the belt. She wasn’t going to have enough time. She was already halfway underwater. She let out a whimper. Flynn made a similar sound. He hoped to Christ the little girl wasn’t watching.

  The broken ice flailed open like a trapdoor and swallowed the woman and the SUV whole. They dropped into oblivion and there was another crashing roar as the great lid of ice resettled almost perfectly back into place.

  And then there wasn’t a goddamn thing, there was absolutely nothing more.

  Christina Shepard had actually done it. The crazy bitch had killed herself and probably murdered the rest of them as well. Flynn stared at the empty ice for another second as his heart chopped at his ribs.

  “Kelly!” he called, craning his neck to look behind. “Kelly, are you all right?”

  “I think so,” she said. He could hear the trembling sob about to break in her voice.

  Flynn tried to get his seat belt open, but the damn thing was jammed. The belt should’ve been part of the punch line too. You survive the crash, you’re alive on the ice, you’ve been an ace driver since you were fifteen but this little busted button is what’s going to do you in.

  He smelled Danny’s cigarettes. The French bulldog, sitting on the ceiling, stared at Flynn.

  “My door’s no good,” Flynn told her. “Can you climb up here and get out the other side?”

  “No.”

  “You’ve got to try.”

  Kelly clambered forward from the backseat, stepped on the dome light and stretched across Nuddin. “The door is stuck!”

  “Can you roll the window down?”

  “Where’s the button?”

  “This is an old car. You’ve got to roll it down. See the handle?”

  Nuddin reached out from behind the passenger seat and cranked the handle. The window slid halfway down and shattered. The car shifted with an enormous moan.

  “Climb out!” Flynn shouted. Kelly got her hands on Nuddin’s seat belt and popped it in an instant. Of course. Nuddin swung out the busted window and slid from view. “Both of you! Go!”

  “Where’s Zero?”

  “He’s right under me, he’ll follow in a second.”

  Nuddin going, Woowoo woowoo.

  “There’s water!” Kelly screamed. “I’m slipping! The ice is breaking!”

  “Don’t stand up. Lie flat. Can you crawl?”

  “It’s cold, Flynn! It’s too cold!”

  “Crawl for the pier!”

  “Come on, Zero!” she shouted.

  The dog was just sitting there and wouldn’t leave. Flynn didn’t know what that meant, but it felt like there was a great weight to it, a huge significance.

  He twisted his neck as far as he could to see what was going on, watching in the rearview as Nuddin and Kelly crept over the splitting ice back toward the pier. He saw lights there now. Figures silhouetted.

  He kept yanking at the belt. The Charger shifted again. The front bumper dipped underwater and just kept going.

  “Christ,” he whispered. The fear he’d been holding back so desperately catapulted through him as the ice continued to break. It sounded like an avalanche. The car lurched forward and dropped, the front end looping around as it sliced into the water. Flynn felt like he was somersaulting in midair as the car jerked loose and started to descend. The dog flopped backwards into his face. Ninety-five seconds left.

  The freezing water raged in, and with it came the intolerable cold and the crushing pressure of a darkness he had always known but had never had to endure before. Every nerve burned and schizzed out at once, and then there was only an insane numbness. The overwhelming terror soon swelled into something like comfort. He had only an instant to take a last breath and wondered why he should bother. Zero looked him in the eye as the water rose and covered its face, bubbles bursting from its nose. The dog let out a noise that was more growl than whine, as if to say, Ah fuck all, we’re gonna snuff it. We’re dead.

  Flynn watched the midnight road open beneath him and he cut loose with a screwy giggle under the water, burning up the last of his oxygen, seeing his brother Danny far below smiling at him with a cigarette hanging off his bottom lip. Flynn was thinking, Christ, I am. I really am. I’m about to—

  Time.

  TWO

  The potential for breath.

  An option to flow.

  A crack in the black.

  A warm light pulsing, way out of reach.

  Awakening was pure hell without thought or reason, without identity or even definition. All that remained was human emotion spread out like an oil slick across the width of the midnight road.

  Maybe it was fear. Maybe hate or remorse or guilt. It was so pure it couldn’t be distinguished.

  Slowly it took on value and made itself known. Flynn didn’t exist anymore, but his futile and wretched hope remained. It straddled spheres. It was everything left after his heart had stopped.

  He began to drive back up the road to his former self. His foot was hammered down on the gas as he broke from the depths of his own death and took his first breath in nearly half an hour.

  Twenty-eight minutes pretty much on the nose before his body came back up through the hole in the ice—a one-in-a-million shot right there—and they got him out of the water and jabbed him with adrenaline directly into his busted heart and got him wired up and burned him back to life.

  Somebody’s eyes searching.

  They were his own. They didn’t remember yet how to blink. He couldn’t shut the world out. The noise of it m
ade him scream. A rush of memory encompassed him, and he knew his name but not his purpose.

  He saw a round, eager face that he took for God. Thinking God looked a lot like a puffy-faced bald guy who smelled like Hamburger Helper and Tabasco sauce.

  God stared at him with a gap-toothed smile and said, “You’re the luckiest son of a bitch I’ve ever heard about. You got angels watching over you they never taught us about in St. Vincent’s, let me tell you.”

  It surprised Flynn that God didn’t have a more civil tongue, but maybe it was a holdover from the whole Philistine thing, slaughtering heathens and smashing the Egyptians. Flynn turned his head and saw that he was in the back of an ambulance. He had an IV in his arm. Flashing red and blue lights flared behind him, stoic cops standing around staring in his direction.

  God turned out to be a paramedic. He was still grinning as he toyed with a plastic tube snaking into Flynn’s nose.

  That first minute back—what some people would call his miraculous resurrection but which Flynn called his Holy Fuck I Ain’t Dead revelation—he felt like he used to after he’d been on a weeklong bender. It hot-wired his memories and dragged them back from great distances. He saw Danny with his forehead propped against the steering wheel, lifelike but utterly lifeless. Next to him, Patricia Waltz’s head had gone through the passenger window, her right ear cut off and a squirt of blood dripping down the outside of the door.

  He spotted Marianne’s face, saw her at the beginning and the end of their marriage. The night he proposed to her, holding out the ring to her at Rockefeller Center a couple hours after they’d lit the big tree. The two of them skating together—ice, more ice—as she slid around into his right arm and he held the ring box in his left palm, sneaking it up to surprise her. Her eyes went wide and then she was leaping at him like a forward end and they both went down on their keesters. The ring flopped out of his hand and she went diving for it, fat kids eating pretzels circling them, Japanese tourists doing figure eights and snapping their pictures. She fell onto his chest and put the ring on and he reached up and held her tight, thinking you live for these moments. She planted a kiss on him that felt like it would never end. It went on and on and on, the back of his head getting frosty but her keeping his lips and his heart so damn hot. The best kiss of his life.

  Then flashing forward as he watched her climb naked from the loins of a cat named Alvin. Marianne even introducing them, saying, This here, this is Alvin. Then Alvin scurrying for his pants folded precisely over Flynn’s desk chair. Alvin dug sharp creases. Alvin going, Oh Jesus, man, I didn’t know, she didn’t, she didn’t tell me. Of course, she wouldn’t have. Marianne had to end a relationship with the broadest stroke possible. She’d shouted and blamed it all on Flynn while Flynn stared at Alvin, frickin’ Alvin, feeling sorry for this guy with his crank hanging out.

  Like life wasn’t tough enough, you had to catch some cat in bed with your old lady and waste your remaining sympathy on the dude. Flynn could taste rum. His past pitched and rumbled. He saw abused and dead children who had been stowed away in carefully sealed compartments at the back of his mind. His own death had blown all the locks.

  Flynn whispered, “…the kid?”

  “Don’t talk.”

  Jesus Christ, the Tabasco stink was like a blast furnace. Flynn hoped like hell he was stabilized because if this guy had to give him mouth-to-mouth, it might flatline him again. “…tell me.”

  “I said shut up. You guys, you come back from the dead, and you always want to talk an ear off. She’s fine. Not even a scratch. I checked them both out. She and the retard are drinking cocoa. They’re going to be staying at Stonybrook for a couple of days of observation. I’m driving them there in a minute, as soon as I finish with you.”

  “The cops—”

  “They got a lot of questions for you, that’s for sure. There were witnesses who caught some of the scene—your spinout, the SUV chasing you.”

  “She was trying to kill us…”

  “Save it for the cops, all right? They’ll be on your case at the hospital after you get checked out.” The smile faded as the paramedic leaned in, the heat of the sauce like an open flame. “Now, why don’t you lie back now, Miracle Man, huh? It’s not every day I drag a corpse up out of hell. I’m feeling good about it, so don’t ruin my high. I really don’t want to think that you were stealing that kid from her mother and the lady died for it, right? So shut the fuck up and let me do my job, and the police can sort it out.”

  The EMT loaded Flynn into the ambulance, where another EMT hauled him forward and started asking him questions. What was his name? His date of birth? Flynn craned his neck and saw the pudgy guy with the Tabasco breath climbing into the back of a second ambulance, where Kelly and Nuddin were huddled under blankets drinking hot chocolate.

  Flynn said his name and his birthday. The doors slammed shut, the EMT called over his shoulder to the driver and told him to get going. The engine growled and knocked hard. It needed an oil change, was down at least a quart. The siren started up and began its looping whine. They hooked a hard right and supplies on the shelves hit the floor and scattered.

  He was alive.

  The next morning, after a pair of hard-edged cops finished shaking him, Flynn heard his boss Sierra’s three-inch heels stomping out there in the halls. He imagined coma patients waking up after fifteen years, rattled out of their sleep by those shoes.

  Sierra stormed in, carrying a cactus. Like that’s what you give somebody just back from the dead, a cactus. Well, all right. She threw it down on the windowsill and stared at Flynn lying there in a foofy hospital gown, a catheter in his crank and a bag of blood-threaded urine hanging from the bed rail. You’d think they could hide the damn disgusting things better, but no, they put it right out there to sink everybody’s stomach.

  Sierra leaned close and peered into his eyes. “They say you might be brain-damaged. Is it true?”

  “It must be,” Flynn said, “for a second there you looked good.”

  “God in heaven, you really are screwed then. Maybe I’ve been setting my sights too high. Instead of looking for a surgeon, I need to prowl around the patients.”

  “The brain-dead ones. It would probably be in your best interest.”

  Sierra Humbold was fifty and looked sixty because some of the plastic work hadn’t completely taken. Due to a crushed cheek, her left eye was significantly lower than the right. The corner of her bottom lip pulled obscenely aside so you always got a look at a couple of her dry, nubby teeth. She wore a different wig every couple of weeks because she’d had some blunt trauma to the head. There must’ve been suture scars, maybe plates. Defensive scars and mottled bite wounds gouged the backs of both hands, forming a flotilla of evil smiles. She had lines dug in by time and more than a few by knives. They diagrammed the blueprints of her past.

  She went two hundred pounds of hard muscle and could kick the ass of a jacked-up rhino, so Flynn had a hard time picturing the mooks who had worked her over. All she ever said was that she was a screwed-up kid who liked bad guys like her father. Her old man got shanked to death at Rikers when she was a child. He was doing an eighteen-year stretch for serial rape. Her last lover put a .22 bullet in her lung. It took her years to find her own hate. Before that, she had swapped it out for love.

  Now Sierra had the difference down cold.

  “You know what happened to you?” she asked.

  “Doctors and nurses come and go, but they haven’t told me anything. Neither did the cops. The paramedic said I snuffed it.”

  “You know another euphemism?”

  It almost made him grin. “Yeah. Iced.”

  “Flash frozen underwater for about twenty-eight minutes, according to eyewitnesses,” she told him. “If the water had been a degree or two warmer, things might’ve turned out different. By the way, half an hour? It’s nowhere near a record.”

  He opened his mouth to snap out a retort, but he felt the icy water pour down his throat again. He st
eeled himself and tried to pull away from the memory.

  “You talk to God?” Sierra asked. “See a white light or anything?”

  Flynn yanked his thoughts back from the midnight road. “The kid,” he said. “Kelly Shepard, and her uncle, they called him Nuddin, where are they? The cops wouldn’t say anything.”

  “The cops aren’t going to tell you shit and I’m not going to either until you explain to me exactly what the hell happened.” She drew the only chair in the room over to the bed and sat waiting, her face hard but expectant. She wasn’t cutting him any slack because he worked under her. Probably less because of it. There were enough internal investigations always going on, everybody suspicious of the guys who worked kid cases. They were right to be.

  He gave her the report down to the smallest detail. The house. Nuddin in the cage. The plunge onto the ice, the dog refusing to leave, awakening to a puffy god. Even the way his thoughts seemed to be skittering a little too loosely. He had Marianne on his mind again, for the first time in a couple of years.

  “Now tell me where the girl and her uncle are,” he said.

  “With me.”

  That wasn’t the way it was done. Sierra already had five foster kids, but none of them came from cases she worked. Not even ones she was peripherally involved with. “What? Why?”

  “No other family members have been tracked down yet. The police are taking their time on that house. They found the cage in the basement. Your story is checking out, but they’re still worried you may have instigated the whole situation. I figured I’d watch over them to make sure nobody separated Kelly and Nuddin. They could easily get split up in the system.”

  “How are they doing?”

  Sierra plucked at her wig the way any woman might toy with her hair when she was keyed up. She didn’t show it but Flynn almost dying had left another lasting mark. The case had her knotted up. “The girl’s acting all right, for the time being, but Dale says she’s still in shock. It’ll be a few days before the upheaval begins to display itself. He expects her to go into fits, the way any normal kid would. Right now she’s on vacation. She’s having fun, playing with the other kids. I taught her to make pasta last night. When she realizes she has no home left to go back to, that her mother’s gone forever, she’ll either shut down or act out. He thinks she’s in for some bouts of rage.”