by Rio Youers
Some fat dude had taken the seat behind us, which kept Sally from talking until he fell asleep, his snores louder than the tires rumbling off the blacktop. Every now and then his fat knees would press annoyingly into the back of my seat and I wanted to bark at him to cut it out, but didn’t want to wake him so had to endure it. Sally’s story, thankfully, offered something else to focus on.
“Lang wanted to keep me close, so he housed us in a modern two-bedroom apartment in downtown Nashville. Beat the hell out of the trailer and it for damn sure beat the hell out of the Grand Am. He helped Dad get a maintenance job at a retirement home, which basically amounted to mowing the lawn and changing a few lightbulbs, and he fixed Mom up with some part-time work answering the phone at a car dealership. All Lang asked in return was for me to assist in his research, which would occasionally involve accompanying him to parapsychology departments at universities across the country. Mom and Dad gave permission willingly, with big stupid grins on their faces. ‘Absolutely, strange but generous man, do take our little girl away for a week at a time, just don’t kick us out of our wonderful new home.’ So yeah, they were bought, and easily, but he knew he’d have to work a little harder to win me over.”
A chain of Harleys muscled by in the passing lane, chrome flashing in the sunlight. A perfect day for a ride, I thought, with the perfect road—historic Route 66—like a ribbon beneath their wheels. To our right was the Union Pacific railroad with a line of hills in the distance, tan-colored, the desert between stitched with mesquite and tumbleweed. For a second it felt like I’d been dropped into someone’s vision of quintessential America—where Old Glory flew proud and the buffalo roamed—but then fat boy screwed his knees into the back of my seat again and Sally continued with her surreal life story.
“Lang needed emotional leverage,” she said. “He had big plans for me, and he wanted to make sure I did whatever he said, no questions asked. That’s when he brought in Kirby Gibb—Rose’s piece-of-shit father, who turned out to have a string of pedophile convictions as long as your arm, and who’d just served time for possession of child pornography: over three hundred videotapes found in a box in his attic. Trust me, Gibb was a nasty, dirty, fucking shitty human being, and Lang locked me in a room with him. No windows or furniture. Just plain concrete walls and a bare floor. Before leaving us alone, Lang whispered that Gibb wanted to do bad things to me. Very bad things. He wasn’t lying.”
“You can spare me the details,” I said. “But you made this motherfucker pay, right?”
“In seconds,” Sally said. “Just the way he looked at me made my skin prickle. I lifted a few memories from his mind, saw some of the terrible things he’d done, and that was enough; I opened the cage door and let the red bird fly.”
“Good,” I said.
“One second he was rubbing the front of his pants, the next he was twitching on the floor with his tongue hanging out. I emptied his mind. Took everything. How to walk, talk, think. Everything.”
“Jesus,” I said.
“I didn’t kill him,” Sally said. “I could have. Easily. Not that it made any difference; Lang had his emotional leverage. I was so scared he’d tell someone what I’d done that, from that moment on, I did whatever he wanted.”
* * *
It was seven years of being on guard, of eliminating threats, possible threats, and anybody who placed a roadblock between Lang and his idea of power, whether that entailed a leather seat in the Oval Office, or a throne of bones at the top of the world. But he wouldn’t get there with all guns blazing. It required exactness, time, a series of strategic, chesslike maneuvers. So he greased as many wheels as he could and expanded his social and political circles. Sally, meanwhile, grew up in a relatively comfortable environment. She went to school, made friends, listened to boy bands, and watched Gilmore Girls. Her parents still went at each other like cat and mouse—like psychic cat and mouse—but were off the hard drugs and had managed to hold on to their jobs. Life was almost normal. Almost.
“Once or twice a year I’d be called upon to ‘assist’ Lang,” Sally said. “We’d attend corporate events, fundraisers, dinner parties. I’d pretend to be his niece—all pretty in my dress—and he’d point out the threat: maybe a high-profile journalist, or a congressperson, or corporate bigwig—all true psychics, very powerful people, who’d used their ability to fast-track their way up the ladder. I don’t know if they were threats but they were certainly dangerous, and Lang wanted them out of the picture.”
“As in … dead?” I asked.
Sally nodded. Her eyes, already tired, were now rimmed with sadness, with distance. “I weakened them, shut down their coils, got them to the point where they couldn’t fight back. Lang swept in and finished them off. It was like shooting a tranquilized lion.”
I shook my head, took her hand.
“I didn’t want to hurt anyone,” she said. “You believe me, don’t you?”
“You know I do.”
“I was in too deep, though.” She squeezed my hand tightly. “There were times when I thought about shutting Lang down, just like he fantasized about slow-roasting my organs, but Mom and Dad were happy and I didn’t want to mess things up.”
“But you did shut him down.”
“Eventually,” Sally said. “Gene died in 2004 and Lang took it very hard. He’d lost his best friend, his emotional center. It changed him, and accelerated his plans. Lang had always moved with precision, but now he moved recklessly, and with anger. He wanted the White House, and he wanted blood.”
“Whose blood?”
“Everybody’s,” Sally replied. “He blamed America—our star-spangled ideology—for Gene’s death. There was no attempt to rescue or even locate Gene. On the contrary, he was used to prove a point. We are America, and we will not be bullied. We are America, and we will not negotiate with terrorists. It garnered sympathy and support—gold dust for any administration at war. Lang, however, was fucking irate.”
“He wanted to turn himself into a flame,” I said.
“What he really wanted was to stand on top of the Hill and let the red bird fly.”
Five miles from Cypress. The manspreader mumbled along to whatever music pumped through his cans, leafing through a comic book about zombies and robots. Behind us, the fat dude had woken up but was wearing a jumbo bag of Chex Mix like a mask. The smell of processed cheddar and sweat made my nostrils tingle. I was so fucking ready to get off that bus.
“Lang established Nova Oculus: mindreading disguised as cross-examination and behavioral science. It quickly won him power and influence, not to mention greater wealth. As his political career escalated, he used me to keep the company going and the money rolling in. I was flown to the Middle East and Guantánamo Bay and to secret locations across the States. I never spoke with the terror suspects, I just downloaded the relevant memories, then passed the information to Lang when I got home. I was a human memory stick, and I hated it. It wasn’t just the locations—the squalid cells with blood and shit smeared all over the walls. It wasn’t just that I was constantly being taken away from my school, my friends. It was the memories I lifted, the terrible things these people had done. So much death. So many screams.”
Sally ran both hands down her face and sighed. I looked through the bus’s front windshield and saw the sun-bleached outskirts of Cypress, buildings scattered amid the dust and scrub off old Route 66, the flashing lights of a casino.
“I had three choices,” Sally continued. “I could endure it and whatever long-term psychological damage it caused; I could tell my parents—maybe persuade them to run away with me in the night; or I could shut down Lang’s coil, cripple his mind.”
“So you shut him down,” I said.
“Actually, I told my parents first. I told them that, while they thought I was at some university or other in California, I was actually at a US installation on the outskirts of Kabul, stealing plans and mutilations from terrorists’ minds.”
“And they did nothi
ng?”
“They were furious,” Sally said, nodding as she remembered. “Maybe because they wanted a cut of the money I was making for Lang. Maybe because they didn’t like being lied to and used. And yeah, I guess they were concerned about me, too. At the same time, they didn’t want to give up a good thing, so Dad went to Lang to see what could be done.”
The bus slowed with a hiss and pulled up at the stop—a silver pole with the skinny dog logo painted on it, jutting at an angle from the sidewalk. Sally and I disembarked gleefully. We were the only ones. The driver pulled Sally’s luggage from the storage compartment (mine was small enough to carry on) and I tipped him five bucks. He muttered something from beneath his mustache, then got back behind the wheel, whooshed the doors closed, and grumbled on to Albuquerque. The bus’s big, dusty ass was the best thing I’d seen in hours.
Then it was just me and Sally and some Mexican dude on the corner selling Route 66 T-shirts out of a suitcase. His eyes sparkled from deep within complicated whorls of facial hair.
“Camisetas,” he said, displaying one of the T-shirts. “Diez dólares.”
“Maybe later, brother,” I said, and pointed across an abandoned, weedy lot to the rear of what looked like a motel with several bikes parked on slants outside the rooms. Sally nodded tiredly. There may have been nicer places to stay in Cypress, but we were too tired to go hunting.
“They fought,” Sally said after a few steps, the casters on her luggage rattling over the uneven surface of the lot. “I went with Dad but he told me to stay outside. Man Business, he said, although he wanted his fifteen-year-old daughter there just in case he needed protection. As it turned out, he did. But to begin with I stayed outside, and I heard them talking, then Dad’s voice got louder and before long they were shouting at each other. Pretty soon, there were crashing, breaking sounds, and I went in to find them wrestling on Lang’s study floor. Dad knew he was no match for Lang in a psychic battle so went at him the old-fashioned way. It was actually kind of heroic, although I think he was doing it more for the money than for me. Anyway, Lang fired a psychic bullet into Dad’s brain and Dad flopped off to one side, convulsing, blood trickling from his ears. He would have been dead within seconds if I hadn’t intervened.”
It was a motel. The Gran Palma, two stories of dirty white stucco with red doors faded pink in the sun. The mechanical backs of air-conditioning units whirred and dripped from every window. There was a rottweiler on a chain outside the front office.
We held up for a moment, blinking in the bright afternoon sunlight.
“I’ll never forget the look on Lang’s face when he saw me,” Sally said. “His mouth was a big, dumbstruck O of terror. He’d gone from being a dominant, consuming presence to a little boy about to load his jockeys. I didn’t care, and I didn’t let up. I opened the cage door and the bird came out screeching. There was nothing delicate or precise about the attack; I went at him like a bird would, flapping and squawking, tearing pieces away. He tried to fight back—I felt him scratching in my mind like a little cockroach—then all his lights blew out. I took ninety percent of his memories, maybe more, and left his coil black and smoking. He collapsed on the floor. A twitching, drooling sack of shit. I knew he wasn’t dead but thought he was close. Dad had just enough strength to leave Lang’s house. I threw him across the backseat of his car, yanked the keys from his pocket, and drove us both home.”
“Christ,” I said. I ran a hand along my jaw, stubble rasping. “That’s like…” I trailed off and shrugged. There were no words.
“Fucked up,” Sally offered.
Okay, so there were words.
“We packed our bags and laid low at a hotel just outside Memphis, but Lang found us within a few days and sent his muscle. Mom took care of them—made them turn their guns on each other—but it was a close call. A couple of hours later, she and Dad put me on a bus out of town with five hundred bucks and a backpack stuffed with clothes. They told me to change my name, to run if I ever sensed danger, to never use my powers, and to never, under any circumstances, come home. ‘You fucked everything up, you little bitch,’ Dad said, and that was the last thing either of them said to me. The bus pulled away. I got off in Indiana, caught another bus to Chicago, then another to Osceola, Nebraska. By that time my name was Charlotte Prowse. I cut my hair real short, found a job folding laundry, and worked on losing my southern twang. And now you know who I am, Harvey, and who I’m running from.”
I wiped sweat from the back of my neck and nodded.
Sally pointed back across the abandoned lot to where the silver pole poked crookedly from the sidewalk. “Another bus will be along soon, just in case you want to—”
I pulled her into my arms and kissed her fiercely. It wasn’t great, if I’m being honest. It was a somewhat awkward, smelly moment that would never win the MTV Best Kiss award. But it was passionate, and it conveyed exactly what I intended: for Sally to know that I wasn’t going anywhere. Not now. Not ever.
“Read my mind,” I said.
I fucking love you, dammit.
A splash of red, and she smiled.
“I fucking love you, too,” she said.
* * *
Our room was on the upper level. It was cool and dark and smelled of dog. The bed was soft, though, and the shower worked. It would do.
Sally kicked off her sneakers and collapsed on the bed. I joined her, thinking I would fall quickly to sleep, but something worked the edges of my mind—three words that had lodged into place at the hotel in Tulsa, and hadn’t strayed far since.
Kill the fucker.
“Where does he live?” I asked Sally.
“No,” Sally said. “Get it out of your head, baby. That won’t work.”
Kill the fucker.
“It might.”
I’d always thought I was nonviolent—my mother’s son—but recent events had given me reason to climb the tree I’d hitherto been hugging, and take a good look at the real world.
“He’s weak, Sally,” I said. “You should have seen him after he crawled through my head—sagging like an empty bag, sucking on oxygen. You’d annihilate him. We could stop running.”
“He’ll have protection,” Sally said. “Armed guards. Dogs. Surveillance cameras. All kinds of security equipment. You’d be dead within seconds, and I’d be dosed up with antipsychotics. As soon as Lang gets into my head, he gets his memories back. His power, too.”
“But—”
“No, Harvey,” she said, and there was a snap to her voice. I imagined the bird in her head bristling its feathers. “All it takes is one goon to sneak up behind me with a tranquilizer gun and it’s all over. So get this dumbass idea out of your head right now. We run. That’s what we do.”
I sighed, then rolled over, propped on one elbow. I touched Sally’s cheek and her eyes flicked toward me in the gloom.
“I don’t want you to have to run,” I said. “I want this to be over.”
“I know,” she said. “And it will be. Lang is sixty-two years old. Not old, but not young, either. One day—hopefully not too many years from now—I’m going to go online and see that his Wikipedia entry has been updated with a date of death. Then it will be over.”
She rolled onto her side, too. Our hands met in the middle.
“Then,” she said again. “Only then.”
Eighteen
Cypress wasn’t so much a town as a bad idea, where two lanes of Route 66 defied I-40, lined with jaded businesses that depended primarily on the trade of bikers and Route 66 enthusiasts. There were two motels that rivaled each other for shittiness, a casino called Banditos, a raucous biker bar called Your Kicks, and any number of desperate, half-shuttered stores all selling the same crappy souvenirs.
“One night,” I said to Sally. “Then we’re taillights.”
We had slept for three hours and showered vigorously, and emerged into a purple desert evening where cicadas called from dusty yuccas and quick, dark lizards disappeared the moment you noticed
them. There was a peppery scent to the air and the breeze was gritty, carrying the thud of rock music from the biker bar. Bleached trash rattled in storefront doorways and along the edges of the road.
Sally and I turned left out of the motel and headed toward Route 66. The plan was to find somewhere half-decent to eat (we weren’t hopeful), but first, to buy tickets on the earliest bus west. There was no depot—only that silver pole jutting from the sidewalk—but we found a ticket machine in the 7-Eleven on the corner of Guadalupe and 66. I tapped the screen and brought up a fifteen-hour run to Blythe, California, leaving at 5:30 a.m.
“There are a couple of long layovers,” I said. “We can stretch our legs, get something to eat. It might not be too bad, and we’ll be out of here before sunrise.”
“Do it,” Sally said.
The machine only took credit cards, though, and I definitely did not want to leave a digital footprint here—one that pointed in the direction we were going—so I persuaded a hairy-ass biker to use his card, and paid him the cash with an extra twenty bucks on top.
“Either your card is maxed or you’re on the run,” he said, tucking the notes into his wallet.
“The first one,” I said. “Hey, you know anywhere good around here to eat?”
“Your Kicks does the best chimichangas this side of the border,” he said, and I don’t know why, but I found this tattooed, leather-clad near-wolf saying the word chimichangas quite endearing.
“We’re there,” I said.
We left the 7-Eleven and followed the distorted thump of rock music, although the bar wasn’t hard to find: a brazen, flashing structure on 66, mesh on the windows, the parking lot choked with hogs and choppers. It was more of the same inside, the walls bedecked with Route 66 and Harley-Davidson memorabilia, TVs in cages, an open space on the floor for dancing and/or fighting. Grizzly bikers circled tables and lined the bar, their backs as rounded as barrels. Female bikers—some silver-haired and beautiful—punctuated the ruggedness like rhinestones.
