by Joseph Fink
18
The first blue of morning crept up on the airplane graveyard. Keisha sat back in her seat and considered the gate of the other town in front of her. There would be no return from what she had to do next, but hadn’t she learned in the last few weeks that there had never been a return possible? This had always been a one-way trip, only now she knew it for sure, and so she could stop denying and come to terms with it.
Her cab was full of a smell so strong it left her dizzy, but whatever helped. She had gotten little help in her life. Now the time for help had passed, had maybe never existed for a person like her. Maybe she had spent her life alone, the only advocate for herself, and she had just never fully realized it. She put her hand on the ignition. She breathed in. She breathed out. She closed her eyes. This was it then.
Her passenger door opened. She opened her eyes and didn’t understand what she was looking at. She couldn’t breathe in or out. She couldn’t do anything even though she wanted to do so many things.
“Chanterelle,” Alice said.
The rush of anger on hearing Alice speak put the voice back into Keisha’s chest. “Let’s stick with Keisha,” she said.
Alice looked as she had on the day she had disappeared. Keisha didn’t know whether she hated her or loved her or if there was any difference in that moment.
“I’m sorry. I . . . I don’t know what to say. I shouldn’t have done it the way that I did,” Alice said.
“A higher calling?” Keisha said, refusing to look at her.
“A lower one, I guess. The lowest, darkest places. You know. You’ve seen them.”
“Thanks to you.”
“Keisha, the world is teetering. I’m trying to keep it sliding in the right direction. Either way a huge and terrible change is coming. But if it slides too far toward them”—she gestured at the Thistle gates—“then it’s all over for people like us, people in love, people who feel.”
Keisha kept both hands on the wheel. She didn’t trust her body to support itself otherwise.
“They’ll kill you,” Alice said.
“Maybe.”
“Keisha, they will kill you to an extent you didn’t know a person could be killed. You don’t know how dangerous they can be.”
“Oh, Alice. I know. I know. I know.”
“Ok. You know.”
“Got your message, and thanks for that, but I can’t go home. I tried that.”
“I heard,” Alice said. “I wish I could protect you. But I need to stay lost for a while. You have to respect that. You have to respect me enough not to look for me.”
Keisha turned finally, faced Alice fully. Her eyes streamed, and she made no effort to wipe it away.
“You want to talk about respect?” she hissed.
“Someday, Chipmunk . . . Keisha, I will come back, if you will let me, and we will live out the rest of our lives. I promise that. I promise that. In the meantime.”
“In the meantime, stop looking.”
“Yeah,” Alice said. “Yes. I’m sorry.”
Keisha could have hit her. Could have killed her, honestly. Let Alice finally actually be dead if she wanted to be dead that badly. But what she did instead was pull her toward her, and their lips met, and it could have been the day they met, could have been the day they got married, could have been any weekday evening before she disappeared. Keisha felt love, right where she had left it, and kissed Alice so hard that it hurt both of them, because what she really wanted to do was to find her way into Alice’s chest and live there among the bones and blood. She wanted them to be one person, but also to be two people; she wanted so many things, most of them contradictory. She pushed Alice away.
Alice couldn’t find breath to speak.
“I won’t look for you then,” Keisha said. “But it’s not about you anymore.”
“I know,” Alice said. She sniffed at the air and smiled a little. “You’ve made some good precautions, at least. I don’t know why it works, but I think it does.”
“That’s what I’m hoping. It’s all about hope now.”
Alice put her hand on Keisha’s leg, and Keisha stopped herself from flinching away. Alice didn’t deserve the touch, but Keisha did, and she wanted it.
“I’m going now,” said Alice.
“I am too.”
“Please don’t do this.”
“Get out of my truck.”
Alice, one lingering moment of hand on leg later, did.
My hands are shaking, Keisha thought, and then realized that she was wrong. Every part of her was shaking. There was not a muscle in her body that wasn’t quivering. She tried to find steadiness, but that was no longer a possibility, and so she tried to find resolve and she didn’t have that either. But she did have stubbornness and desperation, and those would do in a pinch.
The conversation hadn’t changed anything. She still had to do what she had to do next. Because it hadn’t been for Alice, or even for Keisha. She picked up the note and read it again. It had one word and one number. The word was Room. The number was Sylvia’s room number at the Extended Stay America where Keisha had left her. Keisha had called the room over and over, but there had been no answer, and Sylvia’s phone refused texts and went to voice mail when called.
There was no mistaking the message. And so Keisha no longer had the luxury of time to plan, or watch, or gather support. She needed to end this for Sylvia’s sake before anyone else got hurt, even though there was no way for Keisha to do this and walk away. She knew she wouldn’t live to see the morning that the horizon was promising, and she had become ok with this. She tried one more time to call, this time the front desk at the Extended Stay.
“Anything strange?” said a sleepy-sounding man. “Nothing but this call, lady. I’m not going to go knocking on my customers’ doors in the middle of the night because some rando says I should.”
So much for that. No more hesitation. No more waiting. She started the engine and felt the vibration of it roar up through her feet. She was still shaking, but now it felt like she was shaking with power instead of shock. It made her feel like she might be able to pull this off, even though she knew the chances were minuscule.
Parked under the belly of a dead jetliner, Alice watched Keisha start the engine. She pulled out her phone and made a call to a person she had never wanted to talk to again.
“I need a huge favor,” said Alice. “You really, really owe me.”
She was right. The person on the other end really, really did.
But Keisha didn’t know anything about that. Her world had focused to the gate in front of her, and her foot on the gas pedal. She put down her foot and the truck surged forward, using the long stretch of gravel to slowly build up velocity, bracing herself the moment before her truck slammed through the gate of the Thistle town.
19
The gate tore off with a sound like the yelp of a strange animal, and Keisha had to scramble for the brakes to avoid being carried through to the gas station. Hundreds of men with ill-fitting skin and yellow polo shirts. The mob surrounded the cab, sneering. One had been hit by her truck as it entered, and he picked himself up and limped to join the others. The skin of his face had been torn off by the collision and underneath was a mealy yellow fat, dripping down over his chin. There was no sign of bone. Keisha tried to find any calm within herself. Her skin glistened. She couldn’t smell anything but herself, fortunately, but she could imagine a smell like tilled earth, like green things gone putrid. A whole glob of yellow fat fell from the injured man’s face and landed on the ground where he slipped on it. He laughed as he fell, a choked, broken sound.
Tied to a streetlight near the gas station was one of the men. He leaned into the ropes that bound him. His whole body was covered in long narrow wounds that bled viscous trickles of mildew and must onto the rope, but his eyes were alive and focused.
“Get her,” he croaked. “Get her.”
The crowd parted. There was the original Thistle Man. The Hungry Man. The man
who had eaten an omelet and thrust her into a nightmare. He lurched through the crowd.
“Oh, you can get out,” he shouted. “None of us are going to hurt you right away. And you aren’t any safer in there.”
She fumbled the door open with slick hands.
“Look at you,” he roared. “Sweating like a scared child. You’re nervous.”
“I’m always nervous.” The other Thistle Men had backed up, formed a circle, leaving the two of them alone in the center. She was his mess to handle.
“You’re serial killers,” she said.
“We’re freedom. Freedom can be good or bad. There can be terrible freedom.” She shuddered to hear her own words thrown back at her. He grinned at her reaction. “We are the terrible freedom.”
“You’re murderers.”
“We are creatures of the road. We feed on distance, on road trips, on emptiness. Bodies by the side of the highway.”
There was a sound like applause, but softer. The crowd of Thistle Men were sucking in and out on their cheeks, creating a faint sound of flesh.
He grabbed her arm. She didn’t know how he got that close, but he was there, and he took her arm like a dance partner, gentle but insistent, and then he pushed her up against the truck. His arm was on her throat. Fear branched through her like lightning, starting from the gut and ending with a thunderclap in her head.
But he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t push down, and he was wincing, his face wrinkling in disgust. He stepped back, wiping frantically at his arm. She gestured to her drenched face, neck, torso.
“Heather oil. Poured a few bottles right over my head. Tip from a friend.”
The Thistle Man growled, and it reverberated out from his chest like a creature ten times his size. “You think that smell will protect you?” He slapped her. The world went white on one side. “It will hurt me, but I will hurt you more.”
She reached out before he could realize she was moving. She grabbed his face, wrenched open his rotting, gummy mouth, and shoved in a huge fistful of dried heather.
“I also brought this.”
He choked, heaved, his skin turned purple as though his entire body was bruising, and she couldn’t make herself believe what happened next. He turned frantically and ran.
The other monsters froze. The tied-up one, glop still oozing from the wounds all over his body, moved his mouth like a fish, saying, “Fuh, fuh, fuh.”
In the moment they were frozen, Keisha took off after the Thistle Man. The only way out, as always, was through. As soon as she moved, the others moved too. She broke through a gap in their circle, but she could hear the off-kilter rhythm of their running, and the thick, moist gasps of exertion from all around.
She chased the Thistle Man into a diner. The Burgers ’n More. The inside of the diner was full of rotting food. Milkshakes and hamburgers, covered in mold and maggots. Only the glasses of soda, unable to rot, watery with melted ice, still looked like what they were.
He was already in the kitchen, headed for the back door. She put the last of her energy into a sprint and crashed into him, sending both of them sprawling into the walk-in cooler. She slammed the door and pushed one of the low, heavy shelves in front of it. He flopped around on the ground, spitting out heather, his skin still an angry purple. After the heat of the night air outside, the walk-in made pinpricks on her skin. It focused her, like sobering up from a long night of drinking. She glanced back to check the door, and when she looked again at him, he was on his feet.
“That bought you some time, didn’t it?” he burbled. “I wasn’t expecting that. You got me to panic. Got me to run.”
His skin blotched back from purple to faint yellow. He stretched and flexed, his strength returning. The walk-in was small. A soft patter of hands pawed on the outside of the door, and on the walls on both sides.
“But then what?” he asked. “What weapon do you have to finish the job?”
“Nothing,” she said.
“Nothing?”
“Just me. I’m going to kill you.”
He laughed, the deep laugh at the end of a good joke.
“You’re going to kill me. Oh, Keisha,” he said with tenderness, and in the same moment he came for her.
He was stronger even than she had remembered. It was like being hit by a car. Mass without pity, only brutal physics. She didn’t feel pain. She was so full of fear that there wasn’t room for anything else. She had never been so afraid, terror in every part of her. It froze up her limbs, locked up her joints, made her thoughts simultaneously too slow for planning and too fast to follow. She wasn’t a person anymore, just a container for fear.
Keisha thought of Alice. Of believing Alice was dead and then knowing she wasn’t. She thought of Earl outside that diner, dying alone, as decent people ate waffles not ten feet away. She thought of a father in a Target parking lot, calling the police, under the belief that the police would help. She thought of a line of billboards with names, a murderer’s legacy on an ugly stretch of highway. She thought of a teenage girl, doing her best, and how great her best was. She thought of a bus pulling out of Victorville in the middle of the night. She thought of Sheila and David, an ordinary couple living out an ordinary series of years until their neighbor got them murdered merely by coming home. She thought of home. She thought again of Sylvia. She thought again and again of Alice.
Through all these thoughts, a buzzing anxiety. Anxiety like electricity. Keisha knew, in that moment, that anxiety is just an energy. It is an uncontrollable, near infinite energy, surging within her. And as the Thistle Man started to kill her, she stopped trying to contain that energy. She told her heart to beat faster and her panicked breath to become more labored. She demanded that fear overtake her. Make me more afraid. I’m not afraid of feeling afraid. Make me more afraid.
All that energy, she turned it outward, pushing it into her arms, her legs, her teeth. Fuck the Thistle Man. When he hit her again, she hit back. Pounding at his face. His chest. Biting. Letting the wave of terror inside her crest over him.
The Thistle Man laughed when she hit him, and kept punching, as thoughtless and inhuman as a rockslide on a highway. But she kept hitting, too, and he stopped laughing. Keisha clawed at his face, and his skin started to go, and that yellow fat oozed out. He grunted, growled, flailed. He was no longer toying with her, he was fighting for his life, but she stayed on her feet with all the fear that animated her. He was the one who finally fell, his teeth mashed into his cheek, shouting meaningless syllables.
She fell after him, knees first onto his chest. She hit, and hit, and hit. And then he was dead.
The Thistle Man was gone.
Adrenaline pounded through her; she couldn’t turn off the energy she had found in herself, and she was in pretty bad shape. Bruises, probably a broken rib, definitely broken teeth. But the Thistle Man was a pile of fat and pulp that smelled like mushrooms. She threw up, half on the floor and half on his body. The smells of heather, and her vomit, and the ooze from the body mixed horribly. But with her own hands, she had ended this. She had won.
A patter of hands on the walls. And she remembered all the others.
20
“Let us in, let us in,” a ragged voice sang, each note in discord with the note before.
The lights in the walk-in clicked off. In the darkness, she could hear moaning and whispering. A voice sounded like it was inches from her ear. “Fuh, fuh, fuh,” it said. Keisha slid to the ground against the wall, and she waited to die.
Then a new sound. She felt it in her stomach first, a bass tone that hadn’t been there before. Gradually it slid from her stomach to her ears, becoming audible. Engines. Car engines and then gunshots. The whispering stopped. There was scrambling outside the walk-in, like a dog slipping on hardwood.
Then nothing. Nothing but her and the darkness.
Then light. The door burst open, knocking over the shelf holding it shut. A woman holding a battering ram, a rifle slung over her shoulder, an angry scar, perf
ectly vertical, along her left cheek. Keisha had never seen this woman before.
The woman looked at the body on the floor. “Holy shit,” she said. She examined Keisha again with more interest and then clicked on the radio on her belt.
“You’re not going to believe this,” she said, “but Vector H is down.”
There was an exclamation of disbelief from the radio.
“I know, but I’m looking right at him. Vector H is definitely dead.” The woman clicked it off before the person on the other end could reply. “Come on out. Those things have run for now,” she said. She gave Keisha a respectful distance, glancing again at the Thistle Man, the Hungry Man, the corpse.
The woman ushered Keisha through the rotting diner and out onto the streets. They were full of armored vehicles. Women and men in uniforms sweeping house to house with perfect precision. But the uniforms did not look like any military she knew. Navy blue jumpsuits, with a logo on the chest. She squinted, but everyone was running around too quickly for her to understand the logo. They moved out of the way of the woman with automatic deference, and Keisha understood that she was the commander of whatever this group was.
“Who are you?” she asked the woman.
“You did a good thing today, Keisha. A very good thing.” She shook her head. “Maybe amazing. But now it’s time for you to leave.”
“Who do you work for?”
“Who do you work for?” she said. She was wearing one of the jumpsuits, too, and stopped so Keisha could finally see the logo. Bay and Creek Shipping. The same logo as the door of her cab. Keisha didn’t know what to say to that.
“You’re lucky Alice called me. We have a new truck for you. It’s parked outside the wall. This one is, well, it’s a write-off, got in a bad accident with a gate, but we won’t take it from your paycheck.”
