Blood Highway

by Gina Wohlsdorf

  The land was parched, homogenous. I saw it in unclear shutter-clicks that told me only: sand. I pressed the gas into the floor with my full weight. Home wasn’t far now. It wasn’t this; it was this’s antithesis. I cranked the music. “We Belong” and “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” and “Never Gonna Give You Up” and “Don’t Stop Believin’.” Journey sang it how many years ago, and here it was, still playing. A miracle.

  There was a girl on the highway, skipping rope. She was wearing a black-and-white polka-dotted dress with pale-pink tights. I had years to ponder her. To think about how that was my Easter outfit when I was six or seven. I swerved, but I could fix it. The road was so long.

  Tires free, spinning. Me free, spinning. The windshield showed a sweet bath of blue sky, then a thicket of brush and spines coming closer. Had I called him, Blaine’s first question would have been “Where are you?”

  The answer filled me up and made me float above the desert, balloon-light with relief: I’m here.

  I’m right here.

  III

  Roam

  Fifteen

  Somebody’d hung the room wrong. My hair dangled over a floor—ceiling?—covered in glass. Big hunks and tiny diamonds of glass. They threw light, and inside was dark—freaky dark. I heard breathing. It was speeding up, a downbeat to panic, because I was upside-down, suspended by a seat belt. How long had I been out? I remembered fragments about how I got here, all of them surreal.

  I wanted to teleport. I’d take the whole car with me if necessary. A ditch in Minneapolis. December— fine, I’d take the snow, too. As long as there was an ambulance, fire truck, cops: “Miss, can you hear me? Sit tight, we’re here to help.” Maybe it would be Blaine.

  “Blaine?” I said. I tested my neck. It turned okay.

  I waited for the Sylvester the Cat mask to say he told me so, but he wasn’t in the passenger side. The ceiling there had caved in. My window was walled in sand, as was the window behind it. So were both windshields. Like I’d been buried alive.

  But the glass is shining. Where’s the light coming from?

  “Backseat, passenger side.” And its beautiful wide-open frame. The stitch in my ribs complained. I concurred, aloud: “This is gonna suck.”

  I put my right fist on the ceiling. Floor. There was absolutely no good way to do this. I used my hands like brooms, sweeping as much glass away as I could. I planted my fist again and pressed the seat-belt button. Stunning flood of silver across my vision.

  Pain is a lot of things in theory, and a lot of things in retrospect. Pain is only itself when you’re in it. Pain is pure, and it makes people pure, and no matter how bad they are, it makes their motives pure: stop the pain. That’s why torture works. It’s also why torture doesn’t work. I performed actions that were countereffective to making the pain stop, such as oscillating on my glass-covered square of ceiling/floor. I tried to put my right hand to my side and found I couldn’t. When I brought my wrist up for inspection, it was swollen and achy, and there was a fat bulge where that little bump’s supposed to sit parallel to the pinkie. I’d also broken my pinkie.

  Crawling hurt. Surprise of the century. I squished around the headrests and knocked random crap out of the way. I peeked my head into sunlight and greeted a world that was amazingly beige, dug with my elbows and pulled into merciless heat, army-crawled until I needed a breather, turned my head, put my cheek to the ground, and checked out the car. The front end was crumpled into a thatch of bristled spruce that grew about five feet from a cement irrigation ditch. The driver’s side dug into a hill of sand deeply enough that a backhoe might’ve done it. Kinked like this, I noticed my back was iridescent—a few dozen puckers of skin winked widgets of glass. The blood painted rings on my tank top. It reminded me of the sign for Target. Or, I suppose, a target. I spared a few minutes to pick out the bigger pieces, straddling bleak emotional collapse and fierce euphoric ascension because, yes, I was hurting and I was stranded and I was hotter than an egg frying on a dry skillet. But Sam was not here.

  I decided to take five, celebrate. I put my other cheek to the desert floor. There, a few feet away, was the cell phone. A short length of snakeskin was trapped under it, inflating wind-sock-style on a breeze I didn’t feel.

  I got on my stomach, got a mouthful of sand. I coughed once and shrieked, curled up, and that made it worse. I arrived at the cell and picked the snakeskin free, flipped the phone open. The screen showed a bulldog with a Christmas star on his head. He was not pleased.

  I dialed, awkward with my left hand.

  “Listen,” Blaine said. “Tell me where you are. Right now, first thing.”

  “I don’t know.” I did my best, but my best was, “The desert.”

  “Are you— Never mind, look around. Tell me what’s around you.”

  “There’s a road.”

  “Look at the road. Is there a sign?”

  The sun was baking me stupid. My view profoundly dull, dry, and repetitive, an overlay of the same three frames behind that indestructible bird who never said anything but meep-meep. I tried a maneuver to get on my knees.

  “What happened?” Blaine said. “How bad are you?”

  “Bad.” I stumbled to the car, leaned on the flipped front tire. It was slack and wanted to turn. Everything went gray. I dropped the phone and sprawled across the wheel and held it still, and it held me still. I searched for a route I could walk.

  That hill. You’ll see more.

  But that’s a mile, easy.

  The phone was yelling. I bent to pick it up. My entire body rang with pain. “I broke”—where to begin?—“a few things.”

  “Check the charge. How much charge has your phone got?”

  The screen reminded me of video games. Numbers made of squares. I spied nothing that would indicate its life span. “Don’t know,” I said. “I have to move, Blaine.” I limped. Some exotic instability was going on in my leg. Fortunately, it paled in comparison. “Remember when you told me there’s no pain like breaking your hand?”

  I could hear his engine revving to obscene speeds. “Yeah?”

  “Try ribs. Pretty awesome. Every time I inhale, it’s like I’m rolling in broken glass. Which I did, too, so I can vouch for the metaphor.”

  Blaine swore, a nifty cuss combining “shit,” two “fucks,” and a split “goddamn.” “I need you to do something.”

  “’Kay.”

  “I’m gonna hang up.”

  “No, don’t.” The earth underneath me was scorched. I was eyeing those scaly squares, to focus on his voice. His voice was sanity. “Please don’t.”

  “Feds can trace your phone,” Blaine said. “I have to call them, and the cell they’re tracing needs to be on. Trace doesn’t work with no battery, understand?”

  “No.” And I meant that on a few levels. Didn’t know they could do that. Didn’t understand how. But mostly, “Don’t. Don’t hang up.”

  “I’m sorry. Don’t call me back.”

  “Blaine!” I blared it into dead air. My ribs grated, and I was grateful: it brought me back to the fact I was in serious trouble here. I surveyed how far I’d come, the car a greasy blot on a flat of cracked tan, long skid marks the roof had left, like somebody tried to erase a mistake and only made it worse. The road I’d been driving on was endless, stretching nowhere in both directions. Slight undulations of arid windsweep lacked even those cactuses that look, to a desperate person, like people. Their prickly arms raised in a kind of welcome.

  I went for the hill, more an embankment, more a slight rise of gathered dirt. I was getting hotter. I recognized backtracking to the car as the best strategy, crabbing into that swelter of shaded ninety rather than this sunny hundred plus. But coherence had exited, giving way to dumb animal drive, and I tipped forward like a spilled glass of water—water, how great was water—kicked another foot into another step, and so on, like that. Once I was on top of the repulsive void, I shook my head. Buildings appeared in a little bowl of valley not a half mile away.<
br />
  I had to be hallucinating. Though if I were, I doubted the buildings would be falling over. I counted structures and got to nine, but most of them weren’t buildings anymore. They were lean-tos. Whole slabs of edifice had sheared off, leaving crumbled lumber and scabbed drywall. The pieces still standing were a petrified gray color, bulging out in splintered angles, and those were the handful not yet overwhelmed by sand, slithering in the available gaps and massing into dunes as if saying, Nice try.

  That big one’s got four walls. It even has a door. Fancy.

  I blinked aggressively, trying to get a better read on what that squat rectangle was and why it’d been better built than anything around it, before asking myself why the hell it mattered. I got going. Between me and it sat the irrigation ditch, the two-lane, and a long pass of land spotted in spiked bushes and canker-like rocks. I didn’t guess at the distance. I rationed my glimpses. If I checked my direction too often, the buildings seemed to get smaller. I could feel my scalp burning, my hair on fire. I’m telling myself: A ghost town—neat, never been in one of those.

  Shambling onto Main Street. More like Only Street. Standing in the middle of the real deal, you can’t help but think: “Ghost town” is right.

  “Hello?”

  I heard rattles and scuttles. Whatever owned this territory was gossiping, calling me a varmint, a goddamn interloper. A crooked window stared at me, mean idiot eye. That unfeelable breeze caught a ravaged piece of cloth in the shattered pane, making it flutter. I could tell that one was a house, but the others defied the usual labels: general store or school or saloon. They were broken boxes. I had to marvel at anyone attempting to settle here.

  The building with its ostentatious door—it was actually double doors, hanging open—I went in. Blunted, groggy. The temperature plummeted twenty degrees. The darkness was total. I sat. I didn’t mean to sit, but it happened. I crawled: the farther I got, the cooler I’d be. I went until I couldn’t go anymore. The edges of my broken ribs rubbed together. It was like my most appalling menstrual cramps took a wrong turn north. I curled on my side and remembered that Legs did that, in the road, before Sam shot her. I tried to roll on my back and couldn’t. My life began its death-prep slide show. It got stuck on Sam, Sam saying, “Daddy loves you.” I wished he hadn’t meant it. But he had; his love was real. It just didn’t have anything to do with me.

  An incredible heaviness descended. I weighed a quadrillion pounds. I fought sleep, that marketing genius. Sleep! No money down, no interest, no payments ’til brain swelling!

  I looked around, to keep conscious. I realized it wasn’t as dark in here as I’d thought—that’d been the contrast with outside. The roof boasted holes big and small. Sun beamed through. The walls protruded with miniwalls that divided the room into compartments. Each had a latch for a square window. I was in a horse stable. How this knowledge helped me, I did not know, yet a flower of cockiness bloomed in my chest anyway. I catalogued evidence, piled in corners, of a long-ago party: tall boys, cigarette butts, a blanket, and a pair of women’s underpants, its lace yellow or yellowed.

  I visualized the central switchboard of my body, where alarms went off and warning lights flashed. The cell phone was still clutched in my hand. It didn’t seem melodramatic, wanting to tell him goodbye. I pressed buttons, but the screen stayed blank. The battery was dead. I searched for and found the nobility in giving up.

  Hey, God? Your rules are dumb, I quit. Take your best shot.

  A predatory growl came from outside, a distant rumble. I told God, Pshh, eaten alive by a wild beast? You’re not even trying.

  Then I gathered it wasn’t an animal. It was getting closer. I heard gears shifting, an abrupt stop. A car door slammed shut.

  “Rainaaaay!”

  “Uh?” I said. And thought: Yeah, that’ll cut it.

  “Rainaaaay!”

  The secret to good singing is breath. Engage the diaphragm, expand the lungs, which expands the ribs: “Heeeaaaaaaare!” Which terminates in a spate of clogged-toilet noises.

  I shallowed my air intake to quarter teaspoons and watched the last moisture I had stick my eyelashes together. I listened to a powerful engine race for me, but I had no inner hurray about it. I was mostly wondering whether Blaine would shoot me if I asked him politely enough.

  Fast feet moved across the ground outside. The bright-to-dark rendered him sightless, too, and he would have tripped over me if I hadn’t moaned.

  “Jesus Christ,” Blaine said, his outline crouching, his hands searching my sprained wrist for a pulse until it noodled and I gasped and he said, “Sorry, sorry,” putting it down.

  His gun was strapped to his hip. He had on jeans and a T-shirt. The combo was incongruous, as was his being here, side by side with me in our ecosystem’s toaster. We belonged on cold doorsteps. In dens and living rooms strewn with secrets, in police cruisers bound nowhere. I was suddenly, stupidly happy. Maybe the happiest I’d ever been—and this was also incongruous. But I went with it. What better time to make a fool of yourself?

  “Hi,” I said. “How’s it going?”

  Blaine’s jaw jumped. He didn’t like my heart rate. He began to palpate, glancing at and returning my goofy smile with his phoniest one. He showed me his bloody hand, fresh from a visit to my back. “What’s this from?”

  “Glass. You look tired.”

  His eyes traveled over my injuries. I’d forgotten his magnificent powers of blanding, on display now at their most potent. Blaine could’ve been handling auto parts for how engaged his face was in the process. Unless you were me, the auto parts he was handling, and you felt how terrified he was of making a mistake. His palm glided to my ribs. I mewled. He winced but nixed it fast, went back to strong and stoic and blank. “Okay, that’s done. I won’t do that again, I promise. I’ll be right back.”

  I grabbed his shoelace. “Don’t leave.”

  “I need to go get a few things.”

  “Don’t leave.”

  “I’m not leaving. I’ve got a first-aid kit in the trunk.” Blaine stooped and pried at my hold, stopping at the pinkie. “Rainy, this is broken. You shouldn’t bend it. Let go.”

  I did, but: “Don’t leave me here.”

  “Twenty seconds. You can count ’em. Ready?” Blaine didn’t wait. He ran out the door.

  The pain throbbed, and the throbs became strangely restful. “Whoa, whoa,” he said. “Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Moving me. I grabbed on to him. We got to the nearest stall, and he set my good side against it. I had bunches of his shirt. I squeezed, heard a popping sound.

  “Look at me, Rainy. Look right here.” Blaine was slipping. Fiery panic peeked through his cool. He had a butterfly bandage at the end of his eyebrow. His breath smelled of cinnamon. “Let your hand open. Let go.” His grip fought mine, and I watched, rooting for him. My pinkie knuckle was breaking the skin, bone hatching from the flesh like a chick’s beak. He won of course, but only on that hand. My other held around his shoulder, shaking with exertion.

  He got to work with something on the floor. “This’ll sting,” he said.

  Cold bit into my back and went hot. “How’d you find me?”

  “Called the feds, had them triangulate the signal. Like I told you I would, remember?” Blaine used a dozen cotton pads, making a pile of the bloody ones. “They’re on the way from Vegas. Sam shot a guard in the bank. Guy was DOA at the hospital. I told the feds there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell Sam’s hiding in the city if you made it out.” He was relating all this like I knew what he was talking about. “That road’ll be D-day in a half hour.”

  “Vegas?”

  “I beat the others there. Heard a teenage girl with white hair stole a car and hightailed it for the desert.” Blaine opened a few bandages and used them on the deepest cuts. “You’ve been holding out on me. That must’ve been some driving.”

  “Did I hurt anybody?”

  “Just insurance companies,” he said. “I’ve been trying to cover every shitty back road in
the Mojave, hoping I’d get lucky or you’d call.” He checked me for more problems he could treat. He wiped under my nose. “This keeps bleeding.”

  “Sam made me snort cocaine.”

  Blaine’s forehead crimped. I wouldn’t have noticed, except it made a runnel for his sweat. A drop snuck down the side of his nose, almost like a tear. He wiped it off, rolled a cotton pad and dabbed at my nostril.

  I thought I’d lighten the mood. “Coke’s like weaponized coffee, huh?”

  “Dunno,” he said. “Never tried it.”

  “Square.”

  He didn’t laugh. He uncapped a bottle of water. “Sip this. You’ll want to chug it, but sip. Otherwise you’ll throw it all up.”

  It tasted phenomenal. I whined when the bottle went away.

  “There’s more,” Blaine said. “Don’t move, I’m opening another one.”

  I breathed in to thank him and inhaled a water drop. I coughed. It was like a nail gun firing into my side. I screamed, which killed, then I still had to cough, so I did, and it made me need to scream again, creating a fun round-robin rib-jab competition, where everyone was a winner but me. My legs flailed, and that didn’t feel great, either.

  Blaine pulled me to him, trying to brace me, letting me hack and pant in his face. “Slow down. Slow down and breathe.” He observed that this advice took absolutely no effect, my arms starting to beat at him as I strangled, my skin going tingly.

  “Rainy? You don’t need that much air. Watch me. Breathe with me.” He aped a gradual inhale I couldn’t have duplicated if my life had depended on it. Which it was starting to. “Good. Do that again,” he said. “I’m with you, same thing again.”

  I heaved and managed to ask on the exhale, “Shoot me, okay?”

  “In a minute. Do it again.”

  I tucked my head under his chin. That made it easier. We tilted. Rough, musty warmth encased me—the blanket with the balled-up underwear. “You don’t know where that’s been,” I croaked.