by Keith Knapp
Although the car was secure for the time being, getting as much weight as possible to the back of the wagon was a paramount idea. This was a Ford, maybe a ‘67 or ‘68, and if Mike’s memory served him correctly, the engine weighed anywhere from 400 to 700 pounds. An extra hundred pounds or so in the back in the shape of one St. Bernard sure wouldn’t hurt.
A woman who looked like she’d be at home in a trucker bar approached, a cell phone glued to her ear. She smiled as she walked closer, an expression Mike found odd. A pleasant grin to someone you didn’t know seemed completely out of place today.
Shoving her phone into a pocket with a grumble, she reached out for a shake. “No service. How can there be no service?”
Shaking her hand, Mike said, “‘Quake must’ve taken out a tower or two.” He then skirted the conversation to the more immediate problem by aiming a shoulder at the station wagon. “Barrier’s got the car pinned and she can’t get out.” He lowered his voice. “I think she’s hurt. Bad.”
Mike caught a glimpse of a skull-and-bones tattoo on the woman’s right forearm as they shook, completing the picture-perfect image in his mind of this woman pounding back some Budweisers in a truck stop. The skull was grinning, happy as a clam. A cigarette dangled from its mouth.
“Can she move?”
“No, I don’t think so. Not much, at least.”
The trucker woman’s shoulders sagged. “So even if one of us hung over that there barrier, we couldn’t pull her outta the window.”
“Doubt it,” Mike said.
Inside the station wagon, Dorothy strained to see what was going on behind her. The trucker woman caught her eyes in the side-view mirror and again gave that out of place smile, this time accompanied by a casual nod of the head.
“Just sit tight,” the trucker woman said. “Everything’s gonna be okay.” Then to Mike: “I don’t suppose you have some Jaws of Life?”
“Sure,” said Mike. “Back at my shop. Two miles from here.”
“Great.”
About ten feet away sat a crumpled but still classic Ford Mustang. The driver remained glued to his seat, shaking his head back and forth, pouting over the damage done to his beauty.
“He’ll do for starters,” she said and began to walk toward the Mustang.
“Where are you going?”
“Gonna see if anyone has some chain.”
“Chain? What for?”
Annoyed, the trucker woman stomped back next to Mike. “We hook up this car’s axel to another’s, try and pull it back so she can get out the front window. Or so we can get in.”
“It’ll never work,” Mike said. “The car weighs way too much, and even if the axel could hold-”
But she was already gone.
9.
“I can’t believe we’re still alive,” Rachel said. She appeared to be mostly uninjured, as did Jimmy and Brett. There would be bruises all over their bodies tomorrow, but no broken bones, no serious cuts. “Amazingly lucky” was the term that came to mind.
Stirring in the seat, Brett shook the earthquake-induced cobwebs from his head. Quietly, he moaned and felt his forehead.
“You alright?” Rachel asked.
Shaking his head again while still rubbing his forehead, Brett said, “Think I hit my head. Little dizzy, but okay. I’m fine. It’s how I roll.”
“That’s right, Bretty,” Jimmy said as he inched his way up to the front. “Who’s the president?” He wanted to make sure the kid didn’t have a concussion.
“You know I don’t know that. I don’t follow gov’ment stuff.”
Jimmy smiled. “Just the answer I was lookin’ for, champ.”
“Oh my,” Brett said, suddenly worried. “Jimmy, your eye. It’s bleeding.” He pointed at his brother’s right eye.
Blood smeared across Jimmy’s cheek as he wiped at his eye. He pulled away his hand and looked at his now red fingertips. “Shit,” he said. “Something got in there. I can feel it movin’ around.”
“What is it, Jimmy?” Brett asked. “You okay? Ya gonna be okay?”
“I’ll live, sport,” Jimmy said. He patted Brett on the shoulder. “You?”
Maneuvering to show them his left arm, Brett said, “Scraped my arm against the road.”
The sleeve on his Darth Vader tee was gone, along with some skin. Not some, a lot. Grooves had appeared up and down his arm from his shoulder to his elbow. There was no free-flowing blood, but:
“It stings like hell,” Brett said.
“Just a flesh wound, looks like,” Jimmy said. “I think you’ll be okay, kiddo.”
Rachel didn’t think Jimmy would ever run out of nicknames for Brett. If he did, he’d probably just start making new ones up.
“Yeah,” Brett mumbled. “Should make for a pretty cool scar.”
“Damn straight,” said Jimmy.
Turning to Jimmy, Rachael said, “Let me see that eye.”
Jimmy leaned close to her, his head cocked so she could get a better view of the injured eye. There was more red in it than white. Small veins had popped up, rushing blood to the damaged retina. Rachel carefully pried his eyelid open wider for a closer inspection.
“I think some glass got in there,” Jimmy said. “Feels like glass.”
“Well, I don’t see anything,” Rachel said. “Does it hurt?”
Jimmy moved away from her. “Babe, everything hurts.”
“Red,” Brett said, staring out the front window, dazed. “Everything was red. But now it’s not.”
“What’s that, buddy?” Jimmy wanted to know.
Then Brett’s face lit up and he snapped out it. Turning to his brother, Jimmy’s question ignored, lost in the redness of his little daze, Brett said, “Jimmy! You’d be so proud of me. I fought Other Brett while I was driving. While I was driving, Jimmy!”
“And did you tell that asshole to go away, to not come back, that you had better things to do?”
“I did, Jimmy.”
“That’s my boy.”
Then Brett sighed, his jubilance over defeating Other Brett already gone. He looked down at his hands.
“You’re not mad?” Brett asked them.
Rachel furrowed her brow. “Mad about what?”
“The van. Not having it ready for you guys. I’m sorry, I just forgot, I-”
“Don’t worry about it, Bretty. We got bigger fish to fry right now,” Jimmy said.
Rachel squinted at Brett and moved closer, scanning the kid’s eyes, his face.
“What?” he asked.
“Red,” she said. “You said everything was red, but now it’s not.”
Brett’s forehead crinkled. He squeezed his eyes shut tight. “I can’t think so well,” he said. “My head hurts now. It didn’t a little bit ago, but it sure does now. I don’t know what was red.”
Rachel nodded and shared a look with Jimmy; Brett had hit his head harder than either of them thought. They needed to get him off the freeway and to a hospital, pronto.
Jimmy smiled. “Probably nothin’, big guy. We’re all seein’ red right now.”
Rachel clicked open the glove compartment and pulled out a bottle of aspirin. She flicked the cap off with a thumb and dropped four pills into Brett’s hand.
“I need water. You know I can’t take medicine without water.”
“We don’t have any,” Jimmy said. “Just take the pills. They’ll help.”
Brett looked from Jimmy to Rachel then back again. Then one more time. Jimmy. Rachel. “But I need water.”
“Okay, look,” Jimmy said. “Just pretend you have some water, okay?”
Brett looked at his free hand. He held his palm open as if to grab a nice, cool, refreshing glass of water with which to take his pills. “I don’t follow ya,” he said.
Rachel smiled and held up a finger: I got this one. “Not in your hand, Brett. In your mouth. Watch.”
She dumped two aspirin into her palm, tilted her head back, tossed them in. “Now I just pretend to have water in my mout
h,” she said, “and swallow.” And she did. Opening her mouth, Brett smiled in astonishment when he saw that the aspirin were gone. “Not under my tongue or anything.”
The four little circles sat in Brett’s palm. “These aren’t the kind that make me sleepy, are they? I don’t want any of those right now.”
Brett was talking about his Trazodone, which was a subject he didn’t bring up much. Because connected to that subject were many other subjects, most of which involved bad memories. And whenever a discussion would creep up about the Trazadone, or night terrors, or his mother, Other Brett was more than happy to play a highlight reel for Real Brett.
Brett began his bout with night terrors the month his mother died. He had always been closer to her than his brother had, and her death had hit him hard. Not that Jimmy wasn’t affected (Brett had caught him more than once crying alone in the bathroom), but the Mother/Offspring bond was stronger between Brett and their mother than it was with Jimmy. Maybe it had something to do with Brett being a little bit slow in the head, maybe not, but the truth of the matter was this: Brett’s mother was his entire world, and that world ended the day his mother gave up.
Diagnosed with cancer, Sherry Nickson was believed to still have had a good three or four years left in her. Those three or four years were cut down to three or four months when their father ran off with someone else. None of them ever found out who, but Jimmy had a theory that it was a dancer from a local strip club, the Cherry Picker. Brett never thought to ask how Jimmy knew about the Cherry Picker, but it seemed like as good a theory as any.
Sherry’s health deteriorated by the day. Her heart had been broken and could no longer support her already damaged body and she passed away three months later without so much as an apology or a goodbye from her husband. The bastard hadn’t even gone to the funeral or sent flowers; they simply never heard from him again. Maybe he didn’t know his wife had died, but more likely than not he just didn’t care. There was no argument that the guy was in a class of asshole all by himself. He didn’t even deserve to have his name mentioned in Brett’s memories.
Through sheer charm, Jimmy was able to wrangle custody of Brett. At the time of their mother’s death he had a steady job doing data entry at a home loan office. With their closest relative fifteen hundred miles away in Texas, (an uncle on their father’s side that, surprise surprise, neither of them had heard from or seen in over five years), and Jimmy being a legal adult with a decent enough job, Child Protective Services felt Brett would get the sweeter end of the lollypop if he stayed with his brother, whom he clearly loved and admired. Jimmy lost the job a few weeks later due to a dwindling housing industry, but they kept that to themselves. Move around enough, don’t tell CPS where you really are or what you’re really doing; it was remarkably easy to disappear. Jimmy’s smooth-talking ways and I’m-King-Of-The-World attitude went a long way. Even Rachel began to believe his lies.
But Brett could barely sleep in the days and weeks that followed, and when he did he was riddled with nightmares that would force him—and everyone else within shouting distance—awake with banshee yells of panic. He never told anyone what his nightmares were about, but Jimmy had heard him say the infamous “GET AWAY NOW!” in his sleep more than once. Chances were good ol’ Other Brett was giving Real Brett a dilly of a time in Dream World.
So Brett had been prescribed Prozac and Trazodone, neither of which he liked very much. But the Trazodone worked; knocked the kid out in thirty minutes flat. The Prozac, Jimmy promised, would help keep the demons at bay and they always made sure they had a supply. For the most part they worked, too, but there was still the occasional nightmare or bad day when Brett just couldn’t pull out of his funk.
Three months later, Brett gave up. A failed suicide attempt forced Jimmy and Rachel to re-evaluate where they kept the meds. The kid had nearly overdosed on his supply of Trazodone and Prozac. He had miraculously lived, and ever since then his pill intake had been closely monitored.
But the last of their money had gone to refills. Sometimes a five-fingered visit to a pharmacy or a withdrawal from something like, say, a liquor store, was needed to get the kid’s meds. So far, they were the only thing that worked.
And aspirin for the physical pain.
Brett popped the four aspirin into his mouth and swallowed with an effort. He then opened his mouth to show Rachel he had done it: the pills were gone.
Rachel counted twenty or thirty cars aimed this way and that on the road ahead, trapping them. The traffic jam wasn’t what bothered her. It was the road. Or rather the lack of a road.
A few hundred feet in front of them—at the very spot they would’ve been driving had the earthquake come a few seconds later—the road ceased to exist. A portion of it must have fallen to the surface street below because there was now a gap five cars long where the freeway used to be.
10.
With an ear to the sky, Mike listened for the sounds of helicopters and sirens, the kinds of sounds one would expect to be hearing. There was no chop-chop-chop of a helicopter (police, news, hospital or otherwise). The siren of a fire engine made its way through the endless screaming and crying, then it was gone, replaced by hundreds, perhaps thousands, of car alarms.
People on the freeway grappled with the devastation the earthquake had brought to them on what was once a fine Tuesday afternoon. An old man climbed out of his SUV, holding a bloody t-shirt to his head. He still had a shirt on, so the t-shirt must’ve come from somewhere (or someone) else. He looked around in confusion, as if he wasn’t quite sure where he was or what had happened. A Mexican woman in a mumu knelt over what Mike could only assume was the body of a loved one, crying her brains out. And right next to her was the torso of a man stuck underneath a car.
From this height it looked like the ‘quake had gotten the best of the city. There was no doubt the headlines would read, simply, “The Big One Hits L.A.!”
The skyline was different. Mike didn’t know what it was, but something was off. Then it hit him. A building was missing. Maybe two or three. He bet by nightfall more would be down. Smoke billowed up into the sky, creating black clouds that danced amongst the white. The entire city and everything around it had been put on indefinite hold.
Visions of 9/11 sped through his head. He didn’t like thinking about that day (who did?), but his brain made the comparisons for him whether he liked it or not. How quickly the Towers had gone down; there one second, gone the next, puffs of smoke and dust all around. Just like now. And while it was true Mike hadn’t been in New York that day (he’d been sound asleep in his one bedroom apartment in Reseda when it happened), he’d seen it all replayed on TV over and over and over again.
“How’s it going back there?” Dorothy asked from the front of her car.
“She went to go find some chain.”
“Oh, okay,” Dorothy said. A few seconds later she popped her head back out the window. “Why?”
“Because she doesn’t know her physics,” Mike said, and left it at that. Dorothy seemed satisfied with his answer, or at least satisfied enough to not follow it up with another question.
Back to that skyline.
It was really bugging the shit out of him. But it was more than just the downed buildings, wasn’t it? If he wanted to be honest with himself (and he had discovered over the years that he didn’t always enjoy being totally honest with himself), the very sky itself was all wrong.
Further inspection of the sky (it was the color, the color was wrong somehow he didn’t think it was from the fires popping up throughout the city—no, it was red, too red, not purple or orange or yellow but blood red) would have to wait. Here came the trucker woman, and from the look on her face she hadn’t had much luck.
A shrug of her shoulders and a palm-up-wave of the hands let Mike know she had been unsuccessful in her search for a chain. Her arms fell to her sides; there was nothing they could do.
She peered over Mike’s shoulder at the woman sitting in the station wagon.
Every few seconds Dorothy would turn and look at something in the back seat, utter a few words, then revert her eyes back to the roadless view in front of her.
Mike caught the trucker’s gaze and got it. “She’s talking to her dog. He won’t come out.”
“How sweet,” she said.
“Or stupid.”
“Obviously that dog loves her,” she read his nametag, “Mike.”
“It’s either love or stupidity,” he laughed.
“You’re one of those guys that never had a pet growing up, aren’t you?” she asked. “You strike me as the type.”
What was wrong with this woman? Here they were, pondering the life-and-death scenario of another human being, and she was making chit-chat. Insulting chit-chat, no less.
“If you’re gonna insult me, I should at least know your name.”
“Jillian.”
“Well, Jillian, no, I never had a pet but let’s say we just get on with trying to save this woman’s life.”
“No, you’re right. Sorry,” Jillian said. “Okay. Pulling this thing is outta the question. We need to risk getting in through the trunk.”
“It’s locked,” said Mike. “Can’t open it from the inside, either.”
“Then we’ll have to pick it,” Jillian said matter-of-factly. She then reached for Mike’s breast pocket and pulled out the small screwdriver he kept there.
“I don’t know how stable this car is, lady,” Mike said. “We push it wrong, we get an aftershock, the dog sneezes; we could all be in a lot of trouble.”
“Then we’ll just have to be careful.”
* * *
A hand nudged her in the ribs. Sophia moved to push it away—just a few more minutes of shuteye, that’s all she needed—but found she didn’t have the strength. Then there it was again, that nudge, now followed by a voice.
“Mom?”
A third poke from Jody and Sophia’s eyes finally opened. Her vision was blurred and she couldn’t make out a thing—just colors and vague shapes. Something red here, a blue square-shaped thing there. She closed her eyes again and rolled them around, trying to clear the muck. When she opened them a second time, everything was still the same. She racked her focus, then realized why she couldn’t make anything out: she was staring through the front windshield, which had been shattered all to hell. Making anything out through it now would be next to impossible.
