Authors: Brian Hodge
5
St. Louis dwindled mile by mile, the winding maze of highways and overpasses thinning out, with fewer and fewer green signs announcing exits and interchanges. They passed barricades and scattered orange cones marking spots where construction had begun long ago and would never be finished. A steamroller sat to one side of the highway, extinct now, rusting and coated with dust. Four lanes narrowed to three, and finally down to two, until they were left with eastern Missouri countryside.
Goodbye, St. Louis.
Jason’s Sunbird was in the lead, and as they traded the city for the gently rolling hills to the south, reactions were more mixed than he’d thought they would be, even in himself. Of course there was joy, excitement, anticipation. Relief. But Jason began to think, in fondness and sorrow, of how the city used to be, the clubs and concert halls and shops and restaurants he had visited from the time he’d been a toddler. For Erika, she was leaving behind the only hometown she’d ever known. Diane knew that a piece of herself would always be buried there, in a grave marked only by a crudely fashioned cross. Only Caleb could watch the city slide past and feel only glad to be rid of it, for he had no stake in it. It was only a pause along a journey.
And a mystery as well, a beacon that had drawn him in and left him to wonder why, for what purpose.
“How far we looking to get to today?” he asked Jason.
“Better than halfway. I’d like to get to Heywood as early as we can tomorrow, so we’ve got plenty of light left to get settled in.” He grabbed the road atlas from the floor beside Erika’s leg and handed it back. Diane spread it open across the nylon jock bag in her lap and peered at it with Caleb.
“Get an hour or so beyond Little Rock, Arkansas, and we should be doing okay.” Jason gnawed at a granola bar. They weren’t taking any time to eat a relaxed, sit-down breakfast this morning. An entire lifetime of sit-down breakfasts awaited them in Heywood.
He flicked a glance into the rearview mirror. Directly behind them was the first of the pickups, Rich and Pam and Jack sitting three abreast. In the truckbed sat seven five-gallon gas cans, the remainder of what they’d been able to scrounge and save after filling up all the vehicles.
He then looked at the useless radio dial. No working tape player either. Too bad. They could do with some music about now. Caleb still ate like a farmhand, and went at his granola bar with lip-smacking gusto. You couldn’t help but love the old guy, but sometimes he tried your patience in little ways. Jason wondered if he’d been the type who jingled a pocketful of loose change. That seemed to be a perennial favorite of old men everywhere.
Gonna be a long trip…
They’d been rolling through the countryside for twenty minutes when Jason, his eyes routinely checking the mirror, noticed one of the backmost cars traveling abreast of Rich’s truck. From what he could tell, the driver was conversing with Jack Mitchell, their faces deadly earnest. Something about the whole scene ripped into Jason’s gut like a claw. He didn’t like the looks of it, and feared that the morning’s tranquility would soon be shattering as surely as crystal on stone.
Speculation became certainty when the car dropped back and the truck began to creep forward. It wouldn’t be good news, that much he knew. There was only bad news and worse news these days.
Jason swung the Sunbird toward the right and eased off the gas, slowing until Rich drew alongside, close enough to touch, and they matched speeds. Everyone in the Sunbird looked up at Jack with expressions that said they were expecting the worst.
“Looks like we’re gonna have company!” Jack yelled, loud enough to be heard over the whine of tires and engines.
“Bad joke, right?” Jason said, voice tight through his constricted throat.
“I wish it was,” Jack said. He pointed back north. “Sean Clarkson was fooling around with a CB radio in his car. God knows why, but he was playing around with it. He caught some crosstalk between some of Travis Lane’s men. They’re coming in right behind us.”
Jason thought he could easily let his head sag against the wheel and cry, because all any of them wanted was to be left alone. But time was the crucial factor, and they had none to spare. The main message that the other side seemed so intent on getting across was that he and Erika and the rest were living on borrowed time, and had been all along. And that now, their hours were finally up.
Yet hadn’t he wished they could end it all before getting to Texas? Hadn’t this been his last thought before sleep last night?
Sometimes wishes
do
come true.
“You’ve got that atlas,” Jack said. “Is there anyplace coming up that we could turn off and hide for a while? Let them pass on by?”
Jason shook his head, swerved suddenly to the right to miss a rusty section of tailpipe lying in the road like a misshapen backbone. He eased near the truck again. “And then what, Jack? Run scared the rest of the trip? All that would accomplish is postponing the inevitable. And I’m getting
sick
of that.”
“Listen, we’ve been gone this long and haven’t seen them back there yet,” Rich called from behind the truck’s wheel, shouting past Pam. “I’ll bet we got a fifteen- or twenty-mile head start on them. That could last us a while, but you can bet they’ll try to make that up fast.”
“Think we could outlast them?” Jack said. “We’re all gassed up, maybe they’ll run out first.”
Jason clenched the wheel and shook it, then balled a fist and pounded on it, as if trying to beat it apart and let fate steer them from here on out. Threads were unraveling inside him, and if he let too many more fray he would no doubt begin screaming his lungs out. He felt everyone’s eyes on him until the seizure passed.
“You think these guys’ll just get tired and call it a day and turn around?” he shouted at the truck. “Never happen! And if we let them get ahead of us, chances are they’ll have a welcoming committee waiting at the Heywood city limits. And if we get there first, they’ll hit us where we live. But I guarantee you they won’t come in stupid like they did a couple days ago. They’ll do it right next time.”
Sober looks from all three in the truck. Finally, it had come down to the moment that every one of them had been dreading for nearly a year, the moment they’d tried to wish and hope and pray away. The moment they couldn’t run from. The moment that would either set them free forever or leave them dead.
“Did Sean tell anyone else?” Jason asked.
Jack shook his head. “He came straight up to us.”
Think, Jay, think.
“Let’s just keep rolling, and pick up the speed. You fall back one at a time and warn everybody else. And if you get any bright ideas, you know where to find me.”
Rich cut his speed and let the pickup drop back another notch. Looked as if Colleen and Juanita and Nicholas would be the next lucky recipients of the news.
Pick up the speed,
he’d said. Right.
And watch our ass.
* *
Eighty miles per hour.
Travis couldn’t remember the last time he’d kicked anything up this fast. Except maybe the pulse rate of Diane’s little protégé. It felt good, felt right. Overdue.
The black Chevy truck ate up I-55 as smooth as you please. Somewhere down the road they were guaranteed a splendid time for one and all, but for now, the chase was half the fun.
The pickup’s cab was warm, despite the vents being open to let in the early morning air. The day had the feel of a scorcher in the making. The sun was bad already, and soon it would graduate to miserable. Not a problem. Travis was built for heat as well as speed. He could feel the sweat flow and savored every drop. The last dregs of tequila were seeping through his pores, leaving him purified and primed.
The chase, the hunt…it was a far more sporting way than kicking down some dumb bastard’s door and letting him have it in the face before he even knew what was happening. This was Peter Solomon’s philosophy, espoused as they’d departed that temporary South Side hideaway.
And now, with the sun on the rise and the music of the road beneath his tires and the taste of excitement wetting his mouth, he knew that Solomon was right.
His most primitive ancestors would have felt this way.
This
would’ve been the thrill they had experienced in bringing down a mammoth, a victory bought with blood, and to the savage belong the spoils. He could feel the ancient instincts rising within him, undoubtedly a result of his association with Solomon. The man was harsh, but he
inspired
. He brought things out of you that you never knew were there. Travis’s sense of smell—had it ever been this keen? Here he was, in the lead truck, the first of their convoy, and he could
smell
the passage of their prey before him. Their gas fumes hung in the thick, humid air. And, he swore, their fear. He could follow it as long as needed.
He was back on top again, back in control. Can’t keep a good man down. It now seemed paranoid to have brought Pit Bull along for protection, because his men were backing him one hundred percent again, he felt that. A couple of minor lapses, that’s all he’d had. No climb to greatness ever came without slips.
“Hunting them down like dogs,” Travis said.
Hagar glanced furtively at him and nodded, then went back to inspecting his machete. He should’ve known every inch of it by now. It had held his undivided attention ever since they’d hit the road.
“Like dogs,” Solomon said, satisfaction evident in his voice. He took a couple of deep breaths and, with a broad smile, thrust his head out the passenger window into the onrush of wind. His hair became a swirling mass.
Travis wasn’t quite sure what he expected Solomon to do. So he waited, watching from the corner of his eye. In no way did he expect Solomon to start singing. But sing he did, his voice a powerful and dead-on tenor.
“Oh what a beautiful morning, oh what a beautiful day,” Solomon bellowed to the sky, then looked over at Travis with a twinkle in his eye that could’ve been mischief and could’ve been murder. “I’ve got a beautiful feeling, everything’s going my way…”
6
The morning unrolled with the road, hard and hot and pitiless.
I-55 led steadily south, loosely following a parallel course with the southeastern border of Missouri. The land was rural, for the most part, with small towns occasionally encroaching upon the highway from either side. Better than a hundred miles out of St. Louis, the green hills leveled into flatland, with ripples of heat rising from every horizon. To Jason, it felt as though they were driving across an enormous frying pan.
Nobody had much to say. Caleb had fallen stoically silent. Diane fidgeted with her nylon bag. Jason would’ve preferred that she hadn’t showed him the pipe bombs inside. Kept in the bag and away from fire, there was no chance one could accidentally go off, but the way their luck was going, it was likely to happen just the same.
Across the front seats, he held hands with Erika. Her hand felt small and cold, and worry seemed to radiate from her in waves as distinct as the shimmers rippling the horizon.
They approached the Sikeston exit, a Union 76 Truck Stop sprawling at left. Beyond it stood enormous yellow and red signs heralding Big Bob’s Fireworks, “The Biggest and the Best in the Midwest!”
Jason had kept a constant watch in the rearview mirrors, especially when a long straightaway fell behind them, but no one had yet joined them in the distance. It was getting easy to tell himself that nothing was wrong after all, that they were safe and sound and alone on this highway, and things would stay that way.
Sure. That’s the kind of thinking that could get us killed.
He checked the gas gauge: three-eighths of the tank gone.
Another green sign popped up along the right, which Jason read with idle interest.
New Madrid…12.
He checked the odometer. They were definitely covering some ground. Not a lot of Missouri left to go. Arkansas was less than an hour away.
New Madrid…the name nagged at him.
“That town rings a bell,” he said, mostly to Erika. After all, this was her state. “New Madrid.”
“You’re probably thinking of the New Madrid Fault,” Erika said. She seemed grateful for a reason to break the brittle silence that had taken over the car. “You know, the earthquake.”
He nodded, trickles of memory bringing it back.
“We studied about it when I was in grade school,” she went on. “They even hauled us down for an all-day field trip. It was fun.” She started laughing, any excuse to get rid of nerves. “This twirpy kid stuck an ice cream cone down the back of my dress.”
Jason, his curiosity sated, was willing to let the topic drop, but not Caleb. He asked for more of an explanation about what had happened here. Ever tied to the land, he was.
Diane and Caleb reacted with typical outsiders’ surprise to learn that one of the most powerful earthquakes ever recorded on the North American continent had occurred not in an expected place like California or Alaska. Instead, the epicenter had been in the heart of the country, in Missouri, late in 1811. A total area of somewhere around two million square miles was shaken, and the quake had been felt in places as distant as Canada and Boston and New Orleans. Chimneys shucked their bricks in Georgia and South Carolina. For a time, surface waves on the Mississippi made it appear as if the river were flowing backward, and entire islands had disappeared.
Erika concluded by saying that the quake wasn’t better known because the area hardest hit was so sparsely populated. Very little actual damage as a result. A few settlers lost their cabins, a few Indians got freaked out, big deal. Not much stacked up against an Armageddon like the San Francisco earthquake.
Yeah,
Jason thought with a sour turn of stomach.
Who cares about what the Indians go through, huh?
And the morning kept unrolling with the road.
Jason’s ears were caught by the sound of a far-off car horn, blatting long and loud. He flicked another glance into the mirror, peering at the truck behind them. Rich sat grim and long-faced behind the wheel. Not him, then. Which meant that somebody back in the line might have just spotted their pursuers.
For Erika, the sound registered, though just barely.
As a child, one of her favorite toys had been a kaleidoscope. She could spend hours peering into its eyehole, twisting the opposite end and watching the swirls of color rearranging themselves. Sometimes she got a sense of a pattern to come before it was actually visible, and was overwhelmed with little-girl delight when she’d slowly twist the end and watch those fragments of stained glass prove her correct.
Gone was the delight, and gone was the naiveté. But a long-sensed pattern was finally evolving before her eyes. The feeling was familiar enough.
A couple more miles, and then the road sign…
Exit 49 New Madrid.
Erika’s voice: “Jason. Stop the car, Jason.”
“What?
Now?
”
“Do it, Jay. Please? Please stop.” Her eyes were soft and earnest and girded with resolve.
Jason could have ignored anybody but her. He slowed the car, bringing it to a halt just before the off-ramp, a scrubby patch of trees and underbrush strung along the highway. Across I-55, the exit-ramp’s twin curved down into the northbound lanes. Connecting the two was the overpass, gray concrete against a bright blue sky.
“What is it?” Jason asked, but she had already opened the Sunbird’s door and had swung one leg out. Erika looked at the rest of them, face to face to face, then lingered on him. He’d never seen her eyes any tougher to read, such a warring mix of love and emotion…but the devotion was to something else, beyond him. Beyond herself even. And she stepped from the car.
“Shit,” he muttered, slamming the car into park but leaving the engine idling. He got out to stand beside the car, staring at her across the roof. “You want to let me in on this, Erika? Just for laughs?” Out of the corner of his eye he saw Rich’s truck pulling up beside them.
She quickly sized up the roadside, from the exit sign to the open fields to the puny trees to the broiling sun. And when she turned at last to face him, her eyes were transported.
“We’re
supposed
to be here. Something’s going to happen here.” She smiled.
“This
is where it ends.”
“What’s the problem?” Jack called from the truck. Their other vehicles were starting to approach one by one. “You got a breakdown?”
“I don’t know what the hell’s going on,” Jason called back.
Jack started to say something else, but Jason turned back to Erika. “Please. Get back in the car before you get your ass shot off.”
But don’t I
want
it to end? Don’t I really want to just get it over with?
“You don’t understand, Jay,” she said, pleading with her eyes, her hands, her whole body. “Look, you know how it goes with my head sometimes. I’ve told you all about it. Caleb too. Deep down, the two of you, at least, can’t deny there’s something to it. Listen, I
dreamed
about this place. About that sign and the N on it and those scrawny little trees. I
dreamed
about you people around me, even before I knew any of you.” She was close to shouting by now. “It’s supposed to end here! I know it is.”
Her mind appeared set, and Jason feared that even if he were to gear up the car and pull away, she’d still stay here, to see it all through. No way would he leave her behind. Half a year of separation was all he planned on enduring.
And just like that, it came: a sigh, and a quiet resignation to see it through along with her. The butterflies in his stomach had fled south ahead of him, leaving behind a core of calculation and control that was so cold it might have frightened him, had there been time to contemplate it. It felt as if the unneeded parts of himself were flaking away like rust.
He leaned into the car to shut off the engine, to grab his shotgun and a box of shells. He then looked at Diane and Caleb. She sat with her hands composed and folded on the nylon bag in her lap.
“End of the line for this car,” he said. “Catch another ride.”
Diane leveled an even glance at him. “I’ll stay. I’m through running.”
“Me too, son,” said Caleb. “I can’t let you folks stand here alone.”
While they clambered from the back seat, Jason ran over to the pickup, still idling as someone from one of the rear cars ran away from Rich’s window.
“Looks like some of us have decided to stick around a while,” Jason said. “We got this wild-ass idea about stopping them here.”
“It’s Erika, isn’t it?” Pam said softly, staring into the dashboard. “She knows something, doesn’t she?
Doesn’t she?
”
“She says she does. If I ever trusted her, it’s got to be now.”
“I hope she’s right, then,” Rich said. “Sean just ran up here. Says they finally started coming into view a bit back up the road.”
This
is it this is it.
Jason glanced back and saw nothing. Yet.
“Why don’t you guys get moving. I’ve showed you the maps, you know the way.” Jason bit his lip, looked into each pair of eyes. Eyes he doubted he would see again. Because in all likelihood, what were the odds of making it through the next half hour? Slim, he thought. Anorexic.
“Come on, just go!” he shouted, almost pleading.
Rich slammed his big fist against the steering wheel and swore and jammed the gearshift into park. He fumbled for his rifle, an AR-15 taken from a sporting goods shop months ago.
“Rich? Rich!” Pam’s voice rose half an octave. “We’re not staying too!”
“That’s right.” He looked past her to Jack. “Like Jay says. You know the way. Get everybody there.” Rich kissed her hard to smother her objections. “Hon, if you won’t drive this thing, I’ll have Jack do it.”
Pam looked too stunned for tears. She clung with one hand to
the front of Rich’s shirt. Half in and half out the truck, he leaned forward and threw one arm around her in a hurried, clumsy hug and kissed her again. Squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. “Love you. See you soon.”
Rich peeled her hand from his shirt and wrapped it around the steering wheel, then backed out of the cab. The waterworks started for Pam then, but she squared herself behind the wheel and dropped the transmission into drive. The truck started to move.
At the last possible moment Jason saw what was in the bed and reached in to seize a five-gallon gas can in each hand, plucking them up and out as the truck rolled away. A dull ache sliced through his shoulder from the strain. Filled, those cans were anything but light.
Rich stood at the side of the highway, rifle in hand, and waved the convoy back into motion. When someone passed too slowly, occupants asking for an explanation, he shouted and waved all the more furiously. They were all southbound again in another moment, stirring up dust and clouds of rubber.
Then the five of them were left alone on the burning, windswept highway, motionless for a moment. Looking at each other. Jason. Erika. Rich. Diane. Caleb. Bound by love, by honor, by commitment to one another and to the ideals they’d found to be as important as breathing. He was proud to know them.
You’re the reason I live, and if it comes to it, you’ll be the reason I’ll die.
Good enough.
They listened to the fading of the rest of their people’s engines. Until, out of the shimmering northern horizon, there came the first glint of sunlight off a windshield.