Chapter Three
Was she screwing with me? This could not be real. It couldn’t be happening.
“You?” I muttered. I squirmed, flinching as I leaned forward. My leg felt like it had an arrow through it.
“Me,” Ava agreed. She grabbed my shoulders. “Don’t. You’re obviously hurt. Let me look at you.”
I pulled myself away, grimacing but working through the hot knives that poked into my foot with each tiny movement. I still couldn’t stand yet, but I’d get there. “No!’ I yelled. “What are you doing out here anyway?”
“I was trying to find the interstate. I’m supposed to meet some friends, and I’m new here,” she said a little defensively. “Do I know you?”
“Seriously?!” I asked. My eyes went wide and face got hot. “You’re really gonna pretend you don’t recognize me? Here, of all places, you don’t recognize me?”
“I don’t know you,” she said flatly, and stood. “Did you hit your head or something?”
“Stop it!” I yelled. “I don’t know what your game is, but I know who you are. Do you have any idea what you did to me? I mean… yes, you saved my life. But my entire family thought I was drunk or crazy; probably both.”
My eyes stung and my face felt wet. Was I crying? Was I crying in front of a girl?
Well, that’s embarrassing.
She knelt beside me, and brushed some stray pebbles from my hair. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” She looked over, focusing on the pieces of my cane scattered across the ground. Her eyes got narrow. I hated when people saw Renee. It changed how they saw me. It turned me into some pitiful invalid.
“You’re Lucy’s boyfriend,” she said, her eyes narrowing. “The basketball player.”
“The former basketball player,” I corrected. It was getting harder to ignore the throbbing in my leg. Maybe getting up wouldn’t be so easy after all. “You’ve heard of me?”
“A little,” she said. I looked for something in her eyes; for that ‘I’m so sorry for you’ look that was worse than all the physical pain put together, but it wasn’t there. “You’re something of a cautionary tale,” she admitted.
“I can’t imagine why,” I scoffed, rubbing at my leg.
“It hurts?” She asked, leaning forward. “Here, let me.” She moved my hand, replacing it with her own.
“No, don’t,” I said, but it was too late. She was already massaging my leg down to the ankle with tender and firm hands. I NEVER let anyone touch my ankle if I can get around it. Even the nurses had to wait until I was asleep to change my bandages after the surgery. There was something about that area that I didn’t like people getting close to, and it wasn’t the physical tenderness. That ankle, that damn bum ankle, it was epicenter of my brokenness. It was the thing that made me less. I wouldn’t even let Lucy get near it.
But Ava; there was something different with her. She had been there when this happened, at the start of all of it. Or at least, I thought she had been. In some weird way, this belonged to her too. And besides, it was sort of working.
“Feel better?” She asked. I nodded. “My dad fell off of a horse when I was little. He lost the use of his legs. Didn’t stop the damn things from hurting though. I got pretty used to this sort of thing.”
“You’re good at it,” I said. She wasn’t looking at me. She was focused on my leg, but she smiled. “I bet your dad appreciates it.”
“He did,” she said, looking. “He’s dead now.”
“I’m sorry,” I bit my lip. “This is the part where you tell me how lucky I am?”
She smiled a quiet half smile. “This is the part where I ask you if you need an ambulance.”
I wanted to say no, to get up and walk around; maybe even help her fix her car. But I had been in this position before. I knew my ankle, and I knew when it was shot. And, with pain that intense any time I tried to even flex it, it was absolutely shot.
“Would you still think I was super manly if I said yes?” I asked.
She smiled and wiped still fresh tears from my face. “The manliest.”
“You really weren’t here last year?” I asked, relaxing as one of her hands started dialing 911 and the other went back to massaging my leg. This girl really did have magic hands.
“What is your deal with last ye-“ Her watch started beeping, silencing her. I hadn’t noticed it before. It was sort of weird looking; big and bulky, definitely not the most fashionable thing in the world. But it also looked sort of familiar, though I couldn’t place where I had seen it before. Ava looked down at it, and her face went pale. “Winston Theodore Cobb?” She asked me, looking up.
“Lucy told you my middle name?”
“No,” she said. There was a look on Ava’s face that didn’t make any sense. It was hard and darker than it had been just seconds ago.
“911, what’s your emergency,” I heard from the other end of her phone. She didn’t answer. She just pursed her lips and stared at me. Her phone started beeping again. It was loud and fast, but this time she didn’t look at it.
“911, what’s your emergency,” the voice on the phone repeated.
The beeping didn’t stop. “Ava,” I said.
“My friend and I are stranded on Abercorn,” she spoke into the phone. “My car is broken down, his leg is hurt, and we’re being attacked. Please send help immediately.”
“Ma’am, where are your attackers-“ Ava ended the call.
My eyebrows knitted together. Attacked? What the hell was she talking about? “Ava, what-“
“Can you stand?” She asked, jumping to her feet.
“You know I can’t,” I answered, which was true.
“You’re going to have to try,” she said, talking over her still beeping watch.
“That’s not really how it works,” I said. Though the massage had eased things a little bit, I knew enough about my faulty foot to know that getting up wasn’t something I was going to be able to do just yet.
Before she had a chance to answer, the beeping in Ava’s phone morphed into a loud, unimaginably irritating song. Now she looked down at her phone. “Damnit!” She yelled. “It’s too late.”
“What’s too late? What’s going on?” I asked, leaning as far up as I could without risking the pangs of pain again.
A burst of light appeared at my far right. Looking over, I saw a weird car speeding toward us. It was old, and not like 2003 old. This was old old. I didn’t know much about that sort of stuff, but it was black and looked like the sort of thing you’d see Bonnie and Clyde rolling around in.
“Is that a Rambler?” I asked, pulling out the one piece of information I could remember. I looked to Ava, about to tell her to flag the car down and see if they might be able to help us. But there were daggers in her eyes (mostly the green one), and I knew that, in her perspective at least, the attackers she had told 911 about had just arrived. She spoke into her watch, actually into her watch. “Reporting a 37 point break of Kershner’s Loett. Taking evasive action.”
I had no idea what that meant. “Do we know them?” I asked. Looking at the car speeding toward us, I was suddenly very aware that I was on the ground and unable to remedy that.
“Stay back here. Stay out of sight, no matter what happens.” Ava darted away from me and into the road, into the path of the silver bullet.
The car kept coming. If anything, it sped up. It was… oh God, it was going to hit her.
“Ava, they’re not gonna stop!” I screamed. “Ava!” She didn’t move. The car roared closer, and all she did was take a deep breath and look at me.
I started to move. Pain be damned, I wasn’t about to sit here like some disgusting sloth and let this weird girl get run over; even if she seemed intent on seeing it happen. Needles jabbed into my leg as I stumbled up, holding the side of car for dear life.
The old Ramble
r was nearly on her now. I could see the people inside of it; two men with slicked back hair. They looked to be in old timey suits. “Ava move, goddamnit!” I screamed.
She mouthed what I looked like ‘stay down’, and then, with the car inches from her, she fell.
She fell? She was just going to let it run her over? My stomach flipped, making sickening turns as the silver bullet sped over where I knew Ava’s body now was. But, as it sped past, I saw that the pavement under it was empty. I saw her fall. Where was she?
A finger tapped my shoulder. I jerked and spun around, my heart so far into my throat that I would have burped white blood cells. It was Ava. She was behind me. How did that happen?
The car roared as it circled back toward us. “Do you have your footing?” Ava asked, looking toward the car.
“Yeah, I guess,” I answered.
“Then I am so sorry,” she said. And then the bitch kicked my leg out from under me. It wasn’t hard to do, given that I was barely standing as it was. A quick nudge against my knee, and I went toppling like a house of cards. She grabbed me by the shoulders mid-fall, and tipped me forward. I went winding toward the ground. I threw my hands out in front of me, trying to brace myself for yet another face plant. But, just as I was preparing for a mouthful of gravel, the ground went away.
December 23rd 2013
I wasn’t falling anymore. I was standing up. My leg still hurt, and I was still shaking, but I wasn’t falling. Looking around, I saw that I wasn’t even on the road anymore. Abercorn, Mom’s car, the old Rambler full of spiffy would be assassins; it was all gone; as was the sun.
I was in the woods now, and it was dark. But how was that possible? It was midafternoon. A light, like the light I saw when the old Rambler came rushing toward us, burst into my line of sight. It was directly in front of me this time, so I could see it clearly. It glowed a bunch of different colors. Blues, greens, reds, oranges; they all bled into each other, rushing through the light like ripples in a stream.
My fight or flight instinct kicked in, though seeing as how I was a weakened cripple who had basically just got beat up by a girl, neither seemed like a good option. Still, I would have reached out and touched it if the stupid thing didn’t scare me to death. It was a good thing I didn’t, because an instant after the thought entered my mind, the light took a weird shape. It twisted and turned until it folded itself into something that resembled a person; and not just any person. As the light dimmed and darkened, I saw that the person it had become was Ava.
“Are you alright?” She said.
“I think so,” I said, but then the world started spinning. I didn’t know I was falling until she reached out, caught me, and laid me on the ground.
“It’s the trip,” she answered. “It can be draining the first time around.”
“The t-trip,” I stammered. “Where are we?”
“Tomorrow,” she said, looking down at me; which seemed to be a running theme with us.
“You’re not making any sense,” I said, and closed my eyes, because even though I was lying down, the world was still sloshing around me.
“Tell me about it,” she scoffed. “I’m going to leave you here.”
My eyes darted open. “Maybe that’s not the best idea,” I said.
“They’re following us. I need to lead them away,” she said, and stood.
I reached out for her legs, which was a pretty pathetic thing to do, but I was afraid and unable to move, not to mention the fact that, if she left, I would apparently be stranded in tomorrow.
“Lead them away with me,” I said. “Don’t leave.”
“I’ll be back,” she promised. “Just don’t move. Promise me you’ll stay here.”
Nothing I said was going to change her mind. That was clear now. “I don’t really have much of a choice, do I?”
She fell backwards and, just when I thought she was going to hit the ground beside me, the colored light reappeared and swallowed her up. She was gone, and I was alone in the dark. I had no idea where I was, no idea what was going on, and no idea how, whatever it was, was even possible. All I knew for sure was that my leg was jacked, I shouldn’t have taken the car, and that, if I ever managed to get back home, I was never gonna hear the end of this.
I closed my eyes, hoping to stop the spinning, hoping to stop the fire in my ankle. Seconds later, I heard a rustling in the leaves surrounding me. Something was coming. From the sound of it, there were a bunch of somethings, and they were headed right toward me.
Fan-friggin-tastic. The well-dressed lunatics in the really dated car had found me. And now they were going to do whatever it was they were going to do to Ava before she fell into the magic light and disappeared.
….You know what? People are totally gonna think I’m drunk again.
The rustling got louder, and soon I could hear voices. Men. Women. God, how many were there? There were only two people in the Rambler.
I searched the ground as far as I could stretch without moving. The pain in my leg was insane, and it was starting to make me nauseas. Finally, I came across a rock. Picking it up, I held it close to me, waiting for whoever was coming to come. I might not have been able to get away or to fight them off in my current condition. But damn if I wasn’t gonna beam one of them in the head.
My stomach flipped, sickness churning inside of me. The rustling was louder now, so loud that the Rambler dudes and their friends couldn’t be over a couple feet away. I wished I could have seen them coming, but Ava had laid me in a sort of valley, and given the way the rustling was, they would be on me before I got a look at them.
The pain in my leg flared up again and, listening, I could finally make out what the people coming toward me were saying.
“Right down here, past the clearing,” a voice said. I reared back, holding onto the rock in my hand like some sort of pathetic lifejacket. Cafeteria burrito flavored bile started to rise in my throat. Oh good. At least I’d get the satisfaction of throwing up on these idiots before they murdered me.
I didn’t wait to take them in. As soon as I saw the first flit of a person, I launched my rock. It wasn’t until the stupid thing was in the air, on target to strike her right between her mismatched eyes, that I saw it was Ava.
Luckily, Ava’s reflexes were as curious as everything else about her. Without so much as flinching, she snatched the rock out of the air. It was very ninja.
“He’s down here!” She said over her shoulder, then tossed the rock down, and shot me a ‘what the hell’ look. Instantly, I noticed that her clothes were different. But how could that be? She had been gone for seconds; at most a minute. She didn’t have time to change. What was more, who was she talking to?
“Ava, what-“ That’s when the burrito bile came back up. I was still blowing chunks when the people Ava had yelled to; Mom, Dad, Roger, Lucy, and about a dozen other people from our street came rushing down toward me.
Mom knelt down and hugged me hard, totally overlooking the fact that there was half digested tortilla chip on my face. “Thank God. Thank God. Thank you, God,” she muttered over and over again, pressing my head against her chest.
I tried to console her, to tell her that, the way I looked notwithstanding, I was okay. But as soon as I opened my mouth, more vomit came shooting out. It splashed against Mom’s blouse, but all she did when she saw it was look to Dad and say, “He’s sick, Jim.”
“I’m okay,” I muttered through the pain, sickness, and the world, which had started spinning again. The next thing I knew, Dad had lifted me into the air. He was holding me in his arms like he used to when I was a kid. Mom had my foot in her hand, elevating it.
“You shouldn’t move him. You should wait for the ambulance,” some guy whose voice I didn’t recognize suggested.
“The hell with that. He’s been down here long enough,” Dad said. He felt hot and I could feel his heart racing under
his shirt. Long enough? I had only been here for a minute.
“I fell,” I explained, though it surprised me how weak my voice sounded. Dad carried me up to the clearing. He laid me on the tailgate of his truck and wrapped me up in blankets.
“You’re gonna be okay, kid,” he said, rubbing my shoulders. I had literally just got finished telling my Dad how I didn’t need him, that I had absolved him of all responsibility for me. Guess a little bit of trauma changed things. I wanted to apologize, to explain why I was so pissed off all the time. But I was weak and tired, and I couldn’t stop thinking about Ava and all that had happened.
“And she disappeared,” I muttered, as though that would have made sense to anybody. ”She just disappeared.”
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