I was pushed over and then lifted off the ground. My arm was hoisted across a set of broad shoulders that assisted me down the rickety metal steps while a deep voice muttered every swear word in existence.
“Jackie, is that you?” I asked, unable to focus on the person’s face while the background of trees and swamp were spinning all around us. “Have you been working out?”
“Jackie’s dead, kid. She’s been that way for a long while now,” the deep voice rasped.
“Yeah, I know that. But I still talk to her…” …hiccup… “sometimes.”
“It’s good to know you’re talking to someone these days. Why don’t you try and focus on the people still breathing? Might do you some good.” I couldn’t place his familiar voice.
Then again, I couldn’t place anything, including one foot in front of the other. I stumbled but was held upright and urged to keep moving forward.
“Okay, Jackie. Whatever you say,” I slurred as I was loaded into a vehicle.
I didn’t know if it was a car or a truck. It could have been a school bus for all my inebriated brain knew. All I wanted to do was sleep. My eyes grew heavier and heavier under the weight of my drunkenness. “I love you, Jackie. Always have. Always wiiiiiiiillllllll.”
“Stay out of the damned water park or you’re gonna end up dead too,” the voice said, starting the engine. “Then there will be a lot more people who feel the way you do now. Like they were left behind.”
“Nooooo, they can’t feel that way,” I argued.
“Oh yeah, rock star? Why exactly is that?”
“Because, I’m already dead,” I explained, although the point of making any sense had long passed as I dropped my head against the window and closed my eyes.
“You can try and pretend you’re dead all you want, kid, but you ain’t foolin’ anyone.” I felt the sting of a slap against my cheek and lazily swatted the air in retaliation. “It’s best you start acting that way.”
I woke up in the driver’s seat of my Bronco with my seatbelt fastened feeling as if I’d spent the last several hours standing directly next to the speakers at a death metal concert…during the drum solo.
It was still dark out and I was parked in front of the house I hadn’t lived in for years. “How the fuck did I get here?” I grumbled, starting the engine.
It was the very last place I wanted to be.
I checked the clock. It was ten p.m. I vaguely remembered going to the water park earlier in the day.
Jackie.
The memory of why I went there hit me like a hammer to the heart. The anniversary of her death.
I turned up the radio to drown out the memories that always came when I thought of her. I lit a joint and put the Bronco in drive.
I’d just turned onto the highway, still in a Jackie and alcohol induced daze when I almost didn’t see the RV in the middle of the road.
Or the girl.
She was staring at me as I grew closer and closer with a panicked expression on her face. She was probably wondering why I wasn’t stopping.
She had a good point.
I slammed on the brakes, or at least I thought I did.
My brain was sluggish in sending out the message to my foot. When it finally cooperated, the stop was sudden. The brakes squealed as metal scraped against metal. I yanked on the wheel and my truck turned sideways and started to spin.
I glanced up through the open roof to the stars rotating above me. I wondered if tonight was the night I’d finally be able to stop missing Jackie.
Because there was a real possibility I’d be seeing her again soon.
Chapter Five
Sawyer
The highway grew smaller and smaller until I was sure it was going to just disappear. Smooth tar pavement was now pot hole riddled and mixed with sections of only dirt or rock. My tailbone ached from all the ups and downs.
I passed an exit ramp that looked as if it had been started but never finished. A few feet off the highway the broken pavement turned to dirt with tall weeds growing up through it. Bright yellow barricades, most of them heavily dented, blocked the way off the main road.
Was that the exit?
There was no sign, but I knew I had to be getting close.
I also knew that I was kind of lost.
The town of Outskirts was barely a dot on the old faded map from the glove compartment. It was located at the tip top of the Everglades and smack in the middle of the two Florida coastlines. I’d been driving for two days, but as my eyes grew heavy, my spirit grew with determination.
I pressed on the gas pedal to increase my speed to something above grandma level, but nothing happened.
The only other car on the highway zipped past me and it wasn’t because they were speeding, it was because I was slowing down.
Way down.
The sound of something exploding boomed from under the hood causing me to shriek in surprise. White smoke filled the night air like a mini mushroom cloud.
“No! No! No!” I screamed to no-one as Rusty, who was aptly named, sputtered and coughed.
The dashboard lights switched off all at once and Rusty the truck sadly and dramatically rolled to a stop in the middle of the deserted highway. “Not now. Please. I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll keep you in the shade. I’ll wash you every day. I’ll sing to you at night. Please just please don’t stop now.” I promised all of that plus anything else I could think of to keep him alive, but with one last final death rattle, both my heart and my gut sank along with any hope I had of spontaneous revival.
Rusty was no more.
I ground my teeth and pounded my fist on the steering wheel, hissing when the side of my hand vibrated with pain up to my elbow. “Ouch!” I screamed as if he’d actually hit me back.
Hopping out into the road, I kicked the driver’s side door several times which it responded by partially falling from its hinges. Chips of faded paint and rust fell onto the cracked asphalt. With one last grunt of frustration, I turned around to face the dark empty highway. I dropped to the ground and leaned back against the worn front tire, dropping my head between my knees.
“What the hell do I do now?” I muttered as a dark cloud rolled over the stars, turning the night from dim to black.
“What about you Blue? Are you going to give up on me too?” I asked the camper that was hitched to Rusty.
Blue’s metal siding was white on the top and bottom. A faded dove blue stripe ran down the center separating the white. It was thick and horizontal, the same width as the height of the single window.
When I first saw it, I thought my mom had called her Blue because of the stripe. I was wrong. Inside, the walls, the little cabinets above the mattress, the tiny stove, and even the countertops and composting toilet were all baby blue. Even the torn linoleum covering the floors was white and blue checkered.
Everything had started out so great. When I’d rescued Rusty and Blue from storage unit jail I found that it was fully equipped. Blankets, canned food, gallons of water in the storage area in the back that could only be opened from the outside. A full water tank for the mini-bathroom/shower area.
There was a lot of planning and effort to get this ready for me, but for the life of me I still couldn’t figure out how Mom had managed to do it all on her own.
Suddenly the pavement vibrated, warning of an oncoming vehicle. I stood and peered down the black highway in both directions.
Nothing.
However, the echo of an engine cut through the silence, the rumbling growing louder and louder, but still I couldn’t see anything.
By the time the truck became visible it was too late.
Chapter Six
Sawyer
The sound of screeching brakes filled the night air. The smell of burning rubber invaded my nostrils. Metal ground against metal as the older model SUV fishtailed across both lanes of the highway, crossing the median before finally turning sideways, and skating to a halt just a few feet from where I stood.
“What the fuck?” A man’s voice grumbled, sounding every bit as confused as I felt.
Headlights suddenly clicked on and so did another row of much brighter lights attached to a bar above his windshield, blinding me in bright white light.
“So NOW you turn on your lights!” I yelled, covering my eyes.
I stepped out of the light and when I could see again I saw a man shifting around in his seat. The truck was an older model Ford without doors or a roof and it was tall with big thick tires more than half the size of my body.
It was then I smelled something familiar.
Whiskey.
I pushed down the fear making its way up my throat from my gut and squared my shoulders just in time for a massive shadow of a man to approach, his footsteps a series of slow heavy thuds against the broken road.
“Why were you in the middle of the road?” A deep gravelly voice asked accusingly.
When the man stepped into the light I half expected the devil himself to be the one emerging from the shadows, but that’s not who I was faced with.
The man was at least a foot taller than my five feet three inches. He wore fitted black jeans low on the waist and a white undershirt stretched across his broad chest. It didn’t have sleeves either, revealing muscular biceps. The thin material also showcased rows of muscles on his torso that grew smaller as they trailed into the shape of a V disappearing into his jeans.
My cheeks heated when I realized I’d been staring and I tore my gaze away from his body. He wore a black baseball cap that covered his eyes. A few days of growth covered his squared jaw.
We stood there for a few moments. Not speaking. I cleared my throat. He looked from my camper to me like he was just realizing I was there. He looked me up and down slowly, and then folded his arms over his chest, flexing his biceps.
“You all right?” he asked, impatiently.
“Yes, I’m fine, but…”
“Good,” he said, abruptly turning back around and getting back into his vehicle “Stay out of the road.”
I stomped my foot on the ground. “Well, maybe you would have seen me if you weren’t driving with your headlights off!” I called back.
The arrogance! He was the one who’d almost hit me!
“You’re just going to leave me here?” I yelled after him as he shifted the truck in gear. He eased past me before crossing the median in an obvious illegal U-turn. His tires spun. Dirt and mud rose high up into the wheel wells before the truck kicked violently out onto the road.
“You could have killed me!” I yelled out.
“We all gotta go sometime,” he said, raising his voice over his engine. He turned up the volume on his radio. A man singing about a highway to hell screamed from the speakers. As he drove off, the music, the echoes of his big tires, and the beady red eyes of his taillights faded until they were long gone and once again it was just me and the highway.
Without owning a phone, my only option was to wait for another passing car. I looked down the dark empty road in both directions.
It was going to be a while.
After what seemed like hours, a pair of headlights appeared in the distance. An almost tangible beam of bright light shining down the dark highway. Suddenly both the trees and pavement lit up in swirling blue and red.
It was a massive truck.
A massive police truck.
Would Father have called the police?
I was so green at doing something illegal that I didn’t even know whether I should’ve been nervous or not because I had no idea how the process of getting caught actually worked.
“It seems you’ve gotten yourself into a pickle,” a feminine voice rang out. A tall policewoman with dark skin and soft natural curls framing her face came toward me holding a flashlight. She flipped it between me and the camper. Then me and the truck.
Then just me.
“I broke down then almost got run off the road by a guy in a black Ford,” I said, trying to keep my tone as casual as possible even though my pulse was racing.
“Was it a Bronco?” she asked, lowering her light.
“It could have been.”
By my guess, the officer wasn’t much older than I was although she was several inches taller than me.
“Where did you come from?” she asked, eyeing my clothes and giving me a look that told me if I lied she’d be able to smell it in the air.
I smoothed my hands down my long skirt. “Nowhere I want to go back to,” I said honestly.
She gave me a curt nod.
“Where on earth are you trying to go in this piece of shit?” she asked, tapping on Rusty’s bumper.
I felt the need to defend him, after all, it wasn’t his fault he was locked away in storage for…however long he was there.
“My mom has land…” I started, “I mean, I’ve got land around here.”
She lifted her flashlight to the window of the camper and looked inside. “Whereabouts?”
“That’s the thing, I’ve actually never been there and I think I’m a bit lost, I haven’t seen a single sign or marked exit but, I’m thinking I can’t be too far off.”
“You got an address?” she asked, holstering her flashlight.
I took out the folded piece of paper from my back pocket and handed it to her. She grabbed it with perfectly manicured fingernails sharpened into long white points.
A big smile pulled at her face revealing a full mouth of perfectly white and straight teeth. “Come on, let’s get this one piece of shit unhitched from the other piece of shit and we’ll haul it to your land. I’ll come back and tow your truck back when my shift’s over.”
“You don’t have to do all that. I can just call for a tow truck, if I can just use your phone,” I offered.
She ignored me and started unhitching Blue from Rusty. “The nearest tow service is Albrahma County, at least an hour drive north. When they get a call for a tow you know what they do?” She didn’t wait for me to respond. “They call me. So why don’t we just save some time and let me do what I’m gonna wind up doing eventually anyway?”
“Okay,” I agreed as if there was another option.
She told me to get back in the truck and flip it into neutral. I did what she said and together we pushed it off the side of the road just enough so the tires were sitting on the grass without sending it careening into the steep ditch.
She then draped a yellow neon tape around and over Rusty several times.