Swerve

by Vicki Pettersson

  Oh, no. I am not ever letting this go.

  It’s Daniel, of course. It was the first time we were really together, and he had just flopped to his back afterward, almost looking shocked. I, too, was marveling—at the way his dark eyes and hair popped against the white of his skin, the way the atmosphere around him appeared diffused, bathing him in gentle light. I’d never even seen him with a hair out of place before, forget breathless and sweaty, and the way those sharp eyes glazed over as he moved inside of me made me glow as well.

  I am not ever letting this go.

  No, he wouldn’t, I think, and force my eyes open as the coaster swerves into its final spiral.

  Amanda is waiting when the ride finally pulls to a stop. She holds out a hand, but I ignore it and push from the cart on my own.

  “I’m not going again,” I say, and my voice makes me jolt, because I sound like I’m on the verge of tears. Amanda looks alarmed too, but then she doesn’t know that I never, ever cry.

  “I can’t allow that anyway. Here.” She holds out her hand, and I find myself staring at a folded manila envelope. “Your prize.”

  Not Daniel.

  As my fingers close around the envelope, I can’t say that I’m surprised. It was clear as soon as I was forced onto that second ride that Malthus was not going to give up my fiancé so easily. Instead he’s giving me . . .

  “What?” Amanda asks when I gasp.

  I try to shake my head, but it jerks as if in spasms.

  “That is your name, right?” Amanda points to the envelope. “You’re Kristine Rush?”

  Yes, I am. And it’s clear from the words, neatly centered and typed before me, that Malthus has known it all along.

  Hurting is what I do.

  I need to find a place to open the envelope, one that’s away from Amanda and the security cameras, and out of sight from the man named Malthus, who is somewhere nearby. A restroom sign beckons to me in a flashing wink, and I hurry to it, cutting across the clanging din of the casino floor. Inside, the room is clean, over-bright, and bustling with other women, the antithesis of the desert hole where I was attacked just over an hour ago.

  Keeping my head down, I use my long hair to cover my face and claim the largest stall, where I press my back against the tiled wall and stare at the envelope in my hands. My typed name peers back up at me in a sharp, blocky taunt. I slip a finger beneath the seal, and out slides a map, the kind that can still be found in dusty roadside gas stations. This too bears my full name across the white band at the top, the squared print drawn in sharp, whittled slashes, little arrows bereft of their tips.

  The map rattles crisply as I unfold desert town after desert town—they stretch from one crease to the next, interspersed with feeder roads that branch away like thin, black veins. The dry lakebed I spotted from the peak of the Desperado is called the Ivanpah, a fact I would have happily gone my entire life without knowing. However, I note that the state line and Buffalo Bill’s casino are not represented. They’ve been carefully ripped away. Other than that, and my name at the top, the map appears devoid of markings. No additional arrows. No sharp tips.

  Nothing that points to Daniel.

  I tuck everything beneath my arm and grab Daniel’s phone. Thumbs flying, I enter the name Amanda had been told to memorize into the search engine. Malthus is too strange and too specific to be random.

  Dozens of entries flood the screen, all related to one of two subjects. I ignore those associated with an eighteenth-century British scholar—some early influencer on Darwin’s theory of ­evolution—and zoom in on the more obvious and ominous choice: a prince of Hell who sent legions of demons into battle.

  “Great.” A psycho who haunts rest stops and studies demonology.

  I close my eyes and try to imagine what someone like that looks like, but I can’t. I’m also distracted by the unreasonable thought that I should be able to intuit if my fiancé is okay. My love for Daniel is greater than any I’ve ever harbored for another person, save Abby, so I feel like I should have some sense of his well-being. A good woman, one worthy of a great love, should be able to do that, right?

  Yet all I can hear is the blowback of his scream billowing in my mind.

  I open my eyes, and before I can overthink it, switch back to the phone’s text function.

  I’ll give you anything . . . just let him go.

  I push SEND before I can question the wisdom of letting this man know how desperate I’ve become. What the hell does it matter? I’m already doing what he asked. All I have to aid me in finding him are a car, a map, and a phone. Great tools in a civilized world, but I’m pretty certain by now that that’s not where Malthus lives.

  I’m actually jolted when the phone rings in my lap. At most, I expected that chirping tritone message alert again. This is a custom ringtone instead, another of Daniel’s favorite old jazz tunes. It’s the one he specifically assigned to me.

  I answer and say to the man who has my phone, my fiancé: “Where’s Daniel?”

  “He’s with me, of course.” The voice is distorted, mechanized via some sort of masking device that turns it metallic. Listening to it is like biting tin.

  “And who are you?”

  His chuckle sparks in my ear. “You can call me Malthus.”

  You can call me. Not really a name, then? Just one more way to jerk me around. Keeping my voice low in case anyone else is listening, I force myself to play along. “The demon or the scholar?”

  “That would depend on who you ask,” he says, sounding pleased. “So. I understand you’re off for a visit with your future mother-in-law? Got yourself a nice little Fourth of July party planned?”

  “How do you know that?”

  “How do you think I know?” The metallic sound snips at my eardrums like sewing shears.

  “Don’t hurt him.”

  “But Kristine. Hurting is what I do.” His voice goes flat, the humor gone, and I imagine him leaning forward, probably in a car outside, gaze burning like the sun overhead. “Let me ask you. Do you actually care for your fiancé?”

  “Of course.”

  He makes a noise in the back of his throat, unconvinced. “I only ask because I’ve been watching you for a while now. I’ve gone to great lengths, in fact. Taps on your phone, bugs on your computer. Cameras . . . those are my favorite.”

  I bet.

  “Understand, Kristine, that I’ve been desperate to see if there’s anything you value above and beyond yourself. Yet even after ten long months, I have to say . . . I keep coming up empty.”

  I press the back of my hand to my forehead. Ten months. God.

  And he’s wrong. I care for so many things; for my patients and close friends, for Daniel, and, first and foremost, for Abby. But I’m damn sure not going to tell him that.

  “You go to the gym to get your tight little ass,” he continues in that cutting voice, “and then go shopping to cover it with expensive clothes. You clock hours at an altruistic job, true, but only so you can keep eating and sleeping and waking and shitting and running, running, running on that pathetic treadmill that is your life. All that action, all that running. All of it done so carelessly.”

  I’m shaking my head, even though Malthus can’t see me, and even though I’m glad, so very grateful, that he hasn’t mentioned Abby. Ten months . . .

  So why hasn’t he mentioned Abby?

  I lick my lips, trying to think. It’s 5:30 p.m. Where is she right now? My fingers begin to tingle with the sudden need to end this call, to ring up Maria instead, to hear Abby’s—

  “Then I realized, you like things.” The scissored words sever my thoughts. “You like Daniel’s car, for instance . . . so I gave it to you. You can thank me now.”

  My throat contracts like a clenched fist. “Thank you.”

  “You like that nice ring on your finger from him too. I�
�ve seen you looking at it. You’re probably looking at it now.”

  I grit my teeth and lift my gaze.

  “I could have taken it at the rest stop.” The mechanized voice lowers. “I could have chopped it off. Kept it for myself.”

  I can find nothing at all to say to that. The man is talking in complete sentences, trying on reason, but it’s like putting a bow on a rabid dog. It simply doesn’t fit over his obvious madness.

  “But I didn’t just leave you with these things because you desired them. I left them so that you could finally see that physical items have very little value when stripped of context. And I think it’s time you learn to prioritize, Kristine.”

  I open my mouth, but no sound emerges.

  “Open the map.”

  I force the tension from my fingers, leaving half-moons carved into my palms. I fumble the map and end up ripping it down the middle, but I hold it together with forced control, same way I’m holding myself together. I stare down at the dusty enclaves of Baker and Barstow, the specter of Death Valley winging off to the north, and Malthus speaks just as I spot it.

  “You’ll see that I’ve been thoughtful enough to mark your next destination.”

  Yes. A tidy black arrow, where there should be none.

  The map grows heavy in my hands. Malthus did not mark this in the past fifty minutes. He couldn’t have; not while torturing my fiancé, chasing me to Primm, or paying Amanda to deliver this map.

  “Yes, ten months is a long time,” Malthus says, as if confirming my thoughts, “but do you know what’s even longer? The carefully counted minutes in a single twenty-four-hour period.”

  I’m not even breathing now.

  “So after nearly a year of watching your avarice, the way you take everyone in your life for granted, how you have no redeeming quality making you worthy of the good life you’re living, I suddenly realized that what you need isn’t more time to prove yourself. You need less.”

  I suck in a breath at that. It’s cold against my dry throat. I need water. I need help. I need—

  “Twenty-four hours. That’s how long you have to prove you actually care for someone outside yourself. And it’s plenty of time, Kristine. It’s one-thousand-four-hundred-and-forty minutes. It’s eighty-six-thousand-four-hundred seconds. But I can promise you that it’s an eternity if you’re suffering through the whole of it.”

  He means Daniel.

  “And what do I have to do?” I manage, tongue sticking in my dry mouth.

  “You have to follow that map.”

  Chills pop on my arms. “You’ve only marked one spot.”

  “Yes, and when you reach it, you’ll be given a new map. A new destination.” Malthus’s words are rote, like he’s an actor and he’s been rehearsing them for months. Ten whole months, as a matter of fact.

  “Who the hell are you?” My whisper is breathy, there’s no force behind it, and my question is repetitive, but he knows what I mean.

  His chuckle is a sandpaper rasp that’s as sharp as anything I’ve ever heard. “If you want to know the answer to that, you’re going to have to wake up.”

  “Is that what the roller coaster was about?” I ask. “You were trying to wake me up?”

  “Did it work?”

  “Attacking me in a deserted rest stop worked,” I say, and I don’t even care if anyone else hears me. This isn’t the nutso half of the conversation anyway.

  “No, if I recall correctly I left you sleeping there too. Now . . .” He pauses, and even the silence is sliced thin and sharp. “Get the fuck out of that bathroom.”

  And the line goes dead.

  That one thing.

  The wall at my back is all that keeps me upright. The rides on the coaster exacerbated the injuries to my head and foot, but the pulsing has sunk deeper inside of me now. Instead of throbbing at the surface, the pains are nestled right next to my bones. I feel old, like I’ve been in this bathroom for years instead of minutes.

  I still don’t know what this guy Malthus wants. His order to wake up tells me nothing, though the admission that he’s been stalking me for ten months turns that nothing into something significant. He has Daniel, yes, but it’s clear now that this is about me, and I can’t even imagine what I could have done to deserve it.

  Okay, maybe except for that. That one thing.

  But that’s long past, and besides, everyone has something in their history that makes them flinch. My memories just happen to spring up like poisonous mushrooms, mealy and rotted and contaminated by my mother’s voice.

  Try it just once; trust me, baby.

  She is soft and encouraging in my sweat-soaked dreams, the way I’d always wished she would be. The way she only was when feeding me total bullshit.

  So my real dirty little secret is that while Malthus has been watching me, looking for “redeeming qualities” and wondering why I have such a good life, I’ve actually been doing the same . . . and I’ve been searching for the answer a hell of a lot longer than ten months. I know what haunts me and what keeps me only looking forward, but unless I leave this bathroom, I’ll never find out what’s driving him.

  I exit the stall and pointedly avoid eye contact with the trio of women at the long row of sinks. Between the music and their self-absorbed chatter, none seem to have heard my conversation in the stall anyway.

  I do happen to catch my own reflection as I pass by the full-length mirror, though, and I stumble, shocked by what I see. Other than my too-red nose and wind-tangled hair, I look impossibly normal. It’s so at odds with the way I feel that I have to do a double-take before whirling away.

  Back in the casino, whipping lights and clanging slot banks mark my progress, cheering me back into the heat. I turn the corner and spot a security stand looming against the wall, and I hope Malthus isn’t spying on me now because my steps automatically slow. The stand is placed directly opposite the front entrance, allowing the attending guard a perfect perch from which to observe those who enter and leave. It’s also a visual beacon for people who need help.

  I consider it. If I tell security what’s happened, they can close off the lot before Daniel’s abductor leaves. Yet I can already hear the guard’s first question. Instead of immediately reporting that your fiancé was abducted, you drove fifteen miles to the state line and went on an amusement ride?

  Twice?

  Because that’s exactly what the security cameras will show. That, and a man who isn’t my fiancé buying me a ride ticket. And me taking it. And what proof do I have to back up my claims? A few cryptic texts on a missing man’s phone?

  Ones that’ve come from me?

  Sweat pops on my brow despite the frigid casino air. It occurs to me that Malthus has me dead to rights—the psycho can throw anyone in my path now, and I’ll have more than just a little explaining to do.

  Feeling watched, my heartbeat kicks up again, and my gaze begins to dart. I study the faces poised at the slots, the body language of those strolling between them. Maybe they aren’t all simply meandering. Maybe Malthus has an ally.

  Blinking hard, I realize that my breath has grown ragged, so I try and steady it, but then I see that the security guard has realized it too.

  My movement, or lack of it, has caught his attention, and he leans over his elevated stand, his professionally schooled face gone honed. His close-mouthed smile is edged as he nods at me in invitation, an offer of help if I need it.

  Can he help me? Can anyone?

  I have no idea what to do with those thoughts, so I whirl toward the exit instead, working to mask my limp. I feel like I’m being pushed toward the doors, invisible palms pressing at my back, and I can’t help but run a hand over my head as I risk a backward glance. The guard is fully upright now, unblinking as he tracks me across the floor, and my heart sinks. No matter what I do, or what happens next, I know this man will remember me.r />
  I cut across the casino floor on the diagonal, putting a tall bank of blinking, clanging machines between the guard and me, then remain on that angle until I reach the tinted doors. My hand closes over a gilded handle, and I jolt because it’s like ice in my palm. Then, suddenly, I’m back in the heat, quickstepping it away from the covered valet, the sun laser-blasting my body, nearly blinding me as I hurry into the lot. I move as quickly as I can without running and unlock the car by remote before yanking the door wide.

  A neat, white package waits for me on the driver’s seat.

  My head whips up, around. I swear I locked the car when I went inside. How would anyone get in without a key, or breaking a window, or setting off the alarm? Who could break in without even scratching the lock?

  Someone who’d been in my house, tapping my phone, bugging my computer. Someone who’s been setting this up for ten long months, that’s who.

  Bending, I touch the edge of the small package. It’s sturdy butcher paper, its contents secured by a sliver of yellow tape. I pick it up and find it’s surprisingly light. Carefully, I pull back the tape, but when it’s laid open I just stare, trying to make sense of what’s been sitting there, baking in the heat.

  At first I think it’s a dead caterpillar, but there’s too much blood for that. The liquid fills the rounded pocket, browning at the edges and congealing in the middle. The fuzzy object centered in the gooey mess also had no organs or eyes or head. It has never been alive. Yet a thin layer of tissue surrounds it like the rubbery flesh of a landed stingray, its fluttery elegance gone flat with gravity. Still more puzzled than repelled, I tilt the paper, and my gaze slides to the item’s left edge.

  And I flash back to an hour earlier, Daniel and me sitting in the car, me kissing his cheek . . . right beneath the small mole I love so much. It sat to the side of his right eyebrow.

  Both eyebrow and mole sit carefully gift-wrapped in my hands right now. They are wet, fresh. He is close.

  “Excuse me? Ma’am?”

  The voice rises behind me at the same time the bile reaches my throat, and I whirl to see the security guard who’d been watching me inside. He’s only two cars away.