Swerve

by Vicki Pettersson

  In the gloom of the onrushing dusk, I lean past the dog and open the glove compartment. It’s strange, and a little sad, but I’m not even surprised when I push aside the wet wipes to find that the pocket flashlight, just like Daniel’s bag, is gone. Slapping the bin shut so that the dog jumps, I drop my hand atop its furry head.

  “I don’t want to be lost,” I tell it, my voice still small, still ten. But I am twenty-seven now, and I have to climb out of this car into the desert and the dark that I hate so much because some maniac has decided I need to prove I care.

  “Don’t mess the seats any more than I have already,” I tell the dog as I reach for the door. “Daniel will kill you.”

  It’s a bad joke. I don’t laugh, and the dog doesn’t even look up. I think it knows I’m about to leave because it begins licking its front paws, pretending I’m already gone. I climb from the car.

  And then I’m truly gone.

  It’s like being plugged into a socket.

  A dusky wind slings gravel against my bare ankles and whips my hair against my face as I step onto the jagged end of a once-pink sidewalk. I pocket Daniel’s phone and keys as I walk, then roll my hair back into a knot to keep it out of the way. I’ve left the car door gaping so that the dome light remains lit behind me. No sense in locking it. Malthus clearly has access, and besides, the heat’s still up, even though the sun is down. I don’t want to return to a car full of microwaved mutt.

  It’s also a reminder that there’s still light in this world, no matter how dark it may seem.

  I pick my way forward into the water park, hurrying but not, wanting to duck from view of that scarred hilltop, yet not really wanting to arrive. The sun-bleached pastels are being dipped into twilight gloom with my every step. The stars have yet to tap their way into the wan, swollen sky, but when I glance back the way I came I can see headlights floating on the I-15, steering forward on a lake of looming shadows.

  The smart thing would be to cut an angle to the nearest building but for some reason I find myself following the washed-out pathway, obedient and dumb, like I’m lining up in a queue. My progress is marked by a handful of overgrown pepper trees flanking the path’s sides. I have no idea how they’re even alive, but the wilting branches are stung with green, even as they cringe against the heavy heat.

  Painted arrows appear next, rising from the cracked pavement beneath my feet, all helpfully aimed at a crevice between the concrete buildings. I reach the first structure and try to sense movement within, but the only thing that leaps out at me is unimaginative graffiti, obligatory curse words and spray-paint scarring every surface. The scrawled lettering drips in globules off the buildings, coalescing on a sole thought, fuck, fuck, fuck. . . .

  My pace slows, but my breathing picks up, at the park’s edge. Unhinged signage slashes the splintered rooflines, and I squint through empty window frames and naked thresholds to find that the buildings are just empty shells but for the insulation drooping from the ceiling in tufts. I itch just looking at it. I imagine asbestos cross-stitching the air in an invisible, poisonous web, and find myself holding my breath.

  Wedged between the first two buildings, I keep my back to one as I inch forward in the heavy gloom. My ears pop with the silence. I can be ambushed from ahead or behind now, and instead of wishing for more light, I surprise myself by longing for a weapon. My personal oath to do no harm has lasted four whole hours in this desiccated wasteland. I feel almost righteous as I realize how quickly I have lost myself. I want to say I told you so, but there’s no one around to hear.

  At least, no one who cares.

  The cinderblock walls of a restroom slide into view, and a handful of green Martians wave at me from odd angles as I approach. Someone with rudimentary art skills has paid homage to Area 51, but other than that creative deviation, it’s penises everywhere. Large and vertical, small and horizontal. They are modern-day cave drawings, but without the interesting context or, ironically, the passion. Even the cracked concrete beneath my feet blossoms with small, flat dicks, and I quickstep along a series of phallic footprints to what used to be a ticket booth but is now just a urine-stained shell festooned in trash. Pressed against it, I peer around the corner.

  The core of the water park is so dark it’s entombed. Hot wind races through it unchecked, rattling the corners of flattened cardboard boxes, setting little sails of toilet paper to flutter. Dead grasses sprout in dry tufts, cushioning shattered glass and cigarette butts. Steel gates loom mid-clearing, where an arch sports the word WATERPARK, though another promising artist has made jism of the cartoonish water spray. The turnstiles below it are stripped of bars, and the remaining metal stanchions stick up like medieval blockades, sharp and ready to spread infection.

  I stand motionless, ears pricked, eyes wide. I have no idea where to start looking for the map.

  There’s a souvenir shop directly across from me, its face tattooed with black-and-white tiles, a checkered flag urging me on. I veer to its north side, where I can slip around the back and traverse the park’s perimeter rather than cut across the spilled, open bowels of its center. I peer around another corner, gain it, and am about to do the same with the next when I stop.

  There, near my feet, sits a tight coil of twisted rebar. It’s rusted and attached to the brick wall by a spiderweb so large it crackles like tinfoil when I lift the rod. It’s perfectly weighted to my palm.

  It might even be all that keeps me from floating away, because now it is full dark.

  I’ve been bathed in lights and neon for too long. I know this because my technology-soaked, twenty-first-century mind instinctively swings toward the cell phone in my pocket, and I’m reaching for it before I realize that the glowing screen will turn me into a shining target. Instead, I force myself to remember that I once had the ability to tunnel through pure darkness.

  Yet I’ve spent too many years avoiding it, and it isn’t long before I stumble. My good foot cracks against something stunted, the sound a shotgun blast in the aching silence. I force myself to swallow my grunt as pain blooms above my toes. I can barely see the ground in front of me, but when I bend to touch the bridge of my foot, my fingers come away wet. I should have slipped back into my tennis shoes before leaving the car. Silly me. I was too busy being terrified.

  I remain bent low just in case the sound has attracted anyone, but begin inching forward again. I keep to the crab-like crouch as I reach the far side of the building, pausing because I can’t quite make sense of the shadows before me. It’s like facing a dark stage between acts, the blocky outline of the scenery in the foreground made known only by the backdrop of solid sets and filmy scrims.

  A concrete bridge finally takes form beneath my squint, and after another moment, I recognize the tube of concrete below it. It’s a lazy river, now caked with dust, and on the far side of its concrete shore is a slim row of hollow concession stands. It is the deepest section of the park, lying right below the waterslide peaks, and as the wind wheezes around me, I am suddenly dead certain that I am meant to go up there.

  I bolt for the bridge, gripping the steel bar so tightly that the tendons in my hands ache. The darkness barely makes room for me, allowing me sight of the ground only an instant before my foot hits, and threatening to capture my heels if I don’t move fast. I imagine the blackness rushing into my open mouth, crushing my breath when I need it most, and I know I’m going too fast as I come off the bridge, but somehow I make it to the other side, and then I’m racing past the concession stands—one, two, three . . . then five—and then I’m finally, finally pressed against the last one, where I sink to my heels to catch my breath, eyes peeled to the night.

  I cannot see the car. There is no beacon in sight.

  That’s it. My mind jerks away, no longer my own. I drop into myself like I’m lowering into a silver-mine drift, five hundred feet straight down. The rasping wind doesn’t seem to touch me anymore.


  The Coal Man’s voice reaches out and drags me deeper.

  Krist-i-ine . . . are you ready? Cause I’m going to show you how long a night can really be.

  “God.”

  When I come back around, sweat is stinging my eyes, and I have palsy hands. The rebar has fallen, useless at my feet. It was stupid to have picked it up anyway. When it comes to danger, I am always flight over fight, yet even running isn’t enough this time. I have only managed to climb deeper into darkness, and now I’m jammed up against a forgotten building waiting for something bad to happen to me. Again.

  I close my eyes, lower my head, and hear, Mommy.

  It’s like being plugged into a socket. I get a flash of Abby at bedtime, when I’m tucking her in and she turns to me, even though her knees are tucked almost to her chin. She pulls me close, her head crushing my breasts like she’s trying to burrow back into my core. I ignore her sharp angles, those elbows and knees. In those moments I am her singular need, and so I wrap her up, a little gift to me.

  And there, suddenly, is my beacon.

  It’s enough to get me on my feet.

  I think of Daniel as I rise, and I pick up the rebar again. Between the two of them, I’m able to remember who I am, even in the dark. I am not a woman lost in the ruins of this park or in the haunted memory of a pitted mine. I am not trapped in the darkness of the present or the past. I am just a work in progress, a journeyman who just hasn’t reached the apex of those hills yet. But I will.

  And then I’ll work my way down, top to bottom, until I find that godforsaken map.

  As if responding to that thought, there is a snap. It’s actually a light, and its greedy edges reach around my little corner like grasping fingers. I cringe from it, the very thing I was desperate for only seconds before, but I feel exposed as I blink hard against the sudden glow. Something hums on the wheezing wind, something I know, but the surreal depths of the park have disoriented me and I can’t immediately place it. All I know is that it’s coming from the same place as the light.

  The desert flats tilt as I peer around the corner of the concession stand, yet tip back the other way and dump the park back into place when I finally make sense of what I see. Staring back at me, in the middle of a wasted playground—caught between a seesaw stump and a tilted merry-go-round—is a pair of headlights. They’re attached to a pristine and softly idling ambulance.

  The damage is done.

  The ambulance, I think, letting out a long breath. Of course, the ambulance.

  Only upon seeing it here, empty and placed as purposefully as a car in a showroom, do I remember that the CHP uses aerial patrol to canvass these wasted flats. I was too stunned to realize it before—wondering what was happening, what was going to happen next—that the oddity of an ambulance zipping by me on the long stretch of highway hadn’t even registered.

  My gaze snags on the Nevada license plates, confirming it as one of the private franchises affiliated with my hospital. My familiarity with both the ambulance and the logo illuminated on its side must have also numbed me to its presence, but that numbness grows tentacles now, which unravel to vibrate through my limbs along with the vehicle’s motor, which hums lightly on the wild winds. The planning that had to go into acquiring this vehicle, taking it, driving it . . . the knowledge just shakes through me.

  Yet a strange comfort washes over me too. Malthus isn’t some all-knowing demigod. He’s just a man, a sleight-of-hand magician using smoke and mirrors and ten whole months of preparation to terrify me. More importantly, I now know where we’ve crossed paths: the hospital where I do good work. Where I do no harm.

  I ease back behind the concession stand, mind flipping through a mental scrapbook of all the EMTs I know from University. A medic is the most obvious choice—how else would Malthus have gotten hold of a rig?—yet my interaction with emergency services has always come in short, intense bursts. There’s no ­water-cooler talk, just verbal punches, a fast patter of medical shorthand: vitals, BP, and HR on the way to the resuscitation bay. The exchanges are necessarily brusque, but if someone were particularly sensitive? If I’d bruised an ego on a bad day? There’s no telling which road jockey I’ve managed to piss off.

  But Malthus is more than just a little pissed off, isn’t he? And forget his identity, right now the message is clear: the map I need in order to save Daniel is inside that glowing, idling cab.

  My thighs twitch with the need for action, but the way Malthus prepared for me at the diner keeps me in place, and despite the heat, I shiver. Twice now, I have stopped at his command. Twice my name has been revealed in a way that won’t easily be forgotten. Twice I was blindsided in the glare of full daylight, in public . . . and it sure as hell isn’t daylight anymore.

  I realize suddenly . . . I don’t want to see what Malthus has left for me in that rig.

  No sooner do I have the thought, than baarrriiing, a trill rips from my pocket. It falls over the park like an axe, slicing the hot air and cutting my breath short again.

  Green-fucking-Acres. Again.

  I yank Daniel’s phone from my pocket, the ringtone blaring through the wind-washed park like a blow horn, and I fumble the mute button so badly that the entire thing clatters to the ground. My heart makes a drum of my chest, and my ears roar with blood. I lift my leg to stomp it into silence, but it has already fallen quiet.

  The damage is done.

  I don’t just cower—I back into the doorway, that slitted eye of my concession stand, and listen for the arrival of another presence on the wind. I wait for a flashlight to blaze in my face and blind me to my fate. I crouch like a battered woman, gripping the rebar as if I haven’t already gone jelly-limbed, like I could actually lift it.

  The clicking sound reaches me first. Inching farther into the shell, I rattle an empty soda can at my feet. I am too loud, I’ve gone clumsy, and the light from the ambulance seems suddenly determined to reach me. I imagine the headlight beams winnowing into bright arrows pointing right at me, and that’s when the clicking sound is joined by a quick, heavy pant. I rise into a half-crouch, grasp the rebar like a bat, and get ready to swing.

  It’s all so fast. The hunched shape appears, smaller and darker than I expect, and it’s between my legs, and licking my face before my hand even loosens on the steel. “Shit.”

  The dog shakes with excitement, thrilled at our reunion. It’s still smelly and flea-bitten, but I pet its warm, shivering side as I relearn how to breathe. “You,” I tell it in a whisper, “are hard to see in the dark.”

  I scuttle back to the phone, which has been saved by its hard shell case and blinks up at me from the ground with a single red eye. Imogene has left a message. I snag it and thumb the audio to mute as I return to the shadows, but then I pause.

  Because then, I realize, I can do more.

  Malthus waited until I was close to flood the playground with light. He’s letting me know I’m expected, and that he knows exactly where I am. He’s planned this journey so carefully that he knows what steps I’m going to take before I do.

  But I know something too. There are gaps in the high desert, and places where even the best plans can fall through. I bet Malthus has no idea how great the divide can be between what you expect and what you get in the forbidden Mojave. Yes, he has driven me out here, literally, but all that means is that he is out here now as well.

  I tap-tap-tap into the face of the phone, then drop it on the ground just outside the stand. I can’t go head-to-head with him, I know that for sure. I am strong and capable for a woman, and I am a scrappy desert rat at heart, but the psychosis that drives this kind of man—and one wrapped up in a stronger male body—is too much for me. I’ve lived in Vegas long enough to know I have to play the odds.

  Right now, that means crawling back into the darkness.

  I run back the way I came, emboldened by the fringe of light from the ambulance’s beams,
counting on the engine’s low hum to smother the sound of my progress. One-one thousand, two-one thousand . . . I reach the gap between the second and the third stands, then swerve. The angle is great enough that I can reach the base of the hillside holding those not-slides without being seen. Once there, I will dart from pillar to pillar in the dark and come up on the rig from behind.

  But I know I’ve made the wrong move the moment I break from behind the shielding stalls. Even with the rebar in my hands, and the dog at my feet, I feel the vastness of the park around me like a circling wolf pack. I am totally vulnerable to attack, completely exposed. Then, too early, the phone that I left back at the stand rings again, and it’s farther away than it should be. I am falling into a wild gap.

  To the tune of “Green Acres.”

  I reach the last concrete stanchion, realizing I should’ve told Imogene in my text to wait two minutes before calling back. The idea was to draw Malthus, or at least his attention, to the concession stand while I approach the ambulance from behind. Even murderous psychos can’t be two places at once. Yet it cost me the phone, my connection to the outside world . . . and my only connection to Daniel too, since Malthus can’t reach me without it.

  The park falls into that ear-popping silence. I don’t know if Imogene hung up or if Malthus found the phone, but I can’t worry about it. Instead, I charge the rig like an Olympian. My delicate flats scratch at the rocky earth, the motor continues humming atop the swirling wind, the sound of the terrier’s ragged breath fill my ears, and still I think, It’s tooquiettooquiettooquiet.

  The vehicle is self-contained, privacy curtains pulled tight, but light edges out from the sides in a warm, faint glow. I glance back to make sure no one is coming up behind me as I reach for the door handle. It’s warm, almost hot, but I yank it down with my left hand, the dense length of rebar rising in my right.