Swerve

by Vicki Pettersson

  Even half-conscious, he curls into himself. His groan spirals in a pained exhalation and that stops Abby’s whimpers. I meet her gaze with my own. “Now. Give me the keys.”

  She throws them up to me and pushes back, trying to stand on her colt legs, but she’s spasming too hard and has to lean against the bench instead. I want to comfort her, but I have to find the right key. There are two small ones and I can’t tell what they are. They could be mailbox keys, and I have the flashing worry that the one to our restraints is still loose in his pocket, but I can’t think about that. I’ll have to try them both.

  The weight of the other keys pulls at my left hand, which is both jittering and my non-dominant side. I bite my lip and hold my breath, even though I’m already taking in too little oxygen, even though something is screaming inside of me that nothingnothingnothing is going to help.

  “Hurry, Mommy. He’s waking.”

  I hurry and the key slips atop the lock and slides off the face. The whole set clatters to the floor. I try to bend, but the chains stop me short. I shoot a look at Abby past the lank strands of my chopped hair. “Kick him!” I tell her.

  But Abby’s never hurt anything in her life. Even after everything she’s seen on this journey, after whatever it was that Daniel did to Maria, violence is simply not a part of her physical vocabulary.

  I twist back around and grasp the set of keys roughly with the toes of my left foot. Sharp ridges burrow into me, and I lift my leg—the road burn flaring again—and grab the keys with both hands, trying to figure out which one I’ve already tried. Daniel stirs, just out of my sightline.

  This time I don’t try to finesse it. I just shove the key home like it’s normal to be bleeding and locked up with a goddamn serial killer inside a semi, inside a barn, inside an estate that’s bordering a private lake.

  A crisp click, and then my chain goes slack with weight. I turn just as Daniel rises.

  The bike chain still loops my hands, and I try to pull back—to reverse course so I can wind up and propel the linked metal into the side of his head, but he reaches out and simply plucks the newly unlocked end from the air. Then he gives a hard yank.

  Abby shrieks as I topple. I try to catch myself with my legs but they tangle with Daniel’s and he spins me like a top. I let him, lifting my head so I’m not knocked out when I hit the floor. He grunts as he pivots to rise to his knees and makes a false lunge at Abby, who—still bound in chains—cowers on the bench. I know it’s just a feint. Daniel has bigger game in sight.

  And when he wheels back around, I’m ready. I let him jerk me up by that long length of chain, and as he pulls me to him, I bury the syringe filled with Versed into his pulsing jugular. He must have forgotten it in the netting of the driver’s side seat, but I did not.

  Daniel tries to jerk away, but I use the confined space to close in tight and depress the needle before he can shake it free. His roar is an explosion, and the needle wobbles in his flesh seconds prior to him ripping it from his neck. It clatters against the window when he throws it, then drops harmlessly into the footwell. I almost smile.

  Daniel hauls back and punches me square in the face.

  The jab is tight—he doesn’t have enough room to really load up, but there’s enough rage behind it that color bursts behind my eyelids and I lose track of my limbs. Hands seize me, and there’s a growling somewhere outside my body as I’m hurled back around. I know by Abby’s cries of pain that I’ve partially landed on her. Another growl sounds, Daniel realizes that she’s been faking unconsciousness, and something just lights up and flushes through my skull. It brings me back around.

  Daniel is hunched in the confined space with a look so dark it could be a storm. There is spittle smeared across his face, and my kick has dislodged the bandage over his eyebrow so that his right eye is again obscured. The wound above it gapes, and the scoop of flesh that he carved from himself is bleeding again.

  “I’m . . . going to kill you,” he slurs.

  “I’m going to kill you back,” someone inside my body says.

  He spins fast, going for the knife, knowing his time is short. I whip out with the strongest part of my body again and kick him in the side, and the air in his lungs heaves out over the dashboard. I reach up, fingers steady now, and by the time he recovers, Crystal’s gun is pointed directly at his face.

  I shift to the side of the hidden compartment, which now hangs open above me, and which Daniel finally sees. “Shut your eyes, Abby.”

  I don’t want her to see it when I blow his other eye out of its socket.

  Daniel doesn’t even blink away the dare in his look. It glows steadily in him like an electric burner . . . all the way up until his eyelids droop a degree. I can actually see the Versed progressing through his bloodstream.

  And I now find myself cooling, thinking, Maybe I don’t have to kill him. Maybe I can wait him out.

  Stupid mistake. I might as well have spoken the words aloud.

  Daniel’s eye flares with realization and he gives one powerful shake of his head. It’s both a negation of my thought—I will not be allowed to just wait for him to faint—and a personal chest thump, a call to arms. He howls in rage and everything I wondered about him, all the murderous evil and the lies that were left unspoken and unanswered, is in that elongated cry. Eye bulging, veins popping in his throat, strained, Daniel roars until his lungs are empty of air, and on the next gasp, he comes for me.

  I don’t even flinch. I just pull the trigger.

  Click.

  Daniel slams into me so hard I feel his rage bungee into my core. Still howling, he rams his forearm across mine, and I drop the gun into his open palm. Then he flips it with practiced ease, and the butt crashes into my skull.

  He’s weakening, so it takes a half dozen strikes for him to pistol-whip me into submission. Abby wails the entire time, the sound wet, drowning in tears.

  I feel Daniel’s strength failing, but it doesn’t matter. My ears buzz with rushing blood, bringing a flood of darkness along with it. I hear Daniel fall as I go limp, and Abby still cries above me, but I am spinning downdowndown.

  I’m headed back to the desert. In my mind, at least, I’m dropping into the mines. The Coal Man’s voice reaches up, cinches around my thoughts, then grows taut and pulls.

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

  And, just like the first time, there is nothing I can do to stop it.

  Time stops when you’re underground.

  Josie Scott was holding court on Main Street, Tonopah, licking a Firecracker Popsicle and preening in the desert sun like she was another one of its brilliant rays. I caught her laugh first, this high-pitch bray that was some weird fusion of delight and disdain, and immediately tried to reverse direction without being seen. Josie and I were both sixteen, but that’s where our likeness ended. She was, instead, my polar opposite; light-haired where I was dark, ebullient where I was sullen, monied where I was not. It was said she had roots in Tonopah that went back as far as the first Silver Rush, and that’s why she wore silver jewelry on her fingers and wrists and circling her neck. Her hair was her only gold.

  Josie was also my greatest tormentor. She ridiculed my hand-me-downs, my need for a part-time job at Seven Leagues antiques shop, and most especially, my mother. I put up with it because Josie had numbers on her side. She was that girl—the cheerleader, the football captain’s girlfriend, the student-body president. I told myself it didn’t matter. That I was gonna be leaving this small-minded, shithole town soon enough, and I was never looking back.

  Hey, Kristine, Josie would yell across the school, the parking lot, the town. My world. Saw your momma walking into the drugstore today. Blasting powder falls from between her legs every time she takes a step.

  And there was nothing I could say. My mother really did live like a mole by then, s
urfacing from the Lumbago mine only when Waylon allowed it. Prostitution was legal in Tonopah, of course, and plenty of the town’s children had mothers who worked the skin trade, so there was no shame in that. Yet I was the only ninth grader whose mother had a pimp instead of being gainfully self-employed in one of the legal brothels. That was what shamed me most. She discounted her own body.

  “Hey, Kristine,” Josie called out that day, spotting me just before I could duck from sight. She sashayed across the dusty road, licking that Popsicle, four boys and one other girlfriend trailing along at her back. They were in arrowhead formation, pointed at me, Josie the tip. “Where the hell did you get those white Daisy Dukes? They almost look new.”

  I sighed and looked down. They were new. I’d bought them, and the blouse I was wearing to celebrate the end of the school year—the end of seeing this scornful, blond, little bully every day—and the start of summer. One year closer to graduation and freedom.

  Stay away, Josie, I thought, turning back around. Don’t you dare come near me and ridicule the only new thing I’ve had in two damn years.

  “Oops.” The sound came right before I felt the wetness roll down my shirt. I jerked forward, a preventative leap, but when I looked down I saw red and blue colored ice puddling around the Popsicle stick on the heated ground. It painted the back of my shorts like a sticky Rorschach test. It made all the boys tilt their heads and look.

  “You useless little bitch,” I said, my mother’s words rolling off my tongue with automatic efficiency, finding a new target in Josie’s shocked blue gaze. “What the fuck have you ever done? I don’t see you working. I don’t see your name at the top of the dean’s list. All I see is you getting lots of practice with the football team until you’re old enough to join your mother at the Buckeye.”

  There was enough truth to my words that they struck as intended, right at the unsure center of Josie’s piece-of-shit sixteen-year-old heart. The boy nearest to her snorted, but withered again under her pointed look. The other three just shuffled their feet. Verbal battle was a girl’s fight, and these boys were defenseless. The other girl gaped, though, her glossed mouth opening and closing in sharp little gasps.

  But Josie wasn’t run down with taunts, not like me. Sunlight bounced hard off her bright hair, and she leaned in close to blaze in my face. “And who the fuck are you? You aren’t even waiting that long, are you? You’re probably already servicing the Coal Man. Tell us, Kristine, when you pull back to swallow, are your lips rimmed in black?”

  My face burned as uncomfortable laughter rose to fill the empty, dusty street, along with Josie’s wild, confident brays. The Coal Man.

  It was the nickname for Waylon Rhodes, the first person we’d met in Tonopah, all those years back. The adults called him that because he still worked the drifts, even though there was no silver left in Tonopah to mine. As soon as he had the papers on the Lumbago, he’d reinforced the mine—though not in search of silver. Instead, he’d retrofitted the opium den, its walls still stained with hundred-year-old smoke, and committed himself to disappearing inside of it for days.

  He took my mother with him.

  The town kids, on the other hand, called him the Coal Man due to the large chunk of fossilized glassy rock he wore around his neck. They said it was Waylon’s power, like Samson and his hair. I didn’t know if I believed that—there was nothing supernatural about the way he skirted the law in town with a subversive shrug and an oiled grin. There was certainly nothing out of this world about his stench, a pungent sampling of Beech Nut and body odor that lingered in a room long after he’d left.

  Yet I thought of him as the Coal Man too.

  He was like the mines in this town, dark and black and bored right through the middle. I might not have had the words for it when I was a kid, but six years after first meeting him under the awning of the Mizpah gas station, I knew exactly what I’d seen in his face that day, his eyes black and hard, his laugh flinty as shale. He was a man made to dig and destroy, and like the desert spreading out around us, he was everywhere.

  “Ye-ah,” Josie licked her lips, on a roll. “The Coal Man owns you too, doesn’t he? Like property.”

  I felt myself go hot and knew my cheeks had flushed red. “Fuck you, Josie.”

  The world’s weakest response.

  Josie stepped forward. “That’s why you’re never leaving this town, Kristine. No matter how many Fodor’s or Lonely Planet guides you read in that dusty, old Seven Leagues, your stepdaddy already has a place for you cut out in the bowels of the Lumbago.”

  Stepfather. What a joke . . . and not just because there was nothing fatherly about the Coal Man. Waylon Rhodes would never marry my mother. Yet she’d yoked herself to him like a cow, just so she had the illusion of a man at her side . . . which was Josie’s point.

  “Yeah, I see it, clear as the sky above. Don’t you see it, guys?” Josie said, whirling left and right. The girl was the only one who nodded. Josie didn’t seem to care. “He’s got a power over you just like he does your mother.”

  I should have just left. Josie Scott was a stupid bitch townie who would be here long after I was gone, and eventually this shitty desert town would sandblast the brightness out of that hair and carve lines like dry riverbeds on each side of that self-­satisfied smile.

  But even as I told myself this, I hesitated. My mind felt infected, like a virus. I was feverish under the combined heat of these young eyes and the old sun. I tried to blink away my anger, but all I could see were solar flashes of the years that lay before me, all the taunts and indignities yet to come.

  “The Coal Man is a druggie and a drunk and ain’t got any power over me,” I said, voice breathless, like a steam valve releasing all that heat.

  “Prove it.”

  “Prove what?”

  “That he has no power. That you have any.” She flipped her hair with one hand, silver tangling with gold. “Go into the Lumbago right now and take the Coal Man’s power away. Go down and rip that charm from around his neck while he’s laid out on meth and dust and your momma.”

  “Stupid,” I said, and for a moment the word sat up. I didn’t even know who I was talking about—Josie, my mother. Me.

  “Totally stupid,” said Phillip Jensen, earning a pointed glare from Josie. He shrugged under the withering look. “Everyone knows time stops when you’re underground.”

  That was one urban legend I did believe. It was the first thing mining town parents told their kids as they begin to toddle. Don’t venture too close to the mineshafts, the ghosts will reach up and just suck you down. You knew they were only trying to keep them out of danger, but the briny updraft of a century-old mine smelled just like a specter’s breath.

  “If you do it,” Josie said, turning back to me, “you’ll have his power and you can go wherever you want.”

  Now a new future flashed before me, all stemming from an action I could take if only because no one else dared. Do this now, I saw through my angry solar flares, and I could shut Josie Scott up for good.

  Seeing me actually considering it, Josie moved her Keds through the bright puddle where her Popsicle had melted. Red and blue flecked the clean canvas of her shoes. She flicked her toes my way.

  The boy next to her shook his head. “Don’t do it, man.”

  “Shut up, Paulie,” Josie snapped.

  “If I get that necklace,” I said, also ignoring Paulie, “I’ll come back up here and shove it down your throat.”

  Fronting for the boys. A game Josie could appreciate. She brayed: “You won’t get shit.”

  And so we drove to Mount Rushton in Phillip Jensen’s pickup. Green and orange lichen covered the hillside’s north face like a patched beard, though Waylon’s mine straddled the clean-faced south. The pit had long been stripped of its head frame, but the others clustered in the shade of an old ore bin, murmuring to each other while I prepared to climb
down into the darkness.

  “Go on,” Josie said, ambling so close her whisper stirred my hair. “Ore whore.”

  “Down your fucking throat,” I told her, with a matching smirk. “So tell Phillip to keep it clear.”

  I lowered myself onto the first brace and was about eight rungs down when I felt the sun pull away. When I looked up, all I could see was Josie’s face, bright as a wick, peering down. We locked gazes for one moment before her laughter trumpeted over me. She kicked at the mine’s mouth, so that I had to hunch over, pebbles raining onto my shoulders.

  No more. No more ambushes on Main Street, and no more running away. Today I would seize some power for myself.

  Coughing in the dust that Josie had stirred, I continued down.

  Never say never.

  I come to in the present with a roll of my head, my neck aching sharply from its long-forward slant. I make a sluggish attempt at bleary-eyed focus, but it’s at least a minute before shapes make sense.

  A bed rises out of the mental mist, and on the end of it, watching me, is a blurry Daniel. He leans forward. For a moment I feel only a sense of loss as I look at him, a grief as deep as anything I’d once felt in the dark heart of the Lumbago mine, and I don’t know why. Then I spot Crystal’s gun dangling between the fingers of his clasped hands, and fear floods my body.

  I rear back instinctively, causing pain to hiss and throb in my many injuries, but I’m restrained in a chair, each limb spread and fastened to its matching wooden arm or leg. I have to blink another handful of times before my eyes finally stick in my sockets, but when they do, I see Daniel smiling as I test the restraints.

  “Nothing fancy, just duct tape wrapped around old towels. And one very good Chippendale, of course.” He shifts so he can tap the leg of the chair for emphasis, but misses and kicks my shin instead. “I was trying very hard to avoid any evidence of restraint, which is why you were tied so loosely in the truck. That was a mistake. Now you’ve put me behind schedule.”