Wings From Ashes Trilogy

by Linda Nelson

  And her mom would be another thing. She would have to listen to her bitch at her, probably for months to come. In fact, she hadn’t stopped harping about Karla’s last incident when she went to that teen party without her parents’ permission. It was a good thing her mom didn’t know about the rape and only knew about the overdose. If her mom ever found out, Karla would never see the light of day ever again.

  She could continue to beat herself up about agreeing to go along with her friends on this road trip, but that wouldn’t do her any good either. So what if she was going to be grounded when she got back, she might as well make the best of it. There was no curfew, no one to ask permission from. It was just them and the road. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad after all.

  Rod had his own problem wearing away at his insides. Every time they passed a police cruiser parked either on the side of the road or in the median he could feel his heart begin to race. He wondered if they had started searching for him yet. Did they know that he had been the one who had taken the money from the safe at the gas station last night? Did his mother report her car stolen? He hadn’t asked her if he could use the damn thing, he just took it.

  Before he had left home early this morning, he had left a note on the kitchen table for his mom, along with fifty dollars from the money he had taken from the safe. He figured this would help her a little bit with the rent money. His note also said he was borrowing the car for a couple of days, and that he was out looking for a new job.

  He was pretty sure he was going to be fired after last night’s incident. Rod hoped his mom didn’t mind about the car. It had been his original intention to use it just to look for a job after seeing Carol earlier this morning and not this impromptu road trip.

  She wouldn’t call the cops on him and report her car stolen, or would she? Karla’s mom certainly didn’t have a problem calling the cops on her daughter as he saw first-hand yesterday. Would his mom do the same to him? She did have him tested for drug use not too long ago so maybe she would.

  Carol seemed pretty content with their decision to take this road trip. She was almost to calm for him. He wondered what she was thinking. Why was she so eager to go on this trip to the South? What kind of trouble could she be in? Surely she must be running away from something just like he was. Maybe he would ask her later, when they stopped for the night. She looked to peaceful right now with her head back, and her eyes closed.

  Rod looked at her hand lying there on the seat close to her leg. He began to reach out to touch it. That’s when some kind of bug jumped on to his hand.

  He hated bugs…

  First he tried to shake it off his hand and made the car begin to swerve, but that didn’t work. “Fuck, get off me you fucker.”

  Max yelled from directly behind him in the back seat. “What the hell? … Man you’re swerving all over the place. What is wrong with you? Are you trying to get us killed?”

  Rod regained his composure and got the car back under control just in time to avoid a near sideswipe of a passing car. “I’m all right. It was just a bug. It’s gone now,” he replied. “I fuck-‘n hate bugs.”

  Max replied sharply, “Then stay out of the woods man, their full of them suckers.”

  Carol eyed Rod cautiously and then went back to closing her eyes.

  Rod took another look at the back of his hand. The bug seemed to be gone now. He would have to tear the car apart later and find it, so it didn’t bite him. His eyes darted about the front of the car every once in a while in search of the bug, but it never reappeared.

  The last time he had a problem with the bugs was about a week ago. He had mixed up a combination of substances and rolled them into a roach. It was one part Cloud 9, and the rest of it was the K-2 he had bought. At the time, he didn’t really care what the after effects were going to be. He just wanted to get high and do it quick. And all he had left at the time was a small amount of each. The K-2 had been a little bit more, but that was fine. It all had smoked well in the end.

  Well in the end he paid for it when the bugs began crawling out of his bedroom wall. He couldn’t get rid of them, no matter how hard he tried. His mom pounded on his bedroom door, and yelled at him to stop his banging. He quickly replied that he would stop. When he then looked back at the wall, the bugs had mysteriously disappeared. It was as if they had never been there. Since that day, he figured he was rid of those nasty things until now.

  Nothing like that had ever happened to him before when he had used any other type of substance like heroin or meth. He wasn’t sure what brought on the appearance of the bugs. But when they appeared, they were so real looking he had a hard time telling them apart from imaginary ones. Or at least he thought some of them were real. There was no telling.

  Rod knew strange things started happening to him when he used Cloud 9 for the first time. The guy on the TV had said so. No sooner had he turned his TV on the guy on the TV said that they were coming for him.

  The TV guy’s face had taken up the whole screen, and Rod just knew he was talking to him and only him. There was no one else in the room. Even his mother wasn’t home when this had happened. And he had made sure never to tell anyone about it either. They might think he was crazy.

  All this thought about that day made him miss being high. He remembered how the Cloud Nine and the K-2 made him feel.

  He so needed to get a good fix. It would make everything better, even if the bugs came out of the wall once again. Maybe Carol would help him kill all the bugs. Just by looking at her he could tell nothing seemed to bother her, especially bugs.

  A bead of sweat developed on his brow that he quickly wiped away with the back of his hand. No one seemed to notice he had begun to withdraw.

  Now was not the time to develop the sweats and fever. Hopefully he wouldn’t get sick before he could find a place to buy some more of the substance. If he did get sick, who was going to drive the car?

  Surely Max could, but that was not Rod’s intention. He wanted to stay in control of the trip. He had to stay in control. Loss of Control, is always a sign of weakness, and if one is weak then you may as well be dead because if you weren’t dead, then you will wish that you were dead. He was the sole driver, and that was the way it needed to be. Who else was going to be able to keep an eye out for the cops?

  Every once in a while, Carol would look over at Rod to make sure he was all right, after witnessing his little panic attack. He had insisted that there had been a bug on his hand, but she never saw one there. She figured she would keep an eye out to make sure he wasn’t trying to keep her from knowing that he had been just about to hold her hand. Little did he know that, she didn’t think that was such a big deal, she would have let him and he didn’t even need to ask.

  In the back seat, Max gave little notice to Rod and his so called bug as long as he kept the car on the road where it was supposed to be especially on their own side of the road. He was too busy trying to see how far he could get with Karla before she would swat his hand away for his being fresh.

  Karla loved the attention Max was giving her, even if he was trying to touch her in inappropriate places. She would start giggling and push his hand away. It had turned into a game between the two of them. Slowly she started giving into his little touches that would seem innocent at first until she realized what he was really up to by taking his fingers and walking them along her stomach. But it did turn her on, she didn’t want to admit it, but it was getting harder and harder to ignore his advances.

  “Quit it, that tickles,” she said to him.

  In turn, Max would begin lightly poking her in the ribs until she couldn’t stop laughing. She then would try to pull away, but there wasn’t anywhere for her to go to get away from the Max the tickle monster. Max then pulled her back against him and held her until she calmed down and waited another ten minutes before walking his fingers along her stomach once again before finishing off with a tickle attack.

  Even though Karla hated being tickled, she loved how he was making
her feel, even if he was showing a strong interest in her knock-out body parts. What girl wouldn’t like that?

  The three hours they spend on the road before they arrived at the Connecticut/New York border was mostly spent by Max trying to see down Karla’s shirt.

  When he tickled her in such a certain way, she would bend toward him reveling a deep cleavage arousing him more causing him to reach out and gently caress a breast only to have his hand slapped away as she giggled. Her giggling and wiggling made him want to touch her even more, but not yet, he wanted her to want to be touched. He knew she would give into him soon. She was already showing signs of letting him touch her here and there, more and more.

  Just as they passed the sign announcing they were entering New York, Rod blurted out, “Shit, we’re almost out of gas… does anyone have any money for gas?”

  Carol didn’t she was saving what she had left to buy a little bit of smack for herself since her mom had taken her stash on her.

  Max didn’t want to part with what he had either. He had plans for his cash as soon as they got to a stopping point.

  Rod didn’t want to spend his cash either. He knew he was going to need all of it for food and a hit or two. There was no telling when he was going to be able to come across cash like this again. Plus he had to be careful where he spent it just in case the police were watching his movements. Just the thought of it made him wonder, could there be some kind of tracking device on the money? There had been a lot of police activity on the highway since they left Brantwood. It was as though they were looking for someone. Could it be him?

  Karla looked over the top of the seat at the gas gauge to see if Rod was telling the truth. She maybe could spare a little of what she had in her wallet for gas to get them to where they were going. “I have enough to get us a tank of gas,” she said to Rod.

  “Great,” he replied.

  He pulled onto the highway only to get back off it at the next exit and located a gas station before the car began its sputtering and knocks. The car rolled beside the gas tanks just in the nick of time.

  Max hopped out of the car and began taking the gas cap off while they decided amongst themselves as to who was going to go inside the station and pay for the gas. Karla was going to go since it was her money, but Carol wanted to get a drink while Rod needed to use the restroom.

  Carol argued with Karla telling her that someone needed to stay with the car, so it didn’t get stolen while they were inside. “We are in New York, don’t you know,” stated Carol as a matter of fact.

  Carol gave the pump a quick glance and noted that the tank already passed the thirty dollar point. “It will probably take fifty dollars to fill,” she replied.

  Karla grumbled, but she knew she had asked for it by agreeing to put a tank of gas in the car. She reluctantly handed over the fifty dollars, leaving her with only ten dollars left to her name. This she stashed deep inside a pocket of her wallet hidden out of sight. She also took the time to take a quick peek at her cellphone to see if any missed calls. No calls came through. She only found that her cellphone had shut off. Apparently the battery was dead, and she had no charger.

  Inside the station, Carol found a cooler full of cold soda, and a rack of small bags of chips. While Rod went off to the bathroom to relieve himself, Carol pulled four bags of chips off the rack and tossed them onto the counter and retrieved the same in sodas before paying for the gas. The total bill came to forty-five dollars. Carol pocketed the last five dollars to use toward her smack.

  The gas station they had pulled into was in a rough neighborhood. One could see this by the fact that the buildings on the other side of the street were boarded up and abandoned. Karla was not concerned by this since she thought that Max looked kind of tough, and he was right outside the car. She relaxed back against the seat and closed her eyes for just a moment.

  As soon as the gas tank was full Max replaced the pump handle and put the gas cap back on the car. The whole while he was scoping out the neighborhood, which was when he saw what he was looking for on the other side of the street.

  There on the street corner was a dealer. He could tell, by the way, the cars drove past the guy, and how they would stop for a moment and hang out their car window to talk to him, or someone on foot would approach him on the corner and would exhibit a quick exchange.

  Max poked his head in the car window briefly. “I’ll be right back.”

  “Where are you going,” Karla asked. But he was already walking across the street at a fast paced jog leaving her alone in the car.

  She began to nervously eye the many different individuals who happened to pass by the car while she waited for him, Rod or Carol to return. They specifically told her that no matter what she had to stay with the car.

  A rough group of teens passed by the car while she waited and she didn’t know what to do when one of them hopped on top of the hood of the car to look through the windshield and see her sitting there in the back seat.

  “Oh look, Mom and Dad left their little girl behind,” he said as he slid off the car’s hood and put his hand on the rear driver’s side door handle.

  Rod and Carol saw the whole thing from the store window. She quickly scooped up their bag of things and told him they had better go. “Karla might need some help. She isn’t street wise.”

  Outside Rod saw Max on the other side of the street ready to cross the street to come to Karla’s aid. Instead of addressing the group of city teens he addressed Max instead.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Rod said to Max while waving his hands in the air making a show of frustration and annoyance.

  “I had to go get something.”

  “It could have waited,” replied Rod.

  Carol walked right up to the car and pushed one of the rough looking teens out of her way.

  “Man, did you see that,” he asked one of his friends.

  “You ain’t gonna let her get away with that are you?” One of his buddies replied in Hispanic.

  The guy that Carol pushed aside turned and tried to snatch the bag from her hands.

  Rod retrieved a large glass bottle from the trash can that was overflowing nearby and brandished it, ready to pick a fight.

  Max found a piece of broken board that had once been a part of a wooden pallet.

  The two of them approached the group gathered about the car ready to defend Carol and Karla.

  Carol stepped up to put her nose inches from the thug who held onto her bag. “Manos apagado mis cosas roach.”

  Karla had no idea that Carol knew how to speak any other language other than English. She remained frozen in the back seat of the car watching the confrontation taking place. If need be, she was ready to cover her face in her lap if someone should decide to start smashing windows. This was something she had seen done in a movie she had rented recently.

  Max and Rod stepped in beside Carol with their weapons in hand.

  There was snickering amongst the group of teens who happened to be a mixture of several different nationalities besides Hispanic.

  “She called you a roach, you aren’t gonna take that from her are you?”

  Carol moved in closer to the dude holding onto her bag. She was ready to fight if she had to. It wouldn’t be the first time she had to show someone she had a wallop of a right hook.

  Instead, the teen relented. He backed up. Carol’s invasion of his space made him uncomfortable. He knew she wasn’t about to back down.

  The guy who had been standing on the street corner selling his wares approached the group from around the other side of the car.

  “What cha doing Lonny,” the dealer asked.

  “This chicketta won’t share her snacks with me and my friends,” the Hispanic teen replied.

  “Damn it Lonny, you don’t need her snacks. Let them get on their way. Max here told me they are just passing through.” The dealer waved his hand toward Max showing the teens he knew one of the teens from the car.

  Max and Rod continu
ed to hold their ground. They actually didn’t want to fight unless they had to.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Rod was sure he had seen a cop car pass by the station. He was almost certain that this crowd of thugs was going to draw its attention too.

  They had to get out of there and fast.

  He pushed his way into the car and hurriedly started it. He was ready to stomp on the gas, without caring whether everyone was in the car or not. But to his relief the cop car just kept right on going.

  Max slipped into the back seat beside Karla. He tossed his broken board before getting in.

  When Rod pulled out onto the street, each of the teen thugs smacked the trunk of the car in a gesture indicating they were not welcome back.

  The whole time all this was taking place, Karla had sunk down low in the back seat. She was almost sitting on the floor. She never though she could be so happy to see the highway looming ahead. City life probably would never agree with her, especially when it included gangs.

  “You know that wasn’t cool leaving Karla here all alone guarding the car, especially here in New York. What the hell were you thinking?” Carol had turned around in the front seat so she could face Max while she gave him hell.

  “She was all right. I was only gone a minute,” Max defended, “I had to see someone about something.”

  Carol and Rod knew what Max was implying, only Karla was in the dark about what he was talking about.

  “Well you had better have gotten enough to go around for all the trouble we came back to. They could have started stripping or smashing the car. You should know that.”