Highways to Hell

by Bryan Smith

  Josh gulped. His eyes were shining with fear now. “Okay.”

  “And don’t blaze up.”

  He nodded. “Yeah. Okay.”

  Heather slithered out of the car and started quickly across the parking lot, a lean, long-legged, hip-swiveling slice of black-clad beauty. A stiff breeze stirred platinum-blonde hair. Stylish black shades hid eyes a startling shade of blue. A purse with a long strap hung from her right shoulder. Not so stylish, but it was right for the job. The hand gripping the gun was shoved down inside it. The clerk behind the counter wouldn’t see it until it was too late.

  Her heart hammered in her chest.

  I don’t want to do this. Not again.

  Three years ago she’d robbed a liquor store at gun point. Her boyfriend Craig had been the instigator that time. The motive that time had been “fun” rather than monetary. A highly risky piece of thrill-seeking. Craig was dead now, one of the many victims of the Flaherty Brothers Traveling Carnivale and Freakshow. She had hated him by the end, but there had been a time when she’d allowed herself to fall fully under his bad boy spell. It hadn’t hurt that he’d been such a good-looking son of a bitch. For a short while, she’d gone along with any crazy idea that entered his twisted mind. Like doing an armed robbery just to have done it.

  This was different.

  Everything was different since the freakshow.

  She almost never slept anymore. She was afraid to close her eyes for fear of seeing the horribly deformed monstrosities from the freakshow in her dreams. The coke habit she’d developed went a long way toward staving off sleep and the nightmares that came with it. The downside to that was that coke wasn’t cheap. She and Josh moved around a lot. Staying in one place more than a week made her nervous. Josh did a bit of day labor here and there wherever they landed, but they were perpetually low on funds. Yet never so low as they were now. Today they didn’t have a single penny between them. The time had come to take someone else’s money. She didn’t like it, but desperation had a way of narrowing your options down to the single grimmest one available. There would be time for regrets later, after her life had finally settled down. Until the memories of the freakshow at last began to fade.

  But for now...

  She pushed through the double doors at the front of the store and strode confidently inside. Except for the pimply clerk behind the counter, the store was empty, as she’d expected. The store was located off a sleepy exit just inside the South Carolina border. The area was sparsely populated and the store itself was a ramshackle relic from another age. There were no security cameras. Someone else would come along sooner or later. There was no way around that. But if she did this fast, she should be able to get gone long before that could become an issue.

  She approached the counter, hips swaying, her most radiant smile in place.

  The scrawny clerk swallowed a lump in his throat and stared at her tits.

  She pulled out the gun and pointed it at his face. “All the money from the register. Now.”

  He blinked slowly and looked up at her face. “Huh?”

  She screamed and shoved a wire rack of cigarette lighters off the counter. The fake Zippos clattered on the tiled floor. She shoved the gun’s barrel against his forehead. “Open the fucking register or I swear to God I’ll fucking kill you!”

  He was shaking now. Tears leaked from his eyes.

  “Do it!”

  A trembling hand reached for the register.

  A bell rang and Heather shrieked, nearly jumping out of her skin.

  “Oops. Awkward.”

  Heather backed away from the register and wheeled slowly around, trying to keep both the clerk and the interloper in her vision. Actually, it was interlopers, plural. A young girl with shaggy, dyed-black hair and pale skin. Her male companion was slender and wore a shiny black shirt with a flame pattern on the front. It looked like the sort of thing you’d buy from Hot Topic. The girl had a totebag. A hand was dipped casually inside. The young man stared at the gun in Heather’s hand, his eyes wide and radiating fear, but the girl only seemed amused. Heather glanced beyond them and saw an antique automobile parked in front of the store. A big red Galaxie 500. They must have driven up just as she was losing her cool with the clerk, which, by the way, had happened at a stupidly fast speed. She thought about Josh out there in the parking lot. The plan had been for him to lay on the horn if anyone came along. Probably he’d blazed up again and had passed out behind the steering wheel, the fucking idiot.

  She pointed the .38 at the guy in the Hot Topic shirt. “Get yourself and your girl over here behind the counter. Don’t make me—”

  “Talk to me, not him.”

  Heather squinted at the girl. She was smirking. What the hell was wrong with her? She wanted to smack the expression off her insolent face, but there wasn’t time for that. “Whatever. Just do what I—”

  The girl’s hand came out of her totebag. “Oops. Look what I have.”

  Heather gaped in disbelief as the barrel of the girl’s gun came up and pointed at her belly. This couldn’t be happening. Not only was everything going wrong, it was going wrong in every most fucked up way possible. This was just insane. It was—

  BAM!

  The bullet punched through Heather’s stomach, propelling her backward into a potato chip display. The bags went flying and Heather tumbled to the floor, the pain ripping at her as she rolled across the tiles. She tried to bring her own gun around to aim at the girl, but it had slipped from her fingers. She slapped at the floor tiles, grasping for the fallen weapon, but her fingers found only smears of her own blood. Heather cried out and lifted her head.

  The girl was at the counter now, aiming the gun at the trembling clerk. He raised his hands in a pathetic warding-off gesture.

  The guy in the Hot Topic shirt was shaking his head faster and faster. “Roxie, don’t!”

  BAM!

  Blood exploded from the back of the clerk’s head and he slumped ass-first to the floor. The girl strolled over to Heather and knelt down over her. She pressed the barrel of the gun against Heather’s forehead and smiled. “Say goodnight.”

  Blood trickled from the corners of Heather’s mouth. “No. No.”

  The girl’s smile broadened. “Yes.”

  Heather never heard the killing shot.

  Back on the highway now and behind the wheel of the Galaxie, Rob glanced at Roxie, who sat slouched in the shotgun seat. She was sucking on a lollipop, a serene expression on her face. “You didn’t have to do that guy in the Chevelle. He was passed out.”

  She shrugged. “Didn’t have to, no. That’s one of the joys of life, Rob. You can spare a moment now and then for a bit of pointless pleasure. It’s called freedom. You should revel in your freedom.”

  Rob felt sick as he stared at the empty road ahead. “You’re crazy.”

  “That’s not nice. Take it back.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. I forgive you. I am sort of crazy, after all.”

  Rob couldn’t help it. He laughed. It was insane. Even in the face of such horror, she made him laugh. What was wrong with him? What was he becoming?

  Roxie took the lollipop out of her mouth. “You know what the chick’s mistake was?”

  “What?”

  “Hesitation. If you’re gonna go around pointing guns at people, you gotta be ready to use them. She should have shot us the second she saw us, the dumb bitch. But she didn’t. You know why?”

  Rob shook his head again. He could guess, but there was no point. Roxie wanted to pontificate a bit and it was best to just let her go on without interruption. “Why?”

  “Because she didn’t have it in her. She wasn’t a killer. Not like us.”

  “Like you, you mean.”

  Roxie smiled and slurped on the lollipop again. “Like us, I mean. We’re the same, you just don’t fully see it yet. You’re the killing kind, baby. The sooner you admit it to yourself, the happier you’ll be.”

  Rob sho
ok his head and kept silent.

  Maybe she was right.

  The road ahead was long.

  Sooner or later, he’d find out the truth about himself.

  The sheet of paper was as empty as a stormtrooper’s soul, a white sliver of nothingness coiled like an impotent serpent in the old pawn shop typewriter. A ream of paper sat next to the rickety relic, four-hundred and ninety-nine more blank canvases.

  Rafe Martin’s fingers settled once again on the home row keys.

  He could feel something swelling within him, a surge of creative energy, and his fingers tingled with the need to shape worlds with words, to journey to places within himself he could only reach via this strange alchemy/interaction of body, mind, and machine. His fingers depressed the keys slightly, the burgeoning need nearly achieving critical mass, but the drive to create ebbed, breaking like a wave on a shore, then finally receding altogether.

  He sighed and slumped back in his chair.

  A vein in his head throbbed, and he gingerly massaged it, working the fingers of his right hand in slow circles over warm flesh.

  He frowned.

  It felt like something was moving in there.

  Probably just a tactile hallucination brought on by stress and lack of sleep

  The frustration he felt at his continuing inability to fashion even one decent sentence was approaching a level dangerous to his mental well-being. Writing was his life’s passion, but right now it was just a burden. He wanted the words to flow in a heady, mad rush of inspiration, the kind of stream-of-consciousness explosion of prose the old beat writers he so admired were famous for.

  Rafe lit a cigarette.

  He forced his gaze away from the blank sheet. The sun was slanting in through the partially open slats of the mini-blinds, providing the only illumination in the small second bedroom he’d converted into a workspace. He saw the tall spires of the city’s skyline through a haze of smog and refracted light. The city was big and sprawling, a diverse amalgamation of clubs and restaurants, museums and theaters, businesses small and large. Even from here, through the deepening haze, it fairly pulsed with life and vitality.

  With endless possibilities.

  Rafe stubbed the cigarette out and lurched forward. His fingers pounced on the home row keys and he typed.

  THE SLEEPING CITY

  by Rafe Martin

  The city was trauma. Skyscrapers stabbed the bleeding sky. The rain fell like God’s final judgment, a wash of cleansing acid that scorched the flesh and made the sidewalks sizzle. Predator eyes followed a drowning man into a dive bar.

  Blackness like an abyss.

  Then, a rattle of glass and the shock of neon--

  The door to the office creaked open and Rafe muttered a curse. He wheeled about in the swivel chair to face the intruder.

  Balika.

  She entered the room smiling and bearing a tray of food. Steaming, spicy Indian stuff that gave Rafe heartburn. The mere thought of ingesting any of it made his stomache rumble and his throat constrict.

  Balika’s smile was radiant. “A feast for my sweetie. A nice surprise for my hard-working man.”

  She set the tray down on the desk.

  Rafe didn’t look at the food.

  An incipient fever burned behind his eyes, a wall of fear accompanied by a strange tingling along his hairline. If he didn’t know better, he would swear a colony of fleas was nesting there. There was a faint sensation of…crawling.

  Christ, he had to get to bed at a decent hour tonight.

  He forced himself to look at the woman who professed to love him.

  “There’s this thing we Americans do prior to entering a room, Balika. We knock. It’s considered an act of courtesy, a way of asking permission to enter a room.”

  Balika’s hands went to her hips as she struck a defiant pose. “Listen buster, I pay the rent here. I pay the bills. I buy the groceries. Unless you want your unemployable butt thrown out on the street, you’ll knock off the snide tone when talking to me.”

  Rafe spun away from her and sat facing the view of the city skyline again. Balika continued to rant, but the words barely registered, because he was now consumed with a need that exceeded even his drive to create (which, let’s face it, hadn’t been so strong lately); the need to be gone from this place.

  To be somewhere far away from Balika.

  The room suddenly felt stifling, confining, a pit of artistic stagnation. He spent too much time in this room. He needed to be out there, experiencing the city, filling himself up with the raw material he needed to become something more than a wannabe hack.

  He started to rise from the chair, but he felt Balika’s firm hands at his shoulders. She pushed him back down and turned him toward her. Her lovely brown skin looked darker than usual, flushed with the heat of her anger. Despite his own anger, something in Rafe reacted to her raw sensuality. His breathing grew shallow as thoughts of art and transcendence gave way to lust.

  Balika was a twenty-three-year-old native of India whose family had moved to the states when she was a little girl. Rafe had met her at a party a year ago, a boring affair he’d been in the process of exiting when he spied her coming in. She was gorgeous, an exotic beauty with long, lustrous brown hair, a lithe, shapely body, soft skin, and the face of an eastern goddess. Never before had he felt so galvanized by the sight of a woman. She met his gaze at the door, smiled, and that was it.

  He belonged to her.

  How strange to feel the echo of that old feeling now, when the resentment he felt at his “kept man” status was peaking.

  She slapped him.

  The sting of her hand across his check anesthetized his libido.

  “Balika--”

  “Shut up.” Her voice stung, a verbal slap. “I will come and go in my own home as I see fit, do you hear me?”

  Rafe’s shoulders sagged. “Yes.”

  Her gaze went to the typewriter, and an eyebrow rose as she spied the handful of words on the page. She stepped around Rafe, leaned over the desk, and read what he’d written.

  She frowned. “Rafe, you write like a constipated Kerouac channeling Raymond Chandler, like a high school boy with a head full of dope and bad poetry. What the fuck does ‘The city was trauma’ mean?”

  Rafe bristled. “It’s a…metaphor.”

  Who the hell was she to criticize his work? She wasn’t a writer. How dare she presume to tell him anything about artistic matters. She had no appreciation for the flow of language, for the rhythm of prose. She mistakenly believed a handful of college lit courses she’d aced lent her opinions an added authority.

  His temple pulsed some more, the vein throbbing like a frayed power line. He felt something shift under the skin, a snake-like slither of movement that made his eyebrows twitch. He pressed the heel of a hand to his brow, vainly trying to ward off what promised to be one wicked bitch of a headache. The need to be away from Balika was back; her caustic commentary masquerading as “constructive criticism” was only making things worse.

  She snorted. “Metaphor, my ass. It’s non-sensical. It’s crap.”

  Crap.

  The word was like a roundhouse blow to his soul, more hurtful by far than the physical aggression of a few moments ago. It was just more evidence of how little she valued their relationship. The truth was she didn’t want an equal partnership. He could point out all the countless times she’d dissuaded him from efforts to find a regular job, but what was the point? She used his current reliance on her against him, as a means of emasculating him, but the truth was she wanted things this way. She didn’t want a boyfriend, really, or a fiancé or husband--she wanted a possession, a plaything.

  She was like a grown-up little girl with a living, breathing doll.

  Ken with a functional dick.

  Rafe hadn’t minded it much at first, but he’d grown weary of the situation. The sex was incredible, but he was starting to believe even that wouldn’t be enough to keep him in this parasitic relationship much longer. />
  Rafe seethed.

  There was just…one…little…problem…with that.

  With her encouragement and support, he’d quit his job nearly a year ago to pursue his dream of writing full time. That, coupled with his spotty work history prior to meeting Balika, meant he’d have a hard time finding a job with a good enough income to live on his own. The situation was a classic Catch-22; he couldn’t leave unless he found a good job, and Balika would threaten to kick him out and cut off her monetary support if he started hunting for a job.

  Balika was smirking. She folded her arms under her breasts and gazed down at him, her lower lip pooched out in a mockery of a pout. “Oh, did I hurt your feelings, little Rafey? Should Mommy not be so blunt when appraising your…work?”

  Rafe glared at her.

  It was too much; she was pushing him too hard. “You…”

  He struggled to breathe, righteous fury nearly consuming him.

  “What was that, Rafey?” She cocked her head sideways and cupped a hand over her ear. More mockery. “I don’t think I heard you. Were you…” Her hand came away from her ear and her face twisted itself into an expression of phony shock. “Oh my, Rafe, were you about to call me a bitch?” Her voice rose on the last word. “Or…or…no, you wouldn’t call me a …cunt…would you?”

  She gasped and covered her open mouth with her hands.

  Rafe ground his teeth, the need to respond in kind, to lash out, was almost overwhelming. The boiling kettle of resentment he felt was about to spill over. Aside from the physical component of their relationship, he hated everything about her. He hated how Americanized she was, how freely she used profanity as a weapon. She maintained a pretense of sweetness until he showed a hint of backbone, then she unleashed a relentless furry of insults.

  He gripped the armrests of his chair hard to still the shaking of his hands. His face flushed red and moisture, stress sweat, formed along his hairline.