2,000 Miles to Open Road (Barefield)

by Trey R. Barker

  "Go," Hal called. "Get outta here."

  Brooks lowered the gun toward Shawn and fired. Two shots missed, instead pulverizing the walls, vaporizing the adobe. The sting of cordite hung heavy in the air as the priests hit the floor. For a split second, Hal thought maybe they'd all been soldiers once, so quick and seemingly instinctive was their fall.

  While Brooks was distracted by the falling priests, Hal jumped at him. Two minutes, maybe three, and Shawn would be gone. She'd be in the car, on the highway, getting the fuck outta Dodge. And surely Hal could go two minutes with this badge-wearing ape.

  The ape punched him. In the face. Hard.

  Scratch that original plan. Might not make it thirty seconds with the ape.

  Hal shook his head, tried to clear it as Brooks landed a second punch. It banged against the side of Hal's head and his hand to God, it was as powerful as if the Liberty Bell had gone off inside his skull.

  Hal stumbled forward, not really looking to go another round. In fact, not really looking at anything at all. His eyes were closed, the bell in his head bonging. He was just trying to get some place where the fighting wasn't.

  Instead, he found Brooks. They hit the floor in a mass of swinging fists and missed punches. Brooks laughed and pounded Hal's gunshot wound.

  If nothing else, the skin-splitting pain of that punch quieted that goddamned bell, didn't it?

  "Hal?" Shawn called. She had stopped suddenly at the front door. Her eyes pleaded with him, begged him, to get his ass out the door. "What about you?"

  "I'll get back to you. I'm a little busy right now--"

  Brooks' thin fists landed a one-two in his gut.

  Another hesitation but then she was gone. Hal turned back to Brooks and for a while, managed to stay with him, punch for punch. He moved into Brooks, tried to get inside the cop's arm to avoid the gun. Brooks tried to slip around him but the blood on the floor, both from Hal and the priests, made it impossible.

  "Officer?" the priest asked.

  The others stood, brushed themselves off, and watched. Their eyes were intent on Brooks and Hal and more than one gently rubbed himself. Ah, homo-eroticism rears its ugly head, Hal thought.

  "I'm a cop," Brooks shouted. "This guy's wanted for murder."

  His words rang out through the chapel but still no one wearing a robe made a move. Most were frowning now, as though caught in some internal debate. Help the cop? Or help the wanted? Shit, most of them were probably wanted on some kinda bullshit charge, no wonder they weren't jumping to Brooks' aid.

  But the one who'd asked Brooks if he needed help, the one who'd stared at Hal as though he were the devil incarnate, did help. His face a huge, sexually-charged grin, he pulled his robe up, revealing tanned and muscular legs.

  And a wooden holster.

  "The fuck is that?"

  While he was looking at the priest, Brooks nailed Hal in the jaw. Washed out stars, limp and ragged, beat down by the Texas heat and sheer exhaustion, flashed in his head.

  "Lemme help," the priest howled.

  He whipped an obviously old, exotic gun from the holster. A long barrel, a square box with a short magazine in front of the trigger guard, a large wooden grip.

  When he fired, the sound filled the chapel like a thousand whips against skin. Most of the priests screamed and hit the floor. At least one moved too slowly. His head came apart in a mist of robed-red. Behind and around him, adobe exploded in a line from one side of the room to the other. Beneath it, where the bullets pounded, silver aluminum skin peeked out.

  "Shit." Hal hit the floor while bullets sprayed everything in sight. The cross near the back of the chapel danced and splintered its way to the floor. The largest piece, sharpened at the end by the fracturing, went through the leg of a downed priest. He howled.

  The small, framed, stained glass windows hanging on the walls exploded in a blast of shards. The blacked-out windows were gone instantly, as though they'd never been there. Sunlight streamed in, mostly blinding Hal but giving him enough light to see damn near all the priests head for the doors.

  They ran like scared cattle, like cows in the stun line at the slaughterhouse when they figured out what that fucking sledge-hammer was for. Some of their robes slipped down their ankles, got kicked off. Others jerked the hoods over their heads as they ran, almost as if the hood gave them protection.

  Two figured out that was bullshit when their chests burst. Blood splashed everywhere, but not in the neat, organized lines of the penitents. Now, as the one priest continued to shoot, it came in great gobs, reminding Hal of the Garden City motel room pictures. Those priests still alive, screaming and crying now, stumbled and fell away from the dead men, as though that ugly death might somehow rub off and leave them just as dead.

  "Hal," Shawn screamed. She stood on the other side of one of the windows, Templeton's .380 barking in her hand. Who in hell was she shooting at? "Let's go. What the hell are you waiting on?"

  Brooks punched his arm again. Pain flared bright and bold.

  "What the hell is going on?"

  The guy Shawn had scored with--the one Hal had thought was dead on the bed--came through the far doors. His face was waxy, his eyes glassine. Blood dribbled from the crook of his elbow.

  Then blood dribbled from everywhere as the priest raked the gun across the guy. His chest sank in on itself as the bullets slammed him backward. He gurgled, or at least Hal thought he did, before he cashed out.

  "Teach you to eat smack in a church," Hal yelled, his voice mostly lost in the din of bullets. Shitty thing to say, Hal knew, but try as he might, he couldn't quell the hysteria. It jangled him and squeezed him like the one priest desperately squeezing his intestines back inside his abdomen.

  The gun fell silent but as quickly as he had pulled the gun out, the priest jammed in another magazine and fired again. This time, the bullets worked all the way around the room, a jagged line of holes marching somehow neatly from wall to wall. Both Hal and Brooks, intent as they were on each other, knew exactly where those bullets were. When they began to march toward them, both men fell away from each other.

  Hal landed a last punch, managed to send Brooks' gun flying across the floor, and ran his ass toward the door.

  Where the priests were piled up. Some obviously dead, others trying to crawl over the dead, some trying to crawl out from under the dead to the door. Their moans were a dark flip side to their chants.

  "I'll get him," the shooting priest yelled out. He whipped the gun around toward Hal.

  Okay, no door, Hal thought. Window'll work just as well.

  He crashed through the window to get gone. A finger of broken glass caught him and zipped open a stretch of skin on his cheek before breaking off. He hit the ground hard and ran. His boots pounded in the dust as he realized he wasn't going to die in that chapel.

  Behind him, the chapel door burst open, spilling the dead and the somehow still living out. In the harsh sunlight, the brown robes were the same color as the dried blood on the ceiling, as though the blood had gotten scared and jumped its way off the ceiling, ran its way out of the church.

  Like the blood was running for its life.

  There was nothing in front of him. A building, maybe two, and then desert. Fucking Valentine, Texas, he thought. Population four counting all major cats and dogs and there ain't no next move. Where the hell you gonna go? This is it, end of the line.

  Except for the car pulling up beside him.

  "Let's go," Shawn said.

  "I'll fucking kill you," Brooks screamed from the window. Bullets whapped the car.

  Hal dove in the window as Shawn jerked the gear shift into overdrive. "Fuckohfuckohfuck." Hal's teeth chattered, bit the tip of his tongue off. Blood flooded his mouth. "Go go gogogogo!"

  The car fishtailed around a corner just as Brooks came out of the church, blasting away. One shot took out the back windshield while others popped the trunk. Shawn jammed the accelerator all the way down and hit the highway blacktop damn quick. Tire
s squealed like teenagers on a Saturday night and the momentum pressed Hal backward into the seat.

  "Son of a bitch." This was bad. Real bad. Not stealing cars bad or stealing money bad. This was dead Missy bad. This was 'get a rope' bad.

  When he sat up, the town was long gone. His hands shook and his heart had stopped long ago. Fucking thing might never start again. His head, surprisingly, didn't hurt. But it did continue to show him the chapel over and over. Shooting over and over again, priests falling repeatedly to the floor. And priests, continually dying.

  And Brooks' face, twisted into something beyond anger, something in a whole different universe than simple anger.

  "Holy shit," Hal said. "We gotta get hidden, he's going to follow us."

  "Not for a while," Shawn said.

  "Why not?"

  She tossed a hunk of metal and wires at him. "Distributor cap. What did you think I was doing while you two were dancing?"

  717 Miles

  Someone had smeared the landscape. Browns and tans, reds and yellows, smeared like wet paint into a colorless blur. It reminded him of the chapel, when the priests were screaming and diving for cover, when all he could really see was brown robes flying and falling.

  Not that he was paying all that much attention to the landscape.

  He was actually watching her drive. Seventy-five. Seventy-seven. Eighty. Edging toward ninety. Made him nervous as hell yet it wasn't fast enough.

  Hal's nerves edged faster, maybe 115…120. His scar itched, his throat burned. His heart pounded, a thousand cons banging on jail bars. His breath came as hot and fast as the wind had in his dream of Theresa just a few hours earlier.

  "Holy fucking shit." His voice was a croak. "Holy fucking shit what in the hell fucking shit was that?"

  Shawn said nothing. She drove, pushing the car to ninety-four.

  Drive on. Just the way fucking Johnny Cash sings. Drive on, motherfucker, drive on fast as you can.

  Was that smell, that terrible, acrid smell, the odor of the Nova's tires burning? Were those tires leaving little bits of black rubber all over the highway, vomited out by the car?

  "Leaving a trail for the cops."

  Not that they didn't already know where he was going. They knew exactly what was going on. Brooks had told all the cops in all the world and they were all waiting either in Nueva Rosita or Huntsville.

  "Fuck," he shouted, banging his fists against the dashboard.

  Never mind the tires, how long until this crackerbox car was spitting gouts of black smoke into the Texas sky? Exactly how the fucking gun spat out bullets and the dying priests spat out blood and Brooks spat out threats and promises.

  "Dead goddamned priests." His teeth chattered.

  "Pretty much," she answered.

  "How many, you think?"

  "Too many for me."

  This ain't right, he thought. Ain't even anywhere near right.

  "The junkie, too," Shawn said. "I can't believe this. I can't believe this happened."

  "Believe it, baby. This is way beyond ugly. Brooks."

  She shook her head. "He was there, but he sure as hell didn't pull out that gun and shoot up the chapel."

  "Well, that certainly relieves him of moral responsibility." Hal shoved himself back in the seat, let go of the dash. Relax, buddy. Instead, he coughed. A slight thing at first. But it built, like hearing Dogwood's car coming out of the dusty streets two days ago…three days ago…a friggin' lifetime ago, whenever. The cough was the same. Built and built until he was coughing up everything inside. Blood certainly, maybe an organ or two. Phlegm and spit.

  Stars in his eyes, pain in his throat and head.

  And blood on his hand.

  "Son of a bitch." He wrapped his hands around himself, looking for the wound. "Son of a bitch, I been shot. Again." He scrambled to get his shirt off, to find the hole that would kill him. "I can't be shot. I can't be--"

  "Hal, stop it."

  A body shot wasn't like the arm shot earlier. A body shot would end it. A body shot would finish him off here and now. He was too close to be shot. Too close to the end and too close to Theresa.

  He checked himself, panic thick and warm in his throat. There wasn't much blood, but he couldn't calm himself down. A drop here, a drop there until it became a tidal wave of blood. In those tiny drops he saw the end of everything.

  "Goddamnit." He banged around the inside of the car. His arms smashed off the door and the side of Shawn's seat. "Where is it?" He turned and turned, a puppy chasing his tail, except he screamed until his throat was shredded. "Where the fuck is the bullet?"

  "Stop it," Shawn yelled. The car swerved to the left, onto the shoulder. "You're going to kill us." The car shot back across the road into the oncoming lane. Face pulled into a grimace, she managed to keep the thing under control. Eventually, she got them back into their own lane. "Hal, stop it."

  "I don't want to die."

  "Quit screaming, you fucking pansy. You're not going to die."

  He whirled on her. "You did this. This is you, this is all on you. You and that asshole psycho Brooks. You brought this on me."

  "Yes, I did. Now what?"

  "What?" He blinked.

  "Yes, this is all my fault. That doesn't change anything. Now what do we do? You can yell at me from now until Rapture and it won't change anything. This is the situation. Where do we go from here?"

  "Won't change nothing? You actually just say that to me? It changes everything, you stupid bitch. It wasn't some low rent hood back there got killed. It was a bunch of priests."

  "Granted but my question stands. What's next?"

  Hal ground his teeth. How could she sound so reasonable? How could she sit there, driving and wearing the pistol in her waistband like a freakin' bandolero from old Mexico? Did she not understand what had happened?

  "…going to end up in jail…"

  "…too smart…"

  "…to keep from…dead?"

  He coughed again. There was more blood. He stared at it blankly.

  Shawn grabbed his face and twisted it toward her as the car reached ninety-eight. "You cut your cheek. It's coming from your cheek. You're not dying."

  "Day's still young," he said, feeling stupid and slow.

  "True enough."

  "I'm not a killer."

  "So you keep saying."

  "Brooks is."

  "Again, true enough, but he's not responsible for everything. He's not the only killer in the world. There are lots of people a helluva lot worse than him."

  "Not me."

  Yeah, he had never jammed a gun against someone's head and pulled a trigger or slid a knife between two ribs or into a heart. But he sure as hell had shot at people. He had fired bullets past ears and hands and feet, trying to get mouths to flap loose. Maybe that wasn't exactly the same thing, but it put him in the cell, didn't it? Sitting right there on the same jail bench as somebody what did slide that knife.

  This shit, ugly as it had started, was getting uglier in a big fucking hurry.

  "Maybe if you were, we'd already be out of this mess." She said it quietly.

  "What?"

  "If you had done the deed, we'd be on our way free and clear. We could kill his ass, Hal. We could turn around, go back, and blow him away."

  "Are you crazy? There are a million cops there by now."

  "No," she said. "Brooks works off the books."

  "It was a fucking firefight in the middle of Valentine, Texas. I don't care how he works, the cops are there."

  "We could do it, Hal. Quick and easy and be on our way. Huntsville. Or Barefield. Or--"

  "Or what?"

  She swallowed. "We could just get away. You and me."

  "Not gonna happen."

  "One good shot, Hal, and he's--"

  "I'm not a killer." He turned his attention out the window.

  After a few miles, Shawn nodded. "Why'd you do it?"

  "Do what?" he asked.

  "I didn't realize what you were do
ing at the time, all those bullets flying around."

  "What are you yabbering about?"

  "Just for the record, Hanford doesn't know anything."

  "What's on your mind, Shawn, quit dicking around."

  She laughed. "You are a good man, aren't you?"

  "Yeah," he snorted. "I'm a fucking peach, that's why Hanford hates me, Theresa moved back home to Nueva Rosita, Tyler will probably die, and Missy is already dead."

  "It's why I'm not." A bright, vaguely annoying glow suffused her face.

  "Piss off," he said. "It was just an accident, I didn't mean to."

  "Yeah, it just happened that way," she said. "You dancing around, keeping yourself between me and Brooks, keeping him occupied while I got my ass out of that church."

  "It's just the way the cookies bounced, ho-okay?"

  "It wasn't any mistake," she said.

  He turned away, put his gaze back out the window. Hanford was 700 miles from here. Theresa was less than 300.

  "Bet your brother would have never done that," she said.

  "Wouldn't'a had to. Wouldn't'a been there in the first damn place. If he had been, he'd'a made sure nobody died." Hanford, no shit about it, would have done the right thing because he was genetically incapable of not doing the right thing.

  "Maybe so," she said. "But let me ask you this: could he have gotten that disk?"

  "You wanna keep your eyes on the road? We're purring along pretty good here."

  She turned back to the road but her body language left the question hanging.

  "Yeah, Hanford would have gotten it, sure as shit. No muss, no fuss."

  "You really believe that?"

  Didn't he? Wasn't it a given that Hanford could have gotten the disk? That he could have tracked it down and gotten it without the bloodshed and violence? Without payoffs and stolen drugs and the rest?

  Except--Could he have, really? Could he have gone the places Hal had gone? The whorehouse in Amarillo and that friggin' storage unit in Denver with those two whacked-out gun runners. Granted, Hanford would have loved the classical music the one guy played but he would never have dealt that kind of guy.

  And what about the bar in Elk City? Sawdust on the floor, brown stains on the floor, blood or tobacco juice? A band behind chicken wire to save them from the flying bottles, dancing girls in glass boxes rather than cages because men could still stick their hands through cages. Druggies in the parking lot and whores in the back rooms.