“Oh, you are such an asshole,” she spat. “You’re not even trying to hear what I’m telling you. I wish I had told you sooner. I’d have saved myself the hell of having to live with you for the past eighteen months, you selfish prick.”
“I’m selfish!?” Peter snorted. “That’s a laugh.”
“Yeah? Then why haven’t you said a word about Tim?” she shot back. “Not once have you said a negative thing about Tim. Why not? Why haven’t I heard what a piece of shit he is?” She leaned forward, her seat belt taut against her chest. “He’s your best friend going back to college and he screwed your fiancé, Pete. Why am I the only one being singled out here?”
“Oh, believe me,” he snarled, “Timmy boy and I are gonna have a nice little talk when we get there. But, sweetie-” - he locked onto her with a withering stare- “- I wasn’t fucking Tim.”
“What a coincidence,” she snapped tartly, “you weren’t fucking me either. At least Tim knows what he’s doing in bed.”
Peter slammed his foot onto the brake, causing the wheels to lock up. The abrupt action sent the car into a spin. He yanked the wheel in the opposite direction the Grenada was hydroplaning, trying as best he could to steer it to a stop across the wet asphalt.
A low, heavy thumping rattled the underside of the car as it lurched across a shallow drainage culvert dividing the road from a sugar cane field, now caught the Grenada’s headlights.
The car finally came to stop mere inches from the leading edge of the field, close enough for the front grille to crush a few stalks beneath tarnished metal and rubber bumpers. The terrifying incident concluded with a jarring shudder as the tires caught the earth, providing enough grit to bring the vehicle to a standstill.
For a long, silent moment neither of them moved. Peter felt a dull ache in his chest and glanced down, pinching the neck of his shirt between his thumb and forefinger and looking underneath. A faint pattern of purple splotches stretched diagonally across his ribs. He had struck the steering wheel when the car had come to a stop and already had the bruises to show it.
A soft moaning drifted to him from the passenger seat. Next to him, Jessie had leaned back against the head rest, holding a hand across her face. She removed it, staring at her palm in shock.
Peter didn’t need to see it to know what she was looking at. Blood was trickling down her nose, past her lip and around the curve of her chin. The flesh around her right eye had already begun to swell, shades of purple and black discoloring the area.
Her eyes tracked from her hand to Peter. “What the hell…” she said, staring at him blankly. She continued like that for a full thirty seconds, scrambling to find precisely the right words to convey how she was feeling.
“Are you out of your fucking mind!?” Jessie screamed as her shoulder length mane of brown hair went zipping back and forth as she shook with anger. She shoved her palm in his face. “See that? That’s my blood, you asshole! I hit the dashboard! I’ll be lucky if I don’t have a concussion, you stupid son of a bitch!”
She punctuated this outburst by administering two quick blows. The first punch was glancing, with Peter’s seat absorbing most of the impact. The second hit him squarely in the area where he had collided with the steering wheel. Renewed pain flared up between his ribs.
They drew apart, a heavy silence hanging between them as each assessed the other from across the gray, molded plastic cup holder separating the seats. Jessie’s eyes had filled with a defiant fury, matched by a sneer curling her lip.
Peter stared back, suddenly repulsed by the woman occupying the car with him, seeing her in a ghastly new light. Her hair was stringy and greasy, her complexion pale. A frame so thin it was practically skeletal and she wore her second-hand clothes poorly. He took it all in and wondered how he had ever come to love such a grotesque, useless creature.
He would have none of it. Peter unsnapped his seat belt and threw open the door, scrambling out into the culvert. Jessie watched, mystified, as he almost lost his footing, and then managed to regain control. He broke in to a swift, even stride, circling around the rear of the car, his face under lit by a flash of crimson as he passed the taillights.
At first Jessie thought Peter was going to storm into the highway and walk off. Instead, he rounded the bumper, sliding up next to the passenger door.
It dawned on her what he meant to do and she lunged for the lock, but found herself a half a second too late. Just as Jessie’s fingers brushed against the tiny, flat topped silver knob, the door was yanked open. Strong, wiry arms intruded, gripping her by the shoulders.
Things happened so quickly Jessie had no time to resist. Caught off balance, she found herself dragged out of the car and thrown in one fluid motion, stumbling and collapsing face first into the dirt. Pain shrieked through her head as the injury she had received from the dashboard electrified her with renewed agony.
Arms shaking, Jessie planted her palms onto the ground and pushed up, managing to draw her knees up under her so that she was now on all fours. So severe was the pain that it made her stomach churn. She retched, dry heaving, grateful she hadn’t eaten in a while.
The nausea began to pass, allowing her to stagger to her feet. Swiping her thumb against her nose gingerly, Jessie immediately realized the swelling in that spot had grown beyond normal. This was no average injury.
I think he broke my nose! She thought angrily. That miserable motherfuc-
Her thoughts were brusquely interrupted by the sound of the Grenada revving to life. The tail lights exploded into blocks of white and red, racing in reverse toward where she was standing. Panicked, she leaped to one side, narrowly avoiding being run over.
The driver’s side window appeared in front of her, with Peter at the wheel.
“Here,” he hissed, holding up her cell phone. “Call Tim and ask him for a ride, you worthless bitch!” Favoring her with a malicious smile, he cocked his arm back and tossed the device out the window, throwing it sideways and putting a spin on it. The phone swirled through the air, screen blazing, creating spirals of blue and white light as it hurtled deep into the sea of sugarcane behind her.
The rear tires spun out, momentarily catching the damp soil underneath, carving fresh rivulets of mud and shredded crabgrass in the ground as dirt sprayed in all directions. Then, with a squeal, the wheels caught traction and the car rocketed forward, shimmying to the left once before straightening as it sped north.
Jessie stared after her departing ex-boyfriend until the taillights had been reduced to a pair of tiny, red blobs on the otherwise dark horizon. The full realization of her predicament was only now beginning to wind its way into her consciousness through the fresh pain of her injuries.
She was stranded. Stuck out here in the middle of God- knew-where. She had no car. There were no houses in sight. Just Jessie Vincentz, standing alone among the weeds, abandoned on the side of a quiet highway in the heart of sugar cane country.
Surprisingly, she wasn’t frightened, but angry. Even as the chaotic sound and fury of the confrontation with Peter succumbed to the pervasive silence of her new-found solitude, it wasn’t fear which simmered underneath Jessie’s skin, but raw, animal hatred.
She wanted to kill him.
Not figuratively, literally. If she could get her hands on him for only a few minutes, Jessie knew she would have no compunction about clawing Peter’s eyes out. Her mind reeled at the very idea she had ever let him touch her; much less make love to her. Her skin felt slimy at the thought, as if she had been violated. This provoked a spike in her anger and she began to clench and release her fists, squeezing them so tight her nails left small indentations in her palms.
She had to get him. In that moment, Jessie believed this with a zealous fervor. Forget visiting Tim or the weekend they’d planned with their old friends. Her priority was to get out of here and make her way somewhere where she could get cleaned up. She’d rest a bit and then hunt the miserable bastard down and murder him.
The injury to
her face throbbed again and she considered that she might want to seek medical treatment before setting off on a personal vendetta against the man responsible. Jessie shook the thought off as soon as it occurred to her.
No, she thought bitterly, I want him to see me like this. I can get fixed up after. When he’s on his knees begging me not to kill him, I want him to see me like this so he knows all he did was pissing me off.
She’d get out of here. She had to. Peter needed to pay for what he’d done.
To manage that, she’d have to retrieve her cell phone.
A glance at the massive expanse of sugar cane stretching for miles into the night proved initially disheartening. Jessie stared at the field of tall, crowded stalks and doubted she could even find her phone in such a tangle in the middle of the day. At night, it seemed a fool’s errand to try.
Then she remembered: Earlier that afternoon, she had switched the screen saver for the device off while texting with one of the friends they’d been driving to meet. She had never reactivated the function.
If the phone hadn’t been damaged when Peter had thrown it, it could well be lying in that field with the screen lit up, making it easy to see in the dark.
Jessie approached the edge of the field slowly, sweeping her eyes left to right and back again carefully, keeping alert for anything that seemed out of place. She didn’t have to search for long. On the second pass, an isolated point of light caught her attention, winking at her like a solitary star in an otherwise featureless night sky. The phone screen, at a skewed angle from where it had landed, was shining inside a cluster of plants.
She evaluated the distance between herself and the phone, guessing it had plummeted several yards inside the field. She’d have to push through a dozen feet of sugar cane, but Jessie thought it was close enough to the culvert to require nothing more than a quick in and out.
Besides, she thought bitterly, it’ll be worth it to be able to get out of here and get back at Peter.
Stepping up to the closest plants, Jessie realized the sugar cane rose above her head, some of the reeds towering at close to ten feet tall. At five and half feet, there was no way she’d be able to see over the tops. She’d have to keep moving in as straight a line as possible toward the phone, and then track the same exact path back to the road.
Keeping that in mind, Jessie reached out and parted the plants directly in front of her, pushing through.
She met resistance almost immediately, the tight grouping of stalks creating a thick barrier which made moving forward difficult. She could see flashes of the phone display glaring up ahead, but the overgrowth between where she stood and the device kept requiring her to pause and spend time tearing through the vegetation to manage a few feet of progress.
After a few more minutes Jessie stopped, wiping sweat from her brow with the back of her hand. As she swept her hand across her forehead, a light breeze began to wind through the field. The sound of the leaves rustling against the stalks floated across the landscape, the remnants of the storm swept aside. She found herself bathed in a wave of pale moonlight.
Something was on her hand. This something was dark and out of place. Jessie lifted the appendage closer so she could get a better look, startled as she recognized splatters of fresh blood staining her palm. She raised the other hand, turning it over. It was also streaked with thin splotches that glimmered with a dark scarlet in the nocturnal light. She had injured herself tearing at the sugar cane and hadn’t even noticed.
Her anger simmered, her hatred for her ex-boyfriend burning with renewed vigor. Her fists clenched again, causing drops of blood to spill from the fresh cuts on her palms and onto the soil where, unseen by the lone woman, it was consumed greedily by the earth.
Jessie focused all her attention on her phone. That tiny rectangle of light was the key to her leaving this place and achieving her revenge. Twice tonight she had bled because of Peter. She fully intended to see him do the same.
Her breathing had grown heavy, her face flushed. Jessie’s chest hitched. Unseen by any other eyes, her cheeks deepened to a dark purple as rage – primitive and beyond her control- surged through her.
Screaming in fury, she hurled herself into the brush, tearing and ripping at the sugar cane as she fought her way toward the phone. Small tears appeared in the fabric of her shirt and jeans as she plowed relentlessly though the field. The sound of the sugarcane plants rustling and snapping as she wove through them filled the night air.
Finally, it was there at her feet, directly in front of her. Several stalks surrounded the device and Jessie gripped the plants in her hands, yanking at them. They snapped in half underneath the onslaught, creating a small opening. She reached through and snatched the phone of the ground, lifting it up over her head. Her eyes wide, she leered at her trophy as if it were the corpse of some dangerous prey she’d stalked and killed.
Then Jessie went blank inside.
Superficially, the only noticeable change was the expression on her face, which slipped from crazed triumph to bewilderment in a solitary moment.
Internally was another matter altogether. All the rage -all that pure, unchecked hate which had consumed Jessie and driven her to come out here- had vanished. It had blinked out, as if it had never been.
Jessie took in her surroundings with renewed wariness. It was as if she had been wrapped in a fog, her perception diluted by a shroud of homicidal anger the likes of which she had never experienced.
The leaves of the sugarcane stalks shifted around her, snapping Jessie out of her thoughts. She stared down at her torn clothing and bloodied hands, then back in the direction of the highway. She reasoned that she couldn’t have gone that far. The phone had been close enough to the roadside to be visible from the drainage culvert.
The idea of being out here in such an unsteady state suddenly frightened her badly. She wanted more than anything to get back onto the black top. From there, she’d just start walking until she saw the comfortingly familiar sight of buildings and other people.
With the sky, having cleared and the moon dancing above among the company of what seemed to be a million diamond points of starlight, Jessie could make out where the sugarcane ended and the road began. A ragged swath had been torn into the crop between where she stood and the spot where she had entered the field.
The sight should have provided some degree of comfort- after all, the makeshift trail she had carved offered a clearly defined passage out of her predicament- but there was something off about what she was seeing, an unnatural quality she couldn’t quite pinpoint.
The whispered rustling of the reeds surrounded her again, a ripple of motion sweeping across the field in a wave. As she watched the thousands of intertwined stalks surge and shimmy all about her, the sense of dread returned. In that moment, Jessie realized what was missing. It was such an obvious, unexpected subtraction; she had missed it the first time.
The stalks of sugarcane were swaying to and fro, but there was no wind blowing.
Forcefully concealing the ice-cold terror taking hold of her, Jessie slowly lifted an index finger to her lips and licked the tip. Trembling, she carefully lifted her arm, extending the moistened digit toward the night sky, as if she were pointing into the heavens.
Nothing. Not even the slightest hint of a breeze.
The leaves rustled again.
Jessie bolted.
Overcome by the desperate chill of pure horror, she kept her eyes locked on the sliver of black top visible within the opening she had rent into the sugarcane, refusing to allow her concentration to be diverted to anything else. Even as new and frightening sounds of something shifting and tearing at the earth began to occupy the night on either side of her, she focused and ran.
Her feet collided with several large stalks which had fallen across the makeshift corridor, causing her to stumble. For a single, terrifying moment she staggered, arms pin wheeling as she struggled to maintain her balance. To Jessie’s relief, she managed to regain sure footing.
Having no intention of wasting this stroke of luck, she pushed herself to run faster.
The opening was less than a dozen yards away now. Jessie decided that when she hit the asphalt, she wouldn’t bother stopping. She would bank left and continue running north until she was too exhausted to do anything but walk slowly. Only then, once she had put a lot of distance between herself and this dark place, would she call for help.
The ragged hole in the sugarcane loomed large before her, only seconds away. As she drew within a few feet, the earth beneath her began to shudder. Something was moving directly behind her, disrupting the soil and prompting small tremors to cascade beneath the field.
Jessie didn’t care and refused to look. She didn’t need to see whatever was happening to know it was horrible. Her only response was to put on more speed. With one final burst of adrenaline fueled effort, she quickened her pace even more, hurtling herself toward the small opening.
She lunged through, a tremendous sense of relief momentarily filling her as the welcome sight of the culvert greeted her. Then her feet struck the ground and she was caught at an odd angle. She bounced, one foot planting firmly, the other catching and twisting to one side with a sickening crack. A malevolent spike of agony set her ankle afire and she spilled to one side, tumbling down the small slope to the bottom of the ditch.
Jessie lay still for a moment, panting from exhaustion. Sticky globs of muddy runoff captured in the ditch seeped through the back of her shirt, gluing it to the ground. She could still feel the buzz of the adrenaline coursing through her, serving to keep the pain in her freshly injured foot to a low throb. When her body cooled down, though, she knew the injury would be debilitating. There would be no sprinting down the road now.
Guess I’ll be making that call first thing after all, she thought, closing her eyes and trying to bring her breathing under control. She was grateful to still feel the comforting solidity of the phone clenched in her hand. Jessie silently thanked a God she didn’t have a history speaking to that it hadn’t been knocked loose and lost in the fall.
The Blood You Owe Page 2