Walt pulled the car past a bank of diesel pumps and stopped in front of a cinderblock stall.
A car wash.
He hopped out of the car and stripped off his clothes. He motioned for her to do the same thing.
“I’ll do you first and then you do me.”
She was glad it was warm. She removed her filthy clothes and clamped them against the wall in the spot usually reserved for floor mats. Walt just dropped his onto the ground. The lights in the stall were bright and fluorescent, making her look ghostly and pale. Every blemish and bruise glowed from her legs. She also noticed dirt and grime around her kneecaps and fingertips, the folds of her knuckles.
Walt fed coins into the control module and Erica thought, Machines are a weakness. She had just enough time to cover her face before the first blast of water hit her. It stung but felt good and cleansing and she almost came when he sprayed her vagina.
“Sit down. Spread your legs.”
Erica grabbed his jeans and sat down on them, spreading her legs. Walt shot a stream of water at her. She braced herself with her hands on the pavement behind her. The water pounded her clitoris and she almost cried out with pain and ecstasy.
“Now get on your hands and knees. I need to make sure that asshole’s good and clean.”
Her hair soaking wet, water running into her eyes, Erica got onto her hands and knees, raising her ass into the air.
“I need you to spread your cheeks.”
She put her forehead against the pavement, reached back, and spread her buttocks. Walt blasted her anus and she fought the desire to shit, the sphincter closing as tight as a fist.
When he was finished, Walt had a crazy electric look in his eyes.
“Now you do me.”
She repeated pretty much the same routine. When Walt sat on his ass and spread his legs, he covered his scrotum while she sprayed his cock. Thick ropes of come ejaculated onto his lower stomach and she sprayed it away.
Before putting on their clothes, Erica lay back on the hood of the car and Walt ate her out for about a half an hour but she never came.
He gave up. They put their clothes on, got back in the car, and headed for the highway. They passed a thin old woman pulling a Radio Flyer with what looked like a roadside memorial in it.
Erica fought the urge to look at the woman through the rear window, fought the urge to look back at the place they had just left. She didn’t know if she was afraid those things would still be there or if she was afraid of realizing they’d never been there.
Eventually, they came to a town called Marshall and one of the highway signs had ample places for lodging. Walt got off the exit, pulled through a Wendy’s, ordered an abundance of food, drove directly to the second window to retrieve their food, and then drove away. He pulled into the parking lot of a Ramada and they ate in the car. They walked into the lobby. The night clerk didn’t even glance up at them. They took the elevator to the top floor. Walt said all these places had a presidential suite or equivalent and no one ever stayed there, especially on a weeknight. He pulled his gun from his pants, shot the lock, and they walked in, shutting the door and using the deadbolt to hold it closed. Erica took a long shower, a real shower with soap and shampoo and hot water and everything, and wrapped a towel around herself because she didn’t want to put her dirty clothes back on. Walt hopped in after her. She lay on the bed and turned the television on. She kept pressing the button, hovering no longer than a couple of seconds on any one channel, digesting nothing, not wanting to digest anything. Some new torture video must have gone viral and most of the channels consisted of clips from this. People in military garb beheaded, spinal columns poking out of red necks, severed heads that looked more Halloween prop than human. Well, that was something to digest anyway. Otherwise the television might as well have been filled with mannequins speaking a foreign language. Before Walt came out of the bathroom, she decided the light the TV emitted made her angry so she turned it off and waited in the darkened quiet.
Walt came out of the bathroom naked. Erica threw her towel off. They went to sleep a couple of hours later.
Presents
Erica woke up before noon the next day. Walt wasn’t in the room. She decided to take another shower and think about the dream she’d had while it was still fresh in her head. She didn’t remember many of her dreams.
Walt drove a luxurious car. She wasn’t sure what kind of car it was, but it had plush leather seats and an almost science fictional array of bright electronics embedded in the gleaming wood of the dash. She felt happy but had the distinct feeling some other emotion was on the backburner of her brain. Something like fear or anger or anxiety. It seemed like it was in the future, she wasn’t sure how near or far because it felt like she had been with Walt for a long time. He drove really fast and she kept telling him to slow down. Maybe that was the cause of the anxiety. But he kept going faster and faster. It was bright and sunny outside and the windows were down and, with the exception of the speed they were going, it was a nice ride. Despite her protestations, even the speed seemed excessive and exhilarating. They were in the mountains somewhere. It could have been back in Missouri or somewhere else. Hell, she didn’t know what anywhere else looked like. Suddenly the road ended and they were headed for the sheared gray of a mountain. She’d seen these all over in the hills, some construction crew just blasting and sawing their way through a mountain to put down a road. Rigid with terror, Erica braced for the impact but there wasn’t one. They passed through the rock wall of the mountain until they were in a dark room. She knew the room was dark but it seemed lit with some internal light. Like there weren’t any windows or anything and the walls and ceiling were black. Maybe this was what it was like to be able to see in the dark. It finally dawned on her that she was in a cave. The thought of caves normally made her feel claustrophobic and squirmy. But all she felt at the exact moment was an almost fluffy sense of comfort. Walt was no longer next to her. Noticing them for the first time, she saw that hundreds of beds filled the chamber of the cave – for as far as she could see. An old person slept in each bed. It was their gray skin giving off all the light. Something like an umbilical cord trailed from each of their stomachs and into the darkness above. She knew they were deriving oxygen and nutrients through their cords but had no idea what they were attached to. At first, she had a panicked feeling they were attached to some kind of hovering, mammoth creature. Some kind of monster mother. When she strained harder to see where they led she saw hundreds of glowing specks in the ceiling of the cave and then she thought the cords were connecting the old people to the outside world and that was what was keeping them alive. When she heard the crack of gunfire followed by lunatic laughter, she strained to see where the sound came from. Walt, several beds away from her, had his gun aimed down at another one of the sleeping people. He pulled the trigger, there was a blinding flash of light, and then the glowing gray person went dark. She tried to call out to him, tried to ask him what he was doing but her mouth wouldn’t work. He shot another one and there was the same blinding flash of light – even the light reminded her of something but she couldn’t figure out what it was – before the person went dark. She tried to move toward him. Since her mouth didn’t work, she thought she could physically restrain him. It seemed impossible to move around all the beds. As soon as she made it past one, there was another one at a slightly different angle. She felt like she was in a maze. Like no matter how quickly she moved, there would always be a bed in between she and Walt and she would never be able to get him to stop. He shot another one and another one and she realized she didn’t really care that he was shooting the old people. What she cared about was that when all of the old people had been shot and shattered, the cave would be plunged into darkness and then it could collapse around her without her even knowing it.
The warm shower water beat down on her. She was surprised at how perfectly she recollected the dream. She tried to play it over and over in her head, knowing she was certain
to forget it if she didn’t. Maybe it would be better off forgotten.
She got out of the shower, dried off, and walked out of the bedroom to find Walt lying in the bed. A couple of shopping bags sat on the floor.
“Where did you go?” she said.
“Stepped out to get you some clothes. Looking at panties gave me a hard on.”
“Thanks.” The thought of clean clothes seemed like heaven to her.
She pulled the bags up onto the bed and pulled the contents out. She guessed she could still be thankful the clothes were new and clean but other than that . . . It was like Walt’s purchases had been designed to insult her.
The underwear were the huge, unflattering kind, mint green. The clothes consisted of a matching, satiny top and bottom, both of them belonging to some kind of running suit she wasn’t sure people wore anymore. Predominantly electric blue, the zippered top was festooned with sparkles and a weird gold pattern. She’d never seen anyone under seventy wear anything like this. The bottoms were elastic at the waist and ankles.
Walt stared at her with a perplexing expression on his face like maybe he was waiting for her to laugh or maybe he was waiting to laugh at her. “I wasn’t sure what you liked.”
She wanted to tell him that no one in her right mind would like this shit but forced herself to calm down. He’d done something nice for her, after all.
“They’ll work,” she said.
“We can always get something later.”
“Yeah, we might have to do that.” She couldn’t help laughing, just a little, before putting the clothes on. She would have to avoid mirrors until she found something else.
Goals
Back in the car the terrible reek was powerful. They began what was possibly the last leg of their trip.
“The good thing is,” Walt said, “is that this car has a window that isn’t blown out. The bad thing is that you have to keep it down because it smells so fucking bad.”
Erica rolled her eyes. He’d been complaining about the way the car smelled since they’d gotten in it over an hour ago.
“Why don’t you just stop and get another one? I thought you were going to get one at the hotel.”
“I was but I didn’t see anyone in the parking lot. I have to be able to take the keys from them. I can’t hotwire worth shit.”
“So we’ll probably reach Dayton by tonight, huh?”
“Looks like it.”
“What are we going to do when we get there?”
“Whatever the hell we want.”
“I’m still trying to figure out what that means.”
“You don’t know what you want?”
“Not really.”
“Have you ever known what you wanted? Like when you were little.”
Again it was like he was asking her to dip down into some well of memory that was mostly empty. Because she felt like she had to say something, she said, “I don’t know. I guess I wanted what everyone wanted. Go to college. Meet somebody. Get married. Have kids. Have a house. A career.”
“And you don’t want those things anymore?”
She didn’t know if she didn’t want those things anymore. Now, she felt like it would be impossible for her to have them. She felt tainted. It didn’t seem like one who’d seen the things she had in the past couple of days would be allowed to participate in a normal functioning society. And she wasn’t really sure how much she wanted them before hooking up with Walt. So, okay, say her Granny had been dead before Walt shot her in the face. Couldn’t Erica have accepted her death and dealt with things in a normal way? There would have probably been a life insurance payout and Granny had signed the house over to her when she’d turned eighteen. She could have sold that – not for a fortune – but it would have been enough for her to float on for a couple of years.
“You didn’t say anything,” Walt said. “It was like you thought about what you were going to say and then . . . nothing.”
“Well, I know I don’t want to go to college. I tried it for a little while. Not for me. Everything else I think I’m too young to really think about right now. Or maybe I kind of want them but . . .” She exhaled an exhausted breath. “Maybe I just don’t know how to go about it. Fuck. Maybe I’m just too lazy to try.”
“Except meeting somebody. You have met somebody.”
She glanced over at him but he stared intently at the road and didn’t return her look. “Yeah. And it feels really good when he fucks me . . . And I love him more than anything.”
“You want to?”
“Want to what?”
He was unbuttoning and unzipping his pants by way of answering her. All she had to do was slide hers down and try not to laugh at the zhoot zhoot rustle of them. He pulled the car over on the side of the highway and she was crying by the time he finished.
“I feel like somebody else.” She could taste blood on the back of her tongue and wasn’t sure if it was hers or his.
They were moving again. Had been for a while. Now crossing into Ohio.
“How’s that?”
“I need my clothes. I need my makeup.”
“But those are just things.”
“My things.”
“We can get your things anywhere.”
“Can we do it soon then? You asked me what I wanted to do. That’s what I want to do. I want you to drive this foul smelling piece of shit to a mall and occupy yourself while I go in and get the stuff I need. Maybe you could get a different car.”
He nodded. “It’s Ohio. There’s probably a mall every fifteen minutes or so. I’ll stop at the next exit with potential.”
They didn’t really come to much until they were about a half an hour from Dayton. Another hour and the mall would have probably been closed. Not that that would have been a huge problem. It would have just meant a few more obstacles and a greater hassle.
Walt pulled into a parking space.
“I have to find out why this thing smells so bad.” He popped the trunk and got out of the car.
Erica got out the other side, feeling like a clown. “It’s probably just embedded in the seats or something.” She had to raise her voice over the cacophonous rustling of the warm-up suit.
Walt looked excitedly into the trunk.
Erica glanced in and gagged but found it hard to look away.
The trunk was full of porn mags, DVDs and, mostly, crunchy looking yellowed paper towels and napkins. The smell wafting out was exponentially worse than it was in the actual car.
“I’m going to leave you here to figure that out,” she said.
Walt began savagely rifling through everything. Erica didn’t understand how he could let those crunchy, highly compromised napkins come into contact with his skin.
As she walked toward the bright and bustling mall, she told herself that every person they took something from, everyone who happened to die because of them, deserved it. She knew a trunkful of pornography did not make one a depraved sicko criminal, but it helped to think of that man she’d last seen lying face down in a gas station parking lot that way. The waitress had probably been a ruthless bully or queen manipulator, undoubtedly just a couple years away from bringing a child into the world to mercilessly fuck up.
Faulty logic, Erica thought.
Sometimes it’s all we have.
She felt good for now and wondered if she could manage to think like that all the time. It made things a lot easier.
Nostalgia
Entering the mall was like wrapping a security blanket around herself. Many people milled about, some of them with a specific purpose but most of them hollow-eyed and directionless. They had time and money to spare and this was where they chose to spend it because the mall made it easy to get rid of both those things. Bright and scrubbed to a gleaming polish it was like a dry erase board of commerce. What was here one week could be gone the next and yet it felt like nothing really changed.
She would have felt self-conscious about the way she was dressed if she thought anyone wa
s paying the slightest bit of attention. But she knew they weren’t. Between the power walking elderly who sat together in groups around the cookie and coffee shop, the determined middle-age women with their severe hairstyles and expensive but ill-fitting clothes, and the teenagers who lounged around in droves, looking cool, speaking in lines they’d heard from movies and television, and texting or messaging how they looked, what their casual, brief, and vapid thoughts were, or what they were going to buy, she felt like a ghost. A ghost because she was, in a sense, all of those things – determined, distant, vapid – but, above all, she was alone. That was what separated her from them.
She entered a clothing store catering to young women, the smell of new clothing and perfume the same as every store sharing the same demographic. It was a heavenly balm.
This scent, it was the smell of her past. And though she usually fought the urge to reach back into her memory, she seized upon the nostalgia of browsing through many clothing stores just like this, always alone, lost, letting herself get lost, giving into it. When she had them, she’d never brought friends with her because she thought they could only detract from this solitary pleasure.
Was that what Walt meant when he referred to what they had as a gift?
Even if he didn’t know, she thought it might be. Perhaps they could do anything they wanted to precisely because they were and always would be alone. If the mall was the dry erase board of commerce, they were the dry erase boards of humanity. People could sense their aloneness. What was the point in infiltrating that aloneness through some kind of interaction if all traces of that interaction would be gone moments later? People want to believe what they say matters. People want to believe what they do matters. If it doesn’t then it’s a waste of energy, a waste of time.
Sociopaths In Love Page 7