Freedom Road

by William Lashner

  Not once but twice he had sent Erica away. Not once but twice he had told her no, no, even though what he wanted to say was yes, yes, yes. Not once but twice he had thrown away the key to the magical life he had imagined for himself, an odyssey of travel and love and music and sex.

  Now, instead of roaring south to Mexico, his Camaro was still parked under the juniper tree, like a sign. Come and get me. And instead of barreling to freedom with love by his side, Frank Cormack lay sprawled beneath a mess of bush with his pistol in his belt and a rifle in his grip, waiting. Waiting for them to come and get him. Waiting for them to put a bullet in his heart. But he wasn’t waiting alone.

  Gracie was squatting within her cabin with a gun. Toby and Flit were holed up behind another. Wendy was high in a tree with a rifle. And the old man’s truck was parked squat in Gracie’s vegetable patch, facing the road. Oliver Cross sat in a chair in the truck bed, a slab of wood over the rear window and a rifle of his own propped on the top of the cab. It would have been almost heroic, the sight, except his chin was on his chest, his eyes were closed, and he was taking a nap. Yeah, a nap. The old man looked like a crazed geezer getting in his rest before a night of scaring Halloween trick-or-treaters off his lawn.

  The rest of the farm had been cleared out, except for Crazy Bob, who was in his cabin, working on the computer, trying to break past whatever safeguards had been built into the operating system. If he succeeded before the Russian and his soldiers showed up, the old man thought they might have a bargaining chip to exchange for Frank’s life. Otherwise Frank would be running until he was dead.

  It promised to be a short run.

  “I don’t understand,” Erica had said when he turned her down for the second time. “Why are you doing this to me? What did I do?”

  “Nothing, baby. You did nothing. You’re perfect.”

  “I’m trying to help you, to take care of you.”

  “But it’s not enough, don’t you see? I’m no good, not like I am. I’m killing myself, running so hard I can’t stop from tripping over my own damn feet, and there’s nothing you can do about it. I keep falling, sweet pea, and I can deal with that. I am what I am, and might always be. But I’m not any more willing to drag you along just so I don’t die alone.”

  “You won’t die, I won’t let you.”

  “It’s not up to you, is it?”

  “And you’re not dragging me, I’m coming because I want to. It’s my choice. Freedom, right?”

  “Is this freedom, really, running from disaster to disaster, waiting for it all to come crashing down? It’s getting old, baby. I need something different, I need to be something different.” And then he had begun singing in a low voice, with dark hopeless tones, about starting over again a million miles away and this time not losing himself along the way.

  “That song always makes me cry,” she said.

  “I used to think it was just another addict’s line, but I don’t know anymore.”

  “I don’t want to go back to the way it was, either.”

  “Then don’t. Be what you want to be. Whatever you want to be. Get a million miles away and make it different. And when you get there,” he said, turning away so she wouldn’t see his tears, “look me up.”

  That was about right, ending things on a pipe dream, that was about as perfect as it could get. And he had thought, maybe, she’d fight a little harder, and maybe he would have given in, and maybe they’d be on their way now to that glorious fire of destruction waiting for them south or west or wherever the hell they’d run to. But that she didn’t fight a little harder was the answer right there, and he knew that answer was coming in the way she had looked at him, and kept looking at him, after he lost everything in Chicago.

  So maybe it wasn’t decency that propelled him after all, maybe it was just the flat reality of the thing, along with the still living hope of digging his hand into the old man’s wallet. And those motives comforted him some as he waited beneath the bush with the rifle in his grip and the pistol in his belt, gave him the hope as he lay there that he was still conniving enough for some sort of future.

  He awoke from his self-pitying reverie to the sound of an engine roaring down the drive. He lifted a hand and wiped his face as his heart churned like an engine of its own.

  The same red-and-black motorcycle they had seen in Colorado Springs slid to a stop behind Frank’s car. Madam Bob pulled off her helmet, shook her hair, and yanked the bike onto its stand as a rental sedan pulled in behind. She walked around Frank’s Camaro, not paying the truck in the vegetable patch any heed as she examined the vehicle. Then she pulled a knife from her boot and stooped down and stabbed the car’s rear tire.

  Frank had to swallow a shout of outrage as two men stepped out of either side of the sedan: Ken and Sergei. This was far less a force than he thought would come, three soldiers, but surely enough against the old hippies and a damaged piece of crap like himself. Sergei still had a bandage on his head where Frank had whupped him with the butt end of his gun. That at least was satisfying. And Ken had something wrong with his nose: it was swollen and a little bent. Who had done that?

  “Frank?” called out Ken. “You there, Frank? We have business to discuss, little Frank.”

  “The nose looks good,” grunted the old man from the truck, awake now with his rifle pointed at Ken’s head. “One more shot and it’d be perfect.”

  Ken smiled at that. “Oh, we can have our dance, old man, though I’d worry about that eggshell skull if I were you. But we’ve got business to get through first. We’re looking for our friend Frank. We need him and the computer he stole, that’s all. Give them up and we can do this without violence.”

  “What good is that?” said the old man.

  “How was traveling with my Ayana? I sure missed that sweet thing. I sent her to you because I figured over time you’d grow sweet on her, too. Nothing beats the young stuff, am I right or am I right? Did she take care of you as sweetly as she takes care of me?”

  A shot rang just then, a spurt of fire from the old man’s rifle and a simultaneous kick of dust from the dirt beside Ken’s boot. While Madam Bob and Sergei, pulling out pistols, ducked behind Frank’s car and the old man chambered another round, Ken stayed admirably still.

  “I guess that means yes. She’s a talent all right. Now tell me, did you miss on purpose, or are you just a bad shot?”

  Another shot rang out, busting the dirt on the other side of Ken. Frank trained his rifle on Madam Bob and Sergei. He had them smack in his sights, but actually pulling the trigger while his heart was thrumming was another thing entirely.

  “Take it easy there, old man. We don’t want to kill everybody and burn this place to the ground. We will if we have to, that’s what we do, but all we’re asking for is what we’re entitled to. Think of us as an advance party giving you a friendly way out of your predicament.”

  “My trigger can do the same thing,” said the old man.

  “Kill me and what do you get?”

  “Joy.”

  “But you know it’s not just the three of us. We brought the whole gang. And that’s not all. You sent word through Ayana about the thing in Chicago without knowing that Delaney’s an old friend of ours. In fact, he’s in town right now, having a few brewskis, getting ready for a brawl. And you know, he’s looking for Frank, too.”

  Frank’s rifle went off at that, the fear pressed his trigger for him. He hadn’t been aiming anymore and the bullet passed through a tree, but it drew an unwanted barrage of attention as Madam Bob and Sergei both aimed their guns in his general direction.

  “Oops,” said Ken. “Someone got a little anxious.” He turned toward Frank’s hiding place. “How’s it going there, Frank? Throat getting a little tight? Delaney wasn’t so happy learning that the drugs you gave him were stolen. A typically boneheaded move.”

  “Just say what you need to say,” said the old man, “and get the fuck off my land.”

  “Let me show you something.” />
  He took a piece of cloth out of his belt, waved it around like a towel. It took Frank a moment to figure out what it was, and when he did his breath stopped. Ken twirled the vest that Erica had been wearing a final time and then let it go, flinging it toward the old man’s truck.

  “We found your granddaughter in the bus station,” said Ken. “Buying a ticket to California. That trip will be delayed, but give us what we’re asking for and she can be freely on her way. What, it’s one o’clock now? We’ll be back at six sharp with the girl. If Frank and the computer are waiting for us, we’ll make a trade, and you and this farm and your precious little granddaughter will never hear from us again. But hold out, old man, and trust me, blood will flow.”

  36

  ALL ALONG THE WATCHTOWER

  Oliver Cross manages to wait until the bastards leave before he leans over the bed of the truck and vomits.

  He doesn’t have the stomach for games of threat and violence. He thought he did—watching Fox News with the sound off is enough to make anyone believe they have the intestinal fortitude to choke a goat—but this ragged journey west has convinced him otherwise. Every time he is forced into a bout of violence his stomach betrays him, and so it is now. He probably never had the stomach for surfing either.

  He is wiping his mouth with the back of his hand as Gracie, Toby, Flit, and Frank leave their hiding places and Wendy climbs down from her tree. Frank picks the vest off the ground and presses it to his nose, and there is a moment when Oliver tries to justify the trade, simple and straight-up, this stranger, who is a perpetual fuck-up, in exchange for his precious granddaughter. On its face, it seems more than fair. As a carpenter married to a teacher, he spent enough time at Value City to know a bargain when he sees one.

  “That’s some vile shit there,” says Flit. “Is that really Erica’s vest?”

  Oliver looks at Frank, who nods.

  “I should have known she wasn’t going home,” says Frank. “She wanted to keep going west. I guess she left the van and went off on her own. They probably had someone at the station, waiting.”

  “You shouldn’t have shot at the dirt, Oliver,” says Wendy. “You should have shot the bastard in the chest.”

  “I was trying.”

  “Is that a joke?” says Flit. “Because I’m not laughing.”

  “They sure have the hots for you, young man,” says Wendy to Frank. “What did you do to them?”

  “My usual,” says Frank. “But, I didn’t mean to bring this to you or her, I swear.”

  “But you did, didn’t you?” says Gracie. “And now we don’t have a choice, do we?”

  “There’s always a choice,” says Oliver. “First, Gracie, you need to get out of here, you and Wendy, Toby, anyone who can. They’ll let you go out the road. Less people to fight.”

  “We’re not leaving you here alone,” says Toby.

  “And Frank’s our guest,” says Wendy. “That means something. I say we prepare a table for him in the presence of his enemies.”

  “We’re going to eat?” says Flit.

  “Hell no, we’re going to fight,” says Wendy. “They’ll find out why they call this the blood farm.”

  “Who calls it that?” says Oliver.

  “The coyotes,” says Wendy with a laugh.

  “And the people in town,” says Gracie. “For a long time after Lucius they thought it was haunted.”

  “If you try to fight they’ll kill Erica,” says Frank. “I can’t let them do that.”

  “It’s not up to you, is it?” says Wendy.

  “Maybe it is,” says Frank.

  “Get in the truck,” grunts Oliver.

  “They want the computer and they want me in exchange for Erica. It seems fair. What else is there to do?”

  “Get in the fucking truck,” says Oliver. “We’re not deciding anything until we talk to Crazy Bob.”

  As the truck trundles along the rutted path to Crazy Bob’s cabin at the west end of the farm, Oliver takes sidelong glances at Frank. The four others are in the bed, letting the air blow their hair, their chins out in defiance. But there is something defeated about the way the boy sits beside him, the way he stares out the window. He has climbed out of himself.

  “That must have been tough,” says Oliver. “Pushing Erica away like you did.”

  “Fat lot of good it did. It would have been better if we hit the road.”

  “They would have had you already, along with Erica and the computer. They’ve been at the mouth of the road the whole time, waiting on the Camaro.”

  Frank looks down at his hands twisting on his lap. “Saying no to her was like getting hit in the gut with a baseball bat.”

  “But I bet somewhere it felt good and right, too,” says Oliver as the boy nods distractedly. “I bet somewhere it warmed your heart.”

  “Maybe it did.”

  “That’s the problem.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You did something selfless, for maybe the first time in your crappy little life. But you lost a part of yourself doing it.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “And you can get used to it, the selflessness of losing yourself. It gets easier the more you do it. It can be its own drug. You start thinking that’s the only way without noticing how much of yourself you’re giving away piece by piece. Next thing you know you’re killing armored truck guards and blowing up townhouses.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Old friends.”

  “I thought it was good to do good.”

  “It is, sure. But what you’re talking about is something else. It’s like giving a kidney and then giving another one. You think you need to give yourself over to those bastards. You think that’s what I want.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Stop thinking it.”

  “It’s the only way.”

  “It’s the easy way,” says Oliver. “The selfless way.”

  “I stole from them. She doesn’t need to pay the price, I do.”

  “But you don’t have to pay their price.”

  “Just drive.”

  They ramble on in quiet for a moment, neither knowing what to say, until Oliver breaks the silence.

  “Anyone ever accuse you of being too damn selfless?”

  “No.”

  “Me neither,” says Oliver.

  There’s a moment of quiet in the rattling truck and then they both start laughing.

  Crazy Bob is sitting on a rocking chair on the dirt in front of his cabin, smoking a pipe with a rifle on his lap. Four dogs, including Hunter, are leashed to ropes bound around one of the cabin’s posts to keep them out of the fight. Open on a table to the side is the laptop computer, its screen quiet, a cord snaking from its side into the cabin. Crazy Bob eyes the truck as Oliver and the five passengers climb down.

  “Well?”

  “They have Erica,” says Toby.

  “That’s not good,” says Crazy Bob.

  “They’re coming back at six. They want the computer and the boy.”

  “Why do they want the boy?”

  “They want the boy because they’re killers,” says Wendy, “and they want to kill him.”

  “Well, there you go,” says Crazy Bob. “That just makes too much sense.”

  “But that’s not the question,” says Oliver. “The question is, Why do they want the computer?”

  “Well that’s a little simpler,” says Crazy Bob. “They want the computer because they’re the worst kind of fools.”

  “What kind of fools is that, Crazy Bob?” says Wendy.

  “Cryptocurrency fools,” says Crazy Bob with a grin.

  Instead of following Crazy Bob’s convoluted technological explanation, Oliver’s mind wanders, as it tends to do in his dotage. He thinks back to the beginning of all things, when in the midst of a clash of generations he charged an injustice like a bull and saved the day while getting brained by a billy club. He doesn’t remember the actu
al moment, only Helen’s retelling of it, but the fact of his minor heroism remains seared in his consciousness, as well as marked on his skull. It is what gives him hope that he can rise to the moment here and now, when it might be needed most.

  “So they have the passwords,” Oliver hears Crazy Bob say when Oliver snaps back to attention, “but apparently we have their only wallet.”

  “Wallet?” says Oliver.

  “Their Bitcoin wallet,” says Crazy Bob. “Haven’t you been listening?”

  “No,” says Oliver, though Bitcoin is exactly what Oliver thought might be involved, or some other such nonsense, when he gave the computer to Crazy Bob in the first place.

  “They wouldn’t be after the computer so hard if they had properly backed up the wallet,” says Crazy Bob, “but cryptocurrency fools always find a way. My guess is that when the computer went missing they checked their backup and found it corrupted. And then they found their other backup disappeared. And they were up shit’s creek. Which means this little piece of crap MacBook is the key to all their money.”

  “Well, well, well,” says Wendy.

  “I didn’t know,” says Frank. “I just thought it would be useful in Paris, you know. Emailing, recording songs. It was better than what I had so I took it with the stash.”

  “Can we get their bitcoins with the wallet?” says Gracie, eyes wide.

  “Wouldn’t that be nice, what with the run-up lately,” says Crazy Bob, “but without the passwords we’re SOL. If we had a supercomputing system and a couple hundred years, we might have a shot at brute forcing our way through, but that’s it. And I don’t have the patience or the liver for that.”

  “Why don’t we just trade the computer for Erica and call it square,” says Gracie.

  “What about the kid?” says Wendy.

  “Maybe they’ll take the computer and forget the kid.”

  “And if they don’t?” says Toby.

  “I don’t know,” says Gracie. “We’ll talk about it then.”

  “We’re not talking,” says Oliver.

  “Maybe we should just call the police,” says Gracie.

  “No police,” says Oliver. “They have my granddaughter. She’s evidence now. The police come, the evidence gets destroyed. I busted parole to come out here and make sure she’s okay. And it’s going to end here. We’ve all been through the wars, Toby for sure, but the rest of us in battles of our own. We might be hobbled by time, but we don’t run and we don’t beg.”