by Zoey Parker
“I didn't have breakfast either,” Billie said. Her stomach rumbled, and she realized that with all of the action earlier that day, she hadn't had time to feel particularly hungry. Now, though, she discovered that she was ravenous.
“Well, if you can find this shack you were telling me about, I can try to find us something to eat,” said Carter. “I'm not sure how much luck I'll have, though. I haven't seen many animals around, and I have no idea which plants are edible and which ones are poisonous. I'm not in that big a hurry to find out, either.”
“We could always eat the horses,” Billie joked.
Carter snickered. “What are you, French or something?”
There was a brief silence, and then suddenly they were both on the ground, rolling around and laughing hysterically. The joke wasn't that funny, and Billie didn't know whether one or both of them were still suffering the effects of heatstroke, but in that moment it was somehow the most hilarious fucking thing Billie had ever heard in her life. She cackled helplessly until tears streamed down her cheeks.
“So, where is this shack supposed to be, anyway?” Carter asked, trying to compose himself as chuckles bubbled out of his mouth uncontrollably.
“It's about a quarter of a mile from here,” Billie said as her giggles finally started to die down. “Here, help me up again and I'll show you.”
Carter helped her to her feet and they led the horses deeper into the woods, still snorting and snuffling with laughter.
Chapter 18
Billie
As Billie and Carter approached the little shack in the woods, Billie thought about all the times she'd played there with Samantha as a child.
Billie liked to make believe that the shack was a fort or homestead in the Old West. She'd grab a fallen tree branch and point it out the windows, pretending it was a Winchester rifle and imagining hordes of Indians or outlaws in black hats attacking them. But Samantha preferred fantasy tales, and she'd sometimes insist that the shack was a witch's lair or a haven for woodland fairies.
Looking at Carter—long-haired, shirtless, and leading a pair of horses through the misty woods at twilight—Billie had to admit that this looked more like a scene from Samantha's imagination than her own. It wasn't hard to picture him as a brave medieval knight on a quest through an enchanted forest.
The shack that awaited them looked almost the same as it had the last time Billie had seen it, over ten years ago. The wooden walls were warped from countless seasons of rain, and vivid green moss grew all over them. The shingled roof was buckled in the center from a heavy branch that had caved it in during a storm. The windows were all broken, the glass shards long since swept and scattered by the wind. Tall grass and wildflowers grew up through the rotted steps leading to the front door.
“This must be the place,” Carter commented, looking at it.
“I know it doesn't look like much, but at least it'll give us a floor to sleep on and a roof to stay dry under if it starts to rain. Well, most of a roof, anyway,” she amended.
“I've slept in worse places,” Carter shrugged. “Come on, we may as well go inside and sit for a bit before we start grubbing for berries and squirrels out here. At least the horses have plenty of grass to graze on.”
They walked up the rickety steps, looked inside the shack—and stopped in their tracks.
“Was all this stuff here the last time you saw this place?” Carter asked.
Billie shook her head.
Even though the outside of the shack still looked dilapidated and abandoned, the inside was furnished with several chairs and a cot—all of them covered in plastic—plus a couple of waterproof lamps, a long table, a small TV, and a mini-fridge. There was a large box of plastic sandwich bags on the table, as well as a hot plate, some utensils, a can opener, and several cans of soup and vegetables.
Carter could see that a large section of the floor in the corner of the shack had been replaced with new boards, and there was a gas can resting on them.
Carter opened the fridge to look inside. The light stayed off and no cool air drifted out, but the bottom of the fridge was full of beers, and bottles of water and soda occupied every inch of the top rack. He immediately took a bottle of water for himself and tossed another one to Billie, who opened it and drank half of it down in two big gulps.
“What the hell is all this stuff wired up to?” Carter murmured to himself, twisting the cap off his water bottle. He followed the cords to a hole drilled low in the rear wall of the shack, and when he went out back, Billie followed. They saw a generator. A short distance away, there was an outhouse that looked like it had been built within the past year or two.
“All of this seems pretty convenient, doesn't it?” Carter asked.
“Yeah,” Billie agreed, thinking of Samantha's fairy tales again. “Like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, or the candy house from Hansel and Gretel. Do you think we should stick around, or...?”
“Fuck yeah,” he replied without hesitation.
Carter went back inside to retrieve the gas can. He unscrewed it and started pouring fuel into the generator. “There's no reason to be worried. From the looks of it, some locals probably found this place and decided to keep it stocked for whenever they go hunting. We can spend a nice night, help ourselves to some of their food and beer, and be gone tomorrow morning. I doubt they'll know anyone was here, and even if they did, they probably wouldn't begrudge a couple of people who are starving and damn near dying of thirst.”
“But what if they come back tonight while we're here?” Billie asked.
“Slim chance of that,” Carter said, switching the generator on. It gave out a few coughs, belched a cloud of thick smoke, then started running with a smooth hum. “But even if they do—whether it's hunters, talking bears, or a witch—these guns of ours will probably do a decent job of frightening them off.” He pulled out both of his guns, holding them up for effect.
“Well, gift horses and all that, I guess,” Billie conceded.
“That's the spirit,” he said, carrying the gas can back inside. “Let's fire up the hot plate and see what's on TV, shall we?”
Chapter 19
Carter
A couple of hours later, Carter was sitting in one of the plastic-covered chairs, drinking a beer. Billie sat in another chair next to his, her leg dangling over one armrest as she spooned corn niblets into her mouth from an open can. They both used additional cans of chilled beer as makeshift ice packs, pressing them against their sunburned necks and faces.
They both watched the tiny, glowing TV screen. No matter how much Carter messed with the flimsy antennas on top of the set, the grainy picture still hissed with static, and every few minutes the picture would roll upward. Keeping his eyes on it gave Carter a mild headache, but still, he had to admit that it was nice to relax with a cheap beer and some shitty television after everything he'd been through. It sure beat the hard, moldy floors and foraged scraps of food he'd expected on the way to the shack.
“No matter where I go, it seems like whenever I turn on the TV, there's always a Western movie playing on at least one channel,” Carter mused.
“Really?” Billie asked. “I always figured that was just because I live in Texas.”
“Nope, it's pretty much true everywhere,” he said. “Weird, right?”
Billie shrugged. “Works for me. I love Westerns.”
“Me too,” Carter said. “My mom used to show them to me. This was always one of the best ones, though.”
“Oh, hell yeah. This is my favorite scene coming up.”
“The one with the mule?” he asked.
“Uh-huh.”
They watched in silence for a few moments as Clint Eastwood glared with icy blue eyes at a trio of good-for-nothing cowpokes and demanded that they apologize to his mule for laughing at it.
When the laughing stopped and the shooting started, Billie finished off her corn and put the empty can on the floor. “So your mom is the one who gave you the unfortunate name of
Carter, huh? How'd that happen?”
“I think she was hoping for a girl,” Carter said. “And she was a big fan of Helen Carter, the country singer from the '50s. I'm pretty sure she originally meant to name me Helen and make Carter my middle name, but when she found out I was going to be a boy, she just went with Carter instead.”
“And she showed you Westerns? That's kind of strange. I mean, I would think that usually it'd be a guy's father who would do that.”
“I never knew my father,” Carter said. “He ran out on my mom before I was born. She didn't talk about him much, and when she did, she almost never called him by his real name. Her 'sperm bank,' that was what she called him. She showed me these flicks because she liked how respectful most of the good guys were to the women in them. She wanted me to grow up to be like that, I guess.”
As he said this, Carter realized that he couldn't remember ever telling anyone about his childhood before. He usually didn't spend much time thinking about it, and he knew it should probably make him uncomfortable to talk about it, especially with some girl he'd only known for a day. But somehow, he found that he didn't mind.
Besides, he'd already told her his real name, so it wasn't as though disclosing this information would hurt him later on. By the time Billie had a chance to tell any of this to the cops, he figured he'd be over the Mexican border and long gone.
“So what does she think of you riding around with bikers and robbing banks?” Billie asked.
“She, uh, died when I was seventeen,” Carter replied. He kept his eyes on the screen and his voice steady, even though the thought of her death still ached like an old wound. “She worked in a grocery store, and after she closed up one night, some guy jumped her in the parking lot and stabbed her for her purse. The cops never caught him. She only had twelve dollars in that purse, but...” He trailed off, finishing his beer and popping the top off the one he'd been using to cool his skin.
“Jesus, I'm so sorry,” said Billie. He could feel her eyes on him, but he didn't want to turn and look. He didn't want to see the sympathy there—he hadn't had much use for that look in the eyes of adults when he was a kid, and he didn't have any use for it now either.
“Don't worry about it,” Carter said. “I've mostly gotten over it. Those first few years, though, I was really fucking angry. I used to get in a lot of fights, and one time, after I put some kid in the hospital for making fun of me, the judge gave me the choice of going to prison or joining the Army and heading off to Iraq.”
“How did that go?”
“It wasn't so bad over there,” he answered, taking a sip of beer. “I learned a lot about how to fight, how to shoot, and how to keep from dying in the heat. I wasn't too big on taking orders, though, so it was nice to come back when it was over. By then, joining an MC seemed like the only thing that made sense. And it was good, too, for a while. Then the MC I was in got massacred by a bunch of fucking gangster scumbags, and the other guys and I decided to knock over some banks and use the cash to form a new one. Guess that's not going to happen now, though. Mexico's got plenty of its own gangs and bullshit without some gringo trying to set up shop down there.
“Anyway, what's your story?” Carter added, hoping to take the focus off himself. “You've probably got a lot of friends and family back in Cactus Hollow who are worried about you, right?”
“No friends,” Billie said. “Just the guys who come into the bar night after night, hoping I'll throw them a fuck or tell them a good joke. I mean, there's that sheriff, sure, but he's always been kind of a needy dweeb. And no family, either. My parents died in a car crash when I was eight, so I stayed with my aunt and uncle near here until I got old enough to move back and get a place of my own.”
She thought about this for a moment, frowning. “Looking back, I guess that would have been a good time for me to go find someplace else to live instead. But at the time, I couldn't really think of anywhere else I wanted to be. Stupid, right? A whole wide world to explore, and I just ran back to the same old shithole I'd always known.”
Carter didn't respond to this, but he certainly understood what she meant. He'd often had the same thoughts about coming back from Iraq. He could have gone anywhere, done anything, learned and traveled and discovered a million other things to do with his life. But instead, he'd settled right back into what was easy for him.
“I think I'm going to catch some shut-eye,” Carter said. “I'm pretty fucking exhausted. Are you going to stay up and finish the movie?”
“Nah, I know how it ends,” said Billie. She got up and switched the TV off. “You want the cot? It's the least I can do after you saved my ass earlier.”
Carter shook his head, grinning. “You take it. I insist. Otherwise, my mom would never forgive me for my lack of chivalry.”
Billie laughed, flopping onto the cot. The plastic cover squeaked under her body. “Fair enough. Aren't you worried about me trying to run off while you're asleep, though?”
He raised an eyebrow. “Should I be?”
“Nope,” Billie yawned, curling up on her side. “Too tired. Sweet dreams, Carter.”
“Goodnight, Billie,” he said, doing his best to recline in his chair. It was a little uncomfortable, and for a while, he considered joining her in the bed. After all, hadn't she mentioned before that she'd been willing to fuck him the previous night?
And hadn't she hinted that her willingness hadn't exactly waned since then?
Before he could decide, he heard her snoring lightly and figured the choice had been made for him. He grunted once in frustration, then tilted his head back and tried to doze off.
Chapter 20
Carter
The plastic covering the furniture made it difficult for Carter to sleep because every time he or Billie shifted positions, it made creaking and squealing sounds. Billie seemed to be a much heavier sleeper since these noises didn't wake her.
Carter had slept on the ground in countless states, with owls hooting, animals braying in nearby fields, and hard roots digging into his back. Still, he'd generally been able to sleep through all of that without any trouble.
This damn plastic, though. It just didn't feel or sound natural, and it took him a long time to relax enough for sleep to overtake him.
When it finally did, the stresses of the previous twenty-four hours all seemed to catch up to him at once, and his weary body and mind surrendered completely. His sleep was deep and dreamless, and he didn't wake up again until the first ghostly rays of sunlight started to creep in through the broken windows and the hole in the ceiling.
Carter pulled himself out of the chair and stretched. He was still a bit groggy, but overall, he felt like he'd recovered from almost everything he'd gone through yesterday. He touched his face gingerly, feeling the sting of the sunburn. It hurt, and he knew that he probably looked fucking ridiculous with such a red face, but he'd endured much worse before.
On the whole, he felt strangely energized and optimistic. They'd gotten this far, hadn't they? They hadn't seen a single cop on their tails since the robbery, they'd survived the desert, and they'd even found plenty of unexpected provisions in the cabin. Carter wasn't particularly superstitious, but he felt like fortune was smiling on them, and he was confident that he would make it down to Mexico with Hazmat and Oiler after all.
And maybe their plans for founding a new MC weren't completely down the tubes, either. After a couple years of keeping their heads down in Mexico, who knows? Maybe things would blow over enough for them to cross over into the U.S. again and put something together. Hazmat had been angry about the whole Billie situation, but he got angry a lot, and he usually got over it eventually.
He thought about grabbing another bottle of water from the fridge, then realized his bladder was aching. He opened the back door of the shack, then paused briefly to look at Billie while she slept. Even in the dim light, he could see that her sunburn looked pretty harsh, too.
But sunburns fade, he thought. That pretty face of hers will
be back to normal in a few days. And at least she's safe.
He wasn't sure why the fact that she was safe should feel so important to him, but it did. He tried to tell himself that it was because she'd be no good as a hostage if she was dead, or that she’d need to be healthy for when he dropped her off somewhere on his way to the border. But somehow, neither of those explanations seemed to fit.
Carter stepped out, closing the door gently behind him. There were tall weeds with long, serrated leaves growing in thick patches between the cabin and the outhouse. He gave them a cursory glance to make sure they weren't poison ivy, then tromped through them and opened the narrow door to the outhouse, peering in. He couldn't see any snakes or animals inside, but he smacked the side of the doorway a few times to scare them away, just in case. There was no movement, so he stood over the hole, unzipped his jeans, and relieved himself.