Victim's, Inc.

by A. R. Licht

  Phil turns right again onto a side road that after a few feet, turns to dirt. “I hope this isn’t a dead end,” he said, his gaze shifting to the rearview mirror.

  The road is rough, with the wind and the rain it is next to impossible to navigate without nearly spinning around in a ninety-degree angle. Down a long hill, and up the other side, Phil tries to out pace the car.

  There is a loud CRACK! like thunder, but lightening never follows. Or maybe lightening comes first, Kate thinks in a detached sort of way. She tastes salt water on her lips, the spray of the sea from miles away. A rush of air violating their space, her hair flipped into her face.

  “They shot out the back window!” Phil yelled.

  Kate watches in horror as the car behind them moves to the right of them, riding the shoulder. It gives them a light tap on the side of the bumper and Phil shouts out an expletive as the truck spins out of control.

  Kate is pushed by the momentum against the passenger door, she is too weak to right herself. The truck pitches, coming to a stop at a dangerous angle on the opposite side of the dirt road.

  There is a deep void beyond the guard rail that stopped their spin, the emptiness of the space a suggestion of a long drop. Kate is focused on this when the car that had followed them this far springs forward to finish off the job. It slams with incredible force into the front passenger side of the truck, Phil yelling for it to stop. He blasts the horn, spins the tires to try to get them out of there but they are stuck in the mud. The car reverses, pauses, shudders as it is placed into gear, shoots forward.

  The truck slides another five feet, but it is enough. The guard rail rends apart in a loud screech as it scrapes down the side of the truck, turning them so that the front end of the truck is facing that black hell.

  Kate no longer feels pain, no longer hears the howl of the wind or feels the bullet driven rain on the back of her neck. She is staring into the blue dark, weightless, shards of glass and items in the truck levitating with them, her hand in Phil’s. If this is how she goes, at least she is with him. At least she did it while trying to get the truth out to the world, because they need to know. They should know what they are sending their money to, how they have been scammed on a grand scale. It couldn’t be the first time either, and probably not the last. How many of the shootings and mass killings across the globe were real?

  The worst part of the scam is that no one knows who is behind it and what their true agenda is. But she was going to expose it, lay it bare for all to see.

  Then the truck strikes earth, begins rolling down the dirt embankment at a steep incline, finger-sized torrents streaming down the hillside with them. A boulder is illuminated in the headlights, but there is nothing Phil can do to avoid it. Metal screams louder than the storm as the impact jars them, spins them.

  Glass breaks with the first roll, the truck pitching and yawing like a sailboat on a fantastic sea, the tempered glass cutting at her face, and exposed skin. Air bags deploy in a puff, saving them both from smashing into the dash board. The roof creaks as the world tilts yet again, rolling over rocks and brush, a newly growing tree that breaks under their weight, before the world finally stops spinning.

  Upside down, they slide another fifty feet, tar black beyond. The rain is sideways in the only headlight that survived, the wind pushing at the truck, teeter-tottering them at the edge of a ravine.

  Kate can hear the rush of the storm deluged river below, the sound of it immense. She blinks, taking stock of her body. Her leg is no worse than it was before the crash but her head is spinning, and her right side feels bruised.

  Her hair hanging below her, she turns and looks at Phil who is cradling his arm.

  “Are you okay?” Phil said for the second time.

  “I think so.”

  “We need to get out of the truck, Kate. I don’t want to scare you but if a strong wind comes, we’re goners. Do you think you can unbuckle yourself?”

  “Yeah,” Kate said, sounding child-like.

  It took a couple of tries before the belt released, she fell in an awkward position on her neck. Her leg was filled with icepicks and daggers, but she managed to get herself right-side-up again.

  “Can you help me with my belt?” Phil said through gritted teeth.

  She reaches up and unbuckles his seat belt, helping him to stay off his hurt arm.

  “Is it broken?” She asked.

  “I don’t know but it hurts like hell.”

  He struggled into a sitting position, and then leaned forward in a crawl toward the busted out back window.

  “Kate, we have to do this at the same time. I think our weight is the only thing keep the truck in place. Are you ready?”

  She clenched her jaw through the pain, nodded.

  “On three. One! Two! Three!”

  There it was, that count down again, or rather the reverse, a count-up. She thought of Waylon holding the camera as she stood in front of the hospital for the first time, about to give her first national broadcast. It seemed a lifetime ago.

  But now, she was following Phil’s lead and her entire life depended upon it. That one single moment. But she was too slow. Phil made it out and the truck screeched in protest as it slide toward the ravine.

  His hand shot out in the dark, grabbing her by the back of her shirt. He cried out in pain but did not let go, the momentum of the truck dragging him with it.

  She struggled, kicking off the roof of the truck, then she was on dirt. Free as the truck tipped and fell on a gust of wind, flying for a moment before impact.

  Kate was crying, grabbing at the small vegetation in the dirt to keep them from sliding after the truck. Then her arms were around him, her face in his neck.

  “We could have died!” She sobbed.

  Phil grunted, adjusted his hurt arm so that she wasn’t putting her weight against it, put his good arm around her. “We did die,” he whispered.

  “What?”

  “We went over the edge and into the ravine below. We died Kate. It is the only way.”

  She sniffled, laughed through the tears, “But you’ll be stuck with me! We’ll have to be dead together.”

  Phil hugged her tighter, kissed the nape of her neck, “Is that so bad? To be dead with the person you love?”

  “You love me?”

  “I’ve loved you since the day we met at your sister’s wedding, Kate. I was best man, you were the maid of honor, I fell in love with you then.”

  Kate cried harder as a gust of wind howled in the hills around them.

  After a time, Phil was saying her name in a low urgent tone, “Kate. They’re coming. We have to move. Come on, Kate. We need to hide.”

  She opened her eyes, exhaustion making her weary. She just wanted to lay right here with him. Let the damned crisis people finish them off.

  “Kate,” he whispered now.

  She sat up, and together they scrambled away from the edge, Phil still shirtless from when he'd fashioned the tourniquet for her from the shirt on his back. Lights above revealing the warped and ruined guardrail.

  Breathing hard, they fought against the wind to get to cover before they saw them. Then they were in the scratchy underbrush, stickers clawing at her skin, ripping out her hair. They lay still as a spotlight shone down at the place they just vacated.

  The light stayed focused on that spot for a long time.

  Chapter 30

  Dirt Road in North Carolina - April 22nd

  The gale-force winds have lessened as they lie concealed in the vegetation. Kate is in and out of consciousness for some time, transported between dream and reality.

  She is fourteen again, with her best friend Tamara, and they are exploring the different rides at Disney World. Tamara points to a guy and they giggle, isn’t he hot? Then Tamara is berating her in college, telling her to find new friends. Kate is too good for her, she thinks she’s better than everyone else. Kate is crying, telling her she never meant it to be like that, that’s not who she is. Please, give
her another chance.

  She is on a mountainside with grass and thorns staring up at a sky the color of the ocean at night. The white caps and black rocks, the blue grey illuminated by the moon. The clouds are backlit and fast moving, like the waves.

  She is in her old house. Mom, dad, and Abby are arguing about a class trip, Kate is trying to watch something funny on YouTube. Abby storms to her bedroom, slamming the door so hard that her mom’s favorite photo of them at the Empire State Building falls off the wall and breaks. She gets up to help her dad pick up the pieces after her mom quietly goes to her bedroom too.

  The searchlight went out but she doesn’t know when. She finds herself humming a song she’d loved in high school. The melody strong in her head, the lyrics fading.

  Somehow the wind is soft, gentle, almost loving. When she moves, it is with a pain like that of a high frequency hum that buzzes in her ears and prickles in her eyes. Her head aches with the thrum of a thousand bird wings, the dull throb in her thigh like the sound of metal on the rocks.

  She moans as she rolls on her side, facing Phil. He doesn’t look so good, his skin a white sheen.

  “Phil?”

  “Hmmm?” he said with his eyes closed.

  “We need to get up to the road, I think they are gone now.”

  Phil frowned, “Do you see how high up the road is? Its going to take the two of us senior citizens hours to reach the top.”

  His voice is weak, she knows he needs medical attention. “How is your arm?”

  “It’s...”

  He didn’t finish the sentence, it's that bad.

  She stands, a streamer of blood rolls down her leg blending with the other stains there. The brambles and thorns tug at her painfully but she untangles herself. “Come on,” she said softly, “let me help you get your feet under you.”

  “Just let me lay here a while, please.”

  “I’ll give you five minutes.”

  His eyes closed again, she wondered if he was hurt worse than she’d realized. She couldn’t see him very well in the dark, not well enough to examine his injuries.

  She stood, swaying a little in the cool breeze, her clothes still clinging to her from the rain. She shivered, her coat missing in the chase.

  A loud scraping sound below caught her attention, a single light bobbing in the water. The truck was pushed free of something by the current, metal against rock in a piercing rend. Then it was free, the head light still sending a beam up to the sky as it went over the edge of the water fall.

  She didn’t know how much time had passed, but she decided it was long enough. She bugged him until he woke again, then kept at him until he finally gave into her demands. She got him onto his stomach, then on his hands and knees. Standing came easier this way, but he wobbled, nearly losing his footing.

  “We can do this. One step at a time.”

  “I’m so tired.”

  “Nope, old man, you can’t go back to sleep on me. I have a feeling you hit your head, so sleep is a bad idea.”

  “I’m not old yet.”

  “Well, quit acting like a ninety-year old and I’ll stop calling you that.”

  She encouraged him a few more steps, the burning in her leg getting worse. She longed to get the stick that had impaled her out, just yank it free, but she knew from a first aid class that this would cause her to bleed out much quicker. Right now, the stick the width of her pinky, was keeping the wound packed.

  So much for perfect legs, no more bikini. She wasn’t happy with that thought, and she used the anger to push herself harder.

  The buzz in her head was overwhelming, it took everything she had not to sit down and rest.

  “That’s it,” she said, “You’re doing great. One more step.”

  Phil is barely conscious, she has to raise her voice now and then to keep his attention. He keeps trying to crumple, but she can’t let him.

  They are half-way now, a three-legged man-woman thing hobbling up the mountain slope at glacier speed. The rains come in great torrents, windless, thunder-less. Sheets of rain falling so hard and fast that it becomes a struggle to stay upright.

  Finally, she gives up and they lay down on their stomachs, to keep from suffocating from the downpour. She had to hold her leg at an odd angle so that she wouldn’t cause more damage to it by tearing muscles further, or shoving the stick deeper. Then she folded Phil’s arms under his head to make a space for the water and soil to gush down the hill without going up his nose or in his mouth.

  She waited it out, resting, telling herself that she is strong, she can get them to the top. If she can land a national correspondent job, she can push through the pain. Phil had been there to protect her, she can do this for him.

  The rain let up some, their beaten bodies sensing the lessening gradually. Up again, she worked Phil into a stand and labored onward. Thousands of tentacles of water racing back the way they’d come, making their way to the roar at the bottom.

  “Almost there, Phil. We’re nearly there. I can see the guardrail.”

  His slumped head raised, he focused on the dark object not twenty feet above them. He gave a slight smile, “See? I’m not old.”

  “Yes you are, slow poke. I can move faster than you.”

  Then they were eye level with the dirt road with all of its ripples and pot holes in view. Kate nearly sang with happiness. She dared not look back for the crippling fear that they would cartwheel back down to the edge and not stop.

  She brought him to the broken section of the guard rail, he held onto it as they passed through.

  “I beat you to the top,” he said.

  She let him have that one.

  They rested a while in the rain, listening to the river below and the wind rustle the few trees she could make out in the faint light of the moon through the clouds.

  Now that they had made it to the top, she had expected help in the form of a passing vehicle. But she had forgotten that Phil took them down a dirt road far from the main road. He had made the choice on a whim, hoping that he wasn’t leading them to a dead end.

  They would have to begin the long trek back to the main road, most of it level, but not all. She remembered the hills he had spun out on.

  Even now she could make out the tire tracks where he’d lost it after the car tapped them from the side.

  The sky lightened as they walked on, hunched over, zombie-like.

  “I need to rest,” he said.

  “Wimp,” she shot back, but she needed to rest too.

  They sat on the side of the road where a slight incline made for a nice chair. She leaned against him, humming the song again.

  “Is that the song we danced to at Abby and Brian’s wedding?”

  Kate had to think, was it? “Yeah, I guess it is.”

  “Such a romantic,” Phil said, his voice becoming quieter, “You can’t even remember our song.”

  Headlights in the distance. Kate raised her head to watch their approach. It is a miracle. Someone actually uses this road! There is someone out there, driving around after the hurricane.

  “Phil, someone’s coming.”

  His voice, barely above a whisper, “Flag ‘em down. Make sure you flash a little leg.”

  The car grew near, going at a fast clip. She risked getting hit to be seen, standing in the middle of the mud, waving her arms.

  The headlights blind her as the car slows, comes to a stop. She hobbles to the driver side window, noticing that its only down six inches.

  “We need a ride back to town, can you help us?”

  The driver nodded, hitting the door locks.

  “Thank you,” she said, hurrying back to Phil.

  The driver made no move to help her get Phil into the car, but she managed. She almost didn’t care, so grateful to finally see someone.

  She sat in the back seat with Phil, closed the door, and the car moved on, tires crunching on the gravel.

  Chapter 31

  Back Roads of North Carolina - April 22ndr />
  “You have no idea how happy we are to see you,” Kate said, in an attempt to get the man talking. His eyes stayed on the road, and he made no move to respond.

  “We were in a car accident,” she continued, “We really need to get to a hospital. My friend here needs attention.”

  “Friend?” Phil said.

  Kate cringed, “Well, what do I call you?”

  “How about boyfriend? Fiancé? Wait, no scratch that, I want to propose properly. I’m your boyfriend,” Phil mumbled, sounding drugged.