Don't Turn Around

by Jessica Barry

  “What if the truck comes back?”

  Cait scooped up a few pebbles and tossed them into the brush. “I told you, that was just teenage stuff.”

  “What if it wasn’t?”

  “What do you want me to say?” Cait snapped. “That we’re fucked? That some ax murderer is going to come down the road any minute and chop us up into little pieces? Is that what you want to hear?” She tossed another pebble, harder this time. “Because I don’t see how that shit is helpful.”

  The two women stared at each other, anger pulsing between them like a heartbeat.

  Cait held up a hand. “Look, I’m sorry, but—”

  Rebecca spun on her heel. “I’m going to see if I can find a signal.” She needed space from the girl, the car, the road. She held the phone up as she walked, waiting for a bar to appear, but it remained stubbornly blank.

  She picked her way across the dusty ground, the headlights dimly illuminating scraps of brittlebush and Apache plumes. The landscape was vast and frozen and cast in shades of black and white, like the surface of the moon. The light from the Jeep receded and soon it was just the slivered moon and the vast carpet of pinprick stars lighting her way. She had a sudden near-violent urge to break into a run and keep running out across the vast stretch of frozen dead land, straight on until she fell off the edge onto the other side.

  One bright summer morning when she was five years old, she’d gone out into her parents’ small backyard with the plastic bucket and spade her mother had bought for the beach, and she’d started digging. By lunchtime, there was a knee-deep hole in the ground. By afternoon snack, it was up to her waist. She went slowly, crouching beside the pile of scooped dirt and sifting through it for treasure.

  Her father had come home from work early that day and found her sitting next to the hole she’d dug. “You dig any farther,” he’d said, ruffling her hair as he headed back into the house, “you’re going to fall out the other side.”

  She dug even harder.

  That night, she dreamed of falling into the hole like Alice in Wonderland, and waking up in an upside-down world filled with Cheshire Cats and Mad Hatters. In the morning, she ran outside to find the hole filled in and the dirt tamped down tightly across it. She burst into tears.

  Her father heard her and came outside to comfort her. “I didn’t want you to hurt yourself,” he’d said, placing an arm around her thin shoulders.

  She’d turned her tear-streaked face to his. “But now I’ll never see what’s on the other side.”

  That’s what she wanted to do now: reach the edge of the world and launch herself off the precipice. She could feel the plummet in her stomach, the giddy flip before impact.

  She hated the fact that she was out here in the middle of nowhere, forced to rely on a stranger’s help. Cait didn’t know what the hell she was doing—that was becoming more obvious by the minute—but the worst thing was that Rebecca had no choice. In that moment, she felt like a star shining down from the night sky: cold and remote and utterly alone.

  “Rebecca?” She could hear the fear in Cait’s voice as it rang out across the desert. She shouldn’t have stormed off like that. Rebecca took one last look at the screen on her phone—still no bars—and headed back.

  The Jeep’s hood was up, Cait buried deep in its guts.

  “What are you doing?”

  Cait straightened up at the sound of her voice. Rebecca could see the relief in the girl’s eyes. “Just seeing if I can figure out what happened with the tank. I’ve had a look underneath and it doesn’t look like we have a leak or anything, at least not that I could see.” She wiped her grease-smeared hands down the front of her jeans. “I’m sorry for not having a spare gas can in the car. I should have been better prepared.”

  Rebecca felt herself soften a little, but not enough to accept the apology. Not yet. “How do you know that stuff?” she asked, gesturing toward the hood.

  Cait shrugged. “My dad taught me. It’s not that hard, really, especially on an old car like this. Now they’re all run by computers, which makes it way harder to diagnose a problem. You need a technician with a scanner and all sorts of stuff.”

  “I don’t even know how to change the oil in a car,” Rebecca admitted. “I guess I’m not very practically minded.”

  “Yeah, well.”

  “So you don’t think it’s a leak? That’s good, right?”

  “Hopefully, though it doesn’t explain why we ran out of gas.” Cait ducked her head back under the hood, and Rebecca could hear the scrape of metal on metal. “Hang on.”

  “Did you find something?”

  Cait emerged holding what looked like a small electrical plug. “This isn’t right.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s the fuel relay. It was loose.”

  “Maybe when we hit the fox . . . ?”

  Cait shook her head. “Stuff like this doesn’t just come loose.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I think somebody’s been messing with it.” Cait kept her eyes on the plug nestled in her palm. “I think somebody might have drained the tank on purpose.”

  She fixed the plug back in place and slammed the hood shut.

  Ken

  Ken parked up outside the Dark Horse and killed the engine. He checked his watch: 5:23. A little early—Nick wouldn’t turn up until six o’clock sharp, with the same clockwork precision that he did everything with—but Ken didn’t mind. It wasn’t like being in Nick’s company was all that different from being alone, anyway.

  Don’t get him wrong, he loved the guy like a brother. Hell, he practically was his brother, he’d known him so long. They’d gone to school together, two little kids with skinned knees trading baseball cards on the playground. Nick had been quiet then, too—had taken some crap from the other kids for it—but Ken hadn’t minded. Things at home were always so loud—his father shouting, his mother screaming and crying—and things in his head weren’t much different. From as far back as Ken could remember, his mind had buzzed with a swarm of thoughts, and he usually couldn’t stop those thoughts from coming straight out of his mouth the second they popped into his head. His mother used to tell him he had verbal diarrhea. Nice thing for a mother to say to her kid, right? She said a lot of things in her time, most of which he tried not to remember. It can get to you, that stuff. Wear you down.

  Anyway, Nick was quiet, and Ken was loud, and they worked well together like that. Their friendship was like one of those yin-yang stickers he’d see on the back of some hippie’s van.

  He walked across the parking lot and pushed open the door. The place was nearly empty, even though it was happy hour. He remembered a time when everybody stopped work at five on the dot, but it seemed like people were working later and later these days, stretching the workday well into the evening, out of pride or necessity, he didn’t know. Ken, he didn’t understand that. Don’t get him wrong, he worked hard, but he didn’t work a minute past what he was getting paid. Why should he? They weren’t running a charity, and he sure as hell wasn’t a volunteer.

  Ten more years. That’s what he told himself every morning when he pulled on his stupid brown shorts and buttoned up the itchy brown shirt and set off in his stupid brown truck. Ten more years and he’d be finished. It wasn’t that he hated his job, though his knees were starting to give him trouble. He liked it for the most part, driving his route, seeing the same faces, making conversation with people, seeing the insides of people’s houses and offices, catching little glimpses of their lives. He could tell a lot about people by what they had delivered. Some people were real addicts, buying stuff off the Internet and letting it pile up in the hallway. Some were just lazy. Ken, he’d rather go to the store to buy something, hold it in his hand and feel the weight of it, than click a button and sit on his ass waiting for someone like him to bring it to his doorstep.

  He slid onto his stool at the bar, signaled the bartender to bring him a drink. It was some guy with bleached-blond hair
, worn too long. His son wore his hair the same way, or at least he did the last time Ken saw him, which was . . . when? Last Christmas? Beth said it was his fault that Brian didn’t come visit more often, but what was he supposed to do? Pretend that the life Brian was leading was just hunky-dory?

  Thank God he had his little daughter. Though she wasn’t so little anymore. Erin would be in college next year, which scared the daylights out of him. All grown up. No more Daddy’s little girl. Just the other day, she came home and he swore he could smell rum on her, not that she’d admit it. Beth told him to leave her alone when he’d asked her about it, but how could he leave the girl alone, knowing how her brother turned out?

  He took a long pull from his draft, made a face. The long-haired guy didn’t pour them as nice as Cait. Didn’t offer him a shooter, either, like she would have. He looked around for her, hoping to see her come out of the stockroom. She usually worked on Thursdays.

  Sweet girl, Cait, or at least he’d thought so until he’d seen her standing in that parking lot. Since then, he’d learned a lot about his favorite bartender. Cast things in a whole new light, as they say.

  He pulled out his phone and started scrolling through his notifications. It was strange to think he’d lived half his life without the Internet, had only owned one of these smartphones for—what? Five, six years? Now it was like another limb or something. He knew it wasn’t good for him to spend so much time on it. Beth told him so all the time, though she didn’t have a right to talk considering how much time she spent on Facebook. That he didn’t get. Didn’t looking at someone else’s vacation photos used to be shorthand for “boring as hell”? He could still remember his parents setting up the projector so they could show off their photos of the Grand Canyon. He was sure nobody had fun looking at those, though maybe that was because his mother once threw the carousel wheel at his father’s head during the middle of a viewing.

  It had its uses, though, Facebook. It was good for organizing and recruitment. And of course he had his Saturday gang.

  But 4chan. Finding that was a revelation. All the thoughts that swelled in his head throughout the day, that he had no one to share with when he was driving the truck: now he could just pull over, put it out there on a forum, and by the time he looked at his phone again, he’d have half a dozen replies. These people—not all of them, but most—were smart, too. They understood his point of view. Some of them had even given him an education, which wasn’t something he’d been expecting.

  All these years of talking, he’d never been sure if anyone was listening. Beth probably heard one out of every ten words that came out of his mouth. His kids sure as hell didn’t listen to him, even his Erin. Most of the time, he wasn’t sure Nick was listening to him, and even if he was, he didn’t have much to contribute. Ken wasn’t raggin’ on the guy, it was the truth. He loved him like a brother, but he wasn’t much of a conversationalist.

  Online, though, people listened to him. Not only that, they wanted to listen to him. Even asked his opinions sometimes. He was respected there, like some kind of tribal elder. Finally, he felt like his words had meaning. They had weight.

  He looked around the room at the young college kids pounding craft ale that tasted like mulch and cost the earth. They probably thought he was just some sad old guy sitting at the bar on his own like a loser. They didn’t have a clue what he was capable of. Not a single goddamn clue.

  Outskirts of Tolar, New Mexico—180 Miles to Albuquerque

  It was a low growl, faint at first, echoing through the desert.

  The two women froze and turned their faces toward the sound.

  A pair of headlights swept into view.

  “Do you think it’s—”

  Cait shook her head. “I don’t know.” The headlights were coming up fast, but she couldn’t see yet what was behind them. Whatever it was, it was big.

  “It’s a truck.” Rebecca’s voice was tight. “I think—it must be—”

  The headlights grew brighter. The engine was a roar. Cait shook her head. “It’s bigger than a pickup.” She caught a glint of chrome coming off a pair of exhaust stacks. Her heart leaped. Cait scrambled back inside the Jeep and emerged clutching something lit up in her hand. An emergency flare.

  Rebecca reached out to stop her. “No! Cait, don’t!”

  “It’s an eighteen-wheeler. He’s bound to stop.”

  “But we don’t know who’s driving it!”

  Cait stared her down. “We don’t have a choice.” She arced the flare above her head and paced out into the road.

  “You just said someone might have tampered with the gas tank! How do you know it’s not whoever’s driving that truck?”

  Cait shook her head. “If somebody did drain the tank—and I’m not sure they did—it would have happened back at the IHOP. You’re hearing that engine for yourself now. There’s no way whoever was driving that thing could have sneaked into the parking lot, tampered with the gas tank, and gotten away without us hearing it.”

  “Maybe he switched vehicles.”

  Cait twisted her mouth. “Maybe. But I don’t think so. It’s hard to stash an eighteen-wheeler.” She clocked the look of doubt on Rebecca’s face. “It’s fine, I promise.” It wasn’t, not really, but it was the closest to fine they were going to get. The truck was close now, only a couple hundred feet away. She could feel the vibrations underfoot. She waved the flare higher in the air.

  The truck hissed to a stop. The door swung open and they watched a man step down from the cab.

  Cait felt a twist of fear when his boots hit the ground. What if Rebecca was right and the guy was a total lunatic? She shook the thought from her head. Lunatic or not, he was the best shot they had. Besides, there were two of them and one of him. They’d be fine.

  It was hard to tell his age from where she was—he could have been anywhere from a bad thirty to a good fifty. He was wearing a checked shirt and jeans and a Rangers cap with the brim peaked and pulled down low over a pair of light brown eyes. His skin bore the pockmarks of teenage acne, but she could see now that he was handsome in spite of it.

  His eyes swept past her and landed on Rebecca. Something pinched at the base of Cait’s spine. She knew that look, and she took it as a warning. The smell of his cologne invaded the air around her, something musky and synthetic that reminded her of junior high dances.

  Cait pushed herself toward him. “Thanks for stopping. We’re in kind of a jam.”

  His eyes were slow to find hers. “I guess that’s right. What’s happened—it break down?”

  “We ran out of gas.”

  “Out here, at this time of night?” He let out a low whistle. “That’s some poor planning, that is.”

  “Yeah, well. I don’t suppose you have a spare gas can in your truck?”

  “She runs on diesel,” he said, nodding toward the truck. His eyes trailed across Cait back to Rebecca. “There’s a gas station about fifteen miles up the road in Fort Sumner. I could give you ladies a ride.”

  Rebecca stepped forward. “We don’t want to impose.” There was a smile Cait hadn’t seen on her face before, sugar-sweet and dimpled. “I’m sure you must be on a tight schedule. Maybe you have a cell phone we could use to call a tow truck?”

  He shook his head. “No reception out here, and even if you could get it to call one, a tow truck likely wouldn’t make it out here for a good few hours. I run this route pretty frequent. It’s all just mom-and-pop mechanic shops, and they’re all tucked up in bed like good little boys and girls.” He shot her a wolfish smile. “Not like us night owls. I’m Scott, by the way.”

  The two women looked at each other, questioning. The truck driver saw their hesitation and laughed. “I don’t bite, I promise. I’ll get you back here safe and sound, scout’s honor.” He lifted two fingers to his forehead. “Anyway, don’t expect you’ll get many more opportunities for rescue tonight. Yours is the first car I’ve seen in fifty miles.”

  Cait glanced at Rebecca. “What d
o you think?” she whispered.

  Rebecca shook her head. “I don’t think we have a choice.”

  “You could stay here if you wanted. Lock the doors and wait for us to get back.”

  “If we’re going, we’re going together.”

  Cait slipped her hand in Rebecca’s. Her palm was clammy, but her grip was strong. “Let’s go.”

  The eighteen-wheeler was throwing off steam like a thoroughbred. Scott opened the passenger door of the cab and helped them up. Rebecca went in first, smiling that same sweet smile at him when she took his hand, and Cait slid in next to her.

  “Everybody comfortable?” he said, sparking up the engine. He threw the gearshift back and pressed down on the gas without waiting for an answer, and the truck lurched forward on the long, dark road.

  Six Months Earlier

  Cait stood awkwardly in front of the reception desk, ignoring the urge to pluck at the waistband of her tights. What had she been thinking when she pulled them on that morning? Temperatures were already in the eighties before the sun had risen in the sky, and yet she had chosen to wear the itchy shift dress her mother had bought for her when she graduated from college. “For job interviews,” she’d told her, pushing the plastic Family Dollar bag into her arms. “There’s a pair of hose in there, too.” Cait hadn’t had the heart to tell her that she didn’t have a single interview lined up, and the Dark Horse didn’t require nylons underneath the regulation Daisy Dukes.

  It had seemed right, though, to put on the outfit that morning. She wanted to look professional. Competent. Trustworthy. Anyway, preparing for this appointment had done something strange to her, made her feel like she was Dolly Parton in 9 to 5 as she brewed her coffee bleary-eyed in the bright morning sunlight. She watched people file out of their front doors clutching laptop bags and bagged lunches and thermoses filled with coffee. So this is what it’s like to be a real person, she marveled. No, thank you. Adam, her next-door neighbor who sometimes watered her neglected lemon tree, spotted her in the window and raised a hand, whether in greeting or surprise she wasn’t sure. She’d never been seen at seven-thirty a.m. on a Monday before.