Don't Turn Around

by Jessica Barry

  Ken didn’t wait for the waitress to come back from her smoke break. He brought the bill up to the bar, handed it to Cait with a twenty, and told her to keep the change, which came to a princely sum of four dollars. A generous tip, but not enough to make a difference in the waitress’s night.

  “No Nick tonight?” Cait asked as she tucked his change back into the billfold for the waitress.

  Ken shook his head. “Not tonight. Hey, Mike.” He waved to his friend, still sitting in the booth. “I want you to meet a friend of mine.”

  The man got up from the booth and came toward the bar. He wasn’t a big man, but he moved slowly and deliberately, like his clothes were sopping wet and too heavy. He had removed his sunglasses, and she saw that he had eyes the color of the bluebonnets that grew outside her parents’ house in Waco, and that they were filled with sadness.

  “Nice to meet you,” he said, but he didn’t put out his hand to shake hers, and she didn’t offer. She had the feeling that she already knew him.

  “You’re from Austin?” she asked, already knowing he wasn’t.

  “Mike here’s from Columbus,” Ken said, as if that were some particular achievement.

  “I know Columbus,” she said. “My family is from Waco, so I drive through it whenever I go to visit them.”

  Mike nodded once but didn’t offer anything more. They stared at each other for a few silent seconds, and then Ken slapped the counter so hard it made all three of them jump. “Well, Caity, I know you’ll be anxious to close up, so we’ll get out of your hair.”

  “See you soon, Ken.”

  “I’m sure you will. Keep my seat warm and the beer cold while I’m gone.”

  “Will do. Nice to meet you, Mike.” She walked them to the door so she could lock it behind them. “Have a good night,” she said, holding the door open for them.

  “You, too. And be careful getting home,” Ken added, a funny little smile playing on his lips. “It’s a wild world out there.”

  The two men exchanged a look and laughed. She watched them cross the parking lot before closing the door behind them and sliding the dead bolt into the lock.

  She didn’t sleep that night, either.

  Four Days Earlier

  4chan/Caitlyn_Monaghan

  TruePatriot368: why hasn’t someone snuffed that bitch out??? I thought we were soldiers here

  Cucks_Suck: Big talk no action,.

  Cucks_Suck: if you want it done so bad why don’t you do it yourself. instead of whining here like a little bitch.

  TruePatriot368: If someone wants to spot me a plane ticket to TX i’m there.

  TruePatriot368: this is straight up bullshit that she’s still breathing after all she did. Chicks like her should be pinushed so the rest of them know what happens when they step out of the kichenn.

  Anonymous: Mission accepted, brothers. Keep your eye on the weather. A storm’s coming straight toward her.

  Outskirts of Clines Corners, New Mexico—70 Miles to Albuquerque

  When the headlights appeared again, Rebecca couldn’t say she was surprised. She’d known something was coming for a long time, long before the pickup truck rammed them a hundred miles back, long before she set foot in the Jeep and breathed its musty, stale air. She’d known it ever since she’d stared at the scan of her baby and made the decision not to bring it into this world. A part of her had known then that it would be the end of her, in one way or another.

  The pickup was coming up fast now, two spotlights hurtling toward them in the dark, blinding and inescapable.

  “Do you think it’s the same truck?” Cait asked, eyes trained on the mirror.

  “Of course it is,” Rebecca said, and closed her eyes.

  The scream of metal on metal was louder than she’d thought possible. It seemed to emanate from the inside of her skull. They’d been sideswiped. The Jeep jerked onto the shoulder, gravel spitting at the windshield, before Cait wrenched the wheel and corrected. Her face was ghost-white in the glare of the headlights, a pale sheen of sweat clinging to her forehead and the fine hairs on her upper lip, her jaw locked tight.

  They shuddered back onto the tarmac. Rebecca scanned the horizon. There was no one else on the road with them. The early-morning traffic had melted away.

  Cait gripped her arm with one hand, keeping the other on the wheel. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m okay,” Rebecca said. “Are you?”

  Cait touched the side of her head and nodded. “I think so.”

  The truck dropped back a few lengths. They both felt it behind them, waiting. Cait punched the gas and the engine whined.

  “What about the Jeep? Do you think it’ll make it?” Rebecca was watching her face, looking for clues.

  Cait frowned. “She’s okay, too, I think.” But her voice lacked conviction. They dropped in speed a little, and she could feel the Jeep’s power slackening.

  “What are we going to do?” Rebecca heard the tremble in her own voice and worked to steady it. Think. Her hands fumbled for her phone. No signal.

  Cait was watching her. “Any luck?”

  She shook her head.

  “Doesn’t matter anyway,” Cait said. “By the time anyone got to us . . .”

  She didn’t need to finish the sentence. They both knew how it ended. In a slick of blood and glass and twisted metal scraped against the tarmac as the desert looked on, cold and impassive.

  “It’s nearly six o’clock in the morning. The sun will be up soon. He can’t just run us off the road in broad daylight.”

  Cait shook her head. “It won’t be light for at least another hour.”

  “There’ll be more cars on the road. There already were, a few minutes ago. We’ll have witnesses. He can’t—” But even as she said it, Rebecca knew that he could. He had tracked them all the way across this ravaged place. He could do anything.

  “He’s coming again,” Cait said, eyes tight on the rearview. “Get ready.”

  Rebecca placed her hands across her stomach and squeezed her eyes shut. This wasn’t supposed to be how it ended, baby girl. Rebecca was going to die, and so was Cait, and so was her baby, but not in the way she’d wanted. It would be brutal and painful. Rebecca imagined her head colliding with the dashboard, her body sailing through the windshield, the flinch of glass as it made a thousand pinprick cuts, the scrape of her skin across the tarmac, bone and blood and metal mixing. There would be fire, too—the sharp smell of gasoline followed by a plume of smoke rising blindly into the dark sky.

  The man would get out of his pickup truck and stand over her while she died and his eyes—his dead black eyes—would be the last thing she saw in this world before the lights went out and she stopped existing, just like that rabbit she’d held in her hands as a child and her mother taking her last breath. She would become nothing. And deep inside of her, for a few seconds or maybe whole endless minutes, she didn’t know, her baby would keep on living, and the baby would know—even with her condition—she would know that her mother was gone. She would be all alone and scared and floating untethered in her mother’s body and then she would die, too, starved of all the things her mother’s body gave her to survive.

  Or worse: Rebecca wouldn’t die, at least not right away. Her spinal cord would be severed and her brain starved of oxygen, but they would be able to save her body (not her mind, but her mind wouldn’t matter, not here) and they would hook her up to machines that would breathe for her and feed her and pump her heart for her and they would wait until the baby had grown inside her belly and then they would cut her open and bring that baby into this cruel world, and the cold would shock her thin skin and she would die, shivering and alone, surrounded by masked strangers and beeping machines and cold metal.

  Rebecca braced for impact and waited, but the pickup truck just kept revving its engine and dropping back.

  “What is he doing?” she gasped. The terror was making it hard to breathe. “Why is he doing this to us?”

  Rebecca felt Cait’s hand
in hers. “It’s going to be okay,” Cait said. Her voice was strangely calm. “We’re going to get through this.” She twined her fingers through Rebecca’s and squeezed, and something in Rebecca’s chest loosened, just a little, just for a moment.

  The Jeep was solid. Rebecca touched the door with her free hand and felt its cold strength. She pictured herself inside it, a seed within its protective shell.

  She closed her eyes and waited.

  Cait’s training had not prepared her for this.

  It had prepared her for some things, sure: extracting the women from the house if an abusive partner was there, guiding the women through the chanting crowds when they arrived at the clinic, knowing the post-op signs that a woman needed further medical treatment.

  They hadn’t discussed this particular scenario over grayish cups of coffee and stale Pepperidge Farm cookies: that she might end up in the middle of goddamn nowhere with a terrified woman in her car and a lunatic trying to run them off the road.

  The truck was idling behind them. She could see only the outline of the driver, but she could picture the smile on his face. He liked keeping them waiting.

  She looked over at Rebecca, whose face was tilted away, toward the window, and all she could see were the tips of her mascaraed eyelashes and the soft curve of her cheek. Her hand was still resting on her stomach, cradling it. Cait wanted to reach out and place her hand on top of hers, tell her it would be okay, that they would make it to Albuquerque in time and that everything would go smoothly and that she would be back home in Lubbock before she knew it. The words were like sawdust in her mouth. She couldn’t promise anything. She had no idea what was waiting for them up ahead.

  She took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “I’m sorry if this is my fault,” she said quietly.

  Rebecca nodded. “I’m sorry if it’s mine.”

  They watched the headlights coming toward them again.

  Cait fixed her eyes on the road and gripped the wheel tight. She heard the trainer’s voice in her head, clear as the night sky: “The patient’s safety is our first priority.” “I’m going to do my best to get us through this alive,” she said. “Now hold on tight.”

  The pickup surged again, the headlights bright in the mirror, lighting up the inside of the Jeep a brilliant, blinding white.

  “I can’t see him,” Cait said, squinting into the mirror. “Can you?”

  Rebecca looked back. All she could see was the chrome grille of the truck and the darkened windshield. Nothing inside. “No, nothing.”

  Cait pressed down farther on the gas and the Jeep lurched forward. Rebecca could hear the engine struggling, feel the hesitation in the acceleration. There was no way they could outrun him, not in this condition.

  “What are we going to do?”

  Cait shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  Rebecca scanned the road. There was a pair of headlights coming toward them across the divide. She pointed. “Can you signal him somehow? Flash your lights, maybe?”

  “They’ll just think we’re warning them about a cop up ahead.”

  “The horn, then. If you honk, maybe the driver will look over and see what’s going on.”

  Cait nodded, but she didn’t look convinced. “It’s worth a shot.”

  The sound of the horn shattered the night’s silence. The truck dropped back a length and they watched as the window of the oncoming truck—an eighteen-wheeler carrying farm equipment—rolled down and a man’s face appeared, ghostly white. Cait kept leaning on the horn and they both started pounding at the windows, but the man shook his head and retreated back into the cab. He must have thought they were drunk, Rebecca realized, or crazy.

  The taillights of the eighteen-wheeler disappeared in the rearview mirror just as the pickup’s headlights advanced. Soon he was close enough to nudge their bumper. Once. Twice. A third time, harder.

  Cait gripped the steering wheel and cursed. “There’s no way out,” she muttered.

  Rebecca’s eyes followed hers. There was nothing in front of them but flat road and desert. Nowhere to hide.

  The pickup pressed forward again, edging into the left lane and nestling itself close to their side.

  “What is he doing?” Rebecca asked.

  Cait looked to her left. The passenger window of the pickup was nearly parallel with her window. She pressed closer to the glass, hoping to get a glimpse of the driver. The windows were tinted, though, and all she saw was her own reflection staring back, white-faced and terrified.

  Think. Think. You need a plan.

  She had the pedal pushed all the way to the floor, and the Jeep was still struggling to hit eighty. It was sick. She could hear it in the grinding of the gears, feel it in the engine’s vibrations. The transmission was slipping. It must have been damaged when he rear-ended them.

  C’mon, girl, she coaxed. Don’t give up on me now.

  The truck stayed tucked against the Jeep’s side. It was a newer-model Chevy four-by-four, with a double-wide cab and a growling, powerful engine. There was no way she could outrun him.

  She’d have to outsmart him.

  “Hold on.”

  She slammed on the brakes, hard. The rear end fishtailed and Cait struggled to keep the wheels straight. The tires screeched as they gripped the pavement, and the air filled with the sulfuric tang of burnt rubber. The pickup was ten yards in front of them, twenty, fifty. The seat belt bit into the flesh around Cait’s collarbone.

  They came to a juddering halt in the middle of the highway, the only sound their breath as it rattled through their throats.

  “What the hell?” Rebecca looked at Cait, wild-eyed. “What are you doing?”

  Cait didn’t take the time to explain. She flicked off the headlights and the road went black. If it worked once, she figured, it might work again. She threw the car into reverse, backed onto the shoulder, accelerated into a U-turn, and floored it.

  “We’re going the wrong way.”

  Cait’s eyes didn’t waver. “I know.”

  Cait’s heart was pounding so fast, she could feel it pulsing in her skull. She was driving seventy miles an hour, with no headlights, the wrong way down the highway. It would have seemed like she had a death wish if she hadn’t been trying so hard to save their lives.

  So far, nothing was coming in either direction. At least out here, she’d have a fair amount of warning, though she knew they would scare the ever-loving shit out of another driver once she flicked on the headlights. All they needed was a little time. If they could make it back to that travel center back in Clines Corners, maybe she could flag down help. She couldn’t worry about Rebecca and the police anymore. They needed help, whatever it took, whatever the sacrifice. Better than ending up dead.

  She checked the rearview. Still clear. She didn’t think he’d let her get away that easily. He would have seen her turn around, would have watched her taillights extinguished in the dark. Why hadn’t he followed?

  They were heading east now, and for the first time she saw that the edge of the horizon had turned a burnished gold. She glanced at the clock: 6:34 a.m. The sun would be up in another half hour. She no longer knew if that was a blessing or a curse.

  “I see something.”

  Cait looked over to see Rebecca hunched over in her seat, peering at the side mirror. “What is it?”

  “Someone’s coming in the other lane.”

  Cait’s eyes went to the mirror. She caught a glimpse of the headlights at the edge. “Is it him?” In the gloaming, the light bounced off the chrome grille of a pickup truck.

  She knew the answer before Rebecca nodded and began to cry.

  The pickup cut across the divide and landed behind them with a bounce. The growl of the engine filled the air, and Rebecca could hear the urgency in it, and the anger. Whoever was driving that truck was going to get them, no matter what.

  She let her eyes close. Fine. Let them come.

  The pickup pulled alongside them again, but this time it hugged the r
ear wheel. Cait squinted into the wing mirror. “I can’t see what he’s doing back there.”

  The answer came quickly. The truck punched into the side of the Jeep, its front end biting and sending them spinning off the road. The wheels hit the edge of the curb and suddenly the Jeep was airborne. It flipped, the windshield suddenly a funhouse mirror reflecting an upside-down world. It bounced hard on the driver’s side, shattering the windows and caving in the roof, before hurtling through the air again and tilting back onto its wheels.

  The engine let out a long, painful hiss before falling silent.

  There were no airbags to deploy, and Rebecca’s seat belt had slackened at some point during the crash. Her face had smashed against the dashboard, and her neck had snapped back against the seat when the Jeep landed. She reached her hand to her mouth. Her fingers came back bloodied.

  The world tilted again. She’d never been good with blood.

  She pawed at her own body, searching for injuries. Her neck sang with pain every time she moved it, and her right shoulder was bruised and tender to the touch. She moved her legs gingerly; her ankle screamed. She must have twisted it in the footwell. She touched the soft swell of her stomach last. It was still for a few heartbeats, and then she felt it: the slightest movement, butterfly wings brushing inside her. She sagged back in her seat.

  Maybe it would have been a blessing if she’d miscarried during the crash. But she didn’t want to give whatever monster was driving that truck the satisfaction of knowing he’d won. It would be on her own terms. No one else’s.

  She turned her attention toward Cait. She was slumped over in the driver’s seat, limp as a rag doll, her dark hair matted, her face streaked with blood. Shards of glass glittered across her skin like diamonds.

  Rebecca reached out and shook her. “Cait, can you hear me? Cait?” Nothing. A bubble of pink spit rose from the woman’s mouth and burst. Rebecca shook her harder. “Cait, if you can hear me, you have to wake up.” She peered out of the shattered window into the gloaming. No sign of the truck, but she knew that he was out there.