Don't Turn Around

by Jessica Barry

  A gentle breeze carried through the desert, ruffling the soft hairs on the back of her neck. She shivered. She was cold, she realized. Freezing. She needed to get somewhere warm, fast. She needed water and bandages and medicine.

  She needed to know what had happened.

  “Cait?” Her voice came out as a hoarse whisper. Her throat was raw from the man choking her. When she tried to swallow, it felt like a knife cutting straight through. “Cait?” Louder this time, but still nothing.

  She took a few deep breaths, engine oil and Cait’s shampoo and the strange sweet smell the man had left behind. She listened hard, ears straining, waiting for the sound of the engine to reappear, but the silence had settled like a fresh blanket of snow.

  She couldn’t say how long she stayed like that, her senses heightened and alert, breath caught tight in her throat like a small, trapped bird, waiting for something to break.

  A whiptail scurried across the dirt. It saw her and froze, eye trained on hers, black and unblinking. She could sense the workings of its mind, feel the febrile patter of its heart beneath its skin, before she blinked and the spell was broken. The lizard skittered into the brush.

  She struggled to her feet and limped over to the Jeep. She moved slowly. She knew what she would find, and she knew she didn’t want to see it: Cait’s body bloodied and mangled, her dark hair thick with blood, her eyes the dull flat black of the dead.

  She bent double, retched onto the sand.

  “Please no, please no.”

  Dread built in her like a wall, each step another brick. She reached the driver’s side, placed a careful hand on the jagged edge of the window, leaned forward.

  The Jeep was empty.

  Rebecca scanned the horizon, looking for any trace of her. The road stared back, blank and empty. She moved over to the passenger side—Cait’s side. The door was hanging open, and there were drag marks in the dirt leading to the truck’s tire marks. She followed the tracks out onto the road, saw where they crossed back over the median and headed east.

  He had taken Cait.

  Was she still alive?

  Why had he left Rebecca?

  She was a witness. She had seen his face.

  Maybe he’d thought she was dead.

  She remembered the look on his face when he’d opened the door and seen her in the driver’s seat. Pure, undiluted rage.

  She wished she’d fought harder.

  She cupped her stomach with her hands. When he had kicked her, she had tried to curl herself up and shield her baby from the blows, but she knew that his foot had connected at least once. She lifted her shirt and saw the pale pink bloom of a bruise beginning to form. Her baby.

  Who was that monster?

  And now he had Cait.

  Would he come back for her?

  She remembered the taillights heading east. She turned her eyes to where the Jeep was languishing in the dust. One of the headlights was dangling by a wire, and there was a long, vicious scrape along the driver’s side, the shattered window dark and gaping like a missing tooth. She peered inside. The keys were still in the ignition.

  She glanced to the east, half expecting to see the truck’s headlights bearing down on her again, but the road stayed dark. She wasn’t sure how long she’d been out—it could have been a few seconds or an hour. Even if he stayed on the same road, there was no guarantee she’d be able to catch him. And if she did—then what? What was she supposed to do about it?

  Cait was the one he had been after all along—not her. This wasn’t her responsibility. She wasn’t even supposed to be out here with Cait—the girl had admitted that herself. She had lied to get Rebecca in the car with her, and lied about her motives, and all the while she’d been planning to betray her. Sure, she’d owned up to it eventually, but was that really enough? Cait had set out to destroy her life, and she’d put them both in danger in the process. Rebecca didn’t owe her anything.

  This was her only chance. She was eighteen weeks pregnant. The window was closing. She touched her fingertips to her stomach.

  She remembered the knock on the door, the man thrusting the summons at her, the thin smile on his face before he turned and ran back to his car. The hearing was scheduled for eleven a.m. at Lubbock County Courthouse, and she wouldn’t be there for it. Failing to appear in court was a criminal offense. It was a risk she had known she was taking when she climbed into Cait’s Jeep, and now she had to make that count.

  She had come so far already. If she didn’t make it to Albuquerque, she would be sacrificing all of it.

  She didn’t owe the girl anything. Cait had made the choices that led her to this point, just like Rebecca had made her own. It was Cait who knew the man in the truck, it was Cait he was after. It was her fault, not Rebecca’s.

  Even as she thought this, she knew it was wrong. Cait was no more at fault than Rebecca was. Wasn’t living under the constant threat of danger just a part of being a woman in this world? Keys clutched between fingers, earphones out when walking home at night, always waiting for a hand to reach out and grab you, always waiting for the moment that would end it all. Always wondering who it would be: a man you already knew or a man you didn’t. Hadn’t she been certain up until the moment the man wrenched open the door of the Jeep that he had come to kill her, not Cait? Hadn’t she been convinced that it was all her own fault and that somehow she deserved it?

  Who could possibly deserve this kind of life?

  No more apologies. No more blame. From now on, only action.

  There wasn’t much time.

  The seats of the Jeep were covered in glass and stained dark with blood; she carefully brushed the glass off the upholstery and pressed a scarf she’d kept in her bag across the seat before sliding in. Shards still crunched under her weight.

  She turned the key in the ignition. That same cough-stutter.

  “Shit.”

  What had Cait been trying to tell her? Rebecca’s eyes went to the gauge. It was showing nearly a full tank, so that wasn’t the issue. There was a good chance that the Jeep was just broken. It had flipped over twice: it would be a miracle if it was still drivable. Most likely, it had given up the ghost.

  She turned the key again. Nothing. Just a sad cough and then silence.

  She was about to give up hope when she remembered something. The gas. Hadn’t Cait said something about the gas pedal?

  Rebecca pressed down gently on the gas pedal and tried again. The engine still stuttered but sounded a little more robust. She floored the gas and turned the key, and after a few tentative, spluttering seconds, the engine roared to life.

  Rebecca shifted the Jeep into drive and pulled back onto Highway 40. Heading east, following the taillights that had disappeared from sight.

  Clines Corners, New Mexico—58 Miles to Albuquerque

  First Cait tried bargaining.

  “You don’t have to do this,” she said. “If you just stop the truck right now and let me out, I promise I won’t say anything about what happened.”

  His face twisted in anger. “Don’t tell me what I need to do.”

  Wrong move. Time to backtrack. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”

  “Yes, you did. Don’t pretend like you don’t think you can control me. That’s what all you women think, isn’t it?”

  Cait silently recalibrated her approach. She thought about how Rebecca had handled Scott back in the eighteen-wheeler, stroking his ego, letting him talk. Appeasing him.

  “I would never tell you what to do,” she said, making her voice soft and gentle. “I don’t want to control you. I just want to help you.”

  “I don’t need your help.”

  Shit. Wrong move again. “I know you don’t need my help. I just want to make things right between us. I thought we were friends.”

  He laughed bitterly. “We were never friends.”

  “Okay, well, I want to be your friend now. Just tell me what I’ve done wrong and I’ll try to make it right. Is it about money? I d
on’t have much, but—”

  “Of course you would think it’s about money. That’s all you women think about, isn’t it? Well, Cait, some things can’t be bought. Things like respect, and dignity, and honor. You know what women like you are? You’re leeches. You suck the blood out of everything around you.”

  “Adam, please, if you’ll just tell me—”

  “Stop telling me what to do!” He squeezed his eyes shut. The truck veered across the road. “I told you,” he said through clenched teeth, “to shut your mouth.” He raised his hand from the steering wheel and slapped her, hard, with the back of his hand. Her head snapped back against the seat, and her ears rang from the pain. She cradled her jaw in her hand and tried not to cry.

  He was going to kill her, that much was obvious, and there was nothing she could say that could stop him.

  She needed to make a new plan.

  Adam

  He hadn’t planned on hitting her, but every time she opened her mouth, another lie came slithering out like a thick black snake, coiled and ready to strike. He couldn’t think when she talked like that. It clouded things in his brain, made him foggy and slow and confused.

  There was a smell coming off her—blood and sweat undercut with something else, something animal. He didn’t like the fact that he was breathing it in, taking her smell into his lungs, pushing it deep into his cells.

  He didn’t like the fact that she kept talking, either. He’d told her to shut up, but she wouldn’t listen. Of course she wouldn’t listen. He had to teach her a lesson.

  Hitting her had made every nerve in his body sing.

  At first he’d figured he would just kill her. Shoot her straight between the eyes and put her down like the dog she was. Now he wanted to drag the moment out, really savor it, now that she was next to him, so close that if he reached out he could touch her, feel her warm blood racing underneath her skin, touch the soft dark curls on her head . . .

  He had been locked away in his own dark prison for so long. Now that he had been released, he wanted to revel in his freedom. He wanted to look into her eyes and see his own power reflected there. To see that he was a god and that she was nothing in the face of him.

  This is your purpose on this earth, and you are fulfilling it.

  Clines Corners, New Mexico—60 Miles to Albuquerque

  The sun edged up over the horizon, a single blinding point of white light that turned the sky and the desert floor a burnished orange, as if the whole world had gone up in flames and she was driving straight into the center of the inferno. The kind of sunrise meant to inspire awe at the extraordinary beauty of our world.

  Rebecca flipped the visor down and squinted out of the splintered windshield. The Jeep was hurting pretty bad, but she pushed it as fast as it would go, the engine rumbling, the speedometer clocking over eighty, her eyes locked on the highway, searching for the pickup’s taillights.

  She saw the crest of the Clines Corners Travel Center at the intersection of 40 and 285. Four directions, four choices, no sign of the taillights. She punched the gas and the engine groaned. It wouldn’t hold like this forever. She had to find them, fast, before it broke down for good. It was close to seven a.m. There were a few big rigs sharing the road with her now, and she weaved past them, ignoring the spark of fear she felt every time she got near one. She wanted it to be just her and the road and the wink of the truck’s taillights.

  She hit the junction and slowed. Nothing in front of her but an eighteen-wheeler hauling a pair of tractors. Nothing in the rearview, and it wouldn’t make sense for him to double back on himself. Route 285 South stretched out to her right, empty except for a radio tower far off in the distance.

  She caught a set of taillights heading north on 285. She couldn’t be sure they were his, but it was the best chance she had. She clicked her turn signal on and peeled left.

  I’m coming for you, she thought, fixing her gaze on the taillights and gunning the engine. I’m coming.

  Outskirts of Clines Corners, New Mexico—73 Miles to Albuquerque

  He’d taken a left turn at the junction, and they were heading north on an unfamiliar road. Cait’s heart sank. Even if by some miracle people were looking for her, the chances of them finding her were even slimmer. Surely the first thing they’d do would be retrace her steps, though how they’d do that, she didn’t know. She tried to think of the people they’d seen along the drive, anyone who might act as a witness. The waitress back in the diner. Scott the trucker, though he would be long gone by now. The gas station attendant.

  There was no one, really. She was in uncharted territory, alone.

  She thought about her parents, how they would feel when a policeman showed up at their door and told them that their only daughter was dead. Her father would crumple like a tissue—he’d always been the soft one of the two—and her mother would stand there stone-faced and pale, as if this were a burden she was destined to carry.

  It had been months since she’d been back to Waco, and she’d never thought to call them, even when all that stuff about her came out in the news. Her mother had called the day after her name had been revealed to the press. Cait had seen the missed call after her shift, but she’d never returned it. What could she possibly say? Her parents were good people, had worked hard to keep their family afloat, had taught her and her brothers right from wrong, had raised them right, and what had she done to thank them? Left for the city and never looked back, then dragged the family name through the mud. She knew the way that people at church would have looked at them afterward, the whispers and the pitying looks. And she hadn’t even had the courage to let her mother say that she was disappointed in her.

  She had let them down, and now she was going to break their hearts. The policemen would hold their hats in their hands, would stand respectfully on the threshold of the little house on Pine Street, and her father would weep and her mother would nod and thank them for their time and then she would call Cait’s brothers and tell them the news that their sister had been killed.

  That’s if they found her body. They were out in the middle of nowhere, and from the look of it, Adam seemed determined to drive them even deeper into it. In the distance, she could see the faint crest of a distant mesa. A good place to hide a body, in the canyon below. Was that what he had planned?

  She had to get away. Like Rebecca had said when she chased after that kid at the gas station, she was a good runner. He would have to stop the truck sometime. She would get out and run as fast as she could. Her legs started tingling at the thought. Yes, that’s what she would do. She would run and run until her lungs gave out on her, run until she could no longer see him, and then she would keep running. As soon as her feet hit the ground, she would never stop running again.

  Her ankle, though. She’d twisted it pretty bad when they flipped. Her ribs ached, too—one of them might even be cracked. She wouldn’t know what kind of shape she was in until she got out of the truck, and by then it might be too late. If she was too weak, or too slow, he would be able to catch her. And then he would kill her for sure.

  Who was she kidding? She’d been a dead woman as soon as that truck appeared on the road behind her. It was just a matter of time now.

  Cait’s eyes trailed to the rearview mirror. In the distance, about a half mile back, a cloud of dust gathered on the road, a boxy shape lurking behind it. At first she thought her eyes were playing tricks on her—a mirage in the desert, pretty fitting—but then she saw the glint of metal off the grille and she knew it was real.

  She would know that Jeep anywhere.

  Adam

  He didn’t know what she was smiling about. Just trying to make him feel small, probably, like the rest of them. He could feel her worming her way into his head, burrowing into the soft tissue of his brain. She was laughing at him. After everything he’d done, she was still laughing at him.

  He was still that little boy standing in Roller Kingdom, watching his mother hide her tears because she knew her son w
as a loser. He was that pimply teenager getting chased through the parking lot by a bunch of jocks. He was that guy in the bar whom women turned their backs on when he approached them. He was one of life’s rejects. Pathetic. A maggot.

  Then he saw that Jeep in the rearview mirror, and the power surged through him again.

  Remember the mission, he told himself. This was a war they were fighting, and he was their soldier.

  He and his brothers had spent a lifetime being told that they weren’t good enough, tall enough, rich enough, handsome enough. They had been rejected over and over by a society that favored the female every single time.

  No more. Now they were rising up, and he was leading the charge.

  He remembered the words one of his brothers had posted: “Resist. Stand tall. Live for you. Go your own way.”

  Never give up, he thought, gunning the engine. Never surrender.

  Make them pay.

  Outskirts of Young Place, New Mexico—82 Miles to Albuquerque

  The pickup took a right onto a single-track road marked by a Dead End sign, and Rebecca followed suit, heading deeper into the desert. The Jeep kicked up a cloud of dust and she struggled to see the road through the cracked windshield, but she could just make out the Texas plate on the rear bumper. It was definitely him.

  She didn’t like leaving the main road behind. Out here, on this thinly paved road, there were no cars to be seen, or billboards, or any sign of life except the occasional flash of movement she caught out of the corner of her eye of a jackrabbit or a lizard skittering across the desert floor.

  This was wild country.

  Where was he going? What did he have planned?

  She needed a plan.

  The land stayed flat, but now she could see a ridge of blue-tinged mesas in the distance.