Blood Father

by Peter Craig

  From her curled position, Lydia could tell that Jonah had been struck hard by the passenger-side air bag. Her father had gone straight for Cully’s gun, and both men were holding it now, wrestling to keep it aimed away. At the same time, Link kicked the passenger seat just above Lydia’s head, collapsing it forward. As the gun discharged, deafening Lydia, Jonah panicked and scrambled out of the car.

  But her father stayed calm, almost robotic, maneuvering the pistol as Cully repeatedly hit the trigger, cutting through the remaining windows like cracked ice, puncturing the visor, the roof, and the headrests. So loud and so close, each shot seemed less like a noise than a blow to the ears. Her father dropped his leg over her, as if to shield her from the random barrage. While with one hand he pinned the gun against the edge of the driver’s seat, he reeled something up from the back of his throat and slashed it across Cully’s face: a razor, buried in an eraser, tied to a wisdom tooth by a string. It was a brutal prison trick that forced Cully to drop the gun and grab his bleeding eye.

  But Cully realized his mistake, and, as the gun fell to the floor mat, they both grappled for it, until a shot fired and the ceiling was sprayed red.

  The blood washed across the seats and over the floors; it was in Lydia’s hair, syrupy thick; and, as if she had been submerged entirely in cold water, she didn’t breathe or move—not until she heard her father groan, “Ah, fuck,” scooping blood from his eye sockets. She realized that the bullet had gone straight up through Cully’s chin.

  Another series of shots came from outside.

  Link opened the door and Cully’s body fell partway out onto the ground, his legs still hooked over the seat.

  Jonah was now stalking around the car, firing through the broken windows. Lydia caught a glimpse of him and saw how badly he was cut from the glass of the windshield. Holding his neck, he was bleeding heavily, and Lydia thought that his stitches must have pulled open in the fray. But he was firing wildly as he retreated behind a tall bluff.

  Link slashed the razor through the duct tape on Lydia’s hands. He was out of breath. When he tried to climb into the driver’s seat past the deflating bags, he winced and grabbed at his side, falling backward again. So Lydia crawled behind the wheel and restarted the car. The wind was blowing sand and smoke through the broken windshield, and she tried to wipe the blood from her face and eyes where it stuck to her lashes.

  Far downhill, she saw the Impala churning toward them. She said, “They’re coming back, Dad—there’s three more in the other car.”

  “Turn us around,” he said.

  She shifted into reverse and rode them uphill. Cully dragged for a few yards before dropping out the open door and rolling beneath the tires. Lydia said with her voice quivering, “Uh, my God, that is so fucking wrong.”

  Jonah emerged out of hiding and fired two shots, one shrieking through the aluminum of the passenger door, sounding like a zipper. As Lydia craned her head around to face the path behind her, she saw her father pulling up his shirt, breathing with jolts in his chest and shoulders. She couldn’t tell if the blood on his shirt was Cully’s or his own. He sagged onto his side and dropped the magazine from the pistol: “What kind of gun is this thing?”

  “It’s a Luger or a Ruger or something,” shouted Lydia. “Did he have a full mag?”

  “Just about.”

  “Then they went shopping,” she said, over the ascendant sound of reverse gear. “That means they’re loaded down there.”

  “You got to go to a gun show for shit like this,” he said quietly. “That fucking hollow-tip shit your boyfriend is firing through here—fancy motherfucker. I see why you liked him.”

  He examined his stomach above the belt line, where the skin looked scorched with gunpowder. Blood pooled and ran over his pants, and each time he touched the spot with his fist, there was more smeared across his fingers.

  “Dad? Don’t even fucking tell me you’re hit.”

  “Keep driving.”

  She turned around and began accelerating over rough terrain, away from the Impala, which looked in the rearview like a tornado stirring up debris. The car bounced over ruts and trenches and sheared rocks, and at times Lydia could barely keep traction across loose shale.

  Her father peered out the back window, grimacing, and said, “Your boyfriend just got in the other car.”

  “Stop calling him that!”

  Lydia ground uphill on a wind-stripped patch of rough ground, the tires losing grip and the car swiveling, turning diagonally against the slope, until the path flattened out again. The Impala was now gaining on them along a separate route, firing from a distance.

  When a shot tore through the frame beside the door, Link said, “What the fuck are they firing back there?”

  After bucking over a rough stretch, Lydia found a smoother run toward the mountains and began accelerating across miles of open badlands. She could hear nothing now but the drone of the engine and something stuck under the grille, knocking rhythmically beneath them. The wind blasted into her eyes. She smelled fire and blood and dust. The light faded and became so flat that it was hard to see the dips and gouges in the desert. Headlights didn’t help. It was that hour when the sky becomes the more discernible landscape, from the last lit edges of clouds to the sharp silhouettes of the mountains. Her father was suffering terribly in the backseat, his lips clenched, his arm pressed across his waist. Lydia narrowed her eyes, feeling a painful love for him that now seemed more penetrating than the fear that had bound her all afternoon. “If I could get around these guys, Dad—I’ll get back to the highway—”

  “I don’t even know where the highway is,” he said, sounding as if his lungs were full of smoke. “Hey, the bullet went right through me, kid. I just found it in the seat.”

  The car glanced violently off a sharp rock, and, with a sound like another gunshot, the left tire blew out. Lydia pushed hard on the accelerator and continued worming forward on the flat, but she soon came to a wide crater, stretching out across the sloped desert. She ripped off the deflated airbag and pounded on the wheel.

  Ahead of them, the ground rapidly descended into shadows, down loose rocks and chipped shale into a deep, barren valley. The slope was far too steep for a car, but it looked as if a person could navigate it, riding downhill on the seat of his pants, a hundred yards or more along an unstable cliffside into the depression, which looked as if it might be the softened remains of an old detonation site. Farther down in the dimness, the crater stretched out and blurred into years of accumulated rockslides, a rough ladder of loose scree to the base of the first coal-colored foothills and the mountains beyond.

  The Chevy Impala was coming right for them, throwing up a wake of dust. Its headlights flashed on. Lydia waited in a windless pocket just beneath the barricade of hills.

  Her father had also been studying the slope for a few silent moments. Finally he said, “Lydia—listen to me. I’m pretty bad. This is more than a souvenir this time. Get out and start climbing down that hillside. You got a couple minutes and I can hold these guys off you. Then you follow that crevice there, right into the mountains. Head due west, follow the last light. And keep your eyes open—”

  “Dad, stop it.”

  “Because that’s the Naval Testing Range in there—and there’s going to be bombs and ordnance all over the ground. You go right through, kid, watch every step, and you’re going to come out the other side of this.”

  “I’m not listening to you.”

  “And when you get out—I want you to figure out a way to get in touch with a guy in Calipatria. His name is Arturo Rios Tehada, prisoner number C-77105. Remember that number. Say it over and over. Come on. C-77105, C-77105.”

  “No, Dad,” she said, chewing hard on her gum.

  “You tell him what happened and he’ll try to help you. Are you listening to me?”

  The car was rising to meet them, now just a dark shape against the lit skies.

  “Why are you such a pessimist, Dad?”

/>   “That’s not pessimism. That’s getting you out of here. That’s the most optimistic I ever been in my life. I’m ordering you, Lydia, right now: Get out and—”

  “No!”

  “I don’t have time to argue with you!”

  “Then don’t argue.”

  “Lydia, you stubborn fucking brat—get out of the car.”

  “Fuck you if you think I’m leaving you here.”

  “I’m going to count to motherfucking three, and if your bony ass isn’t sliding down that hill . . .” He winced, the pain of his shouting cutting through him. He held his ribs.

  The Impala was right beside them now, and it drifted slowly, like a predator circling a wounded animal.

  “I can still hold ’em off,” said Link. “One . . .”

  “Dad, I just told you I’m not leaving.”

  “Two.”

  “Count to a million if you want to. If you think I’m getting out of this car without you—”

  “Two and a half!”

  “—then you don’t know me. All this time, and you never even knew me.”

  He stared at her across the car in the last light. Behind her the Impala gunned its engine. It was battered and filled with tumbleweed in the grille, but it sank lower on the hydraulics, as if ready to prowl slowly ahead. Link was staring into her eyes, and he must have seen something he recognized, because he nodded and handed her the gun. “All right, baby—nice to meet you. Hold them off as long as you can.”

  There were rifle barrels now emerging from the windows of the Impala, and Chase, his long hair in silhouette, rose up against the convertible roof to steady his gun. Lydia stared at the butt of Cully’s pistol as her father offered it.

  “Fuck that,” she said. “Grab a seat belt.”

  She turned the wheel and spun the tires, heading for the ledge, focusing on a path where the eroded rim had already given out in a partial landslide. As soon as Link realized what she was trying to do, he started to laugh, until it became a wincing cough. She hit the edge and the car dropped, accelerating into the fall, jolting downhill on shifting earth and a growing rockslide. Chips of shale and sandstone gave way and bounced all around, and the dirt and dust rose up into a full avalanche around the windows. Finally the angle sharpened and Lydia regained control over the buried wheels, steering and attempting to point downhill on a plummeting trail over twisted roots and dislodging rocks.

  “Keep straight,” said Link, holding on, yelling over the hailstorm against the car. “We turn sideways, we’re rolling.”

  Lydia blew a bubble and snapped it down. She flew back and forth against the wheel. At one point the car dropped so hard onto its front tires she thought they were about to flip end over end, but she came off the landing, skipping diagonally, and regaining some tiny bit of control by accelerating and turning back into the landslide.

  “Don’t brake,” said her father.

  All four tires were blown and shredded now, and she was spinning the rims, trying to control the car like a sled in the growing force of earth. But suddenly the ground sank entirely, a whole portion of the slope giving way, and the car tipped onto its side and rolled, crushing the roof against their heads. The collapsing hillside swallowed them, so that instead of tumbling they slid downhill as dirt rushed through the windows until—at last—they came to rest, buried in rocks and dust.

  “Dad?”

  “I’m here,” he said from the backseat, kicking aside stones.

  “Oh my God, that was awesome! Do you believe that? We just took half the mountain down with us.”

  “Calm down. We need to dig out of here.”

  Within moments, she was digging in the twilight around the overturned car, keeping her eye on the Impala high above them. She could see the deep groove where they had torn down the hillside, a geologic sampling from the shale to the pinkish granite below, and it now looked even more difficult for anyone to follow them in the diminished light and down the shaky aftermath of the landslide. The shadows along the ridge were pacing back and forth like sentries on a high wall.

  For a few minutes, Lydia was thrilled with herself for making the plunge, but this feeling evaporated as soon as she began helping her father out the open window. She realized from the tension in his body and the awkwardness of his movements that he was hurt worse than she had thought. He was shivering. Lydia wasn’t strong enough to lift him, only to help him crawl backward onto the silt at the bottom of the ravine.

  Someone above fired a shot that sparked off the axle of the overturned car.

  Link couldn’t stand, and he resisted her arms, seeming angry at first, until she understood that it was only a sharp reaction to the pain. She took the gun from him and fired back at the ridge. The shadows moved back behind the car. Far above, Jonah was moving with dizzy, injured paces, and she wondered if one of the random shots in the car hadn’t grazed him earlier.

  Then Lydia helped her father to his feet, and supported much of his weight as he limped ahead along the softening ground. He had been hit in the stomach, and he couldn’t straighten his legs. Lydia needed to plant her feet and fight with all her weight to keep him upright.

  Finally they found a barricade of sticks and logs, piled together from the runoff of some distant storm. Her father was gasping for air, sweating through his clothes. Lydia smelled the wound on him now, sweet and metallic. As she rested him against the thicket, he said, “In about . . . ten minutes,” coughing and grimacing, “it’ll be too dark for them to see us. Then we got to head deeper in. Are they coming down?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, peeking out at the cliff. “One or two of them might. I know all four won’t. Jonah looks hurt.”

  “Oh, shit,” he said. “I could sure use a fucking drink. What are the odds of me getting another sponsor now?”

  Lydia covered her face, sniffed hard, and broke into a deep, emotional laughter. She tried to control herself, and the sound, wailing and stricken, was almost like tears. “You are such an asshole,” she said.

  “Well, he was a good man. I don’t give a fuck about heaven, ’cept for guys like that.”

  Lydia turned somber now, breathing hard and steady, and she whispered, “I got my cell phone, Dad. As soon as it’s dark, we could get up on top of one of those hills and get you help. I swear to God—”

  “Come on, kid. There’s no reception for miles.”

  For a long time, Tito stood on the ridge, howling like a wolf and firing off rounds. Lydia glanced around the rocks and saw that the Chevy’s headlights were now on, and the car was backing away from the edge. Maybe Jonah was hurt badly enough that they were pulling away; but she worried that they would regroup and come from another direction. She told her father that they were pulling back, and he said, “They’re driving right into an ambush.”

  “Dad?”

  “Crazy old buddy of mine, Count, if he timed it right. He was going to call in an accident right there at the mile marker. A Harley smashed into a rental car. That’s practically sacrilegious, but he promised me and I trust him. He just said, Good to have you back, old man.”

  They were quiet for a while, listening for sounds along the rocks. Windless and clear, the night turned cold. They heard nothing. The world reduced to a plot of sandy earth and the starlight above. Link was shivering and Lydia tried to warm him by nuzzling close, but it was too painful and he jerked away. At this, Lydia began to cry quietly, mostly from fear. In the darkness she felt him place his hand onto her hair, working through it, his coarse thumb against her forehead. He grabbed her roughly but tenderly by the back of the neck, as if picking up a kitten, and he said, “Hey. Don’t spend one second of your life regretting this, kid. I wasn’t anything but dirt until you came along. You stay alive, you stay tough. Promise. Because I never knew a thing until right now. You saved more than my life, kid. And you better damn well remember that—or you never knew me either.”

  nineteen

  Lydia didn’t sleep that night, down beneath the cover o
n the streambed—but rather she kept the gun in her lap and listened for any sound. Sometime after the moon rose, she saw flashes of light along the hills, which were followed by deep, seismic blasts. Dark fighter jets cut overhead, and fireworks thudded around the Chocolate Mountains in flurries, until it was silent again.

  Her father was barely strong enough to speak, but he wasn’t asleep either. At one point he whispered, “Bunker busters.”

  His mouth was parched, and she promised him that she would find water as soon as the sun rose. The air was close to freezing, but the sand was still warm, having retained some heat from the lost sun. So Lydia piled it over her father’s arms and legs, burying him like a child playing at the beach.

  He said, “Good girl.”

  He fell asleep for a while, breathing with a rattle in his chest.

  This was the first time that Lydia was hopeful, believing that if the wound sealed itself, he might be able to rise in the morning and climb with her out of the ravine. But this strand of optimism frightened her, as if she had suddenly realized there was farther to fall. She leaned over him, smelling blood and fever, touching his damp hair as if he were an infant.

  A while later, she heard rocks clattering down the slope. It had been so still that each sound was now amplified: a cracking stick, a rockslide, light footsteps and panting. She pulled back the slide on the gun. Was it Chase or Tito? It sounded like a large group.

  Then she heard an unearthly warbling noise, like some hatching brood of hungry animals, and she realized that it was a pack of coyotes in the darkness. Their barks were high-pitched, like nothing she had expected. They were sniffing aggressively around the sticks and branches, and one of them began rooting through the sand piles around her father. They smelled blood. Lydia rose to her feet and shooed them away, but they kept assembling under the stark moonlight—strange, skulking animals, ratty and half starved. When she fired the gun into the air, they scattered, yelping and hiccupping to each other.