Paths

by David DeSimone

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Get your phone ready. I want you to call 911 when I say.”

  She looks at him hesitantly.

  “Eva, please just do it! Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Get ready!”

  She raised the cellphone with a shaky hand.

  “Ready?”

  She tapped 911, held her finger over the talk button.

  “Yes.”

  “Okay.” He grasped the steering wheel firmly with both hands. “Here we go.”

  Drew craned forward, checked the road ahead. He checked the side view mirror on his side and the rearview mirror, trying to assess the gap between the Acura and the pickup. It was difficult to tell, but a “guesstimate” put it at about two feet. Astonishingly close for any speed but especially the high speeds at which they were moving. In order for his plan to work and avoid having the truck slam into his rear, he had to widen the gap - by only about eight feet.

  Right now they were going too fast. He had slow down, way down, even if it meant that the truck would be nipping their tail. Drew wasn’t expecting to hold that speed for too long. Just long enough to give him back control of the road, long enough to get the Acura ready to jump.

  Drew continued to decelerate until they were going less than thirty miles per hour. He checked the rearview and saw a calm expression on the maniac’s face. It was an expression that said he knew what he was doing. The game was in his hands.

  Crazy fuck.

  The maniac had both hands firmly on the wheel, the rifle resting on his lap.

  There was a thud that shook the car. Eva let out a cry.

  Another thud.

  “Drew, he’s hitting us! He’s gonna run us off the road!’

  The speedometer read twenty-five miles per hour.

  Twenty-four.

  Twenty.

  Thud!

  “Oh, God! This can’t be happening!”

  Finally, Drew slammed his foot on the gas. The sudden burst of speed knocked him back with surprising force. The little car actually burned rubber; its front tires screeched and spat out blue smoke as the car peeled away from its much larger pursuer.

  The Acura reached fifty-five miles per hour - a 35 mph jump in just three seconds. It was as if extreme danger had somehow given the car access to untapped power that Drew used with maximum effect.

  The Ford pickup roared and quickly closed in on the Acura.

  To Eva he shouted, “NOW,” and cut the wheel hard left.

  The Acura flew into a screeching tailspin, swerved across the double-yellow line and came to screeching stop in the opposing lane. The car had done a complete 180-degree turn. The scent of burnt rubber was strong, filling the inside of the car with its hot, acrid scent.

  The engine stalled. Neither Drew nor Eva had noticed it until he tapped his foot on the gas and they went nowhere.

  He turned to Eva. “Are you alright?”

  Not answering, instead she stared dazedly at her cellphone. Her fingers seemed to work on their own volition, tapping the talk button.

  She brought the phone to her ear.

  The big gray Ford pickup was finishing a three-point turn a hundred or so feet behind them.

  Drew tried the ignition. The engine whined but refused to turn over.

  “I’m still getting nothing,” Eva said.

  He turned, saw the Ford rolling slowly toward them.

  Eva gazed at the pickup truck, her eyes wide with terror.

  The truck crawled to a stop about ten feet from their rear bumper.

  “Please hurry!” Eva cried. “Pleeeeease!”

  As he desperately worked the ignition switch, Once again, Drew glanced in the rearview mirror. The Ford’s driver side door swung open. A foot appeared from behind the opened door and planted itself firmly to the ground.

  Eva said: “He’s getting out! Ohmygod, he’s getting out!”

  Suddenly Drew remembered to put the car in park, and tried the ignition again. The Acura’s engine finally whirred into life. He revved it once, threw the gear into drive, and sped away. As he straightened the Acura, there was a loud clang that shook the rear of the car.

  Pothole, he thought. At least the tires were still intact.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE ANOMALY

  1

  The service road was history as far as the Fairwoods were concerned. The Final Judgment would rain down upon the earth before they would lay tread to that cursed stretch again. Somewhere on that road, or another one like it, the maniac was gearing up for another game of Ram the Yuppies off the Road.

  So as soon as she got a signal, Eva called the police.

  She offered every detail she could remember – from the man’s scruffy beard, his red baseball cap to a description of the large gray pickup he drove. What she didn’t give them was the license plate. He had been tailgating them so close that she couldn’t see it, and when Drew’s stuntman driving afforded the space to place the license in her view, she was too rattled to think, much less memorize a bunch of numbers and letters.

  From Drew’s perspective, what was going to happen was that the police would dispatch cruisers to patrol the service road for a while, a few weeks, months perhaps.

  2

  They drove a mile and a half on US 1 before stopping at a service station so Drew could check the tires. A blowout was the last thing they needed.

  During that time, the Fairwoods were silent. The trucker had given them a hell of a fright and they were trying to process it in their own quiet way.

  The comfortable, familiar life they enjoyed before today had suddenly been violated. In order to get that comfort back they needed to make sense of what happened, why it happened.

  Drew’s response was to stay the course according to the day’s plan and try and forget what happened.

  Eva kept replaying the terrible event over and over. The maniac had two chances of killing them. One, when he rammed into their bumper. It was just a couple of taps, but she was sure that it was a warm-up for him getting ready to deliver the coup de grâce.

  Had Drew waited a few seconds longer to hit the gas and make their escape, the crazed trucker would have succeeded in running their car off the road. She and her husband would have been trapped in a smoldering pile of twisted wreckage at the bottom of a ditch, dead.

  And then, two, when their car stalled, the maniac could have blown them away.

  She wondered if she was going to need a therapist. She didn’t think so.

  Drew was another story.

  As they parked on a side of the food mart, she noticed him looking completely out of it.

  “Honey,” she touched his arm. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m pretty fucked up,” he said, unstrapping. “But I think I’ll be okay.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  He opened the door.

  “I’d better check the tires,” he said and got out.

  To Eva: “How do you feel? Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” she lied.

  3

  With cellphone in one hand, Eva used the other to pull the release handle to push the seat back to stretch her legs. Once situated, she searched her phone for the hospital’s number to call and say she’s running late and might have to reschedule.

  She hated hospitals.

  Hospitals smelled bad, looked bad, they represented cutting and stabbing and pain, and bad food.

  She supposed she could face an MRI alone, but it would be so much less stressful if Drew was with her, and she was confident he would take off work again if she asked. She felt a little bad about asking him to take another day off, but what the hell. She was tired and just wanted to go home.

  A pleasant female voice answered, “Good morning, Radiology. How may I help you?” Eva greeted her with a hello and proceeded to lie. She said that because of a family emergency she had to miss the eleven o’clock and is there another time available?


  Luckily for Eva, there was. Someone had just called and canceled a two o’clock. Eva took it.

  4

  Drew’s foot was blown to shreds when the tire exploded. That’s how he imagined it as he hesitantly tapped the unexploded tire with the tip of his shoe. Once. Twice. He hesitated before tapping a third time, then bent down leaning on the hood for support.

  The tires looked in good shape, especially considering the beating he put them all through.

  He ran his fingers over the treads.

  The second tire felt pretty good, too. Not as good as Eva’s body felt, but at least he didn’t have to worry that the tires were going to explode.

  He checked the two tires on the other side of the car, each one less cautiously than the last. When he got to the fourth tire he froze, but the tire wasn’t what stopped him. It was the taillight, or what was left of it.

  The plastic red covering was obliterated, gone. The inside reflective bowl, gone. Gone too was the little light bulb in the middle.

  A deep, jagged hole was all that remained, that and few shards of plastic and fiberglass.

  Trying not to believe what his heart told him - that it was the result of a bullet - he searched for alternatives: a pothole, a railing, or the result of the pickup after ramming their bumper. However, recalling the loud clang that shook the back of the car, he could not escape the truth, that the damage was caused by a bullet.

  He put his hand inside the hole. Not just his hand, either, but the entire forearm up to the elbow.

  The only question was whether he was the intended target and not the taillight. Did the maniac really mean to put a bullet in Drew?

  Drew stared at the hole that used to be a taillight and he began to see red.

  If his experiences with the trucker taught him anything it was this: anyone could absolutely be driven to kill, even a regular like Drew. All it took was to have your life and the life of a loved one threatened by a psychopath. If he ever met that guy again Drew believed he could kill him.

  He went to the driver side window, leaned in. Eva put her phone back into her pocketbook.

  “We’ve got the two o’clock now,” she said. “Do you think we could make it?”

  “I think so.”

  “How do the tires look?” she asked.

  “Good,” he said, uneasy over how she might react to the shattered taillight.

  He said, “I think when we get back, I’d like to take it to the shop and have the tires replaced anyway, just to be on the safe side.”

  Eva agreed.

  “I’m going to run in and get something to drink. You want anything?” Eva shook her head no. “Hurry up,” she said. “We have to go.”

  He headed toward the food mart when something caught his eye.

  “What?” She said following his gaze. Then she saw what he was seeing, and her mouth dropped open.

  Eva stepped out of the car, stared up at the sky over the southern horizon. A man gassing up his car noticed the look of awe on their faces. He, too, turned and looked up, as well as others.

  “What is that,” someone asked.

  Another responded, “Don’t know.”

  Drew didn’t know either, but it looked like a big hole in the sky. The inside of the hole wasn’t completely black but dark gray, about the size of a full moon. Drew imagined a giant cookie cutter slicing a circle out of a patch of gray clouds. The edges of the hole weren’t well defined, but fuzzy like cotton candy.

  He and the others tried to come up with some kind of explanation, and it became a conversation amongst strangers. The first man suggested that it could be a hole in the ozone layer.

  Drew replied that it was possible but not likely.

  An ozone hole, he told the man, would have been detected sooner. They would have heard it on the news. Also, didn’t ozone holes only exist in the Polar Regions? He didn’t know for sure.

  Another man chimed in, “Maybe it’s a big storm coming, like Sandy. A super storm.”

  “Maybe,” Drew replied.

  Then again, maybe not.

  He doubted any storm, hurricane, tornado, thunderstorm or super storm, could have begun like this. Then again, he wasn’t a weatherman. It was just that, terrible as they are, tornados and hurricanes are still recognizable storms. What the Fairwoods and the few other onlookers were gawking at was neither familiar nor, as far as anyone could tell, normal.

  “Refracted light maybe?” someone else asked. Drew didn’t think it was that, either. What he was starting to think was that it might be something more ominous than any natural phenomenon. Perhaps it was something unnatural. A part of Drew knew this was a byproduct of growing up listening to his strict, God-fearing Anglican father and all that End of Times crap that he used to warn Drew about. It was nonsense, but it still held an impression over him, to some degree.

  Like his wife, he thought he’d given up religion once he’d entered the wonderful, wacky (and truly mysterious) world of adolescence and, in his case, girls.

  However, staring at the hole in the sky, he was beginning to wonder whether there was some truth to his father’s doomsday predictions after all.

  No, had to be a natural weather phenomenon.

  Everything happened for a reason.

  It was nature. Plain and simple.

  “Drew,” he heard his wife say. He blinked, turned to her.

  “What do you think it is?”

  “I don’t know,” he muttered.

  “Weird, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We’d better get back on the road. I don’t want to be late.”

  Glancing at the sky one more time, the hole appeared lighter, more transparent as clouds began covering it. Maybe it was just an optical illusion created by something so simple as light refraction, like a rainbow effect. It was a cloudy, misty day after all.

  The other customers at the food mart seemed to lose interest as they went back to their daily routines. Drew wished he could do the same, but before he got into his car, he just could not shake the possibility that it wasn’t an optical illusion but real. And if it was real, what the hell was it?

  He didn’t know.

  5

  The drive on US-1 did not turn out to be as frustrating as they had expected it to be. The stop-and-go every couple of blocks wasn’t so bad. It certainly beat almost being run down by Grizzly Adams in a red hat. It also gave them a chance to begin to put the bad stuff into the past. Drew saw it as a form of therapy. Beat your fear by confronting it – in this case to drive through it.

  If there ever was a single thing he was good at, it was problem solving. Drew was a logical guy. He was a programmer after all – a damn good one! But, if he couldn’t figure something, such as the mysterious hole in the sky, then he would block it out like the clouds had blocked out the hole. Just push the DELETE button in his head and it would go away. He was good at that, too, most of the time. There were exceptions – his father for one and all the bullshit fire and brimstone rhetoric that he lived by and tried to pass on to his son.

  Heading south Drew looked up at the trees lining both sides of US-1 and saw a clearing right where the gray hole should have been, but was now under a thin layer of cloud cover.

  He didn’t like to call it a hole anymore. Except for its circular shape, what proof was there that it really was a hole? He preferred ‘atmospheric anomaly’ instead. It sounded less ominous, more grounded. Scientific.

  Despite the stop-and-go traffic, they were making good time. Eva’s mood improved. She was feeling calmer as she watched buildings go by, changing from small town shops to sturdy masonry buildings in municipal districts, to cement labyrinths of shopping malls, and back to small town shops.

  6

  “We’re here.” Drew said, relieved.

  “Great,” she said nervously.

  He smiled and patted her knee reassuringly. “You’ll be fine.”

  “When we get home, I’m going to need a martini. You make them so good,”
she said.

  “A little dirty, extra olives.”

  “That’s the ticket,” she smiled.

  “Done.”

  He helped her out of the car.

  Her knees felt wobbly.

  Drew led her through the parking lot and across a street toward the main entrance of the hospital.

  They came up to a pair of sliding doors, paused.

  “Are you in your happy place yet?”

  “I’m trying.”

  He laughed affectionately. “Just listen to those waves lapping on the beach. Maybe put a couple of seagulls in the mix.”

  “Roger that.”

  Upon entering, they were struck by a blast of cold central air. Inside, the lobby was spacious, bright with hanging globe lamps and rows of fluorescent lights.

  “It’s cold in here,” she said, rubbing her arms. Drew wrapped his arm around her shoulders.

  They approached the security counter. It was long and made of some kind of dark wood surfacing. Mahogany or oak.

  “I hope this doesn’t take long,” she said.

  “Didn’t the doctor tell you?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did he say?”

  “She.”

  “What did she say?”

  “I don’t know. I forgot.”

  “Was it an hour? Half hour?”

  “I don’t know. I think a half hour.”

  Sitting behind the security desk was a uniformed African-American woman, slightly overweight, fortyish. Sitting on either side of her were two male security officers looking bored as they observed people coming in and out of the hospital.

  To the woman officer Eva said, “Excuse me.”

  The woman officer looked at Eva.

  “Can you tell me where I can find the Department of Radiology?” Then she added, “I’m having an MRI done.”

  The woman pointed, her chair swiveled following the direction of her finger, and Eva saw the corridor to the right of the desk. “Go through the breezeway,” the woman said, pumping her arm for emphasis like an airport runway crewmember marshaling an airplane toward a gate, ”until you get to the elevators on your right. Take that down to C-Level 1 and follow the signs.”