Blood Alley th-1

by David Wisehart

  Even with Claire, Trevor, Dakota, and Ethan all pushing together, the Hummer was unbearably heavy. Fat tires rolled on the hot asphalt, making a sticking sound in the heat.

  The road looked level, but there were lots of little dips and rises. Claire felt each one of them in her arms and legs and back. She considered herself to be in pretty good shape, but not for this.

  Not for this.

  The day was hot and getting hotter. The air was dry, but that was small consolation. Claire was used to the swelter, living in the sun-blasted Mojave desert, in crappy old Palmdale, but they were well beyond the city now, and she was beginning to miss that oasis of civilization, such as it was.

  Through the shimmering desert air, she could see what looked like a gas station up ahead. She couldn’t yet read the sign, but from the shape of the building she knew it was a station. Maybe it had a garage. Claire half convinced herself she saw two buildings, maybe even three. They didn’t seem to be getting any closer.

  The desert’s playing tricks on us.

  The sun was hot and the road was hard and Claire could feel blisters forming in her flats. She wasn’t dressed for this. She should be wearing a comfy pair of sneakers and those old denim shorts, not this yellow summer dress that billowed in the breeze and gave Ethan a good long look under the hood. She could feel the wind on her thighs and the weight of Ethan’s glances. He tried to hide it, awkwardly.

  Whatever.

  That weirdo was harmless enough. And besides, he was dating Dakota. If he tried anything strange, Claire’s boyfriend Trevor could beat him up. But Ethan was just being Ethan, and Claire didn’t feel like confronting him, so she let it pass.

  This was going to be a long road trip. Best to be civil.

  Claire wished she hadn’t come along, though of course she had no one to blame but herself. It was her idea, after all. Last week when Trevor learned of his uncle’s death in a car accident, Claire suggested they both go to the funeral. Trevor’s whole family would be there, and it would give Claire a chance to meet his relations.

  Trevor couldn’t see what the big deal was. But why would he? He already had a family.

  I don’t.

  Not a real family, anyway. Claire wanted to know what Trevor’s family was like. Maybe they would accept her as one of their own.

  She had persuaded Trevor to let her go with him to the funeral service by appealing to his sense of adventure. School finals were over. They’d both finished yesterday. Next week was graduation. His uncle’s death had cast a cloud over Trevor’s spirits, but together they could turn his sad obligation into a fun road trip, and once the funeral was over they could spend the rest of the Memorial Day weekend hiking in the mountains.

  Things hadn’t started out well this morning, with the Hummer breaking down thirty miles outside of Palmdale. No one could get a cell phone signal. A road sign had promised a gas station up ahead, and Trevor had insisted on going forward—always the optimist—though his mood now had a harder edge. This morning he had teased Claire because she didn’t know how to drive.

  A side stitch stabbed her.

  Claire stopped walking and let the others push for a while. She bent over and took a few deep breaths. The pain subsided. She felt out of shape, out of her element, and out of her mind.

  She wiped sweat from her forehead. Standing in the middle of the road, Claire regained her bearings. She could see for miles in all directions. Here the Mojave desert was vast and desolate and oddly beautiful. Joshua trees and sagebrush filled the open plain, surrounded by rolling foothills and white-capped mountains. The highway was a straight shot through the desert, but she could see where it started to twist and curve as it negotiated the distant hills.

  Despite the holiday weekend, here were no other cars on the road. She found that disconcerting.

  Claire watched the others push the Hummer. They were all sweaty and tired. Trevor leaned hard into the open doorframe on the driver’s side, keeping one hand on the steering wheel. He was the strongest of them, and did most of the work.

  His car, his responsibility, she thought.

  If Trevor had taken the Hummer into the shop for a check-up before the trip—like she told him to—they wouldn’t be in this mess.

  Damnit, Trevor—

  They were supposed to be in Cedarview tonight, in time for the funeral service tomorrow morning. The plan was to check in at the lodge by four o’clock, take a quick sunset hike along the mountain crest, and have a nice steak dinner at the restaurant on the summit.

  We’re not going to make it.

  They had no choice now but to press on.

  Ethan pushed half-heartedly. He didn’t seem to care. All he cared about was his music, whatever he was listening to on his iPod. Ethan was a good guitarist, but a bad traveler. He’d been grumpy even before the breakdown. He was only here because he was dating Trevor’s younger sister, Dakota.

  Dakota walked beside Ethan, pushing with one hand while playing Angry Birds on her Android with the other. She seemed bored by the road trip, and reluctant to chip in when things went bad.

  Only Trevor pushed on the Hummer with any real force. The others had basically given up.

  So have I, Claire admitted to herself.

  Trevor glanced back. “Come on, Claire! Help out, will you?”

  She caught up with the others, put her hands on the back corner of the Hummer, and gave it her best.

  They rolled the car slowly past a road sign. It was an official warning from the California Highway Patrol’s Safety Task Force: “Stay Alert, Stay Alive!”

  Claire noticed something else. Chained to the bottom of the signpost was a bicycle painted all white.

  “Weird,” Dakota said.

  Claire had read about these on the Internet. “Ghost bike.”

  Hanging from the handlebars of the white bicycle was a handwritten sign in large block letters. It faced out toward the road for passing motorists to read: A CYCLIST WAS STRUCK HERE. Flowers decorated the memorial. Stuck in the rear spokes was the faded photo of a red-headed teenage boy in a bicycle helmet.

  Dakota said, “He must have died right here.”

  Claire nodded. “This is where it starts.”

  “Where what starts?”

  “Blood Alley.”

  11

  The roadside memorial puzzled Claire.

  What’s the point?

  The ghost bicycle would rust, the pictures would fade, the flowers would die and blow away to nothing. Passing strangers in cars and trucks would look, shrug, and continue on.

  But one thing was clear—the bicyclist killed on this highway had a family that loved him. No doubt his mother or father had built the memorial. Here, days or weeks ago, his girlfriend stood weeping. Here a priest or a rabbi left a prayer on the wind. Here his classmates bowed their heads in silence. That moment had passed, those footprints were gone, but the memories would forever haunt this place.

  That, of course, was the point. No death should go unmarked, no life unmourned.

  Who will mourn for me? Claire wondered.

  She did not know her real parents. She had only a few clues about who they might have been. She didn’t even know if they were alive or dead, but it comforted Claire to imagine her parents sleeping in their graves, with pretty little tombstones side by side in the smooth, green grass. The quiet image carried a kind of justice, absolving them of the crime of abandoning their daughter.

  That sense of abandonment still lived inside her.

  Claire had always felt alone in the world, an outsider. She liked to think of this as her unique strength, this ability to survive in an uncaring world, without the love and protection most kids took for granted.

  Her foster families had all been fakes. Flim-fams, she called them, making a joke of her private little horror. Life, after all, had played a joke on her: abandoned, fostered, abandoned again.

  Rinse, repeat.

  It toughened her on the outside, made her cold and cruel when she didn�
�t mean to be, but on the inside she felt everything, and treasured her wounds. The world had rejected Claire at birth, so she rejected it. Her families were never her real family. Her friends were never her real friends. She didn’t trust the girls who tried to befriend her—and trusted boys even less.

  When Claire was younger, boys didn’t matter. But now that she had a cover-girl face and boobs you could see across a football field, boys were a problem. Though she welcomed the confirmation that her mother had been beautiful, Claire’s physical allurements threatened to tear down the wall she’d so carefully built around her.

  Boys stared at her. They even asked her out. But she never wanted to go to the party, or the movie, or bowling, or burgers, or drives, or any of it. She just wanted to be left alone. And they wouldn’t let her. It didn’t matter how much she shook her head and walked away. The boys would follow her. It didn’t matter how simply she dressed, or how plainly she did her hair. Some of those boys just didn’t give up, and she felt powerless to stop them. She didn’t mind the teasing so much. It was the hunger in their eyes that frightened her.

  To protect herself, she pursued Trevor.

  He had scarcely paid her any attention. As captain of the varsity swim team and the cutest boy on campus, Trevor had all the girls he could handle. But once she and Trevor got to talking and spending time together, he liked her well enough to ask her to go with him to see the meteor shower. They’d driven out to the desert, just the two of them, with beers and a blanket, and watched falling stars all night.

  Well, not all night.

  Trevor had kissed her, and she kissed him back. He unbuttoned her shirt, and she helped him with the rest. He covered her with his naked warmth, and when he entered her she welcomed him, and told him she liked it. And it wasn’t exactly a lie. She liked it more and more each time, and soon they were a public couple. The boys stopped staring at her—and the girls started. Claire didn’t mind that so much, those jealous glances. No one could threaten her now. That was the thing she liked most about Trevor. He kept the other boys away. She was Trevor’s girl, and no one messed with Trevor’s girl.

  With Trevor, she could finally relax, and be herself.

  Whoever that is.

  She didn’t know the answer. Maybe there wasn’t an answer. She supposed a lot of people felt like that, like outsiders, strangers to themselves, but Claire was an orphan and felt it to her core. She was making a conscious effort to change, to let herself be vulnerable, to open herself up to experiencing…what?

  Love?

  She didn’t know what that meant. The flim-fams said they loved her, but it wasn’t real, wasn’t true, wasn’t fair. Love was a game they played to control her.

  Claire had run away from her current foster family. The Powells. It wasn’t something she had planned, not really, but when the moment came she grabbed it like a brass ring.

  The Powell family reunion had been a large affair, full of cousins and conversation, mothers and memories. The morning of the reunion had been awkward, the afternoon unbearable. Claire excused herself at lunch and walked away. No one followed her out. No one even noticed. She called a cab and found a hotel. She had saved up some money from working at the restaurant, and had used it then to buy her freedom. It took eighteen hours before the first voicemail and text messages reached her.

  She deleted them unheard, unread.

  Finally Trevor came for her. He stayed with Claire three nights in that cheap hotel. Now she was never going back. Graduation was next week, UCLA was next year, and the summer was hers to do with as she pleased. The rent-a-folks wanted her to come home—for their own peace of mind, if nothing else—but their home wasn’t her home. The Powells didn’t love her like a real family. She wasn’t one of their own.

  She belonged to no one but herself—

  A voice broke her thoughts. Trevor said, “Take the wheel.”

  He sounded weary, pushing on the open door frame. She could see the tightness in his muscles, the exhaustion in his eyes.

  The sun was higher now. She was losing track of the hours. This desert made a mirage of time.

  Trevor glanced back. “Claire! Take the wheel!”

  That startled her. “Me?”

  “Yes, you! Now!”

  “Trevor, you know I—”

  He came back, took her by the elbow, and guided her to the open door. “Just steer it to the garage.”

  “But—”

  “Claire!”

  Reluctantly she climbed into the driver’s seat. The leather seat was hot and sticky. The cab was warm, her clothes were damp. Beads of sweat formed like goose bumps on her skin. When she touched the black steering wheel it burned her fingers. Her hand recoiled.

  Trevor closed the door, then went behind the car for the final push.

  The vehicle rolled slowly.

  He knows I can’t drive.

  Mr. Powell, her foster father, had offered to teach her, but she didn’t like being in the car alone with him. Mr. Powell was always telling her what to do—Do this! Do that! Behave yourself! Instead, she wanted to learn things on her own, to live or die by her own mistakes.

  Claire had planned to take lessons from a real driving teacher. Some day. She never got around to it. She didn’t have her own car, and besides, Trevor always drove her places, so what was the point?

  I should have taken drivers ed.

  Of course, she knew what you were supposed to do with the pedals and the gears and the steering wheel. She had watched lots of people drive. She had even played some of Trevor’s video games where you raced against another player. But it felt different actually sitting in the driver’s seat.

  What the hell am I doing here?

  “Just steer it to the garage,” Trevor had said.

  Simple enough. So simple, even she could do it. Trevor trusted her with the wheel, and his trust meant everything. She wasn’t about to let him down.

  Nervous, Claire put her hands back on the hot steering wheel.

  Ouch.

  But the heat was bearable. Her first reaction had been more shock than pain.

  Just steer it to the garage.

  She saw the gas station up ahead. It had a garage. That’s where they were going. To find a mechanic.

  Then everything will be okay.

  There was a cement curb and a shallow ramp descending to the level of the gas station. The pavement dipped towards the gas pumps, which were next to the garage.

  All Claire had to do was make an easy right turn into the station, where they would find a mechanic and get the car fixed, then they’d be back on the road and in Cedarview by sunset.

  Okay, she told herself, you can do this. Just turn the wheel in the direction you want to go.

  To test the wheel, Claire turned it to the right, towards the gas station ramp. The turn didn’t feel like what she’d imagined. Much more resistance than Trevor’s Xbox steering wheel.

  This is supposed to be easy—

  Trevor screamed, “Not yet!”

  She jerked the steering wheel back the other way. But now she was too close to the curb. She could feel it rubbing up against the side of the tires.

  “Straighten out!” Trevor yelled.

  She turned the steering wheel hard to the left.

  The Hummer drifted toward the yellow median line, then crossed it.

  Too far, she thought, then corrected back the other way, trying to keep the wheels in the lane.

  Trevor pushed hard on the rear of his Hummer H3.

  He barked to the others, “Push, damnit. Push!”

  The metal was hot. His muscles were sore. The sweat kept dripping into his eyes. He tasted salt on his lips, felt his muscles bunch and tense.

  Trevor was nearly spent, and the others were useless. Ethan and Dakota were just going through the motions, letting the all-star do the real work.

  It was starting to piss him off.

  “Push!” he screamed, more at Ethan now than Dakota.

  His little siste
r was a waste of oxygen.

  She gave him a look like it was all his fault, and tucked her cell phone in her jeans pocket. Ethan put his meager strength to the task. Dakota added a token effort.

  It wasn’t much, but it helped. The Hummer picked up speed. They were going to make it.

  Almost there. Almost there.

  “Now!” Trevor yelled to Claire. “Turn the wheel now!”

  “Okay,” she said, sounding nervous.

  He saw the front left tire turn slowly to the right, and for a moment Trevor felt a surge of pride. He knew Claire was scared of driving, and the video games hadn’t helped much, but he also knew she could do whatever she set her mind to. Claire was a smart girl, but easily intimidated.

  This was a big moment for her.

  Claire’s first foster parents had died in a car accident when she was six. He knew the memory of that collision still haunted Claire, held her back. Trevor had always encouraged her to practice driving. She refused. Now here she was, behind the wheel of his beefy H3, taking the wheel in her own hands.

  And she had Trevor to thank for it.

  After his car was fixed, he might even let her drive on the—

  He felt a hard jolt.

  The right front tire was on the ramp, but left front tire had struck the curb. It rode up, almost got over the curb, then fell back into the gutter.

  The car was stuck.

  Shit.

  He’d given her a perfect chance, he’d put his faith and trust in her—and she blew it.

  Typical.

  “Claire!” he screamed.

  She poked her head out the window and turned back to him with a guilty look.

  “Sorry.”

  Joshua was behind schedule and low on gas. His back ached and his joints were stiff. As his big rig rolled down the desert highway—approaching Blood Alley—he could feel the old pain return to his left knee. It always acted up on this stretch of the road. Blood Alley brought memories, and memories brought pain.

  Ten years ago, Joshua had almost died here.