Joe drove to the end of the road. He pulled the car to a stop at the far side of a small cul-de-sac. He looked around. The road was deserted. There were only a few houses on it. There were no people on the sidewalks or out on their lawns. It didn’t matter if people were walking about. What he was doing was right. Anyone who asked would understand. He was saving his mother.
Charlie remained still, slumped over in his seat. The woman continued screaming or singing, whatever. Reaching for her, he felt nothing as she swung her fists wildly at him, landing blow after blow. In fact she had cut the skin of his arm with her nails, but he didn’t notice until he looked down and saw blood. No matter. The cuts didn’t hurt at all.
Joe asked his friend what he should do with them. He wasn’t sure his friend could even hear him. He was glad he could.
“Put them in the trunk,” InVision said.
Chapter 62
Charlie came to in total darkness. His memories were a jumbled collection of disjointed images. He could recall some of what had transpired, but they were isolated experiences and all out of sequence. The sensation of darkness was not yet terrifying. It was merely unnerving. There was no reason at that moment to feel fear. Charlie roused with a logy awakening, like a bear emerging from deep winter hibernation. It was that slow reconnection of his nerves to his brain that helped suppress the panic he should have been feeling.
Charlie felt off balance and knew that he was lying down. He just didn’t know where. He tried to lift himself up. His head cracked hard against something metallic. A bolt of pain followed. It was a staggering blow that left him dazed. In its wake, the blow produced a stinging ache that pulsed in powerful waves and seemed to linger forever. Worse, the echo made by the impact didn’t travel far. Wherever he was, Charlie thought, the space was frighteningly small.
Both for good and for bad, the pain of smashing his head accelerated the return of his memory. His thoughts, though still scattered, were at least now in sequence.
Joe, he first recalled. Joe was driving. The InVision system. Music. No, jazz music came from it. I heard a voice. There were lights. Blinding strobes. The voice issued commands. It was a warning about me. No, it was about us….
As quickly as those thoughts came, they began to trail off. Panic started to set in. He knew where he was now. Charlie’s ears perked up and caught the sound of wheels revolving fast along the ground. He could feel a steady side-to-side rocking that suggested movement at a significant velocity.
Then something brushed against his leg. Whatever it was, it wasn’t inanimate. The object touched him again, this time purposefully. It suggested a certain sense of urgency, as if it were pleading for him to do something.
My God, Charlie thought. It’s Rachel.
Charlie’s hands were not bound. He could move them, but not much, given the cramped quarters inside the Camry’s trunk. Rachel must be pressed up against him. In the total darkness it was hard to tell, but his eyes were starting to adjust to the little light there was. He could now make out the silhouette of her body. They were lying sideways in the Camry’s trunk. She was closest to the backseat. Her feet were at his head.
“Rachel? Rachel? Can you hear me?” Charlie asked.
He heard only a muffled cry.
Had Joe gagged her? he wondered.
“Are you hurt? Can you press into my body one time if you’re okay, twice if you’re injured?” Charlie asked.
Rachel pushed against him with her legs and torso. She did it once, not more.
“Thank God,” Charlie said. “I’m going to get us out of here. Hang in there, Rachel. I’ll get us out of this.”
Again he felt her body press into his. He knew this meant that she believed him. He also knew that the consequence of failure would be death.
“Joe! Joe, it’s Charlie,” he called out. “Can you hear me?”
Charlie concentrated. At first he heard nothing. Then he heard music. It was the distinct first few notes of Miles Davis’s horn announcing the melody to follow. The song must be on loop, Charlie thought. The first blue notes from Miles’s trumpet wailed from the car speakers. The steady roll of the snare drum and the rhythmic accents from the piano set the trumpet off, then blanketed it. The lonesome wail of Miles’s trumpet faded and was replaced with the desperate, almost frenetic melody from a saxophone—Coltrane’s sax. The song “So What,” as it had years ago, had put Joe under its spell again.
So what if my brother kills me? Charlie thought. So what if I die in the trunk of a car?
Charlie called to his brother again. This time he didn’t hold back.
“Joe! You listen to me now!” Charlie slammed his hand against the metal roof of the trunk. He felt Rachel jump. “Joe? Are you listening to me?”
Whenever Joe had a seizure, his trancelike state allowed for certain people, those he trusted, it seemed, to command him. He would follow their instructions to the letter. Stand up. Sit down. Come to dinner. But while he was seizing, Joe had no memory of any action he did. Charlie had witnessed the phenomenon himself on many occasions, but nobody had realized it was even happening until after Joe’s diagnosis. They had explained away Joe’s robotic behavior as him being lost in thought.
Charlie recalled something about Joe’s fight with the bully. The prefight crowd circled around the combatants had caught the attention of their mother. She had raced outside to stop them but had arrived too late. If she hadn’t commanded Joe to stop fighting, it was doubtful he would have. Charlie prayed he wielded the same authority she once did.
As Charlie shouted at Joe, the music only grew louder.
Is Joe turning up the volume to drown me out? Charlie wondered. Or is somebody else doing it?
In the dark Charlie felt Rachel’s fingers scratching against the side of his leg. She was gagged, Charlie thought, but perhaps her hands weren’t bound. Then he felt her fingers reaching in the dark for his hand. When she found it, she parted his fingers and slipped her hand into his. She squeezed his hand, and he did the same. Then he felt her thumb caress the side of his hand. In that moment he believed he could feel her fear.
With his free hand, Charlie again banged loudly on the inside top of the trunk. He was desperate to get Joe’s attention. Maybe even the attention of a pedestrian or another motorist, he hoped.
“Joe, you have to let us out of here right now,” Charlie said. “We are both in very serious trouble. You don’t want to hurt us, Joe. We are not the enemy.”
Joe didn’t respond. InVision did.
“Continue straight along Worchester Street. Then bear right onto Route one-ten, Sterling Street.”
Charlie tried to guess their location using what little information he had. It was no use. The streets and route were unfamiliar to him. They could be anywhere. He had no idea how long they’d been in the trunk.
“Joe!” Charlie shouted. “Don’t listen to what that thing is saying. Stop the car right now!”
The car did not stop. Instead, Charlie felt it accelerate.
“Continue building speed,” InVision commanded. “Then continue straight on Sterling Street in one hundred yards.”
“For God’s sake, Joe, you have to stop this car now!” Charlie cried out.
Rachel in turn clutched his hand even tighter.
“Please, Joe … Please stop….” Charlie’s voice this time was barely a whisper.
The song “So What” had finished and began to play again. The commands from InVision boomed out from the speakers loud enough to rise above the blaring music. Charlie assumed the strobe lights continued to pulse in their steady intervals. Between the music and strobe lights, InVision was keeping his brother’s seizure in full effect.
But who was controlling InVision? Charlie wondered.
“Prepare to enter bridge in two hundred yards,” InVision said. “Continue to accelerate. Increase speed to seventy miles per hour.”
Why go so fast? Charlie wondered.
He felt the car lurch forward. The kick of accelerat
ion pushed him tighter against Rachel.
“Prepare to cross the bridge over the reservoir,” InVision said.
Reservoir? Charlie’s heart began to race wildly. He gripped Rachel’s hand, and she sensed his growing fear.
“Joe, stop! Stop the car!” he yelled.
“Prepare to drive the car off the bridge and into the reservoir in fifty yards,” the voice of InVision said calmly.
Charlie heard Rachel expel a gasp, muted by the gag still covering her mouth.
“Please, Joe! Please!” Charlie cried aloud.
“Prepare to drive off the bridge in ten yards,” said InVision.
“No!” Charlie shouted.
“Turn the car hard right. Keep accelerating. Turn now!” InVision commanded.
For a moment there was silence. No music. No commands issued from InVision. The car turned and then continued straight. Charlie’s body shifted forward as the Camry accelerated. The force of him pressing against Rachel must have been crushing. Instinct must have made Joe apply the brakes. From underneath he heard the screeching sound of tires, followed by the acrid smell of burnt rubber as it filled the trunk.
Next, there came a loud crash. It sounded to Charlie like metal on metal, followed by the twinkling chime of glass shattering. The force of the impact pushed Charlie violently forward. Rachel’s body absorbed the brunt of the blow. She cushioned his impact, but she paid the price. She let out a soft, muffled cry; he had hurt her.
For a moment Charlie felt weightless. Then his face slammed against the top of the trunk. Blood flowed freely from his nose and rolled in two warm streams across each cheek. At that instant the car listed forward and Charlie’s body pressed even harder against Rachel’s. He could hear air expelling from her lungs, the weight of his body magnified tenfold by the velocity of the free-falling car.
He felt a sickening drop in his stomach. It felt like a roller coaster’s first dip. The last sound he heard before he was once again knocked unconscious was a great big splash.
Chapter 63
The car seemed to float on the surface of the water. Charlie’s blackout lasted no more than a few seconds. For the moment, at least, they were horizontal. He was no longer crushing Rachel with the weight of his body. That reprieve, he knew, wouldn’t last long. The weight of the engine would drag the front of the Camry forward. It would sink the car from front to back. As it did, Charlie would once again be pinned against her. Neither of them would have much use of their limbs, making escape an impossibility.
As dreadful as the cramped, dark quarters were, it was nothing compared to the sucking sound of water, displaced by metal, rushing inside the car and beginning to fill the trunk. A strange calmness came over Charlie as he listened to water cascading into the car through vents and window seals. He thought about death. Would it be, he wondered, as dark as this trunk, but without any fear and pain? He had never given much thought to how he would die. Ironic that twice in one day it was all he thought about. Hours ago he had held a gun to his head, ready to pull the trigger.
Compared to drowning, shooting himself would have been a walk in the park. The pain from a single gunshot would probably have been too much for his mind even to have registered. But this death would be agonizingly slow. It would constrict his breath until it tricked his mind into thinking he could actually breathe water. It would be merciless.
The car shifted position, just as Charlie knew it would.
“Joe,” he heard himself say.
Water began seeping into the trunk through the wheel casings. It soaked his back and legs with a numbing cold. The sensation was jarring, but more than that, it was illuminating. It awoke something that was asleep inside him. Adrenaline began pumping through his veins. Its power heightened his senses. The sound of water was richer in his ears. The shape of Rachel’s body became more distinguishable in the darkness.
This was alertness unlike anything he had ever known. It was as though the world moved in slow motion, while his thoughts continued lightning fast. A singular, overpowering urge coursed through him like a current of high-voltage electricity. And it brought with it a voice from somewhere deep inside him. The voice was begging him to live. Joe drove an older model Camry, so there was no glow-in-the-dark trunk release that could free them.
“Rachel, listen to me,” Charlie said. “I need you to feel around. See if there is anything we could use to pry open this trunk. Can you do that?”
It was hard to be heard over the sloshing of water. The rear of the car lifted skyward as water weighed down the front. The water that had soaked the inside of the trunk was pulled forward by gravity and sloshed against the backseat, which walled off the trunk from the car’s cabin. The backsplash sprayed icy water into Charlie’s face. Joe may already be submerged, Charlie thought. He was probably already dead. Then the car listed left. It came back to center, only to angle right soon after. The Camry rocked from side to side as the water sought equilibrium.
The car again came back to center. All four wheels were level and below the water’s surface. Then, without warning, it tilted right again. The sudden movement took Charlie by surprise. He cracked his head against the inside wall of the trunk. His left hand instinctively reached for his head in response to the pain. It wasn’t easy given the limited space in which they had to move. His arm was pinned up against Rachel’s leg. He lifted his shoulder toward his ear to pull that arm free. Then he rested his hand against his chest and slowly brought it across his body to touch the lump on his head. He hadn’t realized until that moment that blood flow to his arm had been cut off. His hand tingled, his muscles reacting to a lack of oxygen in his blood. Charlie moved his hand away from his head and lowered it by Rachel’s feet. Stretching his fingers as far as he could, he slid them into the gap in the backseat and gripped tightly for leverage. Then he felt something. His fingers probed until at last they gripped what he believed to be a lever.
“Rachel!” Charlie shouted. “I think I’ve found a release. We can lower the backseat and then slide out.”
Rachel grunted and pressed her body against his. She was communicating with him. Charlie pulled at the lever and felt it give.
“Rachel,” he said, “slide your body onto mine. Use your feet to push against the seat. Can you do that?”
This time she didn’t bother to respond. Charlie felt her body weight shifting. Her head moved toward his feet; her legs toward the backseat, nearest his head. Her movement at first was deliberate but soon became more frantic and forced as she tried to work herself into position. It took almost a half a minute, but she was eventually able to push the seat forward with her feet.
“Amazing! You’re wonderful, Rachel.”
The water level in the backseat wasn’t high enough yet to prevent the seat from going down. If it was, it would have probably filled the trunk and killed them. But it didn’t mean the water level wasn’t rising.
“You have to slide out, Rachel. Can you do that?”
Again her body contorted and shifted as she made her move. The Camry pitched left. The angle change helped her pass through the opening. She already had her ankles out of the trunk and into the backseat. The shift helped to push the rest of her body through. Rachel’s head was still inside the trunk and rested on Charlie’s chest.
With his free hand, Charlie felt for the gag that covered her mouth. It was a bandanna. Joe had tied it too tight for her to have untied the knot herself, given her limited mobility. Charlie loosened the knot with his right hand and pushed the bandanna away from her mouth. Rachel exhaled loudly and then gasped for air.
“Hurry,” Charlie said. “We don’t have much time.”
“Then you better follow me,” Rachel said.
Chapter 64
Rachel managed to snake her body through the small aperture of the reclined trunk pass-through. Her wool pants were soaked through to the skin. Her legs and feet began to get numb from the cold. Water seeped inside the car through a small crack in the passenger-side window at an
alarming rate.
The view through the front windshield into the world outside made her wish, just for a moment, that she could return to the dark ignorance of the Camry’s trunk. The Camry itself was suspended at a thirty-five-, maybe forty-degree slant, with the front of the car pointing downward into the blackest water Rachel had ever seen. The view through the windshield reminded her of an Amazon exhibit she’d seen during a Walderman outing to the Franklin Park Zoo. The glass enclosure of the exhibit provided visitors with a simultaneous viewing of the tropical forest floor and life beneath the Amazon River water.
The waterline bisecting the front windshield of the Camry had a similar effect. It offered Rachel a glimpse of both the morning sunlight and the dim, murky waters that masked an unknown depth.
“I think I can get out the back door,” Rachel shouted. She turned her head so that Charlie could hear. He was still inside the trunk. “I think the car is elevated enough.”
Joe, if he was still conscious, didn’t even flinch at the sound of her voice. She could see him sitting in the driver’s seat. His seat belt was still fastened. Even though he’d been aggressive with her, she felt as though it wasn’t really Joe who had assaulted her, as if his mind were not his own. She hadn’t gone into that trunk easily by any means. She had punched and kicked him repeatedly. They’d been vicious blows, forceful enough, she believed, to have done some damage. She would have screamed for help had his first move not been to gag her. It was as if Joe had been completely detached from the man who’d attacked her. He had been a moving statue. He seemed that way now. Joe kept completely still, and his head stayed focused forward. Only the gentle rise and fall of his shoulders from his heavy breathing indicated any sign of life.
Rachel gripped the door handle and pushed hard. It wouldn’t budge. Part of the door, she now observed, was well below the water-line. Pressure from the volume of water pushing against it would make her effort no different than trying to open a door that was flush against a concrete wall.
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