by Meg Watson
“Excuse me?”
“Get down!” I tell her, and I hope she's going to just fucking do it, because the next thing I know I've got the kid in my arms and I'm yanking him off the barstool. He barely puts up a fight, just tucks his head under my arms as we both slide to the ground.
And everything is yellow. Or orange. Some kind of colorless bright blast as the diner fills with noise. The entire row of windows overlooking the parking lot shatters, goes white and falls inward like water, like it was meant to do that.
The kid is caged underneath me, so small there is room for Charli. Somehow as I fell I must have gotten her under my arm too, because now she's looking up at me, blinking fast. Her lips are parted and her breath is coming out in short, animal gusts.
“You're okay, you're okay,” I say to her, confused and pissed and ready to go.
She nods mutely, her fingers sliding along the floor to find Gus's. But I've already got him under my arm. He's tucked under me like a football and we’re outta here.
“The fuck you doing?” she says, her eyes nearly white with panic.
“I'm saving your kid,” I inform her as I swing toward the back of the restaurant and the back door, though my legs are wobbly and threatening to buckle. “You coming?”
Her mouth opens and for a second she looks so helpless, so frail that I want to pick her up too. But just as I’m about to reach out to her, she gets to her feet and nods quickly, mumbling to herself and holding the backs of the diner chairs for support.
“Don't look,” I warned her. There's an almost magical tunnel-like path to the back door, but there are also bodies and blood on either side of us. Glass, shattered into dust covers everything in a thick layer of white powder that reminds me stupidly of pancake mix.
“Oh,” I hear her moan and see her jaw tip toward the old grandma waitress. She is leaned backward over the stainless steel counter, one arm thrown up to shield her face. Pointlessly, it seems.
“I said, don't look!” I bark at her, maybe harder than I meant to but it seems to be working. Her feet shuffle forward through the debris, her hands flung out in front of her like a blind person.
I know she's going as fast as she can, but it doesn't really seem fast enough. When we lurch through the back door and out into the lot, Nico is standing next to the Mustang. He shoots me an angry grimace and flings himself behind the wheel.
I hate when he drives my car, but this time it seems all right. The engine roars to life as Charli slides into the back seat. I run around the other side and deposit Gus into the other seat and then climb through the passenger side.
“Front lots, hurry,” I command Nico.
I see his jaw flex for a second, but he nods curtly and hits the gas. We swing a wide loop around the side of the building, and I gesture toward the Hummer. Nico slows down just enough for me to punch open the door and roll out into the gravel.
“What are you doing? What is he doing?” I hear her yammering from the back seat.
But he doesn't even answer her, to his credit. We don’t have time for this bullshit. I crouch behind the Hummer and then slide my knife out of my pocket, jamming it into the back tire and wrenching it diagonally, then the front tire. Air starts running out of the tires in an audible hiss that makes the group of guys turn around and glare at me in surprise.
Two of the thugs break off from the group and start after me but I'm already over by the El Camino, with just enough time to fuck up the back tire and sprint back toward Nico in the Mustang.
Jesus, these guys are terrible shots. I hear the bullets whizzing past my open window but nobody even manages to take out the back windshield. Amateurs.
“Those guys weren’t Family,” I mutter to myself, but I see Nico nodding out of the corner of my eye. He knows it too. Whoever these guys are, they're not connected. Nobody with that kind of piss-poor aim would get a contract. They must be local. Who the fuck hired them?
Or maybe they weren’t even for us?
No, that doesn’t make any sense. The simplest answer is usually the right one.
I twist in my seat to see Charli in the well behind the seat with Gus folded in her arms. That's a good girl. If she could just do that one part, we might actually have a chance to save their asses.
Definitely not what I thought I was going to be doing with my weekend.
“Coastal Carolina?” Nico mutters as he hits the gas and heads north on 55.
I shake my head. I shake my head again. Then, what the fuck? I can't even think. I need a plan, a better plan.
“Turn around.”
“Where are we going?” Charli demands from the back seat. I swear to God. I don't want to hear her fucking voice. If she didn't have a kid in her lap…
“What are you talking about? The airport? You want to take a different route?”
“No,” I say and my voice sounds soft. Too soft. “No, turn the car around. Head south to the 1005 and then Arapahoe North. Atlanta… yeah. Head that way but not the interstate. Low profile.”
Nico sucks his teeth and knuckles his forehead. I guess I just fucked up his weekend too.
“Jesus, that’s going to take forever. I could get us to Atlanta in like six hours if we really—”
“ — just do it.”
“NO!” Charli bellows.
I hear her climb into the back seat and move Gus to the other side. Then she slides up real close behind me, so close I can feel her breath on the back of my neck.
“Turn around!” she hisses.
I just raise a hand. I do not need this crap. I need to think.
“Turn this piece of shit car around right now!”
I take the bait. “This car is a classic. Please keep your arms and legs inside the vehicle and enjoy the ride.”
“NOW!”
I imagine the ocean. Waves. Calming breezes. I take a deep breath.
“No.”
I feel her fingers snaking against the back of my collar. What, she’s going to strangle me? Not fucking likely.
“I need my things,” she explains in a strained voice, “so we have. To. Go. Back.”
“I need to save your lives,” I reply, “so we are. Not. Going—”
“I’ve got your stuff in the trunk,” Nico nods.
“You what??” Charli and I say at the same time.
He doesn’t even turn around. “I figured you’d need it, so I got it.”
“You went in my room??”
“I told you that we were not driving them,” I remind him, trying in vain to remember what the hell the ocean looks like. Calming waves, help me now!
He doesn’t say anything for a few long seconds, then wrenches the wheel for a hard left down a county road that heads more or less southwest.
“Looks like our plans have changed.”
“I thought you said we were going to the airport!” she insists again.
Nico white-knuckles the wheel. He sounds calm but I can almost feel the buzz in his head. He can’t be enjoying this any more than I am, but it looks like this was half his plan anyway. I can’t believe he put her bags in the trunk.
“Hello?” Charli says, her voice rising. I can absolutely see the look she's giving me without even turning around. Green eyes flashing, her cheeks reddening, her upper lip set in a hard line. There is no way I’m going to turn around and look at her right now.
“What does this get, like twelve miles to the gallon?” Nico scoffs. “A road trip is not really a smart choice here. It's got to be a hundred miles between gas stations.”
“I'll find something else.”
He pushes his hand through his hair pointlessly, since it falls right back into the exact same shape when he is done.
“I got this,” I growl.
I just shake my head and stare hard out the front window while he drives. Everything is rushing by too fast to make sense. I need to take some deep breaths, but I can’t help looking around, looking for the next thing that is about to go wrong.
The town of
Oriental just kind of whizzes by us in a flash of pastel colors. Somehow there's nobody on the street to see us. Somehow there are no groups a little ladies taking walks with their tiny, annoying dogs. Must be some kind of lucky witching hour between when all the Family guys get their asses to the Marina, and all the retirees take time for an after lunch stroll.
Finally. Something is working out okay. Nico's going too fast but I don't care. I’ll feel better when we get a few more miles between us and the diner.
“Exactly what is your plan? You want to tell me what the fuck is going on here?”
Finally I twist around in my seat.
“Why don’t you watch your mouth? I never figured you for mom of the year, but you could at least keep it down in front of the kid.”
Her upper lip retracts in the snarl and her eyes flash at me dangerously.
“You dare tell me how to talk in front of my…”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah… You just save it, Charli. You're in our care now, for as long as this has got to last. You and the kid. There's nothing that you need to say to me, so just keep your lips closed.”
“Who the hell do you think you —”
“Language!” I remind her in a bark. That's actually kind of fun, to tell you the truth. She clutches the kid closer to her chest. His eyes are closed and his fingers work against the toy. I'm upsetting him.
I want to stop talking now. Really, I do.
“Listen, Charli… Gus… It's all be fine.” I say in a softer tone. I mean, I understand she's upset. I understand why he's upset. We’re all upset. I just want this to go smoothly from here on out, as quickly as possible.
“Yeah, I've heard that story before,” she reminds me, squinting.
“And that’s the last time you have to hear it, trust me,” I shoot back.
“Guys, quit it,” Nico sighs. “Charli, did you have a particular place that you wanted to go? Because if not? It’s probably best to just do as Tek says.”
She shakes her head tightly and stares out the window, breathing through flared nostrils. I can tell she’s deeply shaken, but I have no idea how to help her right now. All I can think of is escape routes, one after the other. They flip through my mind’s eye like pictures on note cards.
“If I knew where I wanted to go, I certainly wouldn’t have ended up here,” she mutters sullenly. “I’m just following protocol. And it’s just like you guys, always telling me what to do. Like I have no say in anybody's future."
She slides closer to Gus, who is acting like nothing is happening. Guilt wrenches through my belly. What are we doing? Why are we arguing in front of a little kid, no less? God, we’ve all got enough problems without making it worse for this little guy.
Her fingers reach up and push through the back of his hair, circling around a cowlick there, over and over. They both sway slightly as Nico swerves to avoid a family of possum crossing the country road.
I remember her fingers, how she likes to fidget. Always busy, always drumming or twisting whatever gets within her grasp. She likes to hold hands like a teenager. She likes to…
Fuck that, fuck me. I am not thinking about Charli.
DAY 5 - NICO
Everybody is still asleep. Charli and Gus are in the bed closest to the window, while Tek sleeps curled up in a ball, facing the opposite way in the other bed. Finally I have got a little peace and quiet to organize my thoughts.
We found this crappy little hotel late last night. Charli and Gus spent most of the trip from Oriental saying nothing, and Tek spent all of the trip saying nothing. Twelve hours of silence except for the sound of locusts coming from the ditches on the sides of the red clay farm roads. A couple of pitstops, a couple of fast food runs, all in silence. Once in awhile I heard Charli murmur something to Gus and maybe Gus murmur something back, but I could not make out the words.
Tek didn't say a damn thing. He sat there with his hands in fists the entire time, taut as a wire ready to snap. He was figuring something out, some puzzle.
Fine by me. I was sick of the bickering anyway.
He made me drive through countless back roads down the coast and then west toward Atlanta. There was never any sign that anybody was behind us, but he wouldn’t let me get on the interstate. So we just silently rolled through miles and miles of tobacco farms, tiny towns, and stretches of pine woods.
I could see Tek wince every time he heard a chunk of rock or something bang against the undercarriage of the Mustang, but that was his choice. After the first three or four hours I thought it was pretty clear that whoever those guys at the diner were, they were not coming after us. We went for long stretches without seeing another human, at all.
But Tek was not budging. I mean I can understand it. He’d never admit to being rattled, but a rocket launcher? Somebody is not messing around. They’re making a very noisy effort to see Charli ended.
Farm roads, county roads, anything without a lot of streetlights or on-ramps. Essentially we went parallel to the interstate, but with a lot of meandering and slow-as-fuck speed limits that Tek insisted I obey.
So that careful route got us close to Atlanta, but not until about two in the morning. By that time Charli and Gus were curled together on the back seat like a couple of nesting dolls.
When I finally found this motel near a minigolf place and a “Boiled P-Nuts” shack I initially passed by it, then pulled a swift U-turn. I could see Tek nod his agreement out of the corner of my eye. I didn't have to ask him what he really thought.
After I rang the bell a couple of times, a scrawny old man shuffled out of the back room. He yawned and stretched and scratched himself through his plaid pajama top, unbuttoned to the navel. Somehow he only had one double room available, though I hadn't seen any other cars in the parking lot. Weird. Whatever, we all needed to sleep.
Except me, I guess. I stared at the ceiling for a few hours, trying not to make any noise, listening to everybody breathing. But I was all buzzing. Couldn't sleep at all. Eventually I gave up and took to this chair. It’s not the first time I have watched Charli and Tek sleep.
I hear Charli's breathing change and she rolls over onto her back. In about twenty seconds she pushes herself up on her elbows and looks right at me, blinking as though fully awake.
She slides to the end of the bed and pulls the elastic out of her hair, setting it loose again. Without looking at me she pads to the small, dingy bathroom and flips on the fluorescent light. I hear her brushing her teeth and washing her face or whatever.
As soon as she's done, Gus is awake too, just like her. He pushes himself up on his elbows and then sits, looking around the room with a sort of curious but unafraid expression. His eyes meet mine for just a beat or two before he twists all the way around to check out the large print of a landscape painting hung on the wall behind him. It looks like he's cataloguing everything in the room, making a mental list.
When Charli comes out of the bathroom, Gus goes in. She drops at the waist to plant a kiss on his forehead and closes the door behind him. Then she goes back to her bed and sits on the corner, folding one ankle under the opposite knee and looking at me plainly.
“What do you want to know?” she asks me simply.
I raise my hands up, open like I'm holding some invisible parcel. But there's nothing there and I let them fall to my lap.
“You know what, Charli, it really doesn't matter. You don't owe either of us an explanation,” I say. I can hear the fatigue in my voice. I have just spent the last 24 hours straight worrying about her, her kid, and the ticking sound Tek is making as he prepares to explode.
“Yeah, right” she sighs. “Just doing your job, huh?”
I sit back in the rickety wooden chair and rub my eyes with the heels of my hands.
“Yeah.”
Folding her arms across her chest, I see her chewing on her lower lip just like the old days. When Charli gets lost in thought she has these habits, things I don't even think she knows she's doing. Chewing her lip, pinching a little roll o
f fabric on her clothes, blowing her bangs away from her eyes. It's like a set of clues to what she's thinking when she retreats inside of herself. I used to know this language like the back of my hand…
But I don’t want to think about that. I shove all that right out of my mind. All we have to do is get her to Atlanta, and then get back to Oriental.
The bathroom door opens and Gus comes out. His hair is wet and stuck to his head, his cheeks red from scrubbing. I can't help but be impressed. This little kid has made it through three states, not to mention a ship yard explosion and a grenade through the window of a diner without freaking out.
He's pretty amazing. He'd make a good soldier.
Gus climbs on the bed behind his mom, throwing his arms around her neck and giving her a good squeeze. But he doesn't say anything. What kind of kid does that? Just calm and in control himself like that? I'm not entirely sure if I should be impressed or terrified.
Charli catches me staring at him and clearly she does not like this. She stands up and pats at the back of his hand.
“Gussie, can you stay here with uncle Tek? And be very quiet while he sleeps? Uncle Nico and I need to take a quick walk.”
He narrows his eyes at her. “Is he really my uncle?” he says slowly.
She sighs. “No, he's not really your uncle. But it's also not polite to just call grown-ups by their first names. So we’re just going to call him uncle, okay? You could play with your game if you keep the volume down.”
“Okay.”
She jerks her chin at me and heads for the door. I follow her automatically, closing the door behind us after checking to see that Tek is still asleep. Or, he's not moving anyway.
“You think he’s gonna be okay in there? Alone like that?” I ask nervously.
She takes a couple of steps into the parking lot and then whirls around, jabbing her index finger my direction.
“Let's just get one thing straight right now. I don't accept parenting advice from anybody, least of all from a couple of bachelor Family guys, got it? You leave Gus to me. He's not your job. He's not your responsibility. He's mine, and what I say goes. You got that?”