Outskirts Duet 01 - The Outskirts

by TM Frazier

  I passed an exit ramp that looked as if it had been started but never finished. A few feet off the highway the broken pavement turned to dirt with tall weeds growing up through it. Bright yellow barricades, most of them heavily dented, blocked the way off the main road.

  Was that the exit?

  There was no sign, but I knew I had to be getting close.

  I also knew that I was kind of lost.

  The town of Outskirts was barely a dot on the old faded map from the glove compartment. It was located at the tip top of the Everglades and smack in the middle of the two Florida coastlines. I’d been driving for two days, but as my eyes grew heavy, my spirit grew with determination.

  I pressed on the gas pedal to increase my speed to something above grandma level, but nothing happened.

  The only other car on the highway zipped past me and it wasn’t because they were speeding, it was because I was slowing down.

  Way down.

  The sound of something exploding boomed from under the hood causing me to shriek in surprise. White smoke filled the night air like a mini mushroom cloud.

  “No! No! No!” I screamed to no-one as Rusty, who was aptly named, sputtered and coughed.

  The dashboard lights switched off all at once and Rusty the truck sadly and dramatically rolled to a stop in the middle of the deserted highway. “Not now. Please. I’ll do whatever you want. I’ll keep you in the shade. I’ll wash you every day. I’ll sing to you at night. Please just please don’t stop now.” I promised all of that plus anything else I could think of to keep him alive, but with one last final death rattle, both my heart and my gut sank along with any hope I had of spontaneous revival.

  Rusty was no more.

  I ground my teeth and pounded my fist on the steering wheel, hissing when the side of my hand vibrated with pain up to my elbow. “Ouch!” I screamed as if he’d actually hit me back.

  Hopping out into the road, I kicked the driver’s side door several times which it responded by partially falling from its hinges. Chips of faded paint and rust fell onto the cracked asphalt. With one last grunt of frustration, I turned around to face the dark empty highway. I dropped to the ground and leaned back against the worn front tire, dropping my head between my knees.

  “What the hell do I do now?” I muttered as a dark cloud rolled over the stars, turning the night from dim to black.

  “What about you Blue? Are you going to give up on me too?” I asked the camper that was hitched to Rusty.

  Blue’s metal siding was white on the top and bottom. A faded dove blue stripe ran down the center separating the white. It was thick and horizontal, the same width as the height of the single window.

  When I first saw it, I thought my mom had called her Blue because of the stripe. I was wrong. Inside, the walls, the little cabinets above the mattress, the tiny stove, and even the countertops and composting toilet were all baby blue. Even the torn linoleum covering the floors was white and blue checkered.

  Everything had started out so great. When I’d rescued Rusty and Blue from storage unit jail I found that it was fully equipped. Blankets, canned food, gallons of water in the storage area in the back that could only be opened from the outside. A full water tank for the mini-bathroom/shower area.

  There was a lot of planning and effort to get this ready for me, but for the life of me I still couldn’t figure out how Mom had managed to do it all on her own.

  Suddenly the pavement vibrated, warning of an oncoming vehicle. I stood and peered down the black highway in both directions.

  Nothing.

  However, the echo of an engine cut through the silence, the rumbling growing louder and louder, but still I couldn’t see anything.

  By the time the truck became visible it was too late.

  Chapter Six

  Sawyer

  The sound of screeching brakes filled the night air. The smell of burning rubber invaded my nostrils. Metal ground against metal as the older model SUV fishtailed across both lanes of the highway, crossing the median before finally turning sideways, and skating to a halt just a few feet from where I stood.

  “What the fuck?” A man’s voice grumbled, sounding every bit as confused as I felt.

  Headlights suddenly clicked on and so did another row of much brighter lights attached to a bar above his windshield, blinding me in bright white light.

  “So NOW you turn on your lights!” I yelled, covering my eyes.

  I stepped out of the light and when I could see again I saw a man shifting around in his seat. The truck was an older model Ford without doors or a roof and it was tall with big thick tires more than half the size of my body.

  It was then I smelled something familiar.

  Whiskey.

  I pushed down the fear making its way up my throat from my gut and squared my shoulders just in time for a massive shadow of a man to approach, his footsteps a series of slow heavy thuds against the broken road.

  “Why were you in the middle of the road?” A deep gravelly voice asked accusingly.

  When the man stepped into the light I half expected the devil himself to be the one emerging from the shadows, but that’s not who I was faced with.

  The man was at least a foot taller than my five feet three inches. He wore fitted black jeans low on the waist and a white undershirt stretched across his broad chest. It didn’t have sleeves either, revealing muscular biceps. The thin material also showcased rows of muscles on his torso that grew smaller as they trailed into the shape of a V disappearing into his jeans.

  My cheeks heated when I realized I’d been staring and I tore my gaze away from his body. He wore a black baseball cap that covered his eyes. A few days of growth covered his squared jaw.

  We stood there for a few moments. Not speaking. I cleared my throat. He looked from my camper to me like he was just realizing I was there. He looked me up and down slowly, and then folded his arms over his chest, flexing his biceps.

  “You all right?” he asked, impatiently.

  “Yes, I’m fine, but…”

  “Good,” he said, abruptly turning back around and getting back into his vehicle “Stay out of the road.”

  I stomped my foot on the ground. “Well, maybe you would have seen me if you weren’t driving with your headlights off!” I called back.

  The arrogance! He was the one who’d almost hit me!

  “You’re just going to leave me here?” I yelled after him as he shifted the truck in gear. He eased past me before crossing the median in an obvious illegal U-turn. His tires spun. Dirt and mud rose high up into the wheel wells before the truck kicked violently out onto the road.

  “You could have killed me!” I yelled out.

  “We all gotta go sometime,” he said, raising his voice over his engine. He turned up the volume on his radio. A man singing about a highway to hell screamed from the speakers. As he drove off, the music, the echoes of his big tires, and the beady red eyes of his taillights faded until they were long gone and once again it was just me and the highway.

  Without owning a phone, my only option was to wait for another passing car. I looked down the dark empty road in both directions.

  It was going to be a while.

  After what seemed like hours, a pair of headlights appeared in the distance. An almost tangible beam of bright light shining down the dark highway. Suddenly both the trees and pavement lit up in swirling blue and red.

  It was a massive truck.

  A massive police truck.

  Would Father have called the police?

  I was so green at doing something illegal that I didn’t even know whether I should’ve been nervous or not because I had no idea how the process of getting caught actually worked.

  “It seems you’ve gotten yourself into a pickle,” a feminine voice rang out. A tall policewoman with dark skin and soft natural curls framing her face came toward me holding a flashlight. She flipped it between me and the camper. Then me and the truck.

  Then just me.
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br />   “I broke down then almost got run off the road by a guy in a black Ford,” I said, trying to keep my tone as casual as possible even though my pulse was racing.

  “Was it a Bronco?” she asked, lowering her light.

  “It could have been.”

  By my guess, the officer wasn’t much older than I was although she was several inches taller than me.

  “Where did you come from?” she asked, eyeing my clothes and giving me a look that told me if I lied she’d be able to smell it in the air.

  I smoothed my hands down my long skirt. “Nowhere I want to go back to,” I said honestly.

  She gave me a curt nod.

  “Where on earth are you trying to go in this piece of shit?” she asked, tapping on Rusty’s bumper.

  I felt the need to defend him, after all, it wasn’t his fault he was locked away in storage for…however long he was there.

  “My mom has land…” I started, “I mean, I’ve got land around here.”

  She lifted her flashlight to the window of the camper and looked inside. “Whereabouts?”

  “That’s the thing, I’ve actually never been there and I think I’m a bit lost, I haven’t seen a single sign or marked exit but, I’m thinking I can’t be too far off.”

  “You got an address?” she asked, holstering her flashlight.

  I took out the folded piece of paper from my back pocket and handed it to her. She grabbed it with perfectly manicured fingernails sharpened into long white points.

  A big smile pulled at her face revealing a full mouth of perfectly white and straight teeth. “Come on, let’s get this one piece of shit unhitched from the other piece of shit and we’ll haul it to your land. I’ll come back and tow your truck back when my shift’s over.”

  “You don’t have to do all that. I can just call for a tow truck, if I can just use your phone,” I offered.

  She ignored me and started unhitching Blue from Rusty. “The nearest tow service is Albrahma County, at least an hour drive north. When they get a call for a tow you know what they do?” She didn’t wait for me to respond. “They call me. So why don’t we just save some time and let me do what I’m gonna wind up doing eventually anyway?”

  “Okay,” I agreed as if there was another option.

  She told me to get back in the truck and flip it into neutral. I did what she said and together we pushed it off the side of the road just enough so the tires were sitting on the grass without sending it careening into the steep ditch.

  She then draped a yellow neon tape around and over Rusty several times.

  “Crime scene?” I asked, reading the words.

  “You want anyone fucking with your truck?” she asked, resting her hands on her gun belt.

  I shook my head.

  “Well, then. For the time being. It’s a crime scene.” She winked. “You got a name or do I just call you lost girl?”

  “Sawyer,” I offered.

  “I’m Deputy Hugo, but the only people who call me that are…well, no one calls me that. You can just call me Josh.”

  “Josh?” I asked, curiously, following her to her truck. It took a moment to hike up my skirt and lift myself inside.

  “It’s short for Joshwanda,” she deadpanned, shutting her own door. “It’s tribal. From the motherland.”

  “That’s…unique.”

  Josh broke out in a smile and slapped herself on the knee. “I’m just kidding, but you should have seen your face. Motherland? Girl, I’m from Georgia, but Outskirts has been my home since before I hit puberty. My real name is Brittany, but back in high school, it was suggested by my friends that Brittany was too feminine for me so they started calling me Josh. It stuck. Now that’s what everyone calls me. Including my own parents.”

  Josh looked behind her seat and backed up the truck to my camper with expert precision. She waved me off when I tried to get out and help her hook it to the hitch and was back in less than two minutes.

  Josh pulled out onto the highway going the opposite direction of where I was heading. I glanced in the side mirror and hoped that Rusty would be okay out there all by himself for the night.

  “No worries. I’ll come back for him in a bit. Gary has a shop in town. He’ll come out and tell you what’s wrong with it.” She looked in her rearview. “Although that thing might need a bit of Jesus to get it running again.”

  “Or a whole lot of money,” I replied.

  “Yeah, that too,” she agreed. “So, what brings you to our neck of the woods? We don’t get too many newcomers in these parts.”

  “Honestly?” I laughed at the absurdity of my situation. “I’m not a hundred percent sure. I think I’m just going to figure things out as I go.”

  “What sort of things need figuring out?”

  I looked out the window up to the sky and the now bright full moon. “All of the things.”

  The ride became a comfortable silence as we turned off the highway onto a dirt road behind the ramp I’d seen earlier that had been barricaded off.

  “Thank you,” I said, breaking the silence. “If you hadn’t come along I don’t know how long I would have been waiting there.”

  “You don’t have to thank me. You just happened to be in my favorite nap spot. This is the most excitement I’ve seen in weeks. Shit, I’m the one who should be thanking you.”

  We passed through a space between brush just a couple of car lengths wide. Behind it was an oval shaped clearing with trees on all sides.

  A rectangular farmhouse in need of as much repair as Rusty, appeared on the far side. The front porch appeared rickety and so did the roof that seemed to dip in the middle. Shrubs and banyan trees with dripping Spanish moss surrounded the house on both sides, curving over the roof like a hand about to smack it into the ground.

  Parked sideways in the dirt in front of the porch steps was a dark Ford.

  A dark Bronco.

  “That’s the truck!” I exclaimed.

  “Yeah.” Josh sighed, not seeming the least bit surprised. She twisted her lips and flashed me a sad smile. “That’s kind of what I figured.”

  “Do you know him?” I asked.

  She nodded. “Finn Hollis. And yes, I know him. Well, I USED to know him.”

  “Not anymore though?”

  She shook her head. “Not for a looonng time.”

  A light shone from behind thin curtains with no detection of movement from within. It wasn’t until after I got out of the truck that I felt like I was being watched.

  That feeling continued for the entire twenty minutes it took to find a spot on the land that wasn’t covered in either water, mud, or thick tangled trees and brush.

  We’d finally settled on a space between two big trees where the ground was still damp, but not under water like the rest of it seemed to be. A small brown lizard scampered up the door of my trailer and Josh swatted it off.

  “I’ll take another look at the land in daylight,” she said, getting in her truck and shutting the door. She rolled down the window and looked down to me. “If we can spot a dryer section then I’ll move it again for you.”

  “Thanks again,” I said.

  Josh glanced to the shack across the way. “If Finn gives you any trouble, you let me know.” As if angered by her own words she leaned out of her window, directing her shout toward the shack, “Because I’ll come back and shoot his hermit ass!”

  She sat back down. “Shit,” she cursed.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, craning my neck from the ground below.

  “As much as that man needs a good yelling at on occasion, I just realized that today is not the day to be doing the yelling.”

  “Why?

  Josh smiled. “Don’t you worry about it. Do yourself a favor though and make sure you keep the windows and doors shut tight at night. The mosquitos out here are big enough to carry you off.”

  With that, she took off, leaving me alone with my camper, the sound of the aforementioned buzzing mosquitos, the occasional deep cr
oak of a frog, and a very mysterious, very angry new neighbor.

  I opened the door to my camper and had one foot inside when I glanced up at the shack across the way. The curtains were swaying gently as there was a soft breeze blowing through. A large shadow suddenly crowded the window, blocking out the light. It turned, and stopped in front of the window, watching me through the thin curtains.

  A full body shiver erupted from the base of my spine. The same kind of shiver I’d always experienced right as my father’s car pulled in the driveway.

  The feeling that told me things were about to go very, very wrong.

  And as always, it was right.

  Chapter Seven

  Sawyer

  The mattress was hard. Some of the inner springs had begun to uncoil and were poking me in the back. The smell inside the camper was of mildew and mold. Musty, I would call it.

  I loved it. Every tiny little inch of it.

  I was in a strange town, in what appeared to be the middle of the swamp, thousands of miles away from the life I’d always known. I was alone. Terrified.

  And fantastically free.

  Clutching my mother’s letter to my chest, I drifted off to sleep knowing that whatever was in store for me was better than what I’d left behind.

  My mother had told me to be strong. Be brave. I made a promise to myself that no matter what happened, I’d continue to do just that.

  There was a loud bang in my dream. Instantly my thoughts drifted to my father. The ladder. Him falling to the ground. The snap of bone.

  As I roused from slumber to consciousness, I became very aware that the noise hadn’t come from a dream. It was real. VERY real.

  And coming from inside my camper.

  My tiny living space swayed from side to side with each heavy footstep taken toward me.

  I felt it then. The dread crawling up my spine like a slow-moving spider.