by Jay Nichols
* * *
Hector roamed.
The Jeep took him where he needed to go, but the mind piloting the vehicle was a void awaiting instruction from a higher consciousness. He wished the voice would come back and tell him what to do, but he knew that it wouldn’t. Not now. It had abandoned him when he needed it most, just like everybody else. Just like Pete and Rusty, and that schemer Mike O’Brien, the second of his friends to die this summer.
What did I do? WHAT DID I DO??!!
He heard the sirens race up a parallel street but didn’t register them as things that he had caused to roar to life. They were just another night sound, like the crickets, and as such, were sounds best ignored.
I killed him! I really killed him!!!
He shook the thought from his mind by physically shaking his head. When he ceased his silent negations, he was driving on the sidewalk. Quickly he brought the Jeep back onto the street. A tire popped going over the curb, but Hector didn’t slow. There was no stopping now.
I have no idea where I am, where I’m going, or how I’m going to get there. I can’t think straight. It’s the rabies. That voice in my head that pretended to be Pete but was really me said I was going to see and hear things that aren’t really there. I’m hallucinating. Mike’s house never exploded, and that’s not fire I see dancing along those tree tops. I’m really in my room right now. I’m either dreaming this, or I’m in the hospital getting my rabies shots. I know this ain’t real, even though it seems real, because this is too fucking crazy to be real. There’s no forest fire, and Mike’s still alive. So is Lola. I wish I wasn’t so confused. I wish I knew where I was and where I was going.
Hector rambled through Riley’s residential streets. He drove over yards, mowed down mailboxes, and pulled off tire-screeching donuts in the middle of cul-de-sacs he had never seen before. Fearing for their lives, some of the bolder citizens fired potshots at the reckless lunatic, because by that time, most of the town was awake and outside, guns in hand, pointing at the orange flames lighting the tops of the large slash pines in the near distance.
Neither shouts nor gunshots stopped Hector or his Jeep. He just kept going and going. The sirens, the fires, the smoke, the shrieks: they weren’t real. They were all part of his psychotic delirium, more affirmations that death was near.
When a burning tree from the woods fell across the road and cut him off, Hector screamed the most painful scream of his life—not because of the physical pain (which was immense), but because he was finally on a road he recognized. It was Johnson Avenue, the street that led to Pritchard Street and his house.
All he wanted was to go home and die indoors, but apparently fate was denying him of that wish as well.
Why do you hate me so much? What have I ever done to make you torture me like this? I tried to change, but you decided to kill me anyway. Well, congratufuckinglations: you win. But don’t tell me you ever gave me a chance, because you didn’t. You hated me from the start, from the goddamn day I was born.
Hector exited the hobbled Wrangler and marched around the flaming tree trunk. The inferno to his left he ignored. He had thinking to do and a place to find where he could die.
Home had never seemed so far away.