Long Way Home

by Tom Crown

“I’m sorry,” he said, before she could say the words. “It’s not your fault.”

  She looked out the window and touched her own tender face. “He’s got powerful hands.”

  Ryan nodded.

  The van behind them had maintained its lower speed, and he watched in the rearview mirror as it fell further back. He eased his foot off the accelerator to stay with it.

  “The photos?” he asked, having decided there was no right way to ease into that subject.

  “He got them.”

  “Yeah?”

  “He didn’t recognize them, I’m sure of that, but I guess I should’ve asked specifically what... Or when... I mean, I did ask, but... God! What a fool I am.”

  “You’re in shock.” He hoped that was it.

  “No. I mean, I don’t know...”

  “This whole mess must all be connected somehow,” he said, changing the subject somewhat. They needed to figure it all out, and she needed to help, shock or no shock. “The photos of that girl, and now another girl in the van behind us. Is she in danger?” He checked the rearview mirror again. The van was still falling back, almost disappearing out of his view.

  Then he realized the van was slowing to let a pick-up truck pull in front, and the way that pickup truck moved made him instantly alert. He’d seen vehicles move like that before. Like live animals. Hunting.

  He stepped on the accelerator.

  “What’s happening?” she asked.

  He nodded toward the mirror. “Is that him?”

  She turned and watched the pickup as it accelerated toward them. “Yes. That’s him.”

  Ryan looked at the rifle still in her hands, the barrel now sensibly pointed at the roof.

  Jenny noticed his gaze. “I grabbed it off his truck when they attacked you.”

  He remembered. “Does he have more of those?”

  “Not in his truck.”

  He nodded. He could imagine a gun collection in this man’s house, but she probably did have the only weapon on the road, and Mats would know that.

  Glancing in the rearview mirror again, he saw the pickup truck advancing steadily. The Volvo was a respectable car, but the pickup truck had an engine twice as big and four-wheel drive, making it tough competition on these roads.

  “Maybe you should go faster?” Jenny was looking over her shoulder again.

  The road was curvy, the asphalt bad, and he knew absolutely nothing about what was around the next bend. He shot her a quick glance. “I’ll think of something.”

  Those were the exact words he had run through his head again and again when he was face down on that wet stone floor in Afghanistan. He’d think of something. He never did. Instead, he’d wrapped his hand around that sharp piece of wood and ran it into the first person who unlocked the door and stepped into his room. He sank the wood into the soft tissue of that young man’s belly again and again. It hadn’t required him to think of something.

  “What about the girl?” he asked now.

  “I don’t know!”

  He glanced in the rearview mirror. The pickup truck had finally caught up with them and slammed right into the rear bumper.

  “Hey!” The impact was much more powerful than Ryan had expected and the Volvo skidded rapidly toward the forest on the right. He struggled to keep the car on the road.

  Branches began hitting the windshield on Jenny’s side and she jerked away.

  Ryan forced the car back toward the middle of the road and bumped into the pickup truck again.

  “Ryan!” Jenny pointed straight ahead at a railroad crossing, but the lights were off and the gates up. It was more of an opportunity than an obstacle. Ryan pressed the accelerator all the way to the floor.

  The pickup truck accelerated a split second later. Ryan glanced to his left and saw Mats inside, his eyes wide, his face flushed, glancing left and right along the railroad tracks.

  Time was up. The two vehicles flashed across the railway side by side.

  No train.

  He slammed the brake pedal hard, practically locking the wheels, and the car shrieked to a halt. Jenny screamed, and Ryan felt the belt cut painfully into his shoulder. Then he slammed the car in reverse and took it back toward the tracks. He yanked the wheel hard and spun the vehicle around, using the wider space of the crossing to complete his maneuver.

  Mats had stopped farther ahead and was peering back, studying the narrow road and the forest around him. The terrain was flat enough for the powerful pick-up truck, so Mats easily maneuvered down the side of the road, halfway into a shallow ditch, and then back up and around.

  Ryan shifted into first gear and sped away back in the direction they had come from. He kept shifting gears as he tried to remember what the road looked like. There would be plenty of curves ahead, separated by just short stretches of straighter road where he might be able to speed ahead. He would have to try to remember those and accelerate just in time before they appeared. It would be the only way to gain an advantage. Unless they used the rifle.

  He watched Mats in the rearview mirror. He was closing in on them again.

  “Ryan...” Jenny twisted toward him in her seat.

  Ryan looked ahead again and saw the van approaching at considerable speed.

  He checked the mirror again. Mats was closer, inching up on Jenny’s side, apparently attempting a different mode of attack.

  The diesel engine roared, and the pickup swerved toward them. The impact was powerful enough to send the Volvo across the smudged center line, where the van was coming straight at them. The driver had a phone to his ear, but he tossed it and began honking his horn frantically. He struggled with the wheel, drifting uncertainly in search of a gap between the car and the pickup truck occupying both lanes. Ryan considered the brakes, but he wasn’t willing to risk the car’s maneuverability or be trapped with these people in the middle of nowhere. If he could, he wanted to keep moving.

  “Oh my God,” Jenny whispered, looking about in confusion. “Oh my God.”

  Mats kept hitting the car on her side, pushing them still farther to the left, obviously trying to force them into the path of the oncoming van.

  Ryan saw the driver of the van clearly now. He was staring at the vehicles rushing toward him, honking desperately, until the short bursts turned into one continuous howl.

  Then the van jerked, as the man took a final path to his extreme left. Ryan watched as the vehicle wobbled across the road with steaming tires.

  He glanced at Jenny.

  “Hold on!”

  He yanked the wheel left and braked just in time. Mats’s pickup truck roared past on their right and then smashed head-on into the front of the careening van.

  The impact was catastrophic. The vehicles merged, twisting and turning in a cloud of shattered glass as metal shrieked against the asphalt. Then, just as suddenly, they separated and went to opposite sides of the road.

  The pickup truck tumbled over and stopped upside down, with its scraped bottom plate and shredded tires open against the sky, and gasoline dripping from its tank.

  Ryan turned toward the van and saw it balancing precariously on its side. He thought again of the girl in the back and reached to unbuckle his belt, but a sharp noise made him stop. The van turned over and the smashed front compartment crumpled completely under the weight.

  Blood spilled out onto the asphalt.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  KATIA FELT HER heart pounding in her chest, that much she was sure of. Darkness surrounded her, but she was still alive. Her left shoulder ached badly, but it didn’t feel dislocated or broken. It was bruised, but her whole body was. It had happened before.

  The taste of blood in her mouth was sickening, but she had long ago learned to ignore anything her nose or mouth told her about the world. Touching her face, her lips, her neck, she felt no open wounds. Not too bad. She almost smiled.

  Before the crash she had been listening to the wheels against the asphalt, intently trying to imagine the forest outside, branches r
eaching for the sky, a moose deep in the forest, an owl circling above. The landscape here could be beautiful, even though it was barren and nothing like home. With time she had actually learned to like the emptiness. It reminded her of how she had felt when she was really young in the village outside Kherson where she had been born, where the wheat fields had stretched for miles and miles, a golden sea of billowing tranquility.

  She wrapped the mattress around her already when she first felt the sudden movements of the van and heard the agitated voices up front, figuring Sergei and Dimitri were fighting again. It was something they did a lot, and neither ever hesitating to do so when on the road.

  It made her think of her father and his careful driving through Kherson on Sundays, always talking about the better life he envisioned inside the beautiful century-old buildings from behind the wheel of the bus he had so proudly maneuvered. Those homes had been from a different time, when the cities of Ukraine had been magnificent, like Paris or Prague. Kherson did have its good parts, but she much preferred the grand beauty she’d seen on a school trip to Kiev—the boulevards, the fountains, and the Opera. Her teacher had told them about the history of the city, how people had settled on the river during the time of mammoths and Neanderthals, and how a whole ice age had passed before the Vikings from the north found their way to the city to trade with the Greeks from the south. To Katia, it had been an amazing place of adventure.

  Kiev was her last good memory of childhood. Afterward came that Christmas when her mother finally became too sick to stay at home, and they decided it was best that Katia went to stay with her uncle. She never told anyone about what happened to her there, but somehow the other students found out, and the older boys started to approach her. In Kherson, that was not a good thing. Maybe it never was, anywhere.

  Her eyes were slowly starting to adjust to the dim light now. The van was on its side somehow or perhaps even up-side-down, and she saw the floor above her was at an odd angle. She was crouching in a corner where the ceiling met the wall and the partition to the front compartment, but it wasn’t the ceiling anymore. Everything had changed. Hopefully every single thing.

  She hadn’t heard Sergei or Dimitri after the crash. That could mean anything. They could be dead. Or unconscious. Or they could simply be outside, assessing the damage and waiting for her to step out if she could. She wouldn’t do that, though, until she knew more.

  She pushed herself up and steadied herself against the wall, but she couldn’t stand straight up inside the cramped space without hitting her head. The partition that connected to the front compartment was ripped and cracked, and she saw that the mattress was leaning against it. She leaned forward and pulled it away.

  Light flooded in, reflections of the midnight sun, not a bright light, but enough to seem overwhelming after the total dark. She leaned closer to the partition and peered through the crack in it.

  She gasped.

  Sergei and Dimitri were upside down, still in their seats. Sergei was soaked in blood from his waist to his head. It was dripping from his hair to the crumpled door and the asphalt outside. Dimitri had hit the windshield and apparently died from the impact, his forehead caved in, his mouth open and teeth gone.

  She pulled back. The sight was gruesome, but this was also an opportunity for her. She had been too resigned to want them dead lately, but now new feelings were pouring in on her. Triumphant feelings.

  This was the day they died.

  Suddenly she heard a voice and stopped breathing. A man was speaking somewhere outside. It had to be a driver from a different vehicle, maybe someone stopping to help.

  But no, it wasn’t someone outside. The sound was muted and distorted, and she was almost sure she recognized the voice. It was coming from a phone, probably Sergei’s phone, somewhere up front. Somewhere with the two dead bodies.

  She moved forward, pulled at the partition, and leaned in again.

  They were indeed dead, and the voice on the phone was still talking. She made up her mind, steeled herself, and pushed the partition fully aside. Then she crawled in, moving determinedly, ignoring that she was scared and disgusted by the smell, the bodies, and the blood. She made her way carefully over the broken glass, ducking the collapsed interior, making sure not to touch anything that had been alive just moments ago. And finally, she saw the phone, wedged under a twisted sunscreen. She held it to her ear, looking around, looking out the collapsed windows at the asphalt covered in blood and glass. The closest trees were only feet away.

  “Are you there?” the voice asked after a long silence.

  Katia flinched and almost dropped the phone.

  “Sergei?”

  She did recognize the voice. It was Alex. Hard and demanding.

  It wouldn’t take long for the rest of them to get here. She had to do something other than just run for her life. She had to slow them down.

  She held the phone a bit of a distance away and took a slow, controlled breath. She smiled and then giggled.

  “No! No, Sergei, don’t!” She laughed with a high-pitched, musical sound. It was a show she had put on many times before. She put the phone to her ear again to gauge the reaction.

  “Sergei,” she heard Alex say with barely controlled anger, pronouncing each syllable with growling contempt, “get the fuck over here with my fucking money!” He hung up.

  It wasn’t the reaction she had expected. She had simply wanted him to laugh or grunt or say something crude, but at least he had bought her act of normalcy for the moment.

  Still she needed to get moving, and she needed to go far away.

  She looked around, at the asphalt, the trees, then closer, inside, the blood, the bodies. Finally, she spotted a bag stuck above her between Dimitri’s feet, partially open, and she could plainly see money inside. A lot of money. Surely the money Alex had asked for. She looked around again. She was still alone, except for Sergei and Dimitri, but they mattered less and less.

  She reached up for the bag, balancing carefully to avoid the bodies. She grabbed the parking brake above her with one hand and felt the bag with the other, until it suddenly ripped fully open.

  The contents rained down on her, and she instinctively pulled back and watched it all fall. The money landed at her feet, more than she had ever seen before, but the passports that followed were far more important. She ruffled the bag to see if any money was left inside, but she already had it all. And it was plenty. She knelt down and grabbed each of the passports, half a dozen in total, and looked through them. She recognized most of the girls from their pictures and finally she saw herself. She smiled. With the money, these could mean everything. It all could mean things she hadn’t dreamed of in a long time. It could mean life.

  A car door slammed outside.

  She pulled back into the rear compartment and peered out through the ruptured partition. She saw the feet of a man and a woman on the asphalt. They were carrying a rifle.

  She should have left already. She should have run. The man and woman were still some distance away, but not far enough. Not when they had a rifle.

  She grabbed her backpack and jammed the passports inside it. Then she gathered the money, every single bill she could reach. They would kill her for the money, she was sure, but only if she let them see it.

  She looked around for a weapon.

  * * * *

  Ryan took in the full extent of the destruction, the tire tracks, the twisted metal and broken glass. Jenny stood a few feet back by the hood of the banged-up Volvo, wiping away the tears trickling down her cheeks with the back of her left hand. The rifle was still in her right hand, held in a white-knuckled grip as if it was the only thing keeping her from drowning. He knew the feeling well.

  “Wait here,” he said and reached for the weapon, a stainless Remington Model 700, a rifle often used by police departments and armed forces. Apparently Lapland moose hunters appreciated them as well, or maybe it was Russian mobsters.

  Ryan moved forward with the barrel point
ed down at the ground. His shoes crunched the shattered glass beneath him as if it were winter ice. He stopped in the middle of the road and knelt on the asphalt. Looking back and forth between the two wreckages he could quickly conclude that there were no visible survivors. The two Russians in the overturned van had been trapped and crushed. Mats, behind the wheel of the mangled pickup truck, was missing half his skull.

  Suddenly Ryan felt nausea overwhelming him. He threw up right where he stood, then leaned down and steadied himself against the asphalt. Glass pierced his skin and he instantly gasped. The van was too old to have had composite windows, and he should have realized that, but at least the pain was clearing his head.

  He looked back at Jenny and shook his head, knowing the expression on his face would communicate the gravity of what he had witnessed. She turned halfway around, stumbled forward a few steps, and slumped down on the side of the road. He knew he should go to her, but he wasn’t done yet. He had to keep going.

  He got back to his feet and circled the wreckage, taking it all in as he moved. He should get rid of the weapon, he knew that. He could only imagine how it all would seem to an outside observer. He stopped and looked at the body of the dead man he had fought only minutes before. Life kept twisting and turning.

  Suddenly he heard a noise somewhere behind him. He swung the weapon around and pointed it at the van again. The girl, he realized. It was the girl, and she was still alive inside.

  He rushed to the back and carefully placed the rifle on the ground.

  The door handle was upside down but still easy to reach. He tried it. The entire wreckage moved, and he was sure he’d felt the locking mechanism snap open. He pulled at the door. It moved slightly, but only fractions of an inch. He pulled harder, and harder again, until the door swung open.

  Ryan looked inside. The midnight sun was behind him, and it flooded the compartment with light. The girl was crouching in a corner, clutching a backpack in her hands.

  He reached forward to help her, but she flinched and pulled away.