The Brotherhood of the Wheel (10 page)

“No,” Lovina heard herself say as if at from a great distance. Terror was like cotton stuffed throughout her mind and body, muffling everything, diffusing it. She moved back to block the doorway, and she felt the haze in her mind clear just a little, the fear lessen. “No,” she said again. “Who are you?”

The boys looked up, and she saw their full faces for the first time. One was light-skinned black, the other white. They both had pimples, and their mouths were tight slits of contained rage. But it was their eyes—their eyes—that set off the alarm in Lovina's ancient, primal, reptile brain. Their eyes were completely black, filled with the deepest, darkest ink, devoid of any light, any detail, any soul.

“Let … us … in,” the boys said in unison, the acid of anger dripping in their voices now.

“Shit!” Lovina said, and slammed the door hard in the kids' faces. She locked it, dropping her flashlight in the process. The half-moon of the beam's light rolled on the floor, then stilled. There was pounding on the front door now, louder, insistent. Lovina raced through the house. There was a back porch, a back door with a small mud room. She stumbled through the darkness, fumbling with her car keys. She threw open the door and sprinted for her car in the parking lot. Her feet slipped in the loose gravel that crunched under her feet. The thrill of panic, of your mind knowing what your senses can't tell you—knowing eyes are on you, behind you in the darkness, coming closer. She unlocked the car door and jumped in, slamming and locking it. She jammed the keys into the ignition, almost dropping them. She couldn't catch a breath; her heart was a fist, punching to be free of her chest. The car revved to life. She snapped on the headlights.

The two black-eyed children stood before her car, silent, their eyes empty mirrors of oil.

“No!” Lovina shouted and jammed the car into reverse. Gravel flew everywhere as the car fishtailed. The children stood bathed in the red light of her taillights for a moment, standing side by side, and then were lost to the darkness as she sped out of the parking lot and onto Beech Street. She didn't slow down, didn't catch her breath again, until she was on the highway and headed back to New Orleans, to home.

 

FOUR

“10-47”

The sky was on fire, golds, oranges, and reds burning at the razor edge of heaven and earth. The dark green Honda CR-V glided down U.S. 36 into the setting sun, into the furnace of light. The Honda passed farm fields stretching to the horizon in either direction. Occasionally, the endless looping monotony of farmland would be punctuated with weathered grain silos reaching to the bruised sky, or with a field of jade grass or a stand of trees. The Kansas tags on the SUV said K
EROUAC
, and the mellow, joyous music drifting out the open windows was Neutral Milk Hotel's “In the Aeroplane Over the Sea.” The music for this leg of the journey was chosen by the driver, a lean, late twentysomething with a close-cropped fringe of a beard already turning gray and hair of the same color poking out from under his driver's cap. He wore a checked collared shirt, an unbuttoned tweed vest, and a stifling air of smug superiority.

“Look at that sunset,” the driver said to his companions. “That,
that
is why I write poetry.”

“You write poetry in a never-ending quest to sleep with every woman with a pulse, Gerry,” said a dour slender girl in her early twenties, with long, straight, ink-black, dyed hair and thick black eye makeup. She wore a black minidress, torn fishnets, and Doc Marten boots and was sitting in the coveted shotgun passenger seat. “This music makes me want to cut someone besides myself.”

The three passengers in the backseat laughed. One was a handsome, muscular young man with fashionably cut black hair. The boy was in his early twenties and was dressed in a blue-and-yellow Abercrombie & Fitch polo shirt and jeans. He had his arm around the girl sitting in the middle of the backseat. She was a little younger than the boy but carried herself with a practiced maturity. She had long, silky blond hair with straight bangs across her forehead. Her eyes were a brilliant blue and held a wicked intelligence and sheen of cruelty to them behind thick-framed nerd-style glasses. She was attractive, with an athletic body, and wore a blue-and-white University of Kansas T-shirt and cutoff Daisy Duke–style jean shorts.

“If you kill Gerry, Lexi,” the blonde said, “who's gonna buy us beer and weed?”

The girl sitting next to the blonde by the passenger-side rear door nodded in agreement. She was brunette, her long hair pulled away from her face and into a ponytail. She wore a dark-blue-and-black striped top and old, torn Levi's, as well as a pair of old Converse high-tops. She was slender and had less of a figure than the blonde, but her features were much more delicate and beautiful.

“Ava's got a point, Gerry,” the brunette said. “Not to mention your death would probably cause the Rohypnol market to crash.” Everyone laughed again except Gerry.

“Fuck you, Alana,” Gerry said, and flipped the brunette off. “And fuck you, too, Ava! Last time I invite any of you assholes to a field party.”

Alana fished her headphones out of her pocket and connected them to her phone. She was already wishing she had stayed home and binged on
Sherlock
on Netflix, as she'd planned. The only reason she was here was that Ava was her friend as well as her roommate. Lexi was her roommate, too, but, to be honest, she hated the whiny, self-absorbed little bitch. She saw how Lexi and Cole looked at each other and she hated it for Ava. She had talked to Ava about it several times, and Ava had laughed, saying that she didn't intend to stay with Cole past college, anyway, if that long.
What was the fucking point then, to be with someone you didn't even like or really want?
He was a means to an end, and that was Ava's first and governing principle. He kept her warm, he was pretty, and he fucked good.
What else could there possibly be, right?

“Hey, Cole,” Lexi, the goth girl, said. “You gonna let this ratchet old hipster talk that way to your girl?”

Cole pulled his arm out from around Ava and fished a cold bottle of Heineken out of the cooler at his feet. “Shit,” he said, grinning as he popped the cap off the beer with the church key on his key chain. “I'm staying out of this. I open my mouth, I either lose my girl or I lose my beer and I'm suddenly bankrupt. This is a definite fourth-down scenario, baby.”

“My fucking hero.” Ava smacked Cole's arm and claimed his beer as her own. “I skipped on coding for my midterm programming exam in Python this weekend to go watch Cole get drunk and piss on a cornfield, then pass out.”

“Baby, anything you want to know about the python,” Cole said, pulling Ava and his beer close to him, “ole Cole here can teach you with some hands-on experience.”

“I know we're doing, like, sixty,” Alana said, grimacing at Ava and Cole as the couple began to kiss. “But I think I'll take my chances with the asphalt; I'm bailing.”

“Me, too,” Lexi said, but her eyes were fixed on Cole and, for an instant Cole's eyes flicked to hers and they locked, holding the look a second too long. Lexi looked away quickly, and a thin smile came to Cole's lips. He kissed Ava deeply and took a furtive glance at Alana's chest as he did it. “How much longer till we're at your buddy's place, he of the shitty indie music?” Lexi said a little too quickly to Gerry.

“I can't get the damn GPS to work out here,” Gerry said. “Like being on the moon. Look, Evan told me his folks' place was on thirty-six, about forty miles after you get off eighty-one. He said look for a bunch of mailboxes—one of them with a little windmill on it—”

“Fabulous,” Lexi said.

“—and then a dark green grain silo on the left,” Gerry continued, undaunted. “The gate for the access road is about five miles past the silo on the same side of the road.”

“We are going to end up eating each other,” Ava said, taking a long draw on Cole's beer. “I've seen this movie.”

“That don't sound so bad,” Cole said, giving Lexi a quick glance. Ava, not noticing the exchange, smacked him on principle. They both laughed and resumed kissing.

“No worries.” Gerry fished a plastic baggie of pot out from under his seat. “Don't need technology to do everything for you.”

“This coming from the man who once had a nervous breakdown because his Keurig machine broke,” Alana said. “Don't be trying to roll and drive, Gerry.”

Gerry tossed the baggie to Lexi. “Okay, co-pilot, do the honors,” he said to her.

There was the hollow rattle of an empty bottle on the floor, and Cole was pulling another beer out of the cooler. He belched as he spoke. “It's going to be dark soon, man. How we going to see a fucking dark green silo in the dark, Gerr?” Ava checked her cell phone and frowned.

“No fucking signal!” she said. “I swear to God, Gerry, you get us lost out here…”

“Will everyone chill the hell out,” Gerry said. “We'll pass this blunt, and by the time it's dead we'll be there. Be cool.”

*   *   *

Alana slipped in her earbuds and music swallowed up the world, Shawn Mullins's “The Ghost of Johnny Cash.” She looked away from Cole and Ava and all the bullshit and looked out the window at the beautiful emptiness, the farmland, the swaying grass, the endless sky, painfully blue, now turning to ash. The world would be a really beautiful place if it wasn't for all the fucking people, she sometimes mused. That was a terrible way for a person who was studying to become a doctor to think, but she couldn't help it. She had chosen to come to the University of Kansas School of Medicine because she wanted to be somewhere where she could drive a little ways and be alone for miles in every direction. She hated cities, hated the mass mind that seemed to take over human beings when you stuffed enough of them together in a glass steel-and-concrete rat cage. She enjoyed and liked, and even loved, individual human beings very much. But the human race as a mob she had no love for.

She looked away from the increasingly mauve sky to Gerry. He was yapping away about something. He and Lexi were arguing, hands gesturing, heads shaking. Before the night was over, they would most likely be fucking. Gerry had already slept with Ava and Lexi; he wanted very much to sleep with Alana now. Not because he cared for her at all—she actually thought he disliked her quite a bit—but because she was a new conquest; he wanted the trifecta.

Gerry was a pig. He owned a little bistro back in Salina, called Kerouac's, which had become a haven for people who enjoyed paying too much for coffee and listening to open-mike poetry about how some fine-arts major's menstrual flow was a metaphor for getting over her breakup with her emo ex-boyfriend. Alana hung at Kerouac's because it was Ava's preferred hangout joint. Gerry had tried several times to move on Alana, and each time he got a very cutting critique of Kerouac's, his taste in clothing, and his general creepiness. Still, like any true horndog, Gerry was undaunted. In Alana's mind, Gerry figured he was one too many gin and tonics away from getting into her pants. She looked back out the window, listening to her music—now it was ACDC's “Back in Black.” She wished silently for a world all to herself.

“What the hell?” Gerry said. On the road ahead, a dark shape had appeared at the edge of vision, straddling both lanes. It was a motorcycle with a lone rider barreling down on the Honda at dangerous speed.

“Is this guy out of his fucking mind?” Cole said, leaning forward. “He's playing chicken with us?”

“Slow down, Gerry!” Lexi shouted, covering her eyes and drawing her knees up to her chest.

“Shit!” was all Gerry had time to say. The rider was upon them. Gerry jerked the steering wheel hard to the right and jammed the screeching brakes to the floor. The SUV lurched off the road. Bags, coolers, everything loose in the car, was suddenly in midair in one horrifying, frozen instant of stretched time. Alana grabbed the passenger handle above the door. The image of her cat, Mr. Pointy, flashed into her mind, and she wondered who would feed him, take care of him? There was the sound—the sound of all the things in the world breaking, smashing at once. Then it was over.

The moment after a crash is surreal. As elongated and static as the instant before impact, the moment after is oddly peaceful and silent, like space. Alana looked around. She touched herself gingerly, ran a hand softly through her hair. She was okay. Cole had been thrown back into the rear of the SUV. He touched a jagged cut along his scalp. His palm was dark with fresh blood. Ava looked around as if she was coming out of a trance. Her glasses had been knocked off her face from the impact, and she bent forward and retrieved them. Gerry's and Lexi's airbags engulfed them, and both seemed okay. It was Gerry who finally broke the spell and spoke.

“Everyone … everybody okay?” he asked.

A general murmur of confirmation, then Cole's voice—angry, almost incredulous. “You have got to be shitting me! Motherrrrfucker!” There was a click as Cole opened the rear door of the SUV and began to climb out.

“Cole, no!” Alana shouted. “I need to look at that scalp wound! You're losing blood!”

“Cole, damn it!” Ava said, turning to try to stop him, but he was already out.

The others all struggled out of the Honda. The SUV's nose was buried in a deep irrigation ditch on the side of the highway. The front axle was bent, and one of the wheels was twisted at an angle that would barely allow the tire to touch the road even if they did get it out of the trench. It was darker now. Everything was covered in a dusty haze. The sky had lost most of its color, except for the brilliant crimson wound in the west. No stars had dared to venture out yet.

Cole was standing in the middle of the two-lane road. His breathing was shallow, almost panting. His hair and face were black with his own blood. His fists clenched and unclenched. About twenty feet away, the motorcycle rider stood, straddling his all-black antique motorcycle, which was idling, growling like a hungry hound. Alana thought it looked like one of those bikes that army couriers rode in World War II.