Joyce.
She was hanging from a tree, her stomach spread open and displaying all the frozen details of human physiology. One particular snake-like intestine stretched away from her, encircling her neck before heading north to a swollen knot around a tree branch. Her face was freeze-framed in terror, her mouth agape, eyes bulging. Her feet swung lazily in the breeze, the branch groaning. It didn’t seem plausible that her intestines should be strong enough to hang from…but there she was.
Ashley screamed again, hands covering her mouth, body doubling over, feet pounding the ground beneath her. The scream pierced the day and echoed through the neighborhood.
Marcus swept her into his arms and ran through the candy canes lining the front yard.
Ian was running back toward them and screaming something about the Rover’s tires being slashed. “I saw Joyce’s keys in the snow!” he shouted as he passed them.
Marcus had Ashley to the black Saab just as Ian returned with a set of keys sticky with blood. Hitting the unlock button, Ian flung open the driver’s door as Marcus tossed Ashley into the back seat. He slid in beside her and shut the door just as Heather shut hers and Ian slammed the gas pedal, spinning the front wheels in the snow. Ian cursed and applied less pressure, turning the wheel. The tires caught, and the car went backward out of the driveway. Heather turned to the back seat, reaching to touch her sister.
Ian had expected to see the dark man come sprinting out of the house after them, but his black car was already gone.
Ashley couldn’t breathe as Marcus helped her into her jacket, and he tried calming her by rubbing her back once it was on. When she finally did catch her breath, she puked all over the carpeted floor at her feet.
The clock on the dashboard said it was past noon.
Twenty-three
Ian doesn’t know where he’s going, doesn’t care. He just wants to get as far from wherever they are as possible. The Saab has just over half a tank of gas, plenty to get somewhere else. Ashley is crying in the back seat, and her sobs are grating against his frayed nerves. He wants to tell her to either shut the hell up or to get out of the damn car. It’s all he can do to keep from saying so.
And isn’t that strange?
he thinks. Behind the disdain, his rational self ponders why he feels this way and why he wishes he had Charles’ rifle to stick in his fiancé’s sister’s mouth. The thought seems so utterly satisfying. Anything to stop that voice, her
sobbing voice! It’s maddening, a mangled potato peeler taking layers off his brain. But why? He’s never felt like this before. His true self marvels at the observation as through a periscope peaking above choppy waves of insanity.
He glances in the rearview mirror and sees Marcus trying to comfort Ashley. The smell of her piss and vomit is nauseating.
“Shut her up.”
Ian wonders if he said it aloud, and judging from the look that comes from Marcus through the mirror, the answer is an indubitable yes.
Heather reaches over and places a hand on his thigh. He throws it off. Her touch repulses him.
The part of him that is sitting at the periscope again wonders what is going on, why he is acting so strangely.
He can tell that something has changed inside him, these wild seas an undiscovered country. But even that realization comes in the form of a faint echo, whispered from some fading semblance of his former self.
“What’s wrong?” Heather asks.
“What’s
wrong
?” He laughs. “For starters, we just left all our prints at another crime scene and sped off in the victim’s vehicle! Not to mention that we just left Charles’ Rover sitting there. We’re leaving a nice little connect-the-dots trail linking George, Charles and now Joyce all back to us.”
They speed down recently-plowed streets at eighty miles per hour.
“Don’t you think you should slow down a little?” Marcus asks.
Ian smirks. “I can handle it.”
“Do you know where you’re going?”
“Does it matter?”
“Yeah, it might.”
Ian takes his right hand off the wheel and starts working the GPS on the dashboard without even looking at it. “Looks like we’re in Syracuse.” He pulls the wheel hard to the left and narrowly misses a truck backing out of a parking lot.
“Ian,” Marcus cautions.
“Don’t ‘Ian’ me, Blackman.”
Spiders crawl up his spine at the sound of his own words, and he sees Marcus sit upright in the backseat, feels Heather’s stare burning into the side of his face. Even Ashley falls silent.
Marcus’ voice can barely be heard through his attempt to control it. “What did you say?”
“I said you’re just like the rest of them. ‘Woe is me! I’m a descendant of slaves, of white oppression!’ You know what I say, Marc? Get the hell over it.”
Ashley begins sitting up.
“Yeah, that’s right. You and all your reverse racism shit. Hasn’t that card been played enough? Isn’t it about time we all ‘move on’?”
Ashley’s eyes are ablaze now. Ian can see them in the mirror. It excites him and makes him sick at the same time. “What, Ashley? You have something to say in defense of this monkey?”
She actually lunges at the driver’s seat, but Marcus holds her back, restraining her. “It’s okay,” he whispers. “It’s okay.” Though Marcus’ eyes clearly indicate otherwise.
Ian can see books of sociology and cultural anthropology flashing before his eyes, floating off the sharp and defensive tongue of his fiancée’s younger sister, their pages opening and their words flipping from her mouth—stuff like:
centuries of treating a race of people like friggin’ dogs is sure to leave a lasting fingerprint on its collective psyche!
Yeah, stuff like that. She’ll probably even suggest that, as a white person, he has no right to expect the victimized race to so easily forgive and forget most of its history, to pretend that their skin color had never been despised and persecuted…that reverse racism wasn’t the racism of hatred but of simple distrust.
Reverse racism doesn’t hang white children from trees. Reverse racism has yet to lead to genocide!
Yeah, that’s the type of garbage he can see bubbling in Ashley’s eyes. It’s the crap that had motivated her to write her stupid Ernie Davis story. Does it really matter that the running back couldn’t score a southern touchdown and expect to escape the stadium alive? It’s the past. Get over it. Nothing but love and tolerance now, baby. The white man says so. And so it is. Anything to the contrary is reverse racism…which is actually
worse
than racism, because the natural reaction to the crime is always worse than the crime itself, isn’t it?
Ian hears Marcus’ preacher in his ear, the Prince of Preachers claiming that American slavery is “a soul-destroying sin,” “the foulest blot,” which “may have to be washed out in blood.” He knows that Spurgeon’s sermons were burned and censored by the Southern states because of his stance on slavery, that the self-righteous preacher refused to even eat with a fellow Christian who owned a slave… How he knows this is a mystery that doesn’t really concern him, and he’s distracted by more bickering pages turning past his eyes, pages that suggest prejudices targeting religion and political ideologies can simply be avoided by recanting or conforming, that those victims can hide if their pride allowed it. But when the very source of the hatred is the color of skin…there is no hiding, there is no conforming, there is no “getting over it.”
He enjoys the realization that such hatred for skin color will never be eradicated as long as there are different colors of skin. A poor person can escape the hawkish gaze of the elite by finding success, a Christian can deny his or her faith to find mercy from Muslims and vice-versa, and an Irishman and a Jew can learn to blend into the melting pot. But where to go when you bore the mark of Cain, as the Mormons once taught? When the source of hatred wasn’t geographical, political, religious, or class, but the very body you were born with? The snaking darkness writhing within him relishes the conflict even while realizing that such thoughts more than justify the “reverse-racism” rhetoric that he had just, a second ago, found to be intolerably fictitious.
His submarine was diving, the periscope losing sight of himself.
“What’s on your finger?”
Heather’s voice brings him from thoughts not his own. He looks at his hand on the wheel.
“You
took
it from me while I was sleeping?” Ashley wants to know.
Ian stares at the ring on his finger, confused. He doesn’t remember putting it on. Part of him, an increasingly stronger part of him, doesn’t care. He senses its power, a potential that he hasn’t even begun to scratch the surface of. But there’s still enough of him left to understand that its power is a dark one. He sees shapes emerge beside the car, keeping pace with its speed—shapes with flapping wings and flame-filled nostrils.
In that instant, he is faced with a choice. Surrender to endless power and all its corruption, or fight for that tiny voice circling the drain of conscience. He hears Marcus begin to pray, and in a moment of added strength he can’t possibly explain, he pulls the ring off his finger and throws it on the floor at Heather’s feet.
****
“What the hell was that?” Heather cried, quick to move her feet away from the rolling ring that Ashley had cast to the same spot the day before.
Before Ian could answer, however, a loud crash and violent impact slammed them all back against their seats. Marcus turned and looked out the back window. “It’s him!”
Ian glanced into the rearview mirror and saw the Camaro bearing down on them again. The tinted windows of the flat-black machine reflected only the rear of Joyce’s Saab. Ian could see in the reflection both Marcus’ and Ashley’s horrified faces looking out the back window just before the next impact had him struggling with the wheel.
Ian needed to lose the Camaro now and no longer cared about adhering to the GPS. He pushed the gas pedal all the way to the floorboard, and the Saab’s engine whined as it climbed further ahead of the Z-28.
“Can we lose it?” Marcus asked.
“We’re sure as hell gonna try,” Ian responded.
But the Z-28’s V8 engine had at least 330 horses under its hood and getting away from it at all would take a miracle—and that was besides the driver’s ability to maneuver it through the impossible.
Houses flew by on both sides of them in a Christmas-colored blur. The Camaro hung with them, remaining at a distance, speed matched.
Signs for I-81 started to appear.
“Do we get on the interstate?” Heather had one hand on the dashboard and the other on the headrest. She kept looking back and forth between the road ahead and the Camaro behind, her golden hair pulled back in a ponytail and wagging with every turn of her head.
He nodded. “We need traffic, something to lose him in.”
Ashley frowned, tendrils of fear regrouping and breaking from their huddle. Her eyes were staring out the back. “What is he doing?”
The onramp for 81 was coming up, and Ian almost passed it before turning the wheel hard right, the Saab’s tires screeching against the salted asphalt. As the car straightened and shot south onto 81, the Camaro continued on straight, disappearing from view.
Big eighteen-wheelers littered the road ahead, and Ian found their company strangely comforting. He passed a few, taking the car up to eighty miles per hour despite the posted limit of fifty-five. If they could get onto another road soon, then they stood a chance of losing the Camaro. Because even though it passed the onramp, none of them doubted that it would be back.
Ian pondered this. The driver had been able to find them in the Adirondacks, the diner, and at Joyce’s house. So maybe that was why he had rolled on by, maybe it was his way of taunting them, letting them know they were as good as dead already, and that he had all the time in the world to get what he wanted from them…that he rather
enjoyed
their futile efforts of escape. But how was he able to find them? He found his eyes straying from the road ahead, answering the question with an intense focus on the ring that was lying at Heather’s feet.
“Give me the ring,” he said to her.
Heather hesitated. “Why?” She seemed afraid he might put it back on.
“I’m gonna get rid of it.”
Ashley leaned forward in the back seat. “You think it’s the ring?”
Hadn’t they already said as much? He stared ahead. “Yes.”
“What happened to you?” Marcus asked, observing his friend in the reflection of the rearview.
Ian lifted his eyes to the glass, and their eyes connected for a second. But the shame was too great, and Ian turned his gaze back to the road, his hand still held outstretched, anticipating Heather’s compliance. “I’m sorry, Marc. You know I don’t believe any of that.”
“What happened?”
It was a question that Ian was asking himself. He couldn’t explain it, the power…the darkness. He hardly had any recollection of what he had said, as if he’d been asleep while someone else controlled his body. And yet, he had been very aware of the sense of control—which was ironic because he hadn’t had any amount of control over himself. It was like a drug. No…a
presence
. And that presence had been whispering something, had been feeling around inside him, searching. His eyes went to the ring again. His insides leaped at the sight of it, his chest tightening and his breath catching. But the feeling wasn’t coupled with joy and hope and love, like when spotting the girl of your dreams, but rather the promise of supremacy. Ian tried discerning this feeling, finding it bizarre that such an offer—that’s what it seemed like anyway—would tempt him this much. He never had any desire for power or control, yet that little taste of it seemed to have sparked a newfound need for it. There was a lust there, circling his being and forcing him to crave that which the ring had to offer, whatever it may be.
“Ian!”
Heather’s voice snapped his attention from the bronze loop just in time for him to avoid ramming into the back of a slow-moving station wagon. He swerved around it and sped past.