Xeno Sapiens (46 page)

The unbroken lens of the taillight gleamed
at Doyle even in the growing twilight. He turned to face the
officer and saw that he had his pistol drawn. Before he could
react, the officer swung the heavy butt end of the pistol against
the taillight lens and it crashed out with a sad tinkle. It was so
cliché it would have been funny had Doyle not realized his chances
of getting out of this were becoming extremely remote.

“You got Massachusetts plates,” the officer
said. “They let folks in Massachusetts drive around with a broken
taillight?”

“Officer, we can work something out...” but
before he could finish, the cop had interrupted him.

“That's gonna cost you, son.”

So now they came down to it.

“How much?”

“How much you got?”

“Oh, hey, now,” Doyle protested with a
cadaverous smile. “You have to leave me something so I can get out
of here. Never darken your lovely state with my presence
again.”

“You makin' fun of the great state of North
Carolina?”

Doyle backpedaled. This cop was no weak old
woman with a heart condition or a little girl without the strength
to resist him.

“Look,” he said. “I've got thirty-five
bucks. It's yours.”

“Goddam right it's mine,” the cop said.

Doyle pulled his battered wallet from his
back pocket and extracted three tens and a five. The cop took the
bills and tucked them in the breast pocket of his uniform.

“You know what I think,” the cop said. “I
think you're one of them northern boys come down South to stir up
trouble with the darkies. Get 'em riled up so's decent folks can't
feel safe at night while you go back home where you got 'em all
penned up in the middle of your cities.”

“Nothing like that. I'm just passing
through.”

“Well, tonight you'll pass through a holding
cell, enjoy some Southern hospitality, courtesy of Castonmeyer
county.” The cop wandered over to the other side of the car and
smashed out the second set of taillights. “We can't have you
drivin' around with no taillights, even if you are from
Massachusetts. I'll have Royce Reid come up here, haul your vehicle
in. Tomorrow, you'll be in front of the magistrate, trying to
figure out how to pay the tow bill, the fine, and the repair bill
for your taillights.”

He'd been handcuffed and shoved into the
back of the cruiser to await a hearing before the magistrate the
next morning. And the cop had told him if he couldn't raise the
needed money, he'd likely be a guest of the state of North Carolina
for the next month. Doyle had been issued his prison blues and
escorted to a holding cell filled with greasy haired southern thugs
and more real, live black people than he'd ever seen in his life
anywhere besides the television. He'd been taciturn in the cell,
unwilling to speak for fear his heavy New England accent would mark
him for even more special attention.

Before dawn the next morning, a screw came
around to the holding cell with a list and began calling out
names.

“Darrow, DeBerry, Herrick, Nichols...” The
call out continued until the guard got to Doyle's name.

“Rathman,” he called out.

Blinking, scared, and uncertain of what to
do, Doyle filed out of the cell with the rest of the call out.

They trudged into the cafeteria and had a
dreary breakfast of oatmeal, toast and fatty sausage. Falling in
line as the roll was called again, Doyle puppy-dogged the line as
they loaded onto a bus and drove off to parts unknown. Mountains
and fields rolled by outside the lightening windows. Farmland
mostly, lots of barns and a few grimy cinder block and brick
buildings. Even as a first time prisoner, Doyle thought it odd that
only one armed guard rode on the bus with them. Twenty minutes
later, the bus rolled into the small town of Prairie's End and the
bus hissed to a halt at the corner of two fairly large streets.

The cons, unshackled, filed out the door and
stood at the corner of Garner and Qualls streets. After the last
con filed out, the bus door shut and the bus pulled away with a
roar, leaving the cons in the backwash.

Looking around with wide eyes and finding no
shotgun toting guards, Doyle turned to Crispin Cyrus, one of his
erstwhile cell mates.

“This is a setup, right,” he asked, thinking
of the venomous act that had landed him in the cooler. “They let
you out so you can run, then put a bullet in your back?”

“No, man,” Crispin said. “Work release. This
is the Slave Corps for the hayseeds. You wait here until some
cracker picks you up in their truck. Then you go with them to do
whatever it is they want done. Paint their house, work in the
fields, bale hay, prime tobacco. You usually gets a good meal and a
few cents in your pocket. Five o'clock, they gots to have you back
here for head count. Don't shit on a good thing, man. If you tries
to run, they's no place to go.”

They waited as a succession of trucks with
fat farmers and ruddy rednecks pulled up and the drivers shouted
from their widows.

“Need two to drive a dual axle and bale
hay.”

“Here, boss,” the cons would shout, raising
their hands.

“You,” the drivers would say, pointing, “and
you.”

The smiling cons piled into the beds of the
trucks and went off to work.

Who can run a splitter?

Me, boss!

Who can dig a ditch?

Me, boss!

Who can lay brick?

Me, boss!

And so it went until the last cons had been
trundled off to whatever labors they were most qualified for.

When the call came for a man to do
electrical work, Rathmun shouted out.

“Me, boss!”

“Climb up, boy.”

Doyle climbed into the bed of the truck and
watched the last couple of cons recede into the distance. The truck
was an old one, early forties vintage, and it labored and wheezed
up the mountains. This high the air was cold and Doyle shivered,
even though he was of hardy New England stock and used to it. He
didn't know how he had ended up in work release, but it was a
godsend. He had to think.

As signs of even the most rudimentary
civilization disappeared behind them, Doyle waited for the truck to
slow on one of the steep upgrades. As the truck faltered down to
fifteen miles per hour, Doyle jumped from the truck and fell to the
road, lying there as if injured.

The driver stopped and carefully allowed the
truck to roll backward to where Doyle lay. He heard the ratcheting
of an emergency brake and the engine being switched off. Secreted
in Doyle's hand was a large steel nut he had found in the bed of
the pick up truck. God knew where the massive, rust coated thing
had come from, likely some sizeable piece of farm machinery. The
important thing was it weighed nearly a pound, it was cold steel,
and it was a weapon.

The driver, an old man with a trusting face
who was pushing eighty, leaned over Doyle, his eyes concerned and
friendly behind Harold Lloyd glasses.

“You okay, son?”

“My ankle,” Doyle said with a sheepish grin.
“Goddam, I don't know how I managed to fall out of the truck. This
is really embarrassing. Help me up, will you? I think I can walk it
off.”

The old man leaned down and gave a good
effort to help Doyle up. Careful to keep the large nut hidden in
his hand, Doyle pushed off the ground to help the old gent. He
flung his left arm around the old man's neck and hobbled
convincingly to the passenger side door of the truck.

With a sudden grunt of effort, Doyle
squeezed the arm looped around the old man's neck and pinched him
in a headlock. Simultaneously, he brought his right hand with the
massive nut in it around in a great, looping right hook. The old
man's thin skull caved in just above his brow ridge with a crack
and a spray of gouged flesh. Doyle let the old man's sudden dead
weight slither from his grasp as he crumpled to the road.

“That's for your Deputy Dawg, old man.”

Leaving the old man's lifeless body, Doyle
jumped into the driver's seat of the ancient truck. He was
mortified to discover an extra pedal on the floorboard and a shift
mechanism on the column. As a Bostonian he had ridden the commuter
trains most of his life and driven only sparingly. His own car was
an automatic and he had never driven a straight drive in his life.
He would have to take a crash course and he hoped that wouldn't be
literally.

He turned the key and the engine sputtered.
The whole truck jumped and rattled like a massive, shivering dog
before the engine died. Doyle looked down. The clutch. He pushed
the furthest pedal to the left in and keyed the engine. It groaned
and turned over for a few seconds before catching into rocky
life.

Good. Good. Now what?

The brake. He eased the emergency brake down
and the truck began rolling alarmingly backward down the steep
grade.

The clutch! The clutch!

He let the clutch out. Unknown to him, the
driver had placed the gear lever in reverse when he stopped the
truck. With the sudden engagement of the clutch and its already
backward momentum, the truck abruptly accelerated in a series of
jumping fits and starts. Doyle stabbed at the floor pedals, hitting
brakes, clutch and, finally, the gas.

Already rolling backwards at twenty miles
per hour, the sudden acceleration twisted the steering wheel in
Doyle's hand and he careened backward down the steep grade, the
front wheels lazily turning until the entire rear of the truck
slipped off the road and began rolling down the heavily wooded side
of the slope. Doyle wrenched up on the emergency brake and heard
the stretching whine of the cable breaking. He pushed the clutch in
to change gears but the sudden loss of engine compression only made
the truck roll even faster down the slope. Trees and bushes flashed
by him as the steel stallion bounced and reared and bucked,
snorting oily, blue exhaust and whinnying in squeaks and groans. He
released the clutch and when the grinding gears engaged they slowed
the truck enough for Doyle's head to snap back into the window
glass behind him. The engine died with a hiss and Doyle might have
continued in free descent had the truck not crashed with finality
into a large tree, snapping his head back once more.

Seeing stars, Doyle climbed out of the
truck, struggling to push the heavy door open against the force of
gravity, hearing the cooling engine ticking, smelling burnt oil and
exhaust. He slipped down on the steep slope as his feet hit the
ground and the door swung backwards with a mighty squeal. It banged
heavily shut, just missing Doyle's head.

He stood up, supporting himself on the
truck's fender, and looked around in this strange land. Steep
hillsides draped in rioting fall color craned around him, deep
valleys beckoned below. Now a murderer in two states, his only
choice was flight. Whatever bureaucratic slip up had allowed him to
be placed in work release would soon be discovered, as well as the
dead body of the old man. And Doyle believed the crackers who would
be coming after him with dogs and shotguns would likely have no
desire to bring him in for “justice”. They would deliver it
themselves.

He slipped and slid downhill for a way
before he came to a clearing that allowed him to see into a tiny
little hamlet, not the same one he had come from, tucked into a
little fold of a valley like a lost coin that is luckily found
shining like gold. It was beautiful, wreathed in low lying fog and
sparkling with new morning dew, almost as lovely as the mountains
of New England. Still quite distant, maybe six miles, he could see
a few houses and a careless dirt road leading into the town. And it
was downhill. He had to find a place to hole up, to think, to hide.
He would be easy pickings alone in the unfamiliar hills.

He traveled steadily downhill, trying to
keep the town always in sight, panicking slightly when he had to
scale sudden rises that blocked his view of it, breathing a sigh of
relief when it finally showed up again. It crept closer by
maddeningly slow increments and it was only after the sun began its
skid into the west and he heard the first, distant howling of the
dogs in pursuit of him that he was convinced he was closer. Two
more miles, maybe.

He forced himself to hurry, panting, hoping
to have the town within reach before darkness hid it from sight.
Once there he could steal a car, maybe get across the border into
Tennessee or South Carolina. He couldn't think of anything beyond
that.

The dogs were closer, that was certain. Not
within sight, no, but their frantic baying and barking was more
distinct, not safely muffled by distance. Before now, the howling
had been merely benchmarks to measure progress. Now he counted the
howling as second hands marking time toward his escape or
recapture.

Time had hastened as steadily as his
heartbeat. His prison blues dripped with fear sweat. The sun would
fall quickly in this part of the world, first impaled, then
devoured by the mountain peaks. Already the woods were shadowed,
even though blue still lingered in the sky.

Doyle picked his way down another steep
slope, the sound of howling dogs now a sharp discord. He reached
the bottom of the hill only to look up and find his view of the
town blocked by another hateful rise.

“Christ,” he muttered, despair cracking his
voice. He began laboriously climbing the slope, knowing that when
he reached the summit the town would be spread out before him
beneath the last pink of the darkening sky behind him.

He crested the rise and there it was. Lights
shone from the windows of houses only a half mile distant. Soft,
yellow light, like candles. Save the lights, he saw no sign of life
in the town. No cars, no streetlights. He frowned. He had come this
far, he had no choice but to force himself forward.

He nearly fell headfirst down the last
slope, his body outrunning his churning legs. He found his balance
and the ground suddenly eased its precarious slant and leveled out.
He hurried forward, slipping through little copses of trees, the
houses of the town now real and substantial, not miniatures seen at
a distance.