Allison Hewitt Is Trapped (29 page)

“Liberty Village it is then,” Ted chirps. “Watch out … Uh … Where is that again?”

“Colorado.”

“Oh. Right! Watch out, Colorado, here we come!”

“Stirring,” I say, tucking the pistol into the back of my waistband. “Come on, let’s get downstairs and see if there are any canned rations left.”

“My Little Pony, eh?” Renny asks, patting the big pink insignia on my backpack.

“Yeah. You know how I roll.”

COMMENTS

Norway says:

October 28, 2009 at 5:07 pm

I’m so glad that you are still alright.

Scared me half to death when you said you were going by yourself!

Keep strong Allison and please; keep safe.

steveinchicago says:

October 30, 2009 at 5:24 pm

you’re lucky to have such good friends. it’s obvious you should stick together. strength in numbers, allison, don’t forget that.

Allison says:

October 30, 2009 at 6:03 pm

Yeah, yeah you were right, Steve. I guess I’m stuck with these jokers forever.

October 31, 2009 (Halloween)—The Demon-Haunted World

“That’s close!”

“It’s not close.”

“Did you
hear
that one? That was definitely close,” Ted says, covering his head as if we’re stuck in an earthquake and not driving on the interstate. But I can sympathize; the rumbling is making me nervous too. There are bombs falling on Iowa City tonight.

We reach the city limits in good time. It’s amazing how fast one can go when there are no speed traps, no cops, no traffic at all except for the occasional detour. In some places the highway is backed up for miles, empty cars standing in neat rows with dead drivers or no drivers at all. It’s strange to see this go on for miles, hundreds of cars all waiting patiently for some unspoken signal. Every time we come upon one of these blocks I’m convinced the cars will start moving or someone will hail us for help but it never happens. There’s just the bleak feeling that whatever battle was to take place there happened long ago.

To be honest, I’m not sure if there are actual bombs falling, but it sure sounds like it. The noise is deafening on certain stretches of road and there are flickers of orange light in the distance, gunfire, the muted roar of far-off engines. The thunder of war ripples across Iowa City on Halloween Night and there’s not a trick-or-treater in sight, not one friendly house with the lights on, nobody home.

The old Chevy Cavalier we managed to steal has what we need to keep us going on the road but not much more. There are few amenities; the heat sputters, beginning in fits and starts, warming the car for a few minutes before dying down to a fan that blows neither hot nor cold. I can’t complain—with the three of us and our body heat we manage to keep it at a decent temperature. It’s not really the time to be picky anyway; finding a car that a) worked and b) had keys and gas was a misadventure convoluted enough to make Odysseus point and laugh. I think we must have tried three dozen cars before we discovered the Cavalier parked up on the curb in front of an Ethiopian restaurant. The keys were on the ground outside the open driver’s side door. We take turns driving but Ted never wants to sit in the passenger seat; there’s a mysterious stain on the slate gray upholstery. I try not to think about the mauling that may or may not have taken place directly beneath my ass.

Dapper curls up in the backseat with Ted, his furry chin resting on Ted’s thigh. He doesn’t care when it comes to cuddling—no human is safe from the laser-guided mutt love.

The road to Iowa City down Route 88 is spent in long stretches of silence followed by short bursts of conversation. Renny drives like there’s a demon on our backs and maybe there is. I like when she’s behind the wheel—she’s aggressive without being stupid. At one point, near Davenport, she mows down a line of straggling Floaters that have wandered into the road, nailing them right at knee level. Watching them spin up into the air, arms and lungs akimbo as they somersault into the ditch is nothing short of breathtaking.

“Your restraint is admirable,” I tell her, a little stunned.

“If you wanna make it to Colorado before Christmas I suggest you let me drive the way I like to drive.”

“I take it this is a newly acquired habit? Or were you creaming pedestrians in your former life too?”

“Pedestrians? You’re fucking crazy. Those things aren’t
pedestrians
. Pedestrians have a destination in mind, they have
brains
. Were those motherfuckers skipping across the crosswalk, heading to the drugstore for Tylenol?”

“I’ll keep score,” Ted says, chuckling from the backseat. He takes off his bent glasses and breathes on the lenses, inspecting them before rubbing the fog off on his shirt. “Ten points each.”

Renny looks at me but I keep quiet. I’ve killed my share of them, but it seems a little inhuman to treat them like bowling pins. Having the car, being inside of it, makes me feel strangely normal again and all those pesky things like morality come slithering back from whatever rock they were hiding under. They look so vulnerable out there, the undead, wobbling on their mangled legs, stumbling toward us as if they had a chance. I don’t know why I care but I do, and I close my eyes every time Renny tries to hit another one.

Things get boring for a while after Davenport so we start trading stories about Halloween.

“Evan and Mikey were so excited. I hope Ned managed to make them costumes,” I say.

“Out of what?” Ted asks. “Grass and Scotch tape?”

“I don’t know, dickhead, use your imagination. I’m going to make Dapper a moose costume at the next pee break,” I say, reaching back to ruffle the dog’s ears. He rouses long enough to lick my hand and then Ted’s pants. “Would you like that, boy? You’re a great big moose, aren’t you?”

“I went as a TV one year,” Renny says. “I put on a leotard and my dad cut a hole in a box and stuck some rabbit ears on top. We got fancy with it in my house. Oh and once, once we had the interns at the office trick-or-treat to the other firms in the building. We made them get all dressed up like rabbits and pumpkins and ghosts and sent them around to get candy for us. ‘Do we have to?’ one asked, God he was a whiny bitch, and I said, ‘If you wanna keep your job you do.’ So we sent them out, but no one had candy, they had no idea trick-or-treaters were coming so the interns came back with Red Bulls and cough drops and Altoids!”

Renny was in advertising. There are a lot more stories like that from her and most, if not all of them, involve terrorizing the sad, gullible interns. “Tough love” she calls it, something they all had to do too when they were young and stupid and desperate to enter the professional world.

“My mom slaved over this mermaid costume for me,” I tell her, resting my heels on the dashboard. “She wasn’t much of a seamstress but she made it work and I remember I was heartbroken because that was the year there was a fluke snowstorm right before Halloween. Waddling around in that fin in two feet of snow was … Well, I looked stupid as hell. I remember she and her friend had to lift me up the stairs to the neighbors’ houses to get candy. Why the fuck do they do that?”

“Who?” Ted asks, taking off his glasses to mess with the tape wound around the edges. It doesn’t matter what he does, the glasses are beyond salvaging.

“Parents. It’s … the fact that she lifted me up every single one of those stairs, and just because I had chosen the dumbest possible costume.… A fin … Christ. And of course it was ruined by the end of the night, absolutely soaked through from the snow. She was so cheerful, so happy for me when I got home and showed her all the candy I had gotten. I bet she was exhausted too but she never showed it, not to me.”

“This why we’re doing this? Driving to Colorado because you feel guilty for ruining your mermaid costume?” Renny asks, smirking. I know she’s prodding me so I shrug it off.

“Maybe. Maybe that’s exactly why.”

“Boring!” Ted shouts from the backseat. “Next!”

“Fine, how’s this: last year, I accidentally ordered a book about the sex trade for the store’s Halloween display. The word
trick
, you know, has two very different meanings,” I say. Ted cracks up, pounding his fist against my headrest to show his approval. “… One of which is not appropriate reading material for a nine-year-old in a Princess Jasmine costume. We figured it out, thank God, before any customers saw it.”

“Ted?” Renny asks, steering us around an overturned semi. The back of the truck is entirely made up of wire cages, all of which are either open, ruined or bloody. A thick trail of feathers is still pasted to the road.

“What?”

“Your turn,” Renny says.

“We don’t really have Halloween in China,” he replies, drumming his fingers on the door. “There’s Teng Chieh, I guess, and the Feast of the Hungry Ghosts.”

“You shitting me?” Renny asks.

“No I am not shitting you, Renny. I don’t see what’s so unbelievable about that. Sure, I didn’t have the privilege of getting dressed up in a box with rabbit ears to humiliate myself in the street, but it wasn’t so bad.”

“Ass.”

“Although…” he says, pushing the black hair off of his forehead. “Heh, one time I did set my grandfather’s photograph on fire during Teng Chieh. It was an accident but man, my mom was
pissed
. I mean, come on, lanterns fucking
everywhere.…
It’s bound to happen.”

“You sound real remorseful there, Ted,” I say. “Your mom must be so proud.”

“Or dead. Probably…”

“Well,” Renny says, sighing, “that tears it.”

*   *   *

We’re quiet again until Iowa City. I can’t help but think of what Ted said about his mom. I know that it’s a defense, being so cavalier about her death, but it’s worse somehow than if he were crying over it. Maybe he’s come to accept it, maybe he knows he’ll never see his family again. To lose a family, an entire family, and Holly too … There must be something in him, something welling up, waiting to escape, but he won’t let us see it. I think maybe he’s not the only one who’s lost everything. Renny and I have no guarantee that any of our family or friends have made it. Sure, I have the note from my mom, I know where she was headed, but part of me feels it’s impossible, just
impossible
to see her again.

I open my laptop from time to time, looking for a pocket of wireless connection, some way to reach the outside, but there’s nothing. The last flicker of a connection was just before we got on the road and that was my last chance, my last opportunity to reach you all.

We reach Iowa City at dusk. It’s a war zone, worse than the barricade outside the arena, worse than any of the empty, burning towns we’ve driven through. Renny guides us onto 80 and we watch the city go by on our left, the buildings smoldering, glowing like red eyes in the veiled twilight. Ted rolls down the window an inch or two and we can hear the crackling of burning buildings and then the gunfire; Dapper gets up, sniffing the air.

“They must be trying to hold off a lot of them,” Ted murmurs, his nose pressed against the glass.

Then in front of us, stretched across the highway from railing to railing, is a solid wall of stalled cars. There’s no end in sight to the blockage, no way forward, too many cars, semis, motorcycles all piled up together like a giant had gotten carried away at playtime, and in a tantrum, flung his toys everywhere. So we turn back and look for an exit ramp. We get off 80 looking for a frontage road, some route to bypass the clogged highway and exit into a little commercial valley with fast-food places and hardware stores.

There are lights at the bottom of the exit ramp, but not traffic lights; lamps glowing brightly in a parking lot across the street. It’s a big grocery store or department store, but it’s hard to make it out in the dusk. Renny slows down and we see that the road is blocked in on almost every side with lines of cars.

“That doesn’t look like a pileup,” I breathe. “That looks intentional.”

I get that pain in my stomach, that uneasiness and I’m trapped in that preschool all over again, feeling the dread ooze up into my throat. We ease across the blocked-in intersection to a parking lot. There’s movement there, figures, shadows. It’s Halloween. I should be helping Evan and Mikey get into their costumes, putting the finishing touches on Pirate Wall-E, but instead I’m sitting here in a cold car, wringing my hands as an enormous man with a beard steps up to the window.

Renny slowly rolls it down, just a little, because we can see the gun straps draped over each of his shoulders. He’s got some kind of rough insignia embroidered onto his coat pocket and the smell of pipe tobacco wafts into the sedan as he pokes his nose right up to the glass.

“Stop, citizen, stop!” he says. The cry is taken up by a few other men, all of them circling the car. I say men, but it’s hard to tell who or what they are. I can see the glow of cigarettes, the little red cherries pulsing as they inhale and exhale.

“You’re gonna have to get out of the car, young lady,” he says, prodding the glass with the barrel of his rifle. It squeaks as the metal scrapes across the frosty glass. “I’m only gonna ask one time. The rest of you, you get out too.”

Renny looks at me. The parking lot is clear up ahead, but we might have to hit a few “pedestrians” in order to make a break for it. I nod almost imperceptibly and she begins to roll up the window. “You can kiss my ass, cowboy,” she says. The man grabs the rifle with both hands, trying to ram the end of it against the window to break the glass. Dapper erupts, barking and growling, his tail beating out a quick tattoo against the backseat.

“Nigger bitch!” he screams. Renny stomps on the gas, the sedan leaps forward, clipping one of the other men. The window is up and I don’t hear much of his shout. Then I can see the night lighting up in the side mirror and the familiar
rat-ti-clack
of gunfire. The back window shatters, imploding after we’ve gone only a few yards.

“Get down!” I scream. But it’s too late, I can hear Ted moaning in the backseat, swearing and huffing and puffing.