Psycho Save Us (5 page)
Authors: Chad Huskins
But Big Sister
Protocol performed an override of rationale, and it demanded she never leave
Shannon alone, and so she hadn’t. Kaley balled up her fist and smacked the big
fucker across his face, just as he was bending over and snatching Shannon up by
her right sleeve. This had
almost
bought Shannon time to escape. The man
staggered back in surprise, and Shannon’s Jimmy Hendrix shirt that Rick had
bought for her before he left tore in the man’s grip. Shannon got two steps
before one of the tattooed white men got hold of her.
“No!” Kaley
screamed, and leapt for her.
Then, a hand
made of steel grabbed her around her mouth, jerked her head backwards and
lifted her off the ground. There was something clamped between the hand and
her mouth. It smelled sweet at first, then really awful, like the fumes of
gasoline or Drano. Her head swam for a moment as she kicked backwards at the
monster’s shins. She heard him grunt, but otherwise she didn’t seem to have
any effect at all.
Someone muttered
words she didn’t comprehend. “
Bez prablem
.”
Someone else
replied, “
Khorosho
.”
Someone else
said, “Hurry the fuck
up
!”
The world lurched,
her limbs went numb and her eyelids became very, very heavy. She saw Shannon
being lifted and handed off to someone in the back of the Expedition.
Rounded
up
…
like cattle
…
It was the last
coherent thing that passed through her head. The last thing she saw and felt
was Nan’s hand in hers. She was on her deathbed, shaking her head
disapprovingly at her. On that day, Kaley had felt something. The charm,
perhaps. She had also seen something in Nan’s eyes, something akin to a great,
inestimable pity. Kaley suddenly recalled the old woman’s last words. “Oh,
chil’…you got a lotta hurt comin’ yo way…good luck…”
It had all
happened so quickly that Spencer had barely had time to climb out of his
truck. He hopped back inside when he saw the older girl getting tossed limply
into the back of the El Camino, just before the two vehicles took off. The El
Camino peeled out at first, then followed the Expedition up the street past
Strike Gold. As the Expedition went past, Spencer spotted a white fellow in
the passenger side seat, leaning an arm with huge biceps out the window. The
bicep had a crimson bear on it, one claw lifted, preparing to swipe.
The two vehicles
burned ondown the road, but they passed close enough, even the dark, that
Spencer could make out the Georgia license plate. Bartow County, number AXC
327. The two cars made a hard turn at the corner of Cheshire Road, a maneuver
that was at odds witht eh Expedition’s size and tonnage. Its right-side tires
momentarily left the pavement, then it stabilized, and then both vehicles were
gone.
He jumped out
again. The street was utterly silent, not even a honking horn in the distance.
The four black men, who had seemed so eager to boast their confidence before,
had vanished quick as a dream. Across the street, the black couple, who had
been arguing just moments earlier, now stood looking dumbly up and down the
street. Right, left, then right, then left again. They were probably
wondering the same thing Spencer was.
Did I just fuckin’ see what I think I
did?
“Huh,” Spencer
said to himself. “Ya don’t see that every day.” He reached into his pocket
and pulled out another Marlboro, lit it, and opened the driver’s side door to
hop back in. He stopped, though, when he spotted Mac coming out of the store.
The fat man barely fit through the front door, and he opened it more with his
belly than he did his hand, the bell jingling hard against the glass. In his
right hand he carried a weapon. Not a MAC-10, but a Glock, something that
would do the job just as well. “They’re gone, Yoda,” Spencer said.
“What the fuck
was
that shit?!” he screamed, looking up and down the street. Mac’s eyes found
something on the sidewalk and locked on. He was panting, but his breathing
slowed as he started to put something together. Spencer followed his gaze, and
saw the groceries spilled on the ground, the artifacts of a perfectly normal
life for two girls until seconds ago. Then Mac looked up at Spencer
accusatorily. He raised his gun.
“Hey, hey, hey!”
Spencer shouted, stepping so that he could get cover behind most of the
Toyota. He reached behind him, touched his own weapon, a Glock Pocket 10, a
concealable weapon barely bigger than his hand. “Chill out, homeboy.”
“The fuck just
happened here, white boy?” Mac demanded. “
Tell
me! Did ya see it?
They take the girls?”
“Yeah.”
“God
damn
it!” He pulled out his cell and started dialing.
“You knew ’em?”
Mac put the
phone to his ear. “Yeah, I knew ’em! They momma live up on Beltway. Always
high as a muthaf—
hey
! Where you goin’?”
“Good luck to
you and them,” Spencer said, stepping inside the truck.
“Hey, you can’t
just leave like this! I’m callin’ the po-po, man! You gotta give a
description an’ shit! Give a statement! That’s how this shit
works
,
yo!”
“Ask the kind
couple across the street,” he said, pointing to the still dumbfounded woman and
her man on the opposite sidewalk. “They probably saw more than I did.”
“The fuck you
runnin’ from?”
Spencer said
nothing, he just shut the door and got moving.
I can’t be here when the
cops show up
.
If anybody’ll recognize me, it’ll be a goddam pig
.
He squealed out without a second’s consideration, glanced in his rearview
mirror once to see Dodson’s Store and Mac’s big ass diminishing behind him.
Mac was holding his cell to his ear with one hand and waving desperately with
his gun hand.
He could’ve shot me, or threatened to shoot me, but he didn’t
.
Spencer had gauged the fat man wrong. He wasn’t like these other niggers
around here, no, he was one of those that tried to defend himself from the rest
of the garbage. The girls were part of his tribe, and he at least wanted to
protect them.
Spencer made a
turn on Cheshire road, but in the opposite direction that the Expedition and El
Camino had gone. He looked in his rearview mirror, didn’t see them.
Wouldn’t
be able to follow them anyway
, he thought.
A crew like that, they
probably have some safehouse nearby, a garage where they can dip in and hide
.
Yes, they had moved quickly. A professional pull crew if Spencer ever saw
one.
Just pullin’ them off the streets
.
Snatch, snatch
.
He had already
moved on. The past was past. The two girls had to fend for themselves. He
couldn’t be a part of it because it would undoubtedly bring a shitstorm down on
him, as well. In fact, considering his record, the pigs were likely to think
he had something to do with it. No, no statement. And no time to hang around
talking to Mac about what he’d seen. It was time to move.
Something
occurred to Spencer, though. He couldn’t go to Motel Quick now, because Mac
had recommended it and would know he was going there. Mac might tell the
police. .
And Basil didn’t answer his fuckin’ phone
.
Which means he
may not even be in the state
. But Mac had told him Pat’s Auto was on
Terrell Street. He could go there, lay low, especially if Pat himself was
there. After all, a favor was owed, and Pat, asshole that he was, had never
balked on repaying one. And Mac probably wouldn’t mention Pat’s Auto to the
police, since it wasn’t the kind of place one wanted the cops to know one was
associated with.
But then again, he might
, Spencer thought.
He
seemed awfully concerned about those girls
.
But
Pat’s the
only guy I really know in this town
.
He took a quick
right turn on Holcomb Bridge Road and said out loud, “Fuck it, I gotta take the
chance.” Spencer punched in the street name on the GPS. Terrell Street came
up, whereas Pat’s Auto never had. Patrick Mulley didn’t advertise, and kept
his little chop shop from coming up on most searches.
Spencer took a
left turn onto McKinley-Parke Drive, toking on his cigarette and turning up the
radio. Blue Öyster Cult
was
advising everyone not to fear the Reaper, and the voice of his stolen GPS said,
in its usual fragmented way, “Go—two—
miles
—then—turn—
left
—on—Winston—Street.”
The smoke felt good in his lungs. He exhaled, singing along to the music,
remembering the hilarious “more cowbell” sketch Will Ferrell had done on
Saturday Night Live with Christopher Walken, like, what, back in 2000, or
2001?
Back before the towers had even fallen
, he thought. That led him
to think about what Will Ferrell had done since then. Associative thinking
like this took him down more roads than he drove that night, and the only time
he thought of the black girl in the green sweater again was when he considered
how she had stolen glimpses of him while paying for her food.
Spencer thought
back to those piquant eyes. Why had she kept looking at him? Not just at him,
but looking him in the eye. She hadn’t looked him over out of curiosity, she
had watched him. Like she knew him.
Crazy fuckin’ nigglet
, he thought,
and turned the music up some more. The universe was full of random
encounters. So much going on in what that Carl Sagan guy had called the cosmic
fugue (inside Leavenworth, Spencer had read Sagan profusely, particularly
Cosmos
).
Things happened randomly. Indeed, the very event that kick-started life on
this planet was random in itself—random interactions causing haphazard chemical
reactions just so happened to synthesize some amino acids and other organic
compounds from inorganic precursors.
Tonight’s
encounter had been no different.
“Come on, baby,”
he sang. “Don’t fear the Reaper, baby take my hand, don’t fear the Reaper,
we’ll be able to fly…”
The dreams were
spotted and menacing. She came and went. Sometimes, she was in the back of
the car, and other times she was treading water. No, not water. A viscous
liquid; dark shapes swimming just beneath its surface. She swam in a dark room
with tenebrous shadows that fell over her, no,
reached
for her.
People were
calling to her. She looked around to see who it might be. There was her
mother, despondent and alone on her couch, crying for Kaley’s father, Maury,
wishing he would come back home. The pipes she smoked from were made out of
glassblown Pyrex tubes or light bulbs. In this vision, one was now in her
hand, burning the powder and transforming it into a substance of magical fumes
that made Mom feel so good…but the dream also revealed to her those desperate
times when Mom had to heat it in aluminum foil over a flame. Like the time she
had gotten so angry with little Shannon for running around and playing with
their cat Mr. Peps and stomping on her pipe. “Shan! I told you, stupid girl,
watch
yo step
!” Mr. Peps mysteriously vanished the next day.
On some level,
Kaley knew.
Nobody’s gonna come for us
.
My mother’s a meth addict
and she’ll probably wake up not even knowing she sent us to the store
. The
thought echoed, and with it, pain. This was common. Mom gave them a chore, or
sent them to their Aunt Tabitha’s, or saw them walk out the door to catch the
bus, and woke up not knowing where they’d gone. It was Kaley who prepared
their school lunches now. It was Kaley who collected Shan’s laundry and washed
it all. Mom had become a word sometimes uttered around the house to refer to
the husk that roamed about their home, occasionally burning something and
occasionally issuing an “I love you” in their general direction.
Nobody’s
going to save us
.
“Romeo and
Juliet…are together in eternity…we can be like they are…”
Who’s singing?
None of her
thoughts had much substance, because Kaley didn’t even know where she was, or
why she was so worried. Part of her knew that she was now in the clutches of
bad people. The worst people. She knew it, and not because it felt so real,
but because it felt so
surreal
. Her black, liquidy, nonspecific dream
of echoes was loaded with the knowledge, and the intense feeling. The feeling
a person got when they felt like they had stepped into someone else’s life.
This
doesn’t happen to me
, one thinks to oneself.
This is supposed to happen
to someone else, but not me
.
That had
happened at Nan’s bedside. The feeling of disbelief that her Nan had felt had
washed over Kaley, causing her to feel death. The actual coldness of it, and
the utterly despairing part of her grandmother reaching out to someone, anyone,
finding only the granddaughter who shared the charm with her. Kaley had shared
in death, had felt pulmonary functions ceasing, had felt the lungs shutting
down. She hadn’t been able to feel her feet.
This can’t be happening
,
her Nan had thought. And Kaley had shared the same thoughts on the matter.
I
can’t be connecting to death
, she had reasoned.
No one can do that
.
