Take the Long Way Home (2 page)

And now here we were.

I spat blood again.

Charlie moaned in the back seat. “This is fucked up.”

I didn’t respond. Each time I talked, I swallowed more blood. My stomach felt queasy. Unfastening my seatbelt, I brushed fragments of glass from my hair and lap, and turned towards Hector. My mouth fell open and blood dribbled down my chin.

“Oh fuck . . .”

There was a pipe jutting from his head. His eyes, nose, and mouth were gone, just eradicated, replaced with a twelve-inch round length of steel pipe. My gaze followed the pipe’s trajectory: from the ruined thing that used to be Hector’s face to the windshield, over the hood, and into the back of the flatbed truck. An old elementary school rhyme ran through my head: Through the teeth and over the gums, look out stomach—here it comes. My mind then changed it to: Through the windshield and past your gums, look out Hector—here it comes. I gave a nervous little laugh. The sound scared me.

“Steve?” Charlie’s voice was concerned. It must have scared him, too.

Sour bile rose in my throat, and my stomach lurched. I touched Hector’s bloody shoulder and gave him a gentle shake. It was a stupid thing to do, but the mind is funny that way in times of crisis. Hector didn’t move. His arms hung limp. There was an ugly splotch on his wrist where the airbag had burned him.

“Is he okay?” Charlie asked.

“Take a look. What do you think?”

Somewhere behind us, a car horn blared, loud and obnoxious. I checked Hector’s pulse, but there was none. I’d expected as much, but I went through the motions anyway. My own heartbeat quickened. I couldn’t put my fingers under his nose to determine if he was breathing, because he didn’t have a nose anymore. He had a pipe instead. And besides, he wasn’t breathing anyway.

Abruptly, the car horn died.

“He’s gone.” The words caught in my throat. The whole situation seemed surreal.

“Jesus Christ.” Charlie undid his seatbelt and leaned forward, pressing on my seat. “We’ve got to do CPR on him or something! Use your cell phone. Call 911, man.”

“I don’t think that’s going to help him, Charlie. He’s dead.”

“But—”

“He’s fucking dead, man! He’s got no face. He’s got no fucking face…”

“Well, how could this happen? I mean, we were only doing what, forty-five miles an hour? Maybe? The airbags deployed.”

“Yeah. But he’s got a pipe sticking out of his head. It punched right through the air bag and into his head. His face is gone.”

Charlie’s response was a choked half-sob, half-sigh.

“Are you hurt?” I asked.

“I don’t think so.” He rustled around in the backseat and then paused. “Where’s Craig?”

“He’s not back there?” I whipped around, and immediately wished that I hadn’t. The muscles in my neck and shoulders screamed.

“Do you see him back here, Steve?”

“Check the cargo space behind you.”

“I did. I’m telling you, man. He’s not in here!”

My eyes darted around the van’s interior, trying to confirm this new bit of information. There were no Craig-sized holes in the side door or back windshield. The roof and floor were intact. The doors were closed. But there was no sign of Craig.

“Shit.” I pressed my face into my palms, trying to hold back the sudden and severe headache blossoming behind my eyes. “He must have been thrown from the vehicle. Come on. We’ve got to find him.”

Charlie blinked, and I noticed that his pupils were dilated. They looked like two black blobs of India ink. He grabbed my arm. His hands were sweaty.

“Steve, the only hole is the one in the windshield. Where the pipe is. He couldn’t have been thrown out.”

I shook him off and opened the passenger door. Hot steam rose from the engine, smearing the windows, and I breathed in a lungful. I stumbled out onto the highway, coughing and gagging.

Charlie followed. He leaned against the side of the van, his eyes wide and dazed. “We were only doing forty-five. We were only doing forty-fucking-five.”

I got the impression that he was repeating the mantra in an effort to bring back Hector and Craig, as if verifying the safety of our speed would rewind the past two minutes. I reached for him. The ground seemed to spin and I fought to keep my balance. My legs suddenly felt like they were made of rubber. My ears rang, and I started sweating. I could feel it pouring off my forehead and pooling beneath my arms. Charlie said something, but it sounded like he was talking from the end of a very long tunnel. My vision dimmed.

Shock,
I thought.
You’re going into shock. It’s okay, Steve-O. You
were just banged around in an automobile accident, and one of your
co-workers has been killed—he has a pipe in his face—and another one
is missing. You’re allowed to go into shock if you want to. Nobody will
mind. Go right ahead. Hector will still be dead when you wake up.

I tried to speak. “Charlie—”

“Yeah?”

The road fell out from under me, and I dropped. Then God turned off the lights, and I blacked out again. I’m not sure how long I was out. Probably only a few seconds, but it seemed like hours.

When I opened my eyes, the first thing I was aware of was being thirsty. My mouth was dry, my tongue swollen. The second thing was that Charlie and two strangers were leaning over me. One was a black man in a neatly pressed white shirt and tie with a cross on it. I remember noticing his attire right away—end of the workday and this guy’s shirt still looked freshly ironed. Pants creased. Tie smooth, unwrinkled. He looked
crisp
. His wiry goatee and mustache were peppered with silver hairs, and when he smiled his teeth gleamed white. The other man was an overweight white guy in a yellow hardhat and flannel shirt. Underneath the flannel was a stained wife-beater T-shirt, stretched over his prodigious belly. His nose and ruddy face were lined with the red veins of advanced alcoholism. His armpits reeked, and thick beads of sweat rolled off his cheeks.

All three of them leaned close, staring at me in concern. I could smell the horseradish from the sandwich Charlie had eaten for lunch.

“What?” I smacked my lips together, trying to work up enough spit to talk. My mouth felt like cotton.

“You okay?” Charlie’s brow creased.

I nodded, so that I wouldn’t have to talk. My hands hurt and I raised my palms to investigate. They were bleeding, cut by the small stones in the asphalt.

“Just lie still, buddy,” the guy wearing the hardhat said. “I called 911 on my cell phone. Cops and an ambulance are on the way.”

I turned back to Charlie. “Craig?”

He shook his head. “I can’t find him. And nobody saw him get thrown from the vehicle, either.”

I thought about this, turning it over in my mind. It didn’t make sense. Where had he gone? Craig couldn’t have just wandered away—Charlie had remained conscious immediately after the crash, and I’d only been out for a few seconds. We would have known if Craig had climbed from the van. He hadn’t. And he wasn’t inside the van either.

So where the hell was he?

Charlie glanced around, looking nervous and frightened. I wondered if there was something he wasn’t telling me.

I struggled to sit up, but the black man pushed me back down. His touch was light, but powerful. It felt like all the strength in the world was in those warm hands. A small jolt of static electricity shot from his fingertips to my chest.

“Easy now.” His voice was like flowing water. “Just rest until the paramedics get here.”

My head still throbbed, but my saliva was working again and I managed to speak. “You are?”

He smiled. “Gabriel. Or Gabe. Whichever you prefer. I caught you as you fell.”

“Not quick enough, though,” the man in the hardhat grunted. “You scraped your hands.”

I tried to sit up again, but Gabriel gently forced me back down.

“Just lie still.”

“I’m okay,” I insisted. “We need to find our friend. And our other co-worker, Hector, he’s . . .”

I trailed off, unwilling to finish the sentence. Could Hector really be dead? It just didn’t seem possible. Earlier in the day, Charlie and I had stood in his cubicle, laughing over a dirty cartoon Hector downloaded off the Internet. In it, the cast of
Family Guy
was having sex with
The
Simpsons
. We hadn’t shown it to Craig, of course. He was our friend, but he was also a born-again Christian, and we didn’t want to offend him. Craig wasn’t preachy. In fact, he didn’t bring God up unless somebody asked him directly. He respected our views (I was Jewish and Charlie was agnostic; said he couldn’t worship a God who’d condemn him to Hell just for being gay).

We’d laughed over the cartoon. Next weekend, the four of us were going to Lake Redman for the day to do some fishing. Hector had just bought a new bass boat with his bonus. We were going to try it out. So how could Hector be dead now? It didn’t make sense. And where the hell was Craig? Maybe he’d hit his head and had amnesia or something. Wandered away from the wreck.

The man in the yellow hardhat stared off into the distance. “Wonder what’s taking them so long?”

“They’ll be busy today,” Gabriel said. “This is just the beginning.”

Charlie nodded. “You heard the blast, too? Think it was terrorists?”

Gabriel didn’t respond.

“Ask me, it didn’t sound like no explosion,” the guy in the hardhat said. “Sounded more like—well, a trumpet. Fucking weird shit.”

Gabriel’s smile was tight-lipped and sad. I wondered what he was thinking. Groaning, I grabbed his wrist and removed his hand from my chest. Then I sat up and spat more blood onto the pavement.

“You should rest,” Gabriel said again, rising to his feet. “You’re going to need it before this day is through, Steven, and I will be very busy with other things. I won’t be able to catch you again if you fall.”

“What?”

I wondered how he knew my name. Before I could ask, my attention was drawn to the crowd. They were all around us, people from all walks of life. Bankers, customer service representatives, cabbies, stockbrokers, IT techs, secretaries, construction workers, janitors, telemarketers, forklift drivers, systems analysts, machine operators, and soccer moms, all stranded together in the middle of the interstate during Wednesday afternoon’s rush hour. We saw each other every day, drove past one another, competed against each other for lane supremacy, shouted at each other and flashed obscene finger gestures when we lost. But none of us had ever truly met, until now. It was like some bizarre version of The Breakfast Club.

Charlie gave me his sweaty hand and pulled me to my feet. He squeezed, forgetting about my cut palms.

“Ouch.” Wincing, I pulled my hand away.

He wiped my blood on his slacks. “Sorry, dude.”

“That’s okay. Listen, did you tell that guy my name?”

“Who?” Charlie looked confused.

“The black guy. Gabriel.”

Charlie shook his head. Then he turned away and said, “God—look at this.”

I glanced around, stunned by the magnitude of it all. Ours wasn’t the only wreck on the highway. Remember when you were a kid, and you got out all of your Hot Wheels and Matchbox cars and made one giant traffic accident? That’s what the interstate looked like. Vehicles were piled up in both directions as far as the eye could see. Some were just minor fender-benders. Other cars had been totaled. The occupants, those who were mobile at least, milled around on the median strip and weaved between the wreckage, looking as stunned as I felt. Some exchanged insurance information. Others held cell phones to their ears. Many more simply stared in shared disbelief. I wondered how many were in shock.

Charlie, the guy in the hardhat and I were standing in front of the Timonium exit. The on and off ramps were choked with snarled traffic, too. A thick forest spread out beyond the southbound lane. To our right was a steep embankment. There was a chain link fence at the bottom that surrounded a trucking company. Frantic employees ran around in the parking lot, looking as confused as we were.

A pretty redhead took a step towards us. She swallowed, made a choking noise, and then took off her shoes. I noticed that one of her heels was broken. She looked at us and said, “It’s like the end of the world.”

We nodded. Charlie coughed.

Then she padded away.

In the distance, a lone siren wailed.

“Sounds like the ambulance,” Charlie said.

The guy in the hardhat grunted. “Guess that other fella was right. They’re gonna be busy.”

The siren faded. Then another one took its place.

It was mid-August and the late afternoon sun beat down on the blacktop, yet I suddenly felt very cold. Shivering, I gently rubbed my arms with my sore, bloody hands.

We stood there, not knowing what to do next. Charlie and I called out for Craig, but he didn’t answer. In truth, I hadn’t really expected him to. I glanced back at the van once, looked at Hector, and then forced myself not to look anymore.