04:05
Episode 4: Milk Run Mechanix
Part 5
An hour later and one hundred miles further north, a Honda Civic sat at a scenic overlook on Skyline Drive above Duluth. The plastic sheeting taped to cover a missing rear window snapped and popped in the stiff, frigid wind. Inside the car two male figures lay curled on the front seats.
“Turn the car back on,” the one in the passenger seat said.
“Shut up. It’s almost eleven. Go back to sleep.”
“This is stupid,” said the passenger. He reached over and turned the key. The car sputtered to life. The driver turned the motor off and took the key from the ignition.
“I’ll fuckin’ pop you,” he snarled at the passenger.
“Fuck you. How we s’posed to know if that fuckin’ car is comin’?”
“Griefer said eleven. We wait.”
“We fuckin’ freeze. Turn the car on.”
The driver, a very fat black boy in a new dark brown hoodie, pungent with the smoke of many homegrown nuggets, punched the passenger in the face. The passenger, an older pale man whose stained and torn army-surplus coat stank of too much time on his thin body and too little exposure to soap, held his suddenly bleeding nose in his hands.
“Fug you!” he screamed. “Fug you, assho’!”
The driver laughed but the over-sized hood obscured his smile — if he even had one.
“Settle down, freak. I’ll get you a twister after — if you’re good.”
Two gunshots banged in the distance followed by what might have been two short strings of very fast firecrackers, but were not.
The driver smiled at the passenger.
“You’re on, freak.”
The passenger glared at the driver over the tops of his fingers. He opened the door with one bloody hand and stepped out of the car.
Once on the broken asphalt of Skyline Drive, the passenger straddled the icy green center line of the road. He removed his hand from his nose, looked at the bloody palm. Swore again at the driver still inside the car, and then stretched both arms out towards a rise in the road as if attempting to hold back the bitter wind.
There were more gunshots, closer now, and the whine of an engine asked to produce more RPM than its owners manual suggested. The car, a blue Ford Galaxy, appeared over the crest of the hill.. Rubber smoke drifted from the rear wheel wells. The passenger gritted his teeth, closed his eyes and leaned into the wind.
The Galaxie simply stopped as if the universe had made a law against it moving forward another inch. The engine died with a eardrum-piercing whine and the rear-end rose, its momentum propelling it forward despite the refusal of the font end to move. Violet and Laurel flew forward. Violet’s seat belt stopped her before she hit the windshield. Laurel sailed right through. The robot flew over the hood of the car and out over the edge of the road. She vanished behind a parapet of jagged boulders stacked beyond the shoulder, to plunge down the rocky cliff-side below.
The engine of the Civic started. The passenger door opened and the driver leaned out.
“Get in, homes!” he shouted.
The passenger remained with arms outstretched and eyes clamped shut. His eyes opened just a crack. When he saw the blond hanging limp in her seat belt and the hole in the passenger side of the windshield he cowered from the scene. Two mis-matched Ford Broncos, one splattered with frozen blood, came to a stop behind the car. Six men got out and came around it, each holding a pistol, each pistol different. Each man, regardless of his height or ethnicity, sported a large ornate cross tattooed at an angle across his forehead. Two of the men stood guard at the Galaxie while the other four descended the rocky slope to recover Laurel.
The passenger ran back to the Civic. He dove inside and pulled the door closed after him.
“Go! Go! Go!” he shouted to the driver.
The driver pulled away from the shoulder and drove off north along the pot-holed road.
“You look like you seen a ghost,” said the driver.
“It’s – it’s cross-heads. They creep me out, man”
“Creep you out? You the freak with the power.”
“That only works against big stuff,” said the passenger.
“Like cars?” asked the driver.
The driver pulled back his hood to reveal an ornate black cross tattooed at an angle over his forehead.
“Then you wouldn’t stop a bullet?”
The Civic sped up as it cruised down the road. The plastic flapped in the wind.
EPISODES
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
