Читать книгу Alice Isn’t Dead - Joseph Fink, Joseph Fink - Страница 10

Grass and barns and metal windmills. Kansas scenery had delivered on Keisha’s expectations.

Her anxiety was a low, manageable buzz. She had a song she liked on her phone. She hadn’t bothered to figure out how to connect the phone to the truck’s stereo, and so let it play tinny and soft from the phone’s speakers, bopping along to a melody she couldn’t quite hear but knew well enough to sing anyway. Sitting next to her was the second volume of a comic series that she was looking forward to starting over dinner. The air through the window was dry and cool. Not that she was ever calm, but if she were to be calm, it would look like this.

She had stopped to pee at a McDonald’s with a plaque indicating it once was a historical school of some sort, but now it wasn’t a school, it was a McDonald’s, and she peed at it. Given how often people stop at those places to use the toilet without spending any money, she wondered, were they more restaurantor public bathroom on a sheer numbers level? It was an interesting question, and she had nothing but flat road hours to think it over. No plans to stop again until dinner, and dinner would be as late as she could make it. There would be miles done today. She could use the pay, and even more so the sense of movement. The feeling that she was getting somewhere even if she would have to turn right around and head back.

Thump. She felt the vibration through her seat before she heard the noise. Thump thump. THUMP. At first she thought it was her tires going funny, but then realized the sound was coming from the trailer. To be heard all the way up in the cab, above the whoosh of the air and the growling cough of the engine, it must have been seriously loud. (And there it was again, THUMP.) A beast the size of a grizzly bear, running back and forth, slamming into the walls.

There her fear was, right where she always left it, deep in her throat. Metal and acid washed over her tongue and perspired out onto her palms. Her chest was a closing door. A monster in her trailer. Ridiculous. Absurd. A fairy tale. But hadn’t she seen monsters on these roads?

No way from the trailer to the cab, and so she just wouldn’t stop. She would drive and drive forever. She wouldn’t eat, her truck wouldn’t take fuel, she would be saved by the miracle of sheer movement. Because she couldn’t bear to think what would happen when her body or her truck forced her to stop.

THUMP, and her heart echoed the sound with a beat so hard she felt the skin of her chest pulse outward. Thanks to her anxiety, fear was a constant pulse in her life. And now this terrible racket. And she was alone in Kansas. Grassland out to the end of it.

When it gets dark over the grass, it really gets dark. Like being on an ocean, the distant lights of towns like ships. Only her on the road and a fuel tank that was down to a quarter. She would need to stop soon. There was no avoiding this conflict, but she could control how it was confronted. She had to find a way to do it that would be least likely to get her killed. Good luck to her. In the darkness of the fields there was a single billboard, well lit and maintained. It had a picture of a smiling family, and against a soft pink background it said a company name. PRAXIS.

She settled on pulling off in the parking lot of a Target. At least the crowds. Or if not crowds, then at least other people. And if not other people, then at least the lights, bright and sterile across the vast lot. The lights would keep her calm after the long empty of the grassland.

Keisha clutched her heavy flashlight, and she crept around the trailer. There was no noise, not a hint of movement. She had parked as close to the entrance of the store as possible, a bank of automatic doors blaring a welcoming fluorescence out into the cool evening, but still there were only a few cars around. Her hand shuddered as she reached for the latch. A metallic clink. The groan of the handle upward. The rattling complaint of the door opening.

She squinted into the darkness. Her cargo had been pallets of paper towels, and the boxes were torn open by swipes of what seemed to be giant claws. The towels were shredded and tossed about. And there was no need to search for the cause. A yellow baseball hat. Yellow fingernails. Skin in loose folds in places and in other places stretched over angular protrusions. Sharp teeth. Eyes, yellow and pink. Polo shirt, yellow and dirty. The word Thistle on the right breast.

“It seems we keep running into each other,” he said, in his hollow, rattling voice. “How crazy is that?”