Читать книгу Divine by Mistake - P.C. Cast, P.C. Cast - Страница 7

“My number is 074. I’m here to settle my account.” The accounts payable person appeared to be an hourly employee…she moved very slowly. I tried not to fidget. I want my pot I want my pot I want my pot. I was turning into a psycho.

“The total is $3.78…that’s with tax.” She even blinked slowly, reminding me of a calf.

“Here ya go. Keep the change.” I handed her a five-dollar bill. She grinned at me like I was Santa.

“Thank you, ma’am. I’ll have your merchandise brought right out.” Over her shoulder, “Zack, bring out number 74’s stuff.”

Zack emerged from behind the building bearing a box like those I had observed the other pots being packed into. The lid was open and he held it so that I could see that it was my pot. But I didn’t need to actually see it, that now-familiar yucky feeling was back in my stomach.

“Thank you, I’ll take it from here.” Before I could chicken out, I grabbed the box, slammed the lid shut and headed for my car. “I’m getting the hell outta Dodge.”

Talking to myself kept my nerves at bay. Well, almost.

I double clicked the passenger’s door unlocked, and gently set the box in the seat. On second thought, I decided I had better seat belt the thing in; I didn’t want it flopping over, falling out and making me grab at it while I was driving. Gulp.

The air conditioner began its magic as soon as the engine rumbled to life. Trying not to peek sideways at my passenger, I threw the Mustang into gear and retraced my path out.

“What now!”

Children of the Corn’s daddy, aka Lurch, was back at his post, again waving the orange wand in my direction. I rolled to a pause and tapped the window open—halfway.

“I see Fate was faithful.” His eyes skittered back and forth from the closed lid of the box to me. God, his breath was awful.

“Yeah, there was a crack in the bottom of it, so I got a great deal.” Letting up on the clutch I started to roll forward. Couldn’t he take a hint?

“Yes, miss, you have no idea what an extraordinary deal you have purchased for so little.” His eyes pierced me, then he glanced up at the sky. “The weather is changing. You be sure to drive—” pause “—carefully.” (What the hell was he implying?) “I’d hate to think of you having—” pause “—an accident.”

“Not a problem. I’m an excellent driver.” I pressed the window up and let loose the clutch. Glancing in the rearview mirror I saw Corn Daddy take a few steps after me. “Freak.” I shivered.

Turning onto the gravel road felt good, and I gunned the engine, enjoying the juvenile rush of pleasure that spewing gravel with my tires gave me. Glancing in the rearview mirror again, I could see that Corn Daddy was now standing in the middle of the road staring obsessively in my direction. The Freak’s warning about the weather flashed through my mind. I looked up at the sky. “Oh, great, this is all I need.” Puffy gray clouds towered, giving the blue horizon a bruised look. I was heading southwest, the way back to Tulsa, and apparently the way into a lovely example of an Oklahoma summer thunderstorm.

“Well, friends and sports fans, let’s check what the localyokel weather stations are predicting.”

Flipping through my radio all I could tune in clearly was a country-music station, a farm show discussing how bad the ticks are for June (I’m not making that up) and a gospel preacher who seemed to be screaming about adultery (I didn’t listen long enough to figure out for sure if he was for or against it). No weather—not even any jazz or the elusive “soft rock.”

“What say we just pretend like we’re Meatloaf and drive home like a bat outta hell?” I was talking to the damn box. Great. I was stuck in the middle of friggin nowhere, driving smack into (another look forward and a little to the left told me the bad news) a wall cloud, and I was talking to a box filled with a pot that made me feel as if I had taken several diet pills and chugged a large frappa-cappa-mocha-latte. “That’s it—first town I come to I’m stopping at the bumpkin gas station. I’m going to get something chocolate to eat, and find out what the hell is going on with the weather.” Suspiciously I glanced sideways at the box. “And get some fresh air.”

For an instant I almost regretted my cell-phone phobia. I don’t own even one cell phone. All of my friends do—usually multiple phones, like it’s some contest to see how many they can have and how small they can be, kinda the opposite of the penis thing. My best girlfriend (the stuck-up college professor) has a special one installed in her car so she can blab on the phone without taking her hands off the wheel. She also has a cute little deceptively harmless-looking model that nests in her purse. I tolerate the ridicule of my peers because I’ve decided that when they are all dying of brain cancer I am going to tell them “I told you so.” I continually explain to them that, no, I am not a Neanderthal out of synch with the modern world. I simply do not need a phone in my car, my purse, my desk, my gym bag, etc., etc. And I will visit them as they are pitifully wasting away from basketball-size brain tumors caused by constant cell-phone radiation waves bombarding their skulls as they chatter about where to meet for lunch and whose stepkids are the most screwed up.

So I won’t die from brain cancer, but the thunderstorm-wall-cloud-possible-tornado was making me just a little nervous. Studying the sky as I drove quickly down the road, I realized the incoming storm was definitely getting worse. Oklahoma storms have personalities, big mean personalities. It has always amazed me how the summer sky can change so quickly and completely. I remember one time I was lying out in the sun at the current flavor-of-the-month boyfriend’s pool. As proper sunbathing etiquette requires, I was facing the sun and drifting in that wonderfully relaxing sunbathing la-la land (obviously the boyfriend wasn’t home, you can’t drift in la-la land while a male is telling you what great tits you have) when suddenly the wind shifted and cooled. I opened my eyes and glanced behind me to see puffy gray clouds forming. I grabbed my stuff, left a thank-you note for the boyfriend and took off. I only lived fifteen minutes away, but I didn’t make it home before the skies opened. The gray puffy clouds had morphed into blacks and greens. The bizarrely cool wind bent trees. Sheets of rain made driving impossible. I was lucky that I made it to the little hospital in Broken Arrow. I just had time to run through the E.R. entrance and into the basement before a tornado blasted through the center of town.

Okay, maybe I was more than a little nervous. And the damn pot wasn’t helping any.

The green-and-white road sign said Leach 10 miles, which turned out to be the last road sign I could make out, because at that moment the sky puked ropes of rain that began to beat up my Mustang.

Now, I love my car. Really. But the little sucker is truly not the car to drive in rainy weather. It loves to slide and hydroplane all over the road. So I downshifted to slow, turned my wipers on high and tried to keep to my side of the centerline.

The radio was static. The trees I could vaguely see on the side of the road were bent over at insane angles. I flipped the headlights on, trying vainly to help visibility. It felt as if the wind was slapping my car around; it was taking both of my sweaty hands to hold the wheel still.

Sweaty? “What the hell?”

The car felt warm. Why? There was cool air blowing from the vent, but I was still uncomfortably hot.

And then I noticed it. The heat was coming from the damn box. My eyes darted from the nearly invisible road to the box. I swear it was glowing, like it had a heat lamp inside it, and someone had just flipped on its switch.

I tore my eyes from the box and back to the—

“Oh, God!” Suddenly there was no road! I could feel the tires crunch in the shoulder gravel and, too quickly, I yanked the wheel to the left. My overcompensation began a spin and I tried desperately to correct back to the right. No good. The wind and rain completely disoriented me. I struggled, just trying to keep the wheel straight; my heart fell into my stomach as the spin carried me across the road, tires screeching. And then the world turned upside down.

At the same time I felt a slice of pain shoot through the side of my head, I realized that I smelled smoke. My eyes must have been closed, because I wrenched them open and it was like I was trapped in the middle of the sun. The pot had burst from its box. It was a ball of heat and light hurling, slow motion, in my direction. Time stalled and I seemed to be suspended on the outskirts of hell. Staring at the luminous globe, I got a bizarre glimpse of myself, like I was looking into a rippled pool of water that had been set afire, but was still able to show a ref lection. My mirror image was rushing forward, naked, with arms outstretched and head flung back like a glorious pagan dancer being submerged into the fiery ball. Then fire and smoke enveloped me, too, and I knew I was going to die. My last thought wasn’t a flashback of my life, or regret about leaving friends and family. It was simply, “Damnit, I should have quit cussing. What if God really is a Baptist?”