Page 44 of Dread

“Let go of me.” I forced the demand through clenched teeth, barely above a whisper, every syllable sharpened by the effort to stay controlled.

He didn’t let go. His grip adjusted, his thumb pressing harder into the muscle, and he walked me toward the passenger door of the truck like you’d walk a dog that was misbehaving -- firm, directional, without excess force because excess would draw attention and we were in a parking lot in broad daylight and he knew how many witnesses too many, same as I did.

The passenger door swung open. He’d left it unlocked, or unlocked it with the fob as he walked, and the interior hit me before anything else -- the smell of fast food and sweat and the stale sweetness of a pine air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror, swinging gently in the draft from the open door.

“Get in.” His tone left no room for argument, and there was nothing hurried about the command. “We’re going to talk.”

My right foot found the running board. The metal was hot through the sole of my sneaker, and I braced against it and grabbed the doorframe with my free hand. My fingers closed around the edge of the window, and I held on with everything I had. The angles were wrong. He stood behind me, his body blocking my hips, his grip on my arm providing a pivot point I couldn’t overcome, and for three seconds I hung there braced on the running board and my hand on the doorframe and the orange juice drying on the asphalt behind us and the elderly woman three spaces down still loading her groceries, still not looking.

He pushed. One hand flat between my shoulder blades, the other maintaining its grip on my arm, and the force traveled through my spine and into my knees and I was inside the cab before my brain registered the transition. The vinyl seat was hot. Burning hot, the kind of heat that came from hours in direct sun, and it seared through the thin cotton of my shorts and into the backs of my thighs with a pain so specific it cut through the white noise in my head.

The door slammed. The sound traveled through the frame and into my bones, a heavy metallic thunk that landed like the end of something I hadn’t finished naming. Marcus was already around the front, his boots on the asphalt, his shadow crossing the hood in the elongated shape that afternoon sun produced, and then the driver’s door opened and he slid behind the wheel and the cab filled with his presence -- larger than the space allowed, his shoulder brushing mine as he reached for the ignition.

The engine turned over. A deep rumble, the air conditioning blowing warm air that smelled like engine and old filters, and somewhere beneath the dashboard a small electronic click sounded. I sat with my back pressed against the door and my thighs burning against the vinyl.

The locks. All four of them, engaging simultaneously, the sound so final it might as well have been a cell door.

Fast food wrappers littered the floor at my feet. McDonald’s bags, Burger King cups, the crumpled paper of a wrapper that had held fries once. The dashboard was cracked in two places, the plastic split along seams that stress had found and exploited. The radio was tuned to a country station, the volume low, a man singing about lost love in a voice that didn’t know the irony of its timing.

I looked at the door handle. My right hand rested near it, my fingers inches from the plastic lever that would do nothing because the locks were engaged and the child safety was probably on and Marcus had thought of everything because Marcus had spent five years in a cell thinking of nothing else.

The truck pulled forward. Slow. Careful. Navigating the parking lot at exactly the speed limit, his left hand on the wheel, his right resting on the center console near my knee, not touching but present, a reminder of proximity that needed no elaboration.

Route 61 opened up ahead through the windshield. Flat. Sun-bleached. Stretching east toward farmland and tree lines and whatever came after tree lines, and I sat in the burning vinyl seat and watched the Harmon’s Foods sign shrink in the side mirror until it was just a square of white brick against Missouri blue, and then it was gone.

* * *

The farmland opened on both sides like a diorama I’d seen in a museum once. Flat, gold, stretching toward tree lines so distant they blurred into the horizon, and the truck hummed along Route 9 at exactly fifty-five miles per hour, Marcus’s left hand loose on the wheel, his right resting on the center console two inches from my knee.

Not touching. Not yet. But present, like a weapon is present even when it isn’t drawn. I pressed my shoulder against the passenger door and felt the vinyl seam dig into my skin through the thin cotton of my T-shirt. Didn’t move away from it -- the pain was clean and mine, a fixed point. The rest of it wasn’t. I was in a truck with a man who had put his hands around my throat in an Indiana kitchen five years ago, and he was driving me east into Missouri farmland with the calm precision of someone running an errand.

My purse sat on my lap. Shoulder strap still hooked, the familiar heft of it against my thigh, and inside it my phone -- charged this morning, seventy-three percent according to the lock screen I’d checked in the cereal aisle, now separated from my hand by twelve inches of fabric and the physics of a moving vehicle and a man whose left hand rested two inches from my knee.

The odometer read 187,429. I memorized it. The dash clock said 4:17. I memorized that too. The fuel gauge sat at three-quarters, the needle holding steady at an angle that suggested recent refueling.

We passed a grain elevator. Concrete silos clustered beside the highway, their corrugated metal roofs catching the late light, a faded sign on the access road reading HARMON CO-OP in letters that had once been red and were now the color of dried blood. I committed it to memory. Grain elevator, west side of Route 9, approximately eight miles from the grocery store if my mental map was right, which it might not have been because panic did things to distance.

A water tower rose beyond the silos. Blue, faded, the town name stenciled in white letters too small to read at this speed, and I memorized the color -- faded blue, the shade of a paint job that had been repainted once in the nineties and left to weather -- and the approximate bearing relative to our direction of travel, which was east, steady east, the sun at our backs now, the shadow of the truck stretching long across the asphalt behind us.

“I’ve been patient.”

His voice broke into the silence, calm enough that I knew he’d been waiting to say it. I kept my attention on the highway instead of looking at him. The grain elevator diminished in the side mirror, followed by the faded blue water tower, until both were behind us.

“I found you, didn’t I?” There was satisfaction in the statement, as though finding me proved something beyond his ability to pay someone with better resources than he had. The truck stayed at fifty-five, carrying us farther from town. “That should tell you something.”

It did. I’d left the same night the victim advocate called. I hadn’t told anyone where I was going because I hadn’t known myself. Two days later, a breakdown had stranded Ellie and me in a Missouri town I’d never heard of. There shouldn’t have been a trail leading from Indiana to Dread’s compound.

Except somehow there had been one.

“How?” I asked, keeping my attention on the road ahead. I hated giving him the satisfaction of the question, but I needed the answer. “I didn’t even know where I was going.”

He smiled. “Your license plate did.”

My stomach dropped.

“You think people disappear because they drive away?” he asked. “Cameras everywhere. Toll roads. Gas stations. Parking lots. Guy I hired found your SUV. After that, all he had to do was keep looking.”

Which explained the search. The cigarettes that hadn’t smelled like his. Someone getting onto the compound before anyone realized they should be looking for more than one man.