Page 10 of Vile Bastards
No.
Fear spikes through me as I realize the enormity of that statement. If Bohnes doesn’t know where she is, and Widow doesn’t know where she is … where the fuck is she?!
“Her Pantera was left near the intersection with Coburg Road,” I start, and then he’s turning and sprinting for the front door. I hesitate just long enough to kick aside the debris on the floor and retrieve Shipman’s gun.
Then I’m stumbling after Bohnes, bleeding everywhere, and listening to the distant echoes of Aspen’s laughter surfacing from the very depths of my nightmares.
Widow
My headlights sweep through country darkness as I aim for the intersection between McKenzie View Drive and Hill Road. McKenzie is trapped between two other roads with the river on one side, and a forested hill with scattered mansions on the other.
It’s a tunnel; it’s a trap; there’s no way out.
I need to find Scarlett before anybody else does.
I’m nearing a hundred and twenty miles per hour, listening to the pleasant rumble of the Stingray as she eats up the pavement, blasting past sleepy houses with smoke trailing from their chimneys. The echo of my car cutting through the frigid air ricochets through the valley, and I wonder how many of those sleepy people in those sleepy houses can hear it.
I’m so focused on making it to Scarlett that I barely notice the figure lurching into the road ahead of me. Eyes reflect the light of my car and my immediate thought—it’s a deer, you can’t stop, you have to hit it—is obliterated by the sudden realization that it’s a person standing in the road.
I release the gas, but I can’t hit the brakes at this speed without risking killing myself.
The person—pretty sure it’s a man—flies up onto the hood, hits my windshield, and then tumbles up and over the roof. I ease on the brakes, controlling the skid of the ‘Vette so that I’m turning with a squeal of rubber on pavement.
I come to rest several hundred feet down the road, panting and shaking and cursing. I’ve already killed a cop tonight, but now I’ve just hit someone else? There’s gonna be gore all over the road, all over my car.
How am I supposed to clean this up?
I don’t let myself consider that I might’ve hit someone who didn’t deserve to die, that I might’ve killed someone who has a family, a wife, children, a best friend … “Shit.”
I climb out, shaking all over, the cop’s gun held in my hands—just in case.
I’ve seen way too many fucking horror movies with this exact same scenario to approach with anything less than extreme caution. Holding the weapon in both hands, I ease toward the dark stain on the road. It glimmers darkly in the glow from my headlights as I struggle to control my panting breath; my lips summon frosty clouds as I creep with silent footfalls.
Slowly, slowly …
There’s a body, twisted and crooked lying just beyond the pool of blood.
I move toward it, swallowing down bile and revulsion. My heart is so loud that it drowns out the distant hooting of an owl and the faint echo of frogs from the direction of the river. There are so many emotions inside of me, I’m having trouble sorting them.
This is why I didn’t want to fall in love. Why I didn’t want to fuck anyone. Oh God, Widow, you literally walked right in the door of your worst nightmare.
I pause beside the body and squat down.
I don’t need to touch the man to know that he’s dead.
Nobody survives a car going over a hundred miles an hour. That, and the position the man is lying in is so grotesquely unnatural that my brain is having trouble making sense of it all. Against my better judgment, I reach out and search in the man’s back pockets, looking for a wallet so that I can check his ID.
“This fucker’s going to pop up and bite me, start a zombie apocalypse or something,” I mutter, just to chase away the ghosts of fear and guilt that are haunting me even now. No wallet that I can find. After a minute, I sigh and drop my head, letting the gun hang idly by my side.
This is a fairly quiet road, but that doesn’t mean there’s no traffic. Doesn’t mean the mayor and his goonies or the mob and their goonies or … fuck, whoever it is that’s trying to kill us today, doesn’t mean they won’t be coming this way.
I stand up and tuck the gun into the waistband of my jeans.
“I Know What You Did Last Summer teen movie bullshit.” I choke on the smell of blood as I grab the body by the arms, dragging it to the side of the road. Unlike Bohnes, I don’t keep industrial chemicals in my trunk, so there’s not much I can do about the bloodstain.
