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Kill Well [The Steep Climes Quartet, Book One]
© David R. Guenette, 2023 (Revised December 2024)
All Rights Reserved
ISBN 979-8-9885055-0-1
LCC 2023911828
Cyn walks back to her car, her steps and stride growing faster until she’s almost running. She slows, focusing on the instances of her earlier shoe prints, where sufficient wind-sifted sand has collected to catch an impression. She fiercely concentrates on retracing her steps back toward her rental.
She remembers nothing else about returning to the car. She’s surprised to find herself underway and her quick glance at her phone thrown onto the passenger seat shows she’s been driving only for a few minutes. Her rearview glance see nothing of the curve or the cut-faced looming rock, just the road she’s advancing along receding like a movie run backward. She feels nauseous again, but she keeps that in check with a sudden fury about backtracking the way she’d come, upset and angry she has to take the risk.
Everything’s a danger, she feels. She’s driving back toward the resort, thinking she’ll go straight past and make the Interstate instead, but a white vehicle is driving east on 247, covering ground like a bullet toward her. She fights to stay in her lane, to keep heading west and north, fights not to give in to her impulse to drive the car away, off road, into the scrub, away, away.
The pickup passes.
The driver, seen in a glimpse, is an old lady with tight gray curls fluttering in the air of the truck’s open window above a logo for Lucerne Valley Pecans. The woman lazily lifts a hand off the steering wheel as she passes, a greeting to another lonesome vehicle.
Shaking, she releases a breath as she watches the truck recede in her side mirror. Then she sets her eyes and thoughts to where she should be heading.
It’s not easy. She struggles to maintain her awareness of the road, still beset by cascades of tumbling thoughts and feelings of dread, and her flashing memories and formless old feelings and anxieties. She’s surprised. She had developed the belief, or habitually assumed, anyway, that her past and all the trouble that had followed on was long ago resolved. She hasn’t thought of her father for years.
Dead father.
Driving, she figures she owes her life to her father.
“Probably,” she says out loud in her rental car, trying to figure out where she needs to go, but still on the desert highway, trying not to press the accelerator to the floor, which is what her animal self seems intent on doing.
It occurs to her that the Chevy Bolt isn’t exactly a speed demon.
She tries to remember Barstow, which is up ahead. There’s the intersection of the county highway she’s on where she thinks it meets Interstate 15, just south before she hits the town.
The miles pass in a mix of dread, panic, and elation, the mix like a buzzing cloud that envelops her.
If I hadn’t stopped right at Mile Marker 27, I’d be dead.
If I had gone with Joe in one car, I’d be dead.
And some other part of her understands that if she hadn’t had the childhood trauma, she might have reacted differently. She almost never thinks about it, what happened when she was young, the force of habit of years now, but she certainly knows that seeing her father get shot right in front of her when she was eight qualified as childhood trauma.
She sniffs. No shit.
Her father shot by the police responding to the domestic violence call, one of those things she would never really get over, despite the therapy, the childhood PTSD work, her own history of dysfunction, the dissociative problems, and all the efforts to sort her out.
The relapse in her mid-teens, the trouble at school.
Acting out.
She had always thought that phrase was funny.
Hilarious.
Nothing feels remotely amusing.
Cyn is trying to figure out what she should do.
Part of her understands she should go to the authorities, but she knows she can’t, and part of her tells herself to just wait until she’s far enough away, far enough from that sheriff or deputy or whatever he was, far enough away from his colleagues even. She can’t know who to trust locally.
But what she really keeps telling herself is to go away, get away. She considers if Barstow is far enough away, but nowhere feels far enough away, not in any way. She only has the briefest flashes of such thoughts, though, because despite her effort, a darkness keeps coming over her, a cloudbank of blankness, a smothering static from which she only sporadically rouses herself before the absolute sense of annihilation propagates glimpses of her old living room, of the spike of bright that is her father’s white t-shirt disappearing with dark blood eating the light.
Cyn starts, seeing that the car has slowed, her foot has receded from the accelerator at some point beyond her recollection, the car barely rolling, already at the gravel edge. The crunch of the tires on gravel is the first real sensation to come through. She shakes her head, looks backward in a glance, and pulls back onto the road, toward speed.
Jesus, she tells herself.
She knows she has to get a grip on what was, is, happening, and as she makes the effort, she finds herself wondering if her childhood trauma is why she’s alive. Wouldn’t normal people have shouted or stepped out?
I’d be dead.
Thanks, Dad, Cyn suddenly thinks, and she starts giggling even as she knows she’s having another inappropriate reaction. She knows she has to settle herself and so is breathing deeply, slowly. She needs to go over what’s happened.
She had pulled over right at Mile Marker 27, that little green and white sign, the sort that’s everywhere but is almost always unnoticed. The text said mile marker 27, and she had pulled over, figuring he’d show up.
She’d been surprised Joe’s car wasn’t there, but somehow—well, the weird text? she tells herself now—knew that something was off, something had felt odd.
And then she had noticed the bounce of lights, the flashing subtle strange colors bouncing off the sun-lit rock on the other side of the road up at the far curve and she had known, somehow, had understood something was wrong, very wrong.
And then she had looked around the rock edge.
She sees it again in a flash that feels like she’s there again, there, seeing the man leaning into Joe’s car.
She tries to force her focus on the road she’s driving down.
A policeman, the sheriff, whatever and whoever that person is, had killed Joe.
The county highway has no other traffic, but she keeps drifting faster.
Whoa Nelly, she says to herself, and in this moment she is aware of the strangeness of it, she’s in a cowboy movie, rocketing through the desert.
“Whoa Nelly, indeed,” she says to the car, willing her foot back off the accelerator pedal.
She’s still in a stretch of the highway that looks the same as all the rest, same shallow rises of scrub, but she’s put dozens of miles between her and Joe and the sheriff, deputy.
Dead Joe.
She hadn’t screamed when the gun fired, which was good, of course, but then, she’d never been much of a screamer. She hadn’t run out, asking, What the fuck! but that’s because she already knew what just happened, and even still processing, she had already been ducking down.
And then time behind the giant rock formation had stretched, and she was in two places, flickering in and out of each.
It had finally occurred to her, moments or minutes later, that the man was sticking around. She heard him talking, muffled by distance and the mass of rock.
This had confused her, until it occurred to her he was sticking around for her to show up, she had suddenly been sure of it. Her body had gone still and cold with that knowledge.
And then she had received the text asking her where she was.
Imwaiting.
Her moment of brilliance had come, a moment of clarity among her bouts of confusion, panic, and flashes out of time.
She had taken up her phone and texted back.
Straining, she thought she could hear a text notification tone up the road, and he had muttered and sworn into the phone he was using, and she had chanced a peek and saw him pull out another phone.
“No,” he shouted into the first phone. “A new text from her.” “No shit, she sent it,” he had said, and then, “She was supposed to be in the fucking car!”
“Fuck!” he had yelled before saying, “Okay, okay,” and then he was gone, driving, flashing off to where she had hoped to send him.
And now here she is, speeding down the county highway in the other direction, past dust and dirt and rocks and scrub brown and black with the morning’s shrinking shadows, everything stretching along her sight, a corridor, a strobing tunnel of light and shadows in the morning sun.
And now here she is, speeding down the highway, wondering where she needs to go.