Crawl (3 page)

3.

The second time they ran across the Mercury with the JXSAVES plate was at a Waffle House in Columbus. Neither Colton nor she was hungry, but he needed coffee, and she had to pee.

The Merc had been parked at the back of the restaurant, beside the dumpster’s enclosure. White exhaust puffed from the tail pipe, and the headlights highlighted the steel doors that hid the trash area. As the Subaru’s lights washed over the driver’s side of the Merc, Juliet could see that even the side windows had been tinted. Given the creepy message made when the vanity plate and the bumper sticker were combined—

(
JXSAVES… I DO NOT
)

—Juliet doubted that a benevolent individual owned that relic of a bygone age. A time when a cup of java and a gallon of gas would have run you about the same price, and twenty bucks bought enough groceries for a fortnight. She kept expecting the Merc’s door to pop open and Satan to step forth into the parking lot—the asphalt smoldering under his cloven hooves. All those thoughts of Sunday school had her imagination running in religious circles. Her mind needed better company. She averted her eyes and focused on the empty booths inside the Waffle House as Colton pulled into a spot directly in front of the entrance.

Both hopped out. He held the door open for her then followed. Garth Brooks’s “Friends in Low Places” played over the speakers while the cook at the grill sang a high-pitched backup. The heavy-bosomed lady twirled a spatula like a drumstick as she crooned. She nodded at Juliet and winked at Colton.

“Down, boy,” Juliet chided.

“As if,” Colton said, before grabbing a stool at the bar, looking not unlike a cowboy saddling up to a saloon in preparation for a night of drunken abandon. He dropped a quick “Hello” on the cook as Juliet made for the restrooms.

As she passed the men’s room, the door swung open and a man stepped into her. His momentum pushed her into the opposite wall. Her arms came up in a defensive reaction.

“So sorry, child.” It was as he said this that she realized he was dressed like a priest. No… Not a priest, exactly. His slacks and shirt were a deep crimson, but the requisite white clerical collar was unmistakable.

She scanned his face; his coal-colored eyes couldn’t actually be black… could they? No. Just a deep (hell-deep?) brown. Had to be. His silver hair came to a widow’s peak that could surely have pierced stone. Ruby cheeks offset a bloodless face, making him look like a corpse all made up and ready for his wake. His thin, purple lips arched perpetually downward, and, when he smiled at her, stretched into a flat line you could balance a level on.

“Jesus saves…” she heard herself mutter.

He smiled, “…and I do not.”

She pointed down the short hallway. “I’m… I have to piss.” As unladylike as her statement was, it burst from her nonetheless.

“Do wash your hands afterward, young lady. Cleanliness is next to godliness. I suggest running the water before using the commode, though, as the water takes a while to warm up. Have a good night.”

A silly need to ask him what his ominous “I do not” meant caught in her throat and she coughed.

Forget that shit
, she thought as she retreated down the cramped hallway to the ladies’ room.

She rushed into the first of two stalls, shoved the door in, spun, and slammed it closed. She yanked the chrome lever into the clasp and backed up until the back of her jean-clad legs bumped into the lip of the toilet. Her heart, a wild animal in her chest, scrabbled at her ribs. It was hard to breathe. A cloying antiseptic odor hung in the air. She filled her lungs to the point of bursting with that smell. She tasted cigarettes, and was not surprised to see a fine, gray haze clinging to the ceiling above the cubicles.

In the stall beside her, someone coughed.

A raspy female voice, sounding an awful lot like Kathleen Turner with throat cancer, said, “I’ll be done in a minute.”

“No rush,” Juliet managed.

She undid her button-down fly and sat on the cold porcelain. She made water like a busted fire hydrant.

“They don’t let us have a smoke break,” Deathbed Kathleen Turner said.

This isn’t happening
, Juliet thought.
I am not having a conversation with some unseen soul while I’m emptying my bladder.

Obviously DKT hadn’t gotten that memo, for she continued with, “Takin’ a crap’s the only time I get to have a butt.”

“That’s… unfortunate,” said Juliet, and instantly regretted it.

“Don’t worry, though. I wash up real good ’fore goin’ back to work. Say, where you headin’? No one comes in here—” DKT paused and made a sucking sound Juliet assumed was her taking another puff off her cancer stick, “—at this time ah night unless they’s travelin’.”

Do not answer. Ignore her.

Juliet heeded her inner voice’s advice. Instead of playing twenty questions with DKT, Juliet wiped, flushed, and stood up.

“You okay in there?”

Quietly, Juliet undid the chrome latch.

“Eh, didja have a stroke or somethin’?”

As she pulled the door inward, the hinge squeaked. She cussed it, her lips moving but not adding sound to the expletive.

“Fine, then. I’s just makin’ conversation. Sheesh…”

A half-smoked cigarette cartwheeled over DKT’s stall door and landed in the sink. Juliet wanted to wash her hands, badly—

(
Cleanliness is next to godliness
)

—but she didn’t want to spend another minute in this carnival sideshow, with attractions like red priests and Kathleen Turner impersonators.

When she stepped back into the hall, she caught a glimpse of Colton as he disappeared into the men’s room. She quick-stepped in that direction, hugging the wall, and backed into the restroom after him.

When she faced him, Colton already had his fly down and his pelvis thrust into the urinal.

He craned his neck to look at her. “Whoa, what’s wrong with you?”

“Weird, weird, weirdy-type people.” Her heart continued to race. She couldn’t remember if it had calmed in between the red priest and Deathbed Kathleen Turner, but she didn’t think so.

Now, standing in the men’s room of a Waffle House and watching her hubby piss into a wall, she began to laugh. Whether her sudden joviality was a nervous outburst, the realization that a chatty restaurant employee on an illegitimate smoke break was nothing to be worried about, or the insanity of the situation truly setting in, she didn’t know.

“You’re the only weirdo I’m seeing right now. Get out of here before some stranger comes walking in. We guys are infamous for whipping out our hoses before we get to the fire.”

“Nope. Nu-huh. I’m bound to stumble upon Laurel and Hardy running away from the Wolfman out there.”

“What’s gotten into you?” He shook off, flushed, and went to the sink—

(
Cleanliness is next to godliness
)

—to wash his hands.

Juliet felt faint. The way her pulse was throbbing in her temples, her blood pressure had to be through the roof.

You’ve gone crazy. Deathbed Kathleen Turner was nothing to worry about, and neither was that priest. You’re acting foolish. This situation with Colton’s infidelity has you mistrusting people and jumping at shadows.

“Oh,” Colton said, meeting her eyes in the mirror, “did you see that dude in the priest getup? Is that what freaked you out? I think he’s the one driving the Mercury I passed earlier.”

They
had
passed the Merc with the vanity plate, hadn’t they? Juliet fought to remember whether or not the car had overtaken them again. The interstate had been empty, though, and she would have recalled the return of the red priest, if he was the Merc’s driver after all.

JXSAVES… I DO NOT

Colton finished washing his hands and faced her. “You look like shit. You feel all right?”

“Are you done? Can we leave?”

“Lemme tell the lady to put my coffee in a to-go cup, and, sure, we can go.”

“Hurry up.”

“She had to put on a new pot. It might be a—”

“Just hurry. Please.”

Juliet spun on her heel and exited the men’s room. As she passed the booths and then the bar/grill area, she noticed the small-framed, greasy-looking woman who had joined the big-breasted cook behind the counter. The new lady flashed Juliet a yellow smile and waggled nicotine-stained fingers at her as Juliet pushed through the exit. As the door swung shut, she thought she heard DKT call her a bitch.

The Mercury was nowhere to be found. And neither was the red priest. She sighed in relief as she popped open her door and slid back into the passenger seat of the Subaru.

Five minutes passed before Colton, blowing into the suck-hole of his coffee cup, rejoined her in the car.

“Ready?” He shot her a smile through the steam rising from the Styrofoam mug.

“Very funny. Drive. Now.”

“I be honking, Miss Daisy.”

“Shut up. That’s racist.”

“Really?” Colton started the engine. “I had no idea. I’ll have to write my congressman to have that film stricken from public record.”

She ignored him. He might have thought she’d momentarily misplaced the memory of his indiscretions, but they were still in the forefront of her mind, only now they were accompanied by a red priest piloting a black Mercury.

JXSAVES …

And I do not.

4.

The accident occurred on Highway 96, just outside of Fort Valley, Georgia, at two-fifty-three in the morning, between mile marker eight and a cross bearing the name of a girl who’d been killed by a drunk driver. A layer of thick fog covered the road, and a light drizzle made windshield wipers a necessary evil. The rubber smeared the mist instead of removing it, but to go without the wipers was to be blind, eaten up by an all-consuming gray scale maw. Colton left them squeaking.

Juliet had her hand up, in the middle of a diatribe about something she would not remember later, when she saw the pinpricks of the headlights coming from the opposite direction. A grass median separated the eastbound lane from the westbound, and it was that fact that caused Juliet to pause. This stretch of Highway 96 was bolt straight for a good ten miles, curving only once, somewhere in the middle, and they’d already passed that. The pinpricks expanded quickly, as if someone were throwing two flashlight-tipped spears directly at her. Colton raised his arm, presumably to point at the oddity, and his lips set to work, forming words that he never had the chance to birth.

The bodiless lights broke eye contact and seemed to look to their left. The fog acted as if it were a curtain slowly being pulled away to reveal the surprise waiting onstage. That’s when Juliet first saw the truck careening toward them, sideways, and the wide-eyed teenager clinging to the railing on the bed. The boy was redheaded and covered in freckles. She saw all this in terribly high definition because the Subaru was colliding with the truck’s passenger side rear panel and the teen was flying out of the bed, toward the windshield. The teen’s face connected with the upper right corner of the windshield as Juliet’s seatbelt caught, slinging her forward.

The rest was a blur. When they finally came to a rest, Juliet noticed someone had painted a red bunny in the upper corner of her vision. She glanced up, and saw that the painting was dripping. The red bunny was hurt. It was
all
hurt. Nothing
but
hurt. She hurt. Her chest was on fire. No, not just her chest. A column of flame had been set down upon her—across her abdomen, between her breasts, up across her right collarbone. Even though her agony was a powerful drug, willing her to run away from the world, that red bunny seemed a more pressing issue. The painter had been important. Hadn’t he? A ginger teen with freckles as big as manhole covers flickered across her eyes, and Juliet was able to match his face with the shape of the bunny. Because it wasn’t a bunny.
My God, it’s not a fucking bunny.

“Colton?” she rasped, as she pulled the seat belt away from her abraded chest. “
Colt
?”

Her neck worked on a rusty ball bearing, swiveling and creaking with solid effort. She could smell antifreeze and gasoline now. Neither odor bothered her; she simply noted them.

Colton’s face rested in a pillow made of airbag. She watched her hand move of its own accord, pushing down the material, trying to find her husband’s face. Colton groaned as she unmasked him.

“Wha-happen?” He coughed, sending up a white cloud of what looked like flour.

“We hit someone.” She said it just like that. Not, that they’d hit some
thing
, but some
one
. The ginger’s face had painted that red bunny in her periphery, she was sure of it.

Airbag. Why hadn’t the airbag saved her from her seat belt or, at the very least, the vision of the ginger flying toward her? Her eyes focused on the key slot on the dash beside the radio. Three words hovered above the slot: Airbag On/Off. The nail of her index finger slid into the opening, and she picked at it absently. The slot had been lined up with Off. But why? Why would Colton turn off the passenger side airbag?

“Turn that thing off,” a younger version of Juliet had said once upon a time. “Have you seen what those things do to people’s faces? They peel them. Airbags peel people’s faces like oranges.”

Colton had laughed. Why had he thought her face being scalped was an amusing concept?

“Sure thing,” he’d said, not entirely done laughing. “Because you’d rather be dead than disfigured. Good job, honey. Way to be shallow.”

But he’d done as she’d asked. That meant something, hadn’t it?

Right now it meant fuck all, because she was alive, not disfigured in the least, and there was a bloody bunny lurking in the corner of her vision. All these things were far more important than Colton’s acquiescence to her shallow pleas.

Colton came fully awake. At first, his face was placid, seemingly drunk, as it rose from the airbag. Then he was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. And screaming his head off.

Why was he screaming?

His strained voice finally formed words. “
My legs
!”

She pushed the airbag away to reveal the messy amalgamation of plastic and flesh and steel and bone underneath. Was that the engine resting between Colt’s legs?

Oh
, Juliet thought,
that’s not pretty
.
Fat lot of good that airbag did.

She should have been more concerned. Somewhere in the depths of her mind, she knew this, but was still punch-drunk from the accident. Not really all there, was she? No. Not at all. For some reason, that bunny still bothered her. Sure, Colton screamed. He wailed and wailed, but that bunny was louder. Where had the artist gotten off to?

Juliet shoved her door open, not surprised in the least when it gave no resistance. After all, the majority of the damage had been on Colton’s side. It was he who’d been trapped, not her. She spilled out into grass, her hands and jeans becoming instantly dew-damp. Crawled two feet forward before pushing herself up. Shuffled out into the road. Spun languidly, assessing the scene.

The truck with the smashed in rear panel lay right-side-up in the culvert just beyond the breakdown lane. A vaguely human shape was hunched over behind the steering wheel.

The Subaru sat at an angle in the median. The front of the car was nonexistent, looking like a cab-over big rig.

No
, she thought,
that’s not right. It looks like an accordion that’s been put away for the night. Collapsed. It looks collapsed
.

Like the red bunny before it, something new sat in the corner of her eye. This time, to her left. She turned, numb all over.

The ginger was approaching, head down, shuffling like—

Dawn of the Dead
. Colt hadn’t wanted to see it. He had strep. I wouldn’t kiss him.

—a drunk after last call.

“Hey,” she said, without much tone to her voice at all. “You… you all right?”

The ginger stumbled forward, went sprawling, and pushed himself back to his feet. As he rose so did his head, and Juliet was allowed to look upon his face. Or what was left of it.

The entire left side of his face had been crushed in; it looked as if he’d been punched with a flatiron. Juliet recalled the red bunny. Didn’t the ginger’s squashed face resemble that strange ruddy hare in the backward way a stamp will look before being dipped in ink? She thought so.

The ginger reached for her, and she saw that two of the fingers on his right hand had been torn off—the pinkie and ring finger. She shuddered and was sick on the pavement. Wiping her gorge from her mouth, she glanced back up at the shuffling dead man. But he wasn’t dead. Dead men don’t bleed. And this poor boy was still bleeding. Fat drops of crimson spilled out of the mangled nubs where his fingers used to be and splashed down onto the street.

The teenager glowed. Brilliant light enveloped him. Juliet tried to step right, to get a better look at the source of the illumination behind him, but stumbled and went to her knees. She relaxed back on her haunches, watching in stunned disbelief as the Mercury pulled to a stop behind the boy with the shattered face. The red priest stepped out into the fog, and the moisture in the air seemed to part before him, giving him free passage to the teenager.

“Help,” Juliet asked quite calmly. “Help us.”

“Jesus saves,” the red priest said. “I do not.”

And Juliet had one thought before she passed out. A rational thought. A thought so unlike the ones she’d had up until then that it seemed ludicrous. That thought was:
Why is he smiling?