“Shall we try taking one step back in time?”
Phil and Mailer moved sideways, their heads high, their eyes small and threatening. Phil’s posse and Mailer’s militia lowered their weapons.
“Now, let’s talk.”
Nora stood mesmerized. Inside her head, she heard the hum of stars. Down by the commissary she saw Rosa’s van, the Salvadoran families piling into the back, their arms loaded with children and bundles. She watched Rosa steer down the dirt road toward the state highway. Rosa would do them right.
Nora caught the shadow from the corner of her eye. Saw Stasi leap into the cab of one of Mailer’s pickups, grab the Ray-Bans from the windshield ledge. Saw Stasi push off toward the ground.
Saw Stasi shudder in midair before she heard the shot.
“Fuckin’ thievin’ dog! Told you I’d kill her one day!” Mike Smith roared.
Mailer’s militia took cover behind their tank. Phil’s posse got behind the fire engine. When all the world’s a target, there’s no time to ask who fired the first shot. The duck hunters were on the radio for support. The Japanese were taking phone photos, sending them to the world. Oblivious, the congressman stepped out of the van, smiling for posterity. The Fox News helicopter hovered overhead, sending live video back to the station: Congressman taken hostage by Montana militia.
Radio static. Backup on the way. Federal. State. Extraterrestrial.
Behind the barbed-wire fence, MAC, Inc.’s warehouse doors rolled open, releasing strange aircraft like dandelions on the wind. Outside, the paid-for party girls stopped dancing and started screaming for real.
Armageddon in a blink.
Nora ran.
She followed the trail of Stasi’s blood over a rise to the old barn she rented from a wheat farmer. The blood trail went through a broken board in the wall she’d meant to fix. Nora reached for the two keys on the chain around her neck. The first was for the padlock on the door. The second one she hadn’t touched in years.
Inside, she threw on the lights even though she knew every inch of the barn with her eyes closed. Her high-wire rig was in place above a safety net and a sawdust floor.
She called Stasi. No reply. She followed the blood to the drop-cloth mound in the center of the room and raised the shroud.
Stasi lay against the car door.
A pink-and-gold 1952 Dodge convertible. An eight-year-old girl in a pink tutu doing handstands on the hood, her toes caressing the stars. A teenage boy racing time, racing to freedom.
Nora sat in the sawdust on the barn floor with Stasi’s head on her knee. She pulled gauze from her backpack and swabbed the dog’s wound. She didn’t hear the approaching pickup or the footsteps.
“Hey, pipsqueak,” said the voice.
She stroked Stasi’s head. Took her time looking up. “’Bout time, Frank,” she replied to the volunteer sheriff.
“You kept the car.” He ran a finger along the side, slowly, as if he felt vibrations in the metal.
“You’re a doctor now?”
He nodded.
“Then give me a hand.”
Frank retrieved his emergency pack from his pickup. He wrapped Stasi’s wound and gave the dog a shot.
“Your mother saved your car. She kept everything after you left.” Nora bent her head and nuzzled Stasi.
Frank’s eyes focused on Nora’s skull, the raw cap of scar where her flesh had been pulled from her and she’d been turned inside out. He reached his fingers toward it. Touched her.
Nora felt the stars race through. “Six months, Frank. I’ve been back six months.”
He traced a tear down to her lips. “Couldn’t do it, Nora. Couldn’t come close.”
“Your mom got away.”
“I saw her in the van with the illegals.”
“You knew.”
“I knew.”
The sounds of Armageddon filtered into the barn. Jets. Helicopters. Gunshots. Screams.
Nora pushed herself to her feet, Stasi cradled against her chest. Frank held the car door while she laid the dog on the cream-leather seats.
“Feel like a ride?” said Nora. She opened the driver’s side, taking the second key from the chain around her neck. It slid in smoothly and the engine turned. It purred. “Get in, Frank. I’m driving.”
He leaned over and kissed the salt from her mouth. “I’ve seen the future,” he whispered.
“It’s murder.”
“We’re cousins,” he said simply.
The words had sat between them for years, had driven her away, had kept him from her. Their own no-fly zone.
Nora touched the badge on his shirt, traced that star. “It’s the law.”
“Law goes where you take it.”
Stasi stretched out on the backseat, enjoying the drugs.
Nora took a moment to pull on her blond wig and paint her lips pink in the rearview mirror. Satisfied, she put the car in reverse and backed it out the barn door.
The gunfire song of Armageddon played all around them and across the curve of the earth.
“Canada?” Nora asked. “Zombie Road?”
“Montana’s a big state.” He looked at her hands on his steering wheel.
“Don’t worry, Frank,” Nora said, lips pursed, cool as an Arctic breeze. “I’ll do it slow. Real slow.”
The Road You Take
by James Grady
Shelby
A big blue sky arced over that prairie highway driven by a lone white minivan.
Roxy rode behind DezAray who’d called shotgun when they left last night’s motel in a pine-trees-and-good-money town across the mountains. Shotgun meant riding next to Bear, three hundred — plus pounds of watch out crammed behind the steering wheel. He stank of weed he wouldn’t share, cigarettes, and whiskey, plus you might catch a paw if he thought you sassed or he simply got the itch to pop somebody, but DezAray packed sixty extra pounds of flesh on her five-eight-in-stiletto-heels frame and the big girl knew how to take a hit.
Cherry rode on Roxy’s left, past the cooler, behind Bear. Her golden-blond dye job had more class than DezAray’s motel-sink peroxide. Cherry craned to see where they were going as if there were some destination besides the next gig. She was a few high-school years ahead of Roxy, who wondered if somewhere under heaven there was a letter or e-mail inviting her real name to her class’s ten-year reunion. That notion made Roxy sort of laugh as the white van rumbled her life away.
“What’s so fucking funny?” mumbled Star from the way back, where she rode slumped amidst suitcases, sound system speakers, cables, minispots, makeup and costume bags, telescoping dancing poles, and the deflated ring for oiled-up bikini-wrestling gigs.
“What isn’t.” Cherry arched her back to stretch. Potholes on this two-lane highway across the top of the state rattled the minivan, but Roxy saw no tremble in the breasts some surgeon built beneath Cherry’s red sweater.
Wonder if Cherry paid back the loan plus vig Luke fronted her for that work. Wonder how much longer I can keep him from “helping” me go under some knife.
Star said: “’Nothing funny ’bout one of you skimming my stash.”
“Not me!” said DezAray. “And no way it’s Bear: crystal’d make his heart fart!”
Whoosh came Bear’s backhand toward DezAray — missed because a gopher ran across the road, made him swerve the minivan, and messed up his aim.
“Almost,” said Cherry of the attempted varmint murder. “Star, Luke’s rules say no rips, no hold-backs, so there’s no thieves in this ride.”
Bear growled: “Don’t talk ’bout Luke. I’m road boss. And no more you askin’ to drive or some What the fuck you want? and cozyin’ up to the man.”