When I looked down, it was Randy. He was dressed in his school uniform. He smiled at me, and reached out to take my hand. I put my hand over his, and then immediately jerked it back. His hand was warm, and that scared me.
I tried to talk, but nothing happened. He smiled again; his hand was still out for me to take. “It’s okay,” he said, but I never saw his mouth move.
I put my hand over his again, and closed my fingers. His palm was impossibly warm, almost too hot to hold. He turned and tugged me along behind him. We walked for hours over the fallen leaves, and uneven ground. The wind was blowing hard. I knew that because I could see his hair flying around, but I couldn’t feel it against my skin. The sun was moving faster and faster across the sky. As night came, a storm moved in. The moon came up and over us, flying. The trees were enormous and went on mile after mile. I thought, my legs should be tired, but they weren’t.
When the sun rose again, it seemed as if we’d jumped far ahead of ourselves without walking. We were standing next to an open space in the ground. He was beside me, and our hands, clasped, hung between us. The hole was perfectly six foot. I don’t know how I knew that, but I knew it as surely as I knew I was breathing air. Six foot long and six foot deep. I looked at him, and his eyes seemed to take up my entire vision. I could hear the buzzing of flies. “Katy,” he said, and smiled that smile of ‘I’m sorry’. He pointed into the hole. I looked, and with just the sliver of light that fell to the bottom of the hole, I could make out some finger bones nearly covered by dirt.
He let go of my hand. I looked back at him quickly, and saw that he was climbing down into the hole. “Where are you going?” I tried to ask, but there was no sound except the buzzing of a fly.
“This is where I go,” he said without looking up, and then disappeared. The flies seemed to be growing, because the buzzing was louder, now. It seemed like a horde of bees were above me.
I looked up to see where they were, and the buzzing got louder. I was sure they were all over me; that I was covered in them. I knew they were crawling through my bones and out my mouth. Still, they got louder.
When I opened my eyes, the buzzing was earsplitting. I wanted to tell someone to make it stop, but I couldn’t see anything. I could feel my body starting to wake up under me, though. It seemed hot and loud inside me. I wanted to move, but something told me not to. I wondered where Randy had gone, and then I remembered. ‘In the hole’ I thought.
“Mikey, please. Mikey, please get up. Mikey—,” someone kept chanting my name over and over, in a whisper. I couldn’t see them, but I knew they were nearby. “Mikey, Mikey, please—,” it kept saying.
“I can’t see anything,” I mumbled.
“What?” someone whispered from behind me.
“I can’t see anything,” I said, trying to speak more clearly.
“Lift up your head,” someone whispered, “and try to be quiet; I don’t think he’s dead.”
I tried to lift my head, and it moved. I tasted blood in my mouth. My nose was starting to wake up with the rest of me, and it hurt badly. I lifted my head some, and saw that I had managed to go partly into the dashboard. Blood was everywhere; on the spidered glass of the windshield, on the smashed dashboard, all over my shirt and legs. I looked around for a few moments, still dazed. The world kept swimming in and out of focus.
“Mikey, you have to get his gun. Mikey, hurry, please; get his gun and his keys and get us out of here. I don’t think he’s dead,” someone said. I turned, and saw Kevin lying up against the mesh divide between the front and back seats.
I looked down where I knew the gun was. The holster was unsnapped, and I reached for it, but my hand went awry, and hit him in the stomach. The wet smack of it made me retch, but there was also a grunt. I heard Kevin flinch back from the meshing with a startled yelp. I felt more than saw bloody mess coming from my mouth and hitting my pants. My mouth was alive with the taste of wet copper, like sucking on pennies. I moved my hand again, and got it around the gun. I pulled and it came free. It was enormously heavy, though. It took everything I had to lug the gun from the sheriff’s hip onto my lap. I reached for the door, but everything was still moving far too slow.
“His keys, Mikey; you’ve got to get his keys,” Kevin whisper-pleaded.
I stopped moving, and looked back over at the Sheriff. His head had gone sideways, for some reason, and had smashed a hole in the window just big enough for the top of his head to fit through. The broken glass was the only thing holding his head up. His body had gone forward into the steering wheel. As my hearing came back, I could tell that the bees I’d heard earlier was actually the car horn. Just past his shoulder, which was slammed against the wheel, I saw the sheriff’s key ring. The keys were in the ignition. I reached over to get them.
I was so weak that it took some wiggling to get the keys loose. “Okay, good; you’ve got to get out and open the door so I can get out, and then we can get away from the car,” Kevin whispered. I reached for the door handle, and didn’t have enough strength to pull it. I pulled again and again, and nothing happened.
“It’s stuck,” I mumbled.
“Hold onto it, and push yourself sideways; use your weight,” Kevin said.
I did, and the door clicked. I leaned back toward it, and couldn’t stop myself. I fell out of the car. My body was still numb enough that, while I felt the ground under me, I didn’t feel any of the pain of hitting the doorway of the car, or the stones under me. The horn was much louder outside the car than it had been inside. I looked up and saw Kevin peering out the side window. He waved and made a motion for me to hurry. I knew I needed to, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t move any further.
Just then, the horn stopped. I thought maybe I’d just gone deaf, and I let my eyes loll closed. A continuous banging sound, though, brought my attention back. I opened my eyes with the certainty that the horn had stopped. Kevin was pounding on the window, yelling. Something in me moved, and for the first time I understood what the something, the mysterious something that was always alert and awake in me was.
I sat up. The world spun around me, but I knew I had to stand. I made my legs move. I managed to get the key into the slot on the door, and turn. The door flew open, and Kevin jumped out. I felt someone grabbing at my hands, and then I felt lighter. Then someone was under me, and my head was cradled against someone’s shoulder. I could hear their breathing; it was ragged and shallow. I felt like I should tell whoever it was that they needed to relax or they’d wind up dead, but I couldn’t.
That’s when I heard the shot. It sounded like the muffled thump of someone fluffing a pillow, or the snap of someone putting fresh sheets on a bed. I knew it was a gunshot, though. It didn’t sound right.
“Wha?” I asked, trying to move to see.
“Gawd dammmit, you cock suckin’ mother fucker! You twisted little nancy cock sucker!” someone was yelling from nearby.
Whoever had me, moved me against something solid. I could see over the top of an enormous white field of metal. Someone was stilling yelling mean things, but I couldn’t see who it was. I saw Kevin go in front of my eyes, then disappear below the field of white.
“Don’t you dare, you nancy cock sucker! Don’t you mother fucking do it, you faggot piece a’ trash!” someone was still yelling.
I was up against the car, my head resting on the roof. The world stopped spinning. The sheriff had been taking us to kill us. I managed to lunge for the gun, and in the fight, the sheriff had run the car into a telephone pole. Then I thought, the gun!, and I moved so I could look for it. It wasn’t in my hand.