“You’re a cheap bastard who wants Gary and Brian to pay more.” She looked at Gary. “Four ways.”
He didn’t know how to express his gratitude. Not only for helping to defray expenses but for offering to come along in the first place. He honestly hadn’t expected any of them to accompany him. Yes, they were his friends, but they’d already gone far above and beyond. Besides, this wasn’t their fight.
Looking from one to another, he actually started to tear up.
Reyn clapped a hand on his back. “We’ll get her, don’t worry.”
“Everybody get a change of clothes, toiletries and whatever,” Stacy suggested as they reached the car.
“I’m good,” Brian told her.
She ignored him. “We’ll meet back at… where? Gary’s?”
“You’re forgetting something,” Reyn said. “It’s nearly midnight. All of the rental car places are closed.”
“Then we’ll—” Gary began.
Reyn cut him off. “We’ll go back to our rooms, catch a few hours of much-needed sleep, then head out bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in the morning.”
“No.” Gary shook his head in firm disagreement.
“Do you want a repeat of last time? Breaking down in Asswipe, Arizona, while we spend hours waiting for some Homer to find the part that’ll fix our alternator? We get some sleep, wait until morning, then rent a car and drive nonstop until we’re there.”
“We could fly,” Brian suggested.
“Yes!” Gary said.
Brian already had his BlackBerry out and was moving his fingers over the screen, tapping the keypad. They waited patiently while he accessed different sites and saved specific information. At the conclusion of it all, he looked up and said, “The earliest flight we could get would be a Southwest leaving LA for Austin tomorrow night at eight. The problem is, we’d have to rent a car for the rest of the trip, which would be a good four hours more. But since we’d be landing in the middle of the night, we’d have the same problem we have right now: we’d have to wait until morning for the car. And find a place to sleep.”
There was no way Gary was going to wait around all day tomorrow until a night flight—that could very well be delayed—took them to Austin, Texas, where they would have to wait for ten hours for a rental car. His muscles were tense again, and he had to force himself to unclench his fists. “Okay. We’ll go in the morning.”
“And get some sleep,” Reyn said.
Reluctantly, Gary nodded. “And get some sleep.”
They were on the road in a new silver Nissan Altima by nine thirty the next morning. Stacy had brought textbooks and schoolwork to keep her occupied on the trip. Reyn and Brian were lugging their laptops, Brian also bringing along his ever-present BlackBerry, while Gary had packed… nothing. It was stupid and shortsighted, he knew. They were going to be in the car for a long time, and a book or a game would have helped while away the hours—only he knew that he wouldn’t be able to concentrate on anything extraneous. Joan was the only thing on his mind, and nothing could distract him from thinking about where they were going and what they were going to do when they got there.
He hadn’t even brought a weapon, and that felt like a mistake to him the second they left. He remembered all too clearly that battle-to-the-death he’d had with the gas station attendant in New Mexico, and that should have taught him a lesson: he ought to be prepared at all times. A sledgehammer was not always going to be nearby when he needed it.
“The sun barfed heat onto the desert,” Brian said to no one in particular as they passed one of the Palm Springs exits.
Stacy frowned at him. “What?”
“I’m composing my memoir of this adventure. In my head. I’m memorizing my thoughts and impressions so I can write them down later. This will make an amazing book. True-life trauma makes for instant bestsellers. Especially firsthand accounts of widely publicized events, which, face it, this is bound to be.”
“If we play our cards right,” Gary said, “no one will ever know about this.”
Brian looked at him incredulously. “Are you kidding? This is gold. Four college students setting out on a road trip to rescue their friend who’s been abducted by a cult? You couldn’t make this stuff up.”
Stacy’s voice was tight. “A little insensitive, don’t you think?”
“No offense, dude,” Brian told Gary sincerely. “I’m just thinking out loud. And I know everything’s going to turn out okay; otherwise I wouldn’t even entertain this thought.”
In a weird way, that made Gary feel a little more optimistic.
“It’s fine,” he told Brian.
Stacy wasn’t willing to let it go. “It’s wrong,” she said flatly.
Brian ignored her. “I read this science fiction story once where, after he croaked, this guy went to a world that was just this wild, overgrown jungle. It turned out that when people and animals died, they just died. They rotted away and became plant food. But when plants died, they went to a kind of veggie heaven, where they grew forever. Somehow wires got crossed, and this dude ended up there with the plants, the only human ever to experience life after death.”
“Does that have anything to do with anything?”
“No. I’m just saying.”
Gary tuned them out. He was glad they were here, happy they had come along, but their focus was more diffuse than his. He found it impossible to think of anything other than Joan, and talk of any other subject he found not only distracting but annoying.
Disloyal.
Yes. More than anything else, it felt disloyal to him, though that was a fanatic’s reaction and he would never admit to it aloud.
Stacy and Brian continued to argue, but Gary said nothing, simply stared out the window, watching the scenery pass by, wishing they were moving faster.
As with the trip to Burning Man, they took turns driving and sleeping. Stacy had gone first, then Reyn. Gary took the wheel after Tucson and didn’t give it up until they reached El Paso that night. They had an interim meal at Denny’s (“Dekfast,” Stacy called it, “half dinner, half breakfast.” “Wouldn’t that make it dickfast?” Brian wondered aloud), and afterward Reyn and Stacy slept in the back while Brian drove and Gary rode in the passenger seat beside him. Outside, the world was dark and flat, the road impossibly straight. They met no others on the highway, and it was easy—too easy—to imagine that they were all alone, the last people on the planet. Gary found himself grateful that the rental car had come equipped with satellite radio, that they could listen to music being broadcast from New York. It made him feel tethered to modern life and the world of human beings.
He found himself wondering if the area around Bitterweed looked like this as well. Was Joan chained up in some room, looking out on a barren landscape of endless plains? The thought sickened his heart.
Although he’d not just been anxious to reach Joan but driven to do so, impelled by a deep primal need to go after her, he had still not thought through the mechanics of rescue. Stacy was right. How did he expect to free Joan from her captors? Walk up to the door of whatever this place was and demand that she be released? Try to sneak in through a window and spirit her away, fighting anyone who attempted to bar their escape? What was he going to do?
He had no idea.
Gary continued to stare out the window into the empty darkness, listening as Brian fiddled with the satellite radio, trying to find a song that he liked.
Eventually, lulled by the music and the blackness and the motion of the car, he dozed.
He dreamed about a gigantic farmhouse, identical on the outside to the one in New Mexico where he’d been held but a hundred times bigger. Inside, there was only a single barnlike room where dozens of young women who looked just like Joan were manacled to the floor. At the far end of the room, the psycho from the gas station was trying to start up a chain saw. He intended to cut up the captive women, and Gary knew this because he had a chain saw in his hands as well. They were supposed to work together, moving in from the outside and killing everyone in between. “No!” Gary yelled at the other man. “Stop!” But the gas station attendant didn’t understand English, spoke only that weird alien language, and he revved up his chain saw and cut through the midsection of a young woman who not only looked like Joan but screamed like her.