He heard the gas cans slosh behind him as the pickup rattled to a shuddering halt. Sheesh! He ducked his head down and held his breath, cringing. He’d heard of static electricity building up in gas cans that are not grounded, then blowing up like a bomb. He sniffed the air for any smell of leaked gas as he got out of the car and ran around to the front. He smelled no leaks and bent down to inspect the items in the road. Two bikes, with some bags strapped to them. Stepping out, he gathered both bikes and threw them into the back of his truck bed, moving deftly and staying low around the truck. He didn’t know exactly why he was doing it, but it felt right, and he didn’t argue with himself. He worked quickly and instinctively, without a plan other than to help. He swung around the door and jumped into the cab and realized that he had not turned off his lights on approach.
Some of the men who’d been fighting with the yellow suits, the ones in motley military uniforms, were now coming towards him. They were shouting at him and waving their arms. Calvin could not make out what they were shouting but he did not need to.
He inched the vehicle forward, as if he were pulling up to ask directions. As if he were just some guy out on a Sunday drive and he’d taken a wrong turn. He came upon the first of the men, and he punched the truck forward. He pushed at the horn but with no effect. He was just ad-libbing now, an actor on the stage who didn’t know his lines. He just did what felt right.
He swerved this way and that as the thugs tried to run along beside him and reach into the cab. He swerved into the snow embankments on the sides of the road, spinning the wheel and the truck to shake the men off, and he just kept driving. The men in the uniforms up ahead, the ones fighting with the yellow suits, stopped and gawked at the spectacle. Everyone stopped for a moment as Calvin broke free and drove like a maniac toward the yellow suits and toward the uniforms.
There was a moment when, in the headlights of the pickup, Calvin saw in the eyes of the uniformed bandits that they thought they might intimidate him. They raised their guns and pointed them directly at his head. They stood in the roadway as if they thought that would stop him. They thought that it would stop anyone. They can’t be blamed much. It is in the nature of things. The guards were simply not accustomed to dealing with people who did not understand the underlying force implied in such situations. They lived, unconsciously, by the Maoist doctrine that truth was found in the barrel of a gun, and they were not accustomed to coming across people who were not familiar with such a philosophy. The guards weren’t normally challenged in such a manner. But it didn’t take them long to figure out that they didn’t like it.
They stood in the roadway with their guns pointed at Calvin’s head, and they wondered whether the driver of the approaching pickup knew just who they were. Did he know exactly who he was dealing with?
The answer to that question, had they bothered to actually ask it, would have been “Yes.”
But that wasn’t the problem.
The problem was not that Calvin did not know who the men in the road were, or that he did not see their guns, or that he did not assess the danger. Rather, it was exactly the opposite. The problem was that the soldiers in the road, pointing at him with their guns, thinking that threats were all that needed to be said on the matter, did not know Calvin Rhodes.
The light of the headlamps bore down upon the guards and they scattered like cockroaches before it. One of the rear guards held his ground though. As the guard sighted down his gun to shoot though the windshield, Calvin leaned slightly to his left, and then turned his head towards the side glass. He prayed.
As the bullet ripped through the windshield, and the cab, and then the back glass, missing Calvin’s head by inches, he slammed on the brakes and the truck slipped sideways and struck the gunman with the passenger-side rear fender back by the bed. Calvin thought, that guy ain’t gonna make it, and then he accelerated again, streaming by the other bandits, heading towards the yellow suits.
Calvin came upon the yellow suits as if in slow motion, and they looked like aliens, these people, in their hoods and breathing apparatus. They leaned toward his pickup, in the ball of light created by the ancient headlamps, and held up hands as if in supplication. Their bright yellow suits were set in contrast with the red of the truck, the green of the tarp, the white of the snow.
Calvin leaned over to look into the framing of his pickup truck’s window. The taller suit leaned in to stare at him as he passed. A face in a window. The truck paused.
Time itself paused. It was a woman’s face, looking out the plastic window of the hazmat helmet. Her breath momentarily, just for a micro-second, fogged up the shield of her helmet as he passed by, but then it cleared. Her startled visage was luminous in the nighttime glow. Not even for a moment did she look frightened. But she looked at Calvin, and he noticed it. And she mouthed the words…
Help Us.
Get In! He mouthed the words back at her. He pointed to the back of the pickup. The two yellow suits put their weight on the running boards and pushed their way up onto the bed, even as Calvin peeled out along the highway. He punched the gas and shifted gears, and they were almost fifty yards away before the bullets began to rain down on them. The shots, thankfully, were not very accurate. He was half a mile away before the sounds of gunfire faded into the night and were masked by the crunching of the tires on the road and the cold wind knifing through the bullet hole in the windscreen.
He’d learned from his recent mistakes, and, after the two yellow suits had piled into the bed of the truck, he’d flipped the headlights off. It’s hard to hit what you cannot see, his father had told him. But now he was driving blindly through the night, and he tried his best to use the glow of the stars in the nighttime sky to drive by, watching intently for the faint reflection from the road that disappeared near its edges.
He drove unconsciously, and couldn’t have told you if you’d asked just how long his mind was frozen in the shock of the moment.
Kerthump.
Calvin heard it, but it didn’t really register. Then it came again and again.
Kerthumkerthumpkerthump… kerthump!
He struggled to hold the wheel on the road, and as he gripped the wheel in a white-knuckled embrace, he became aware of the knocking on the window behind his head. The car rumbled and shook. The drive shaft shook too as he fought to keep control. He glanced at the gauges. He’d been doing sixty-something in the dark. Maybe more. Adrenaline exploded through his mind and body. The truck slowed to almost nothing, and the sound of muffled screams through the busted window behind his head. It was timed with the pounding of a fist on the cab top.
Calvin had driven into a ditch. He was riding on four flats tires. Blowouts, he thought, On all four, and all at once! He’d been blessed that the truck hadn’t overturned… blessed to be alive.
He sniffed the air and jumped out of the cab. Again, no fumes. Calvin gave a little hop to look over the truck bed, where he saw a tangle of tarp and bikes and cans… and yellow hazmat suits. He looked in at the wriggling bodies inside the suits. The tallest of the them eventually righted itself and reached up to unbuckle its hood. It was the woman. The face in the window. The shorter suit was a boy, obviously her son. The resemblance was clear. They were beautiful, the two of them. Calvin smiled.