Sacrifice (4 page)

Joe regarded the girl next to him from the corner of his eye and wondered if he was doing the right thing. He hadn’t carried her over state lines, and wouldn’t, even if he took her with him all the way up to the Rockies. But should he be helping her at all? What if there was an APB out on her, and the police picked him up? Would they accuse him of kidnapping? Aiding and abetting?

“So what are you running from?” he asked at last. After smiling her way into his car and taking over his CD player, the girl had clammed up, staring out the passenger’s window in silence.

“Does it matter?” She looked at him with suspicion. “You don’t have to care; I won’t bother you. Just let me ride with you, huh?” She held her arms across her chest as if to form a protective coat.

“I think it does matter,” he said. “What’s up?”

“If you don’t want me in your car, just say so. I’ll walk.”

“Whoa, whoa,” Joe said, stifling a laugh. “I didn’t say that. I’m just trying to figure out
why
you’re in my car. Is that so strange? I mean, I pick you up in the middle of nowhere, alone and underage. Seems like I’d be an idiot if I didn’t gather a little information.”

She glared at him a moment, then shrugged.

“You really wanna know? I’ll show you.”

Alex clutched her yellow T-shirt at the waist with both hands and pulled it up, exposing the thin slit of her belly button and the clearly defined lines of her ribs. Joe could see the white of her bra strap and the bottom of a cup as she lifted the shirt up over her face.

“Hold on,” he said, suddenly feeling the blood rise in his face.

“Just look,” she said. “Look at what they did to me.”

She twisted in her seat so that he could see her back, its creamy, freckled skin marred by long stripes of ugly maroon. There were spots between and over her shoulder blades that were a blend of scabs and angry red raw flesh; a little infected, he guessed. Lower, near her waist, the weals graduated to light pink welts, instead of swollen furrows.

“Been working on the chain gang?” he asked.

She snorted.

“Yeah. Chained by a gang at my daddy’s feet,” she said. Alex pulled her shirt back down and sunk into her seat, careful not to meet Joe’s eye.

“So you packed up and said, ‘I’m not taking this anymore’?”

“Pretty much.”

“They’ll be looking for you.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Parents don’t usually give up that easily,” he said. “Especially if you spit in their eye when you left.”

She shrugged, and Joe caught the slight grimace of pain that accompanied the motion.

“Look,” he said. “If your parents put the cops on your tail, and they find you with me, who do you s’pose is going to take the heat?”

“They won’t find me. They won’t find you. Just don’t worry about it.”

With that, Alex twisted away from Joe, staring again out the window.

He decided not to press it. For now. But Denver was a couple hours away, and the Rockies an hour beyond that. If she camped with him to night, there’d be time to find out the rest of the story.

Joe nodded and stepped on the gas a little harder. The white lines blurred to a solid dash behind him. The girl stared out the window, volunteering nothing more.

He pulled in for gas at a BP station in Loveland, and Alex finally broke the silence.

“You’ll take me all the way up into the mountains, right?”

Joe nodded.

“Would you wait for me here then? I want to run over there to the drugstore. I’ll be back in a minute.”

“You’re not going to rob it or anything, are you?”

She shot him a dirty look and said, “Just don’t ditch me, okay?”

With that, she slipped out of the door and ran across the parking lot to a Walgreen’s.

The credit card reader on the pump was broken, so Joe had to pay inside after filling up. He grabbed a couple bottles of cold Coke and a bag of potato chips, and was just walking back to the car when he saw Alex hurry out of the Walgreen’s with a bag. She was out of breath when she slid back into the seat next to him. He could see her visibly relax.

“That was quick,” he said.

“I didn’t want you to leave without me.”

“I wouldn’t have.”

“I couldn’t be sure. And I don’t know where we are.”

“Does it matter? You’re a couple hours from home, for sure.” As he said that, Joe realized he really didn’t know how far Alex had come from. Was she from a small farm town on the border of Nebraska, or Colorado where he’d picked her up? Or had she hitchhiked halfway across the country?

She shrugged.

“Tell me this much,” he said. “How long have you been on the road? If your parents were to set the cops out looking for you, would they have gotten a call yet?”

“I left yesterday,” she said. “But don’t worry about it. Just get me to someplace that I can change clothes and stuff”—she held up the bag—“and you’ll have nothing to worry about.”

“We’re not far from the base of the mountains,” he said. “I figured on finding a camp area and pitching a tent. It’s not a big tent, and I’ve only got one sleeping bag and some blankets. Up to you if you want to keep going with me, or head out on your own. You can probably find someone else to tag along with here in town.”

Alex scowled, the lines of her face twisting in obvious fear.

“Take me with you?” she pleaded.

Joe bit his lip. The kid obviously needed some help, but in just a couple hours she’d gone from belligerent self-reliant road tramp to dependent. She was obviously scared to death of being left behind. But he didn’t really want a tagalong right now. Let alone a “wanted” runaway. If she’d been gone overnight, the police had to be looking for her by now. Still, it wouldn’t be long before they could disappear into the deep, rolling forests of pines that hid ravines and rivers and cabins and humans, indiscriminately.

Joe turned the key and put the car in gear.

“All right,” he promised. “We’ll see where we end up for the night.”

It was amazing how fast the Rocky Mountains switch from being hazy bumps on the horizon to looming hills of jagged rock and evergreen dead ahead. Joe had been watching them grow from fuzzy faraway ghosts to grandiose monuments for the past three hours, but now, suddenly the road was rising, and the flatlands were disappearing.

“Welcome to the mountains!” he proclaimed, and Alex gave a slight smile. She was still clutching the bag she’d bought at the Walgreen’s tight in her hand.

“Coke?” he asked, offering one of the bottles he’d bought at the gas station, and she accepted with a mumbled thanks. The car filled with shadows as the trees thickened on either side of the car, and in moments they were both staring in awe at walls of rock that enveloped the road. careful, falling rock, a sign warned, and Joe wondered how you could possibly be “careful” about a falling rock. If it came down off one of these craggy boulder-strewn hills, you were either going to be crushed or lucky. Nothing you could do would make a difference. You sure couldn’t hang a left or right turn to avoid it—you’d either hit a solid wall of stone or plummet off the edge of a cliff.

The engine strained a bit as the incline increased, and soon they were driving round S curves in the hills, following a stream that crashed and frothed over a long strip of boulders. “Welcome to the land of sky blue water,” Joe said out loud, thinking of the friendly bear from the old TV beer ads, but Alex said nothing. He wondered if she even caught the beer commercial reference. Did they even make Hamm’s anymore?

They were only a half hour or so into the mountains when Joe pulled the car off into a gravel-packed lane. A round wooden sign hung from one of the tall pines near the main road advertising: elma’s campground and cabins. A vacancy sign was tacked to the bottom of the main sign, and he guessed if the cabins were open, some camp space ought to still be free.

“Let’s try here, huh?” he said, and Alex gave a by-now familiar shrug. He shook his head, pulled up in front of the weathered log cabin office and killed the engine.

“Wait here,” he said, and slid from the car.

Elma was a rotund bear of a woman, one of those Amazons with a larger-than-life personality and a hoary mass of silver hair to match. Joe thought her steely hair looked rough enough to use as wire.

“How can I help you?” she trilled as he entered the cabin guarding the start of the campgrounds. She moved from behind the pine-log counter to extend a meaty hand.

Joe shook thick sausage fingers and asked for a spot to set up a tent.

“Oh we’ve got those. Plenty of those. But wouldn’t you rather take one of our cabins? Only twenty dollars a night more, and I can guarantee that the mattresses will be softer than your sleeping bag.”

“That’s not promising much,” Joe joked, but she didn’t take it as humor.

“You questioning my facilities, young man?” she said, voice raising quickly. “You think you can find a sweeter cabin in these here hills?”

“No, I only meant…”

Elma doubled over. “I was just kidding, boy. My cabins are crap heaps.” She laughed until her breath came in wheezing gasps. Finally, she straightened up and slapped Joe on the shoulder.

“Those cabins probably got more bugs inside ’em than the ground outside,” she said. “You take your tent and set up wherever you like past the sign that says ‘camping’mdash;just down the path out here.”

She pointed farther down the lane that Joe had followed to get to the campground’s office.

“I’ll just say this,” Elma said, lowering her voice and leaning conspiratorially closer.

“Your tent may be cleaner, but my cabins are safer. You watch what you do with your food to night, or you may be sleeping with a grizzly by morning.”

She slitted an eye at him and nodded. “And that’s no joke, believe you me. Had a fool here just last summer who left his dinner pots out by the fire and his scraps in a bag by the back of the tent. Had a five-hundred-pound black bear sniff out those leftovers and put his claws right through the tent looking for more. Guy lost an eye before one of the other campers got wise and fired off a couple shots. Bear took off back to the woods, but that camper…well, I’m guessing he never looked at things quite the same again, know what I mean?”

Elma scratched the wide round shelf of her ass, tarped over in loose dungarees, and then stepped back around the stand to the cash register.

“Tent camping, then, eh?” she said and hit a couple buttons on the register. “That’ll be…”

They drove back into the woods, following an increasingly narrowed, rutting path until the motor homes, tents and clearings that held them became few and far between.

“Far enough,” he announced and pulled the car off underneath a tree. Alex helped unload the trunk without complaint, and by the time the sun was throwing deep orange shadows across the tops of the pines, they’d set up the tent, tested the large lantern and smaller flashlight, laid out the sleeping bag and a couple of blankets Joe had kept in the car just in case, and gotten a small campfire going within a ring of fist-sized rocks. Alex enjoyed tossing in the dead pine needles to see the fire flare. Her orange kinky hair glowed brighter in the flare of the fire and the deepening hue of the sun.

Joe finished pulling out canned goods and fire-scorched pots from the trunk and sat down next to her with a grunt.

“Alright,” he said. “I think we can survive a night or two here, provided it doesn’t get too cold. Or the bears too hungry.”

She lifted an eyebrow at the latter comment. “You’ve got more meat on you than me, so I’m not worried.”

“True,” Joe nodded, stroking his chin in thought. “But younger meat is usually sweeter.”

“And faster.” She smiled. “They’ll never catch me.”

“Speaking of which,” he began, but suddenly Alex shot to her feet.

“I almost forgot—I wanted to change and rinse off before dark. I’m going to run back up to that building with the showers, okay?”

“You want me to drive you up?” he volunteered, but she shook her head. “I wouldn’t mind the walk. It’s pretty here.”

“I’ll cook up some victuals while you’re gone,” he said, holding up a couple red and white cans. “Do you prefer beans and pork, or pork and beans?”

“You decide,” she grinned, and retrieved her backpack and Walgreen’s bag from the car. “I’ll be back.”

“Is that a promise or a threat?”

She stood in front of him and raised both of her eyebrows, flashing an evil grin. Then she turned and started walking back down the red-rutted path towards the front of the campgrounds.

Joe used a portable can opener and emptied a tall can of pork and beans into one of his camping pots. Then he dug out a small can of corn and poured that into a second frying pan. He set both pans at the edge of the stack of burning wood that they’d scavenged from the woods around them. The small sticks and arm-sized logs wouldn’t burn for long, but they’d cook the food and warn away wildlife until it was late enough to turn in.

He lay back with his hands behind his head and stared up at the sky. The smoky scent of burning pine colored the air, but still he could taste the freshness of the breeze here. It had a crisp tangy scent, flavored by the woods and the fresh water streams that ran from the peaks to the base of these mountains. He could see the white globe of the moon hanging at about 10 o’clock in the still-blue sky. He traced the dark spots and craters with his naked eyes, wondering how they’d formed. He wondered if once, the moon had held the same amazing breadth of trees and crystal clear streams around those craters as the earth held now.

He daydreamed that the moon held wicked spirits in the bottoms of those craters, spirits that just waited, in patient malevolence for men to come along and stir them up, as he’d stirred up the sadistic evil of Malachai in the base of Terrel’s Peak.

None of my breed,
whispered the demon in answer to Joe’s silent speculation.
But perhaps the Curburide call the dimension beyond some of those dead lakes and frozen marshes of the moon home. From there they could lie in wait, peering through the shadows alert for the call. The invitation to come through to this side. From there they could launch a bloody expedition to wipe the earth clean.