Fully Loaded Thrillers - Crouch Blake - Страница 37

The RV pitched and slammed onto its right side, pavement skinning metal, debris hammering the undercarriage. Peter could feel the pressure drop in his ears and his lungs, and Melanie had her legs drawn into her chest, head buried between her knees, bracing, yellow sparks firing on the other side of her window.

In the swirling gray madness, a potted plant shot past with the velocity of a cannon ball and the walls of the RV creaked and a window exploded in back.

Then the sparks disappeared and the grinding went quiet, the sudden acceleration beyond anything Peter had experienced, pressing him into the cushion of his seat, the roar escalating to a screaming hiss, now pitch black through the windshield and nothing to see but the glow of the dash.

Lightning flashed and the view out his window made him cry.

It would have been invisible but for the lightning. The RV was upright and tilted left. At an inconceivable speed, they orbited the center of the tornado—a cylinder of still, clear air with walls of rotating clouds made brilliant by the ribbons of lightning that streaked across the funnel. Inside, smaller tornadoes were constantly forming and writhing and dying away, and he glimpsed a gray thread at the base of the funnel that he realized was Highway 9, eight hundred feet below.

Peter was still squeezing the steering wheel, holding onto some illusion of control. He let go, tucked his hands under his arms, and stared through the window. Drinking it all in. Fighting to stay with the moment, this last moment, but he kept seeing their faces—clarity where for two decades there had been only blur.

Darkness again.

By the dashboard glow, Peter saw coins rising out of the drink holders.

His stomach lifted into his throat, and he had the inescapable sense that they were plunging earthward—exhilaration and fear and unbearable weightlessness.

Then the G-force struck, crushing his arms and legs, pinning his chin to his chest, and it occurred to him that he couldn’t breathe, that no matter how hard he tried, he wasn’t going to be able to stop his eyes from rolling back into his head, and he wondered if he would lose consciousness before they hit the ground.

He felt no pain. He looked down at his arms resting on the seat, bits of glass caught up and glittering in the blond hairs. Wondered if he should try to raise them. If he wanted to know so soon. He decided that he did. He tried. They raised and he held his hands in front of his face and let his arms rotate at the elbows. Next, he let his neck wobble on his head. He wiggled his toes. Like an infant discovering its new body, he thought, running his tongue across his teeth, everything still intact.

He looked over at Melanie. Her eyes were closed and she had slumped against the door, her hair covered in shards of glass.

The nightgown barely swelled over her heart. She breathed.

He watched her for awhile, watched her sleep, and then begin to stir, her eyes opening, struggling to sit up, moving her fingers and toes, touching herself just as he had—a delicate evaluation of what worked and what did not.

At last she looked over at him, her face bleeding where the glass had cut, but otherwise in one piece.

She raised her eyebrows and he knew the question, shook his head.

They were sitting upright in a beat to shit RV, still buckled into their seats. Glass busted out of the passenger and driver side windows, sunlight passing in blinding shears through fractures in the windshield.

And they had not smiled like this before. Not in their lives. Like they’d borne witness to a private miracle. Been made to see. Called forth from their tombs.

There was nothing but grassland and morning sky as far as they could see, and the sound of wind moving through the tall grasses and the coolness of that wind was everywhere and upon everything.

An introduction to “Unconditional”

I’m a father. I love my son beyond words. Beyond understanding. This is one of the most difficult stories I’ve ever written. You’ll understand why afterward, but to say more would spoil the revelatory nature of how this story unfolds.

unconditional

“I’m not scared of what’s coming. Almost looking forward, you know? Like Christmas morning when you’re a kid and you been thinking about it so long, when it finally comes, it don’t feel real? Probably be like that.

“Way I figure, if it’s nothing? Great. If it’s better than this? Hell yeah. And there’s no conceivable way things can get any worse than what I lived. It’s like ever since I was fifteen, I been shot up with anesthetic. A heart pumped full of it.

“Not feeling nothing will drive you to do strange and evil things. This ain’t excuses. Just the way it is.

“You’re looking older, but I guess I am too, right? You missed it. I had a beard yesterday that I’d been growing for years. Looked like some demon prophet. But I figured I should have it cut. See my face one last time. Look, this is more than I talked to anybody in years, and still, it’s about all I got to say, so…

“What?

“Want me to read this now? While you watch?

“You’re just like all of ’em, you know that? Want to bleed me for something, and I can already guess what it is.

“Ain’t I right?

“No?

“Yeah. I am. And if you think you’re going to leave here knowing, I got some news for you.”

My son do you remember the backpacking trip we made into the Ozarks when you were eight years old? I still have a photograph of us squatting by a campfire, you looking cross in the cold with your arms wrapped ’round yourself in that green fleece jacket which last week I took down out of the attic for the first time in ages. Sat alone at the kitchen table late into the night fingering the cinder burns our campfire had made, the polyester melted into circles of plastic. The fleece still carries your scent, or at least some smell my brain has been long-programmed to associate with you.

In my bedroom hanging above the chest of drawers is a drawing you made for me twenty-seven years ago one morning when I was rushing out the door to work. Black Sharpie on orange construction paper—a tall house with too many windows. A tree. Flock of birds in the sky and in the wobbly scrawl of a five-year-old: “I love you, Papa.” I know what it does to me to look at the drawing and the photograph. I wonder what it would do to you? Are you capable of being moved by anything?

I remember teaching you how to tie a fly. How to cast. The joy in your face as you lifted your first rainbow from the current—exhilaration and pride. The other day I drove past the playing field beside the Episcopal church. A perfect October afternoon. The light golden. Leaves turning. Children playing soccer. Ruddy faces and grass-stained knees, and I thought of all the games I watched you play. I can still hear your high-voiced questions, so many of them, coming from the backseat of our car as the three of us drove home from somewhere on some night I failed to appreciate what I had.

When I was a boy, I passed a homeless man, drunk and begging on a street corner. My father, sensing my disgust, said something I never forgot, that I think of every time I see your face on the news or in the paper—“That man was once someone’s little boy.”

I cannot separate the man you are now from the boy you were then, and it is killing me.

I wanted everything for you, son.

I still do.

You never experienced the gift of children, and I hate that for you, because you won’t understand how I can still love you, how, even though you took everything from me, you’re still all that I have.