MICHAEL SAT IN THE DIRT, his hands tied behind his back and his legs tied under him. The man with the shotgun stood beside him. The person he had seen through the trees in the metal garage was still tucked away in the shadows.
“You a cop?”
“No.”
“No . . . of course not. You a junkie trying to get some freebies?”
“No,” Michael said.
“Just thought you’d spy on us out here?”
“I didn’t even know you were here. I was just walking through. I’d keep walking if you’d just untie me.”
“That ain’t going to happen.”
The door of the trailer slammed open and the skeletal woman Michael had seen before fell out of the inside. She caught herself after one step, found her balance, and proceeded to sit on the top of the metal steps that led to the ground. She looked over at Michael and his captor, but her eyes were vacant. She looked both childlike and grizzled, aged and infantile, as if she had experienced too much of the world in too little time.
“Artie, get in here!” a voice yelled from the darkness of the garage.
Michael’s captor slung the gun over his shoulder and walked into the apparent laboratory.
Artie was met outside the stall by the haggard beast of a man in overalls. He was shirtless underneath, and rolls of skin hung from his waist over the denim. He had a gray mop of hair that shot in every direction but up, and on his hands he had thick industrial rubber gloves.
The two men talked at a level that Michael could not hear, but he surmised from the random glances and nods in his direction that the men were talking about him.
It didn’t take a rocket scientist to realize what he had stumbled into. The years in prison had brought him in contact with folks like this. Illiterate white trash who somehow possessed the chemistry expertise of Einstein, cooking up lethal concoctions out of household products. The vapor coming out of the garage looked like their business was in full swing and the woman sitting on the trailer steps a waiting and eager customer.
The men talked for a long time and the sun beat down on the spot where Michael sat. The world had stopped and was considering what to do next. As Michael looked on, out of his peripheral vision he saw the woman stand up and approach him.
She was rail thin. Her blonde hair was ratted out and the color was returning to its darker brown in patches across her scalp. Her face contained numerous sores, acne gone too far, and in a couple spots there appeared the faint color of bruises. The way she was walking toward Michael made it appear that the earth below her was in a constant state of flux, her equilibrium vaporized from her possession.
“So who are you?” she asked. Her voice sounded like tires on a gravel road.
“I’m nobody,” Michael said.
“Yeah? Me too.”
“You live here?”
“No. This place is a dump.”
“So why are you here?”
“Why? Because this is heaven,” she said. The woman stood uneasily, looking toward the garage, and then to the sky, lost in a daydream creation of a boiled mind. She looked back at Michael and giggled in a childish laugh as she slumped to the ground, ending up a few feet from him. “They make it up extra special here. Plus they give me extras.”
Michael stared back at the garage. The men had walked inside and gotten back to their work. He could see their shadows inside working with bottles and canisters, mixing and pouring. The smell emanating from the place was nauseating and vile.
“You use?” she asked.
“No.”
“Too bad. It’d be better if you did. It’s not like you’re ever leaving this place. A hit would just make it not so painful. Artie is a horrible shot.”
Michael knew she was right. He knew from the moment he was led out of the woods that they wouldn’t let him leave. They had too much at stake. Their small enterprise wouldn’t exist with spectators lurking about. He knew this, the inevitability of the future rolled out before him. He knew when harm was coming, he could feel it in his bones like a coiling snake readying itself to strike, but during this whole process of being tied up and held captive, he had done his best to quiet the beast inside him. Now, though, the situation was so obvious it couldn’t be ignored.
The wanderer.
The scourge of Coldwater.
He knew when people were contemplating his death. And he knew that they were painfully unaware of what the result would be. Now, sitting in the sunlight next to a riddled-out addict, he could feel the tension stirring that would spell the end of Artie and whoever joined him in his future plan.
“Are you hostage here too?”
“Me? No. I’m here by my own free will,” she said, throwing her hands up in the air and smiling to the sky.
Michael watched her with morbid curiosity. “I don’t think you’ll want to be around here soon,” he said. “It’s not going to end well.”
She giggled as if his words were a joke. “It always ends well. Every day. Ain’t no way I’m leaving,” she said. Her hands rubbed the grass as if she had never felt such a pure sensation in all her life. She was gone, physically here in this world, but permanently checked into a different plane of existence.
“Cathy! Get away from him!” Artie screamed from the garage and then disappeared back inside.
Cathy managed to get herself upright again, looking around at the world painted new with each breath.
“Bye!” she said seductively as she started to walk away.
He could feel the impending storm forming within himself. The men had made up their mind, in that garage, to kill him. They had set their minds to it, and the protective shade inside him felt the danger and was preparing itself.
“I wouldn’t go in there,” Michael said to her.
Cathy stopped and cocked her head back at him. “But, honey . . . that’s where heaven is.”
She strolled casually into the bowels of the garage.
The coiling snake tightened in Michael’s stomach. He knew it was coming. He knew it was now.
Michael rolled to his side and onto his stomach. He tried to move farther away from the structure, every foot of grass an extra foot of safety. He hadn’t moved far when it happened.
The garage exploded in a brilliant fireball of blazing chemicals and flame. The screams of the three people inside mixing with the roaring plasma. Michael buried his face in the ground as he felt the heat singe the back of his legs and his feet. He rolled over and watched as a body ran out of the doorway. He couldn’t tell who it was—Cathy, Artie, the man in the overalls—as the person was engulfed in flames. The human torch dropped to the ground after just a few steps and was still, melting out of existence. The heaven that Cathy sought, now an inferno.
Michael’s stomach released itself as he continued to crawl away from the burning structure like an inchworm escaping the heat of a magnifying glass.