Jack awoke to a dark night where the stars burned like orphans in a field of black. He did not remember falling asleep. He looked over at Laura, who was in the reclined seat next to him. He touched her arm, but she didn’t move. The skin was warm but lifeless. He sat up more with a quick start and said her name. She groaned a bit and then fell back into sleep. Jack grabbed the last water bottle, which held a thimbleful of moisture in its base, unscrewed the cap, and poured a small amount into his wife’s mouth. It sat there between her parched lips, but she did not drink.
Jack looked at her, but his mind was too fatigued to process any solution. They were dying, and he knew it. He accepted it now. His only wish was that Laura would sleep through it. Why awake to this horror again? He envied her in dreamland. He did not remember the last time he envied her.
The car door opened with a squeak and Jack stepped out onto the blacktop. The heat still nipped at his ankles, but the air was cooler. He had no idea what time it was.
Jack thought himself an interesting sight for any animal that might be lurking off the highway. He staggered half dazed in his sandals and his boxers toward the center line, then turned around, hoping, praying for a sign of life. There was none. No haze of city light, no moving headlights in the distance. Just moonlight, stars, and heat. If he could have spared the water, he would have cried.
Here he was, reduced to a loincloth in the middle of nowhere, forced to watch his wife die a slow death by heat exhaustion, only to follow close behind. Yet his mind could not accept his fate. He still hoped for rescue. He still hoped that he was watching a movie, and all he had to do was wait for the credits to roll and the lights to click on and be ushered out.
His legs collapsed and he slumped to the road. The tar singed the back of his legs, but he didn’t struggle. What was the use? By daybreak he wouldn’t have the strength to beat back the sun. The heat would slowly cook him and he would die. He prayed that they would go quickly. Before the tearing and the ripping of the coyotes and birds.
How quickly they had come to this. Just this morning, they were happy to leave the strip, content that they would be back by midafternoon and play in the pool, have a nice dinner, enjoy the city. The idea that they would die on a highway seemed ludicrous. But here they were.
“I don’t deserve this,” Jack repeated to himself.
He reached down and felt the dimpled surface of the road. Why build such a thing? Jack thought about the day laborers who must have poured their sweat into laying the road. So much work for a road going nowhere. Why bother? Who traveled this narrow, deathly stretch of earth that they would require pavement?
Why does a dark road grip the heart in fear? When on foot, a person quickens their pace at night as fears of stalking boogeymen come haunting up behind them. A flash of headlights causes the muscles to tense in anticipation of complete terror. What is coming? Jack stared off into the night, looking at the faded yellow lines vanish in the darkness. Forty-two was buried in blackness.
He would have killed for that sensation of anticipating the approach of a stranger. At least that would have meant discovery. But there were no boogeymen out tonight.
“Jack? Jack?” Laura groaned from the car, sounding scared and exhausted. “Jack!”
He crawled over to the door and climbed into the driver’s seat.
“I’m here . . . I’m here.”
She still had not opened her eyes. “I thought you left me, I thought . . .”
“I’m here. Go back to sleep, hon.”
She drifted off into space as he sat there looking at her. The pain gripped his heart and tore his soul.
“I don’t deserve this,” he whispered, “I don’t deserve this.”
Soon, darkness took him too.