Cambry hasn’t lost consciousness—not yet. She’s only pretending. Letting her limbs go limp and sagging helplessly in the Plastic Man’s arms is just an act.
He buys it.
His lips move beside her ear. “Gone already?”
My knife. It’s been there in her right pocket, a faint pressure against her thigh, skimming the edge of her thoughts. It’s right there. Inches away. And now, as the Plastic Man loosens his grip slightly to check her pulse, it’s finally, finally within her reach.
Unseen, she closes her fingers around the KA-BAR’s handle, sliding it out of her pocket. She peels open the three-inch blade with her thumbnail. Tightens a fist around it.
“Huh.” He huffs, disappointed. “You know, kiddo, I thought you’d last longer than—”
Over her shoulder, she stabs him in the face.
The blade finds soft tissue and it feels like piercing jelly. Easier than she’d dared hope. She can’t see where it entered, but she has a pretty good guess. At first the Plastic Man barely reacts. He just inhales sharply through his nose, crinkling plastic. Like the buildup to a sneeze.
Then he lets go.
Cambry rockets forward, hitting her palms on the slick tarp. She has let go, too—of the knife—and left it planted in the man’s face behind her. She springs upright, shoes slipping, recognizing the tall shadow of the truck. The night air is shockingly cold, stinging her raw throat. Blinking, searching for Raycevic, for his red and blue lights, finding only darkness.
She spins, looking back at the Plastic Man.
He hasn’t moved. He stands dumbly with both hands raised to his face. He’s afraid to touch it. A double flash of lightning reveals the KA-BAR jutting above his respirator mask, pierced between his cheekbone and eyeball. His eyelids jerk open and shut, as if trying to blink away a grain of sand, waggling the knife’s handle up and down.
He touches it, patting it with light fingertips. Feeling out this new development with a profound and terrible awe.
“Oh,” he says. “Oh, wow.”
She tastes vindication—then fear. He’s not dead. Not even close. He’s an injured animal, stunned by the sight of his own blood. In another moment he’ll be enraged by it. She backs away from him, away, away, until her back thuds against the trailer’s chilled metal.
“Oh.” The crinkle of flexing plastic in the darkness. She can’t see him.
Behind her: “Dad?”
Her heart seizes in her throat—it’s Raycevic’s voice—but it’s recycled, electric. It came from a radio unit. Meaning the cop isn’t nearby. Not anymore.
“Dad, should I turn around?” The radio chirps again. “I’m at the bridge—”
The Plastic Man stomps furiously now. Hands clenched, hissing with exhaled pain. She can’t see details without another flash of lightning, but she knows he’s pulling the knife from his eye socket. With racing thoughts, she considers attacking him. Right now. Charging, tackling him, landing on top of him and mashing both palms downward against the jutting knife with all of her weight and tunneling it directly through his brain—
This is your chance, her furies urge. Your one chance. Now.
Fight him, Cambry.
But it’s already too late. He screams and his knuckles tear juicily from his face. The knife flies and claps against the tarp somewhere. An enraged grunt.
“Dad. Come in—”
Invisible in the darkness, the Plastic Man lunges at her now. But Cambry feels the rush of displaced air and ducks under his whooshing arm. Then she twists on her ankles and skids below the semitrailer, crawling for the other side.
“YOU BITCH.” He crashes down on all fours behind her. “YOU FUCKING BITCH—”
She scrambles between the giant tires on her elbows and knees, pushing through the dangling chains. She can’t see the Plastic Man, but she hears him scuttling close behind her, panting, lunging for her ankle with a crinkly, grasping hand.
“Gotcha—”
But she slips between his closing fingers. He’s too slow. She’s too fast. She’s born to run. Cambry has always been a speed demon, untouchable and uncatchable, always a heartbeat ahead, making her graceful French exit before the party rolls and the cops show up. She’s already somersaulting out from the trailer’s other side, pivoting hard left under a kicked spray of gravel.
She can see her Corolla now—there it is, lit by another strobe of lightning—and she breaks into a sprint as the Plastic Man howls behind her, in bloodcurdling rage: “FUCK!”
On the radio: “Dad. What did she do?”
“SHE . . . OH, JESUS FUCK. I CAN’T SEE OUT OF MY EYE—”
“What?”
“SHE POPPED MY EYE.”
Good, she thinks as she reaches her car. She tugs the door open—it’s still ajar—and crashes down into the driver’s seat. Home again. She twists the key and the engine coughs, taking a few sputtering seconds to turn. Just fumes in the tank.
But the interstate can’t be far now.
You’ll make it, Cambry. Don’t look at the clock.
The time is 8:58.
She cranks the car into gear. You’ll get somewhere, and you’ll find a well-lit public area, and you’ll call the police. The real police. And both of these assholes will burn—
“SHE’S IN HER CAR—”
“Wait. What happened to your eye?”
Cambry stomps the pedal and the engine roars. An exhilarating sound she’s always associated with freedom. The Corolla surges forward, barreling past the eighteen-wheeler. She flicks on her headlights, flooding the empty road with light and scans for the half-blind bastard, hoping to clip him as she careens past. No luck. Their voices fade in a blast of air: “SHE’S GETTING AWAY—”
It’s all vanishing behind her. The Sidewinder truck. The Plastic Man. Their bickering voices, the choking pressure on her windpipe, the musty odors of sweat and snake shit inside the cab. All of it going, going, and finally gone.
Her speedometer hits sixty, seventy, eighty. The road bends and weaves. The night air races through her windows, tearing her hair back. She shivers and laughs, giggles as hard as stones in her throat. The assholes’ trap failed. She witnessed something she wasn’t supposed to see, and she’s slipped their clutches and soon the whole world will see it, too. She’ll make them famous. They’ll be arrested, strung up, sentenced. Maybe the fat one will need a double-wide electric chair.
Now the road twists, ribbonlike, into an incline. A final patch of foothills before the interstate. Then she’s home free. She checks her rearview mirror for pursuing headlights. Nothing. Another bolt of lightning confirms it. She’s alone.
A straightaway now and she floors it. More cold air flecks the tears from her eyes. She can’t help it—she’s crying, laughing, screaming, all at once, because every breath is new: Mom and Dad and Lena, she thinks with aching joy. I’ll see you again. When I get back to Washington, I promise, I’ll see all of you again, and we’ll be a family.
* * *
I’m sorry. I should stop.
I’m being wishful. The truth is, I have no idea what was in her mind at this point.
I should stick to the facts while I write this.
But I like to imagine my sister thinking warmly about us as she drives for safety. How she’ll make amends with Mom and Dad. Maybe she’ll get an apartment, stop living hand to mouth, take night classes in graphic design. Maybe—I hope—Cambry even thinks about me as she drives: I miss you, too, Ratface. I’m sorry we never speak. I’m sorry we’re strangers.
I wish I had spent my time with you differently.
It’s also possible that I never entered her thoughts at all on that cold night in June. I can’t prove it. Based on Corporal Raycevic’s account, I know only that my sister eluded the Plastic Man’s attack and kept driving north, toward the interstate. Which means . . .
* * *
Ahead of Cambry, the road twists sharply.
Revealing a bridge.
It comes up fast. It emerges from the blackness, gaunt and skeletal and hideous. Erector-set beams stand in spidery fractals, bolted solidly into rock. A rust-eaten sign catches Cambry’s high beams, and she glimpses black spray paint as the Corolla whips past:
ALL OF YOUR ROADS LEAD HERE.