Violet Eyes (36 page)

Anders looked in the rear-view mirror, and nodded. A dark cloud of black smoke had erupted from behind them. He couldn’t see buildings or flames, but the smoke told the story well. Passanattee was burning. Just another reason to get the hell out of Dodge. Anders itched his head and neck relentlessly. He was thinking of all the ways he could itch his back without giving up the wheel, when he saw them.

“Son of a fuckin’ bitch,” he said. He took his foot off the gas.

“What’s wrong,” Rachel asked, but before she’d finished saying it, she got it.

The highway ahead was no longer a clear ribbon of black asphalt.

It was blocked by a barricade of cars and Jeeps and tanks. The air beyond it was dotted with helicopters.

“We aren’t getting out of this easy, kids,” Anders said.

Terry shook his head, and stifled the urge to whistle.

This was bad. He could see the military emblems…the way out of Passanattee was blocked. The only way out. At least by car.

“Slow down,” Rachel said.

“I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” Terry said.

“What do you mean?” she asked. “We have to stop! They’ll shoot at us if we don’t.”

“They’ll shoot us anyway,” Terry said. “This is a containment exercise…and you’ve seen what happens to those stuck inside the perimeter. We’re not leaving here alive.”

“Hang on,” Anders said. “We’re not dead yet.”

All of a sudden, he pulled the wheel to the right, and the SUV shot off the asphalt and down a gentle incline into the strange field of forest and trees.

“Where are you going?” Rachel screamed, holding on to the dashboard in front of her with both hands. “I always knew you were fuckin’ crazy!”

“Language!” Anders said.

The SUV bounced and jumped as Anders floored it and they shot across the uneven ground that bordered on swampland. He didn’t dare slow down since he didn’t know where the ground was going to suddenly want to suck them in.

The back of the vehicle suddenly jolted. And then again. Inside the cab, it felt as if someone had just punched the car.

“Lay down!” Anders commanded. “Everyone down, now!”

“What’s going on, Dad?” Eric asked. 

“The Man wants to keep us down,” Anders said. “And right now, so do I. Lay down.”

“They’ll hit the gas tank,” Terry warned. “You’ve gotta stop. They’ve got us.”

Anders shook his head. The motion made his vision blur. There was a dull ache running from his neck up across his skull.
Already?
he thought. But it didn’t matter. He already knew his time was on a clock. A quickly running down clock. He just didn’t realize how quick.

A voice echoed through the cab. The windows seemed to shake with each word. “Stop where you are. You are attempting to leave a quarantine zone. Stop now or we will need to shoot again.”

“One more minute,” Anders said. He didn’t take his foot off the gas.

Another jolt shook the SUV, which lurched sideways, and then thumped down. Eric bounced off the seat and slipped halfway to the floor. Rachel cried out and held on to the plastic armrest on the door to keep from falling herself.

“Okay,” Anders said. “We’re there.”

He stomped on the brake, and the SUV shuddered to a halt.

“Please exit the vehicle,” the voice thundered overhead.

“Here’s what’s going to happen,” Anders said. “I am going to go out the driver’s side and run towards the highway. I want you all to wait a minute until I’m away from the car and they are focused on me. Then I want you to crack open the back door and slip out to the ground. Stay low, and push the door back closed. They can’t see that you’re here.”

“There’s no way this is going to work,” Terry said. “They had to have seen us already.”

“Maybe, maybe not,” Anders said. “But this is your only chance. My time is already over. So if I can draw their attention away from the car, and you can make it into the trees…”

“You have to come with us,” Eric said. He grabbed at his father’s arm. “You can’t surrender!”

Anders looked at his son, and for once, he didn’t have a smart-ass comment or a loud criticism to make. He didn’t have much to say at all, because he saw the concern in his son’s eyes, and he knew that there was absolutely no way out of this one for all of them. There was no way out of this for him, at all. So maybe he could, just this once, play the hero. At the same time, putting a middle finger in the face of the Man…

“Eric,” he said. “You’ve got to try to get away. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you. I’ve had my time and…well, sometimes…you just have to do what needs to be done. And right now, I need to do this. I want you to have your time.”

“But, Dad…”

Anders leaned over and kissed Eric on the head. “I have to go, buddy.”

He cracked the driver’s side door. “Hey, Crocodile Dundee?”

“Yeah,” Terry answered.

“She’s all yours now. Slap her around once in a while, if you’re smart. She likes that. But right now…get them outta here, okay? Don’t fuck it up?”

“Do my best,” Terry said.

“Do better than that shit,” Anders said, and then threw the driver’s side door open. “I’ll give you whatever distraction I can. Count to thirty,” he said, and stepped out of the car. “Be strong, Eric.”

Anders slammed the driver’s side door behind him, and began to run across the sawgrass field. Rachel lifted her head and tried to peer through the driver’s side back window, but Terry pulled her back down.

“He’s right. We’ve got one chance at this. We can’t be seen now.”

“What if they shoot him?” she said. Her voice was a whisper. It had finally sunk in that Anders—that fuckwad, asshole, wife-beating piece-of-shit ex-husband of hers—was about to die. And something in Rachel’s heart shriveled up as she realized that.

Because he was going to die
for
them. She hadn’t thought he had it in him.

“Here’s what we’re going to do,” Terry said. “I’m going to crack this door, and slip out to the ground. If they don’t notice me, Rachel, I’ll have you follow. If they do notice me…you guys just stay down, and I’ll try to draw their eyes the same as Anders is doing right now. If they don’t see me…Rachel, you slip out, and then Eric, you come over the seat and follow us. Then we crawl across the grass and into the trees.”

From outside, the booming voice called across the field again.

“Stop right there.”

“Now or never,” Terry said, and cracked the door open on the opposite side of the SUV from the highway. He slipped to the ground like a snake. Rachel followed, and when no voices told them to “Stop!” they called for Eric to follow.

From the highway, they heard the staccato report of a machine gun. Rachel started to get up from the ground, but Terry laid a hand on her back. “Don’t,” he whispered. “The best thing we can do for Anders is escape.”

Terry led the way, crawling through the waist-high grass towards the tree line a few yards away. Anders had gotten the SUV at a perfect strategic angle. Rachel and Eric crawled along behind him, the shadow of the SUV covering their escape.

When they were inside the tree line, Terry stopped and risked a careful look behind them. Rachel joined him, and Eric sat up as well. The three of them peered through the leaves and branches and saw a dozen silver-suited forms converge on the prone body of Anders, lying facedown in the middle of the field. Two of the silver figures were walking towards the SUV. They held guns in front of them, at the ready.

“C’mon,” Terry said. “They’re not sure if the car was empty or not. And we don’t want to be here if they decide that Anders wasn’t alone.”

Eric was crying, and Rachel looked as if she might be about to. He took both of their hands, and led them through the brush, slowly. Hunched over.

“Quietly,” he whispered. “Watch your feet.”

Terry led the way, hunched over almost in half. Rachel followed, holding Eric’s hand. They stepped carefully, but still cracked twigs every few feet, and Terry would hiss a quiet
shhhhhh
. But slowly, the field and the noise of their pursuers disappeared into the brush behind them.

“We can’t get complacent,” Terry said, though he was now walking straight up, not hunched at all. He led the way through the trees, winding them deeper and deeper into the woods. The sound of the planes and trucks on the highway had disappeared.

“Do you know where we are?” Rachel asked.

Terry nodded. “This stretches on for a few miles bordering the ocean. Up around Elena it thins out, and then you’ve got the Columbia River valley that cuts in just north of there. But if we can get to Elena, I think we’ll be okay.”

They walked together in silence for a few minutes, and then Rachel stopped. She slapped at Terry’s shoulder to alert him, and then bent down. Terry waited.

Eric’s shoulders were shaking.

“What’s the matter, baby?” she asked. Still, she kept her voice to a whisper.

“Dad is…” he began, but couldn’t finish the sentence. Instead, he let out a series of coughing sobs.

Rachel pulled her son close. She couldn’t imagine what he was feeling, and she couldn’t lie and say that his dad was okay. “He got bit,” she said. “And he knew that he was going to die from that. So he tried to save us. We have to take that, that…gift he gave us. And make it work.”

Rachel looked around at the dark leaves and cloistered branches. “We have to live.”

Eric nodded his head, though he didn’t look terribly convinced.

“He gave us this chance,” she said, and felt a piece of her heart twist inside her. “We need to make it work.”

“And right now, we need to go,” Terry hissed. “Hurry.”

“What’s the matter?” Rachel asked.

“Take a little breath?”

She did, and the acrid scent of pesticide suddenly made itself known in her head. “They’re spraying.”

“All over here,” Terry agreed. “We need to get ahead of it.”

He motioned them forward, and in a few minutes, they were short of breath and walking along a deep-set, root-tangled creek bed. The water level was low, just a trickle, but Terry led them along it. He knew that eventually, it would wind its way out to the sea. And if they reached the ocean, they’d ultimately reach another inhabited town.

“Breathe as little as you can,” he warned. “And hurry up.”

Terry led them along the bank. Rachel could feel the sweat streaking her back, and Eric’s hand holding her own had begun to feel slippery and hot.

“Get down,” Terry hissed. He dropped prone to the earth. Rachel and Eric did the same, hugging close to a cypress.

Overhead, a helicopter passed slowly.

“What if…” Eric began, but Terry shushed him.

The echo of the chopper blades slowly faded, and eventually Terry pulled them up from the dirt. “Come on,” he said. “We have to keep going.”

“I can’t…” Eric began, but Rachel shook her head.

“We have to,” she said. “We have to keep going.” She hesitated a moment, and then added, “For your dad.”

Terry didn’t miss the tear that stained her cheek as she said it. He didn’t say anything. What could he say? Who could understand the reasons a man and woman fell in love? Who could understand the reasons they abused each other under the auspices of love?

He didn’t try to refute or change it. Nobody could ever get in the middle of that and come out the better. She had chosen Terry, regardless of whatever she’d still felt about Anders. That had to be enough. It didn’t matter what she felt about Anders now. Anders was unreachable. Terry kept his mouth shut, and only led them on.

And after a couple hours of walking, they arrived at last on a dirt trail.

“We need to rest,” Rachel said. She was gasping for breath, and wiped a slick of sweat from her forehead.

“I think we’re almost home,” Terry said. He wasn’t sure he could go on too much farther himself; while he was in shape from hiking the trails, the sweat was running down his back like a small river. The heat of the day had grown, and the humidity of the swampland made the air heavier and heavier the longer they walked. It felt harder and harder to breathe.

And then over the course of a few steps, the tree cover broke, and they were standing in a clearing. The grass stretched out unbroken in front of them for a hundred yards. Beyond that, a thin asphalt parking lot broke the grass, before a long brown brick building rose a couple stories in the air.

They had exited the swampland in the back of an industrial park.

“I think we made it,” Terry said.

“Can we go home now?” Eric said. His face was flushed, his hair sticking to the sides of his cheeks.

“I don’t think so,” Rachel said. She pictured their home in Passanattee briefly, and then saw in her mind’s eye the ramshackle home she’d shared with Anders for a decade. Neither seemed to be viable options to call “home” at this point.

“I don’t think we can ever go home again.”

Epilogue

Milo, Florida

Wednesday, May 22. 9: 04 p.m.

“The area surrounding Passanattee has been evacuated today, due to the release of a dangerous pesticide from the Triple T industrial complex on the west side of the town,” a female news commentator said. “It’s unknown at this point what the cause of the leak was, however, authorities have confirmed that the leak is under control. At the same time, firefighters from the surrounding county have gathered at the south end of town, fighting an unrelated, but equally dangerous swamp fire that began sometime yesterday afternoon. It is unknown at this time if there have been any fatalities due to the leak or the fire, but Passanattee Mayor Ivan Pelford confirms that the evacuation was initiated this morning.”

The newscast flashed to the face of a tall, thin man with graying hair and thin black glasses. “We’ve gone house to house today to make sure we got everyone out of harm’s way. Hopefully, tomorrow, when the air has cleared, we will assist everyone in returning to their homes. Once it is safe.”

The scene flashed off of the mayor’s face and back to the blonde commentator. “Currently all telecommunication to the area of Passanattee has been interrupted due to the chemical leak, but we are assured that this should be restored by tomorrow afternoon. In the meantime, anyone with concerns about family members in the area, should contact this number.”