Eighty-Sixed: Chapter 41 - Pins and Needles

Photo by Ben Collins on Unsplash

David was gagged once again.  His arms were bound behind him with a seat belt strapped across his chest.  Behind the wheel of a tiny matchbox-like Yugo, the man in the Pink Floyd t-shirt hadn’t spoken for over an hour.  David squirmed as the pain of sitting on his hands from the passenger seat was nearly unbearable.

His hands had now been bound that way for days.  His wrists were raw, torn, and burning like fire from the rope.  If the wounds weren’t already infected, he knew they would be before long.  His shoulders and biceps throbbed with numbness, made worse by the way his knees crushed against the dashboard.

The tiny car shook like a bowl of marbles as it sped much too quickly down one dirt road after another.  With each mile, they deeper into the North Carolina wilderness, swallowed up by pines and shadows and long patches of trees with long branches spread out like canopies above them, snuffing out the sky like midnight.  

Pink Floyd smiled bemusedly whenever he caught David sizing him up.  The scrawny man mostly stayed silent.  He had a habit of chewing on his fingernails and spitting his cuticles out the open window.  There was no air conditioning in a Yugo.

David’s heartbeat, he suddenly realized, was pounding so hard he felt it in his neck and temples.  This was not the first time over these last few days that panic washed over him without warning, but usually followed the same unending repetition of thoughts: 

What happened to his parents? 

Where was Jeremy? 

And where were Olivia and the children?  

Having been isolated from news of the outside world, and after so many days of captivity that he was nearly losing count, he still couldn’t understand anything that was happening.

Unexpectedly, Pink Floyd pulled over to the side of the road.  Skidding to a sudden stop, gravel kicked up and rattled the bottom of the tiny car, sounding like a hail storm shooting up from the ground.  He slapped the car into neutral and jerked back on the hand brake with a loud grinding clank.  

As he turned in his seat to face David, he pulled out the black-handled switchblade from his back pocket.

“Alright,” he said.  “We’re about to pop out into civilization again.”

He stared David in the eyes.

“You know where you are?”

David shook his head.  He suspected they were heading northward, most likely toward Raleigh, but he couldn’t be sure.  Between the pain in his arms and having had little more than a few peanut butter sandwiches tossed his way over the last few days, washed down with nothing more than watered-down soda that had long gone flat in its two-liter bottle, disorientation had settled in again.  His brain constantly felt muddled and watery, just like in the hours immediately following whatever it was that ended him up back in North Carolina.  

“I’m gonna take that handkerchief off your mouth because I don’t need people staring.  Don’t try biting me or anything, or I’ll stick you right here and now and drop you off the side of the road.  Got it?”

David nodded, and Pink Floyd slid the surprisingly cold steel between David’s cheek and the bandana wrapped tightly around his head.  As he started cutting through the fabric, it sounded like a buzzsaw in David’s delirium.  The bandana finally gave way and snapped off entirely, falling onto David’s shoulder where it looked like some strange epaulet he’d earned.   

“What about my hands?” David asked.  He couldn’t remember it ever hurting so much to talk.

“We ain’t ready for that,” Pink Floyd told him.

“I haven’t moved my arms for days, man,” David pleaded.  “This is agony.”

“I said not yet.” 

Pink Floyd slapped the blade against the steering wheel and popped it back into its handle before sliding the knife into his left sock. 

“Where are we going?” David asked.

“I ain’t ready to tell you that, either.”

“I don’t understand why you’re doing this.”

“I don’t understand why you’ve got so many questions,” Pink Floyd said.  “Now we going to have a problem?”

“You’ve got my hands tied up, so I don’t see how we could have a problem.” 

“Good,” Pink Floyd said.

He popped off the emergency break and wrestled to get the car back into first gear before continuing their lumbering journey down the gravel road.  A mile down the road, the thick veil of trees suddenly fell away like a curtain dropping.  The sky opened up, blazingly blue above them.  With his hands still tied behind him, David had to squint and turn his head away from the window to block the sun from blinding him.  

“So here’s the deal,” Pink Floyd said.  He veered the tiny car to the right and onto an access road parallel to what David suspected was Interstate 85.  “Your family is alive, but we had to put a beating on them.”

“What did you do?”

“Shut up and listen,” he said.  He wiped at his nose and scratched the scruff on his chin again. “I’m taking you back to your house.  When we get there, I’ll remove the ropes from your hands, and you’ll go into the house. My friends have already left.  And that’ll be that.  We’ll be done with each other.  But I’m just telling you to brace yourself because it ain’t gonna be pretty.”

“The lake house?”

Pink Floyd looked at him thoughtfully for a moment, silent.

“I don’t understand,” David said.  His throat was so dry that every word took effort.  “Why did you do all this?”

“You telling me you seriously don’t know?”

“No,” David said.  His eyes pleaded to the driver, desperate to understand.  “No, I don’t understand why you’d attack my family.  Why you locked me up for days on end?  And beat my family?  Things are bad enough already.  Why would you make them even worse?”

Pink Floyd looked pensive.  He drove silently, thoughtfully, saying nothing at first.

“It’s a whole new world, man,” he finally said. “A clean slate, you know?”

“So why do this?  And mess up a clean slate?”

“Because I ain’t living like I did before,” he said.  

“Before?”

“I spent twenty-seven years in prison for trying to steal a six-pack of beer and thirty dollars and ended up shooting a dude working at a Circle K.  Before that, I spent another five years serving time for stealing lottery tickets. That’s apparently a felony, which is stupid.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Whole world’s gone back in time or something.  Every man for himself.  Gotta take while the taking’s good.”

“So why my family?”

“The luck of the draw, man,” he said.  “When all this came down, I came to with the same gaggle of idiots I used to hang with.  We’d all made stupid mistakes, and we knew right then that we weren’t going through that again.  We’d already robbed one other house before we even saw you, and your situation just went bad when we realized you didn’t have anything worth stealing at that lake house.  But your dad? Working for a bank in Raleigh?  That’s all we had to know.  We’d be set.”

“So why lock me up?”

“Because your brother would be trouble enough.  And between beating on him and your mom, we knew we’d get your dad to give us what we needed.”

The gravel road was ending, and Pink Floyd once again slowed to a stop and loudly cranked the hand brake.

“Alright, that’s enough talking,” he said.  “We’re about to get…”

Suddenly, what at first sounded like a screaming guitar blared out of the car’s cheap stereo, cutting him off.

“What the hell?” Pink Floyd yelled.

There was a loud pop, like a transistor exploding inside the tiny car, yet the screaming guitar sound persisted.

Pink Floyd slammed his fist against the stereo’s power button to no avail.  He hit it again, slapping it with his palm.  There was another crackling pop from inside the radio.  David felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up on end.

“What the hell?” Pink Floyd screamed again.  “What the hell?”

The man was in a panic, stomping his feet on the floor and wildly pulling at his right hand using his left.

“My hand is stuck!”

The car began to shake violently as if a train was rushing at them.  Then, despite the parking brake, the small vehicle slid forward as if dragged.     

“I can’t pull my hand off the radio!” Pink Floyd screamed again.  He slammed on the floor brake, but the car was sliding sideways.  “Do something!”

“You have me tied down, you idiot!” David yelled.

Pink Floyd flailed and twisted his body toward his captive.  He slapped at David’s seat belt latch once, twice, and on the third attempt, David’s buckle detached.  

“I still can’t move my arms!”

“Help me!” Pink Floyd screamed.

His hands were still tied behind his back. David watched in disbelief as Pink Floyd’s right hand went from being stuck to the radio to suddenly disappearing into an unexplainable floating black orb that now instantaneously appeared from nothingness.  

Pink Floyd opened his mouth to scream again, but all David heard was silence.