Eighty-Sixed: Chapter 46 - Skipping

Photo by Lucas van Oort on Unsplash

The car skidded loudly as the rear unexplainably pulled first to the left and then to the right.  The threadbare tires let out a stuttering squeal. Pink Floyd — his right arm now disappeared up to his elbow — was limp against the steering wheel.  

The entire back of the car then lifted off the ground as the Yugo went airborne. It spun in midair, first one flip, then another, and on the third, it launched into a wide arching trajectory for over a hundred feet before it crashed back to the ground. It bounced and rolled at least a dozen times or more as it skipped down the street like a rock skimming across the surface of a lake.

Now unbuckled, David felt the weight of his body crash into the roof of the car, then back into his seat.  The glass from the passenger window shattered and sprayed in all directions like mist.  With each flip, David felt pulled in every direction.  His legs took on new gravity, as heavy as tree trunks, as the torque of their spin pressed his entire body against the door.  His hands still bound behind him, David strained to keep his head from flailing out the now-open window.  At the moment his side of the car slammed to the ground yet again, Pink Floyd fell on him like a dead man.  The black hole remained in place, with Pink’s arm firmly lodged inside.  

Relenting, the car — now as dented and crushed as a soda can — screeched to a sudden stop.  Pink Floyd was flopped over David like a rag doll, pinning him underneath. Twisting his head, David looked with horror as the black hole on the dashboard suddenly doubled in size. 

David’s ears were ringing, and blood dripped from somewhere.  He wasn’t sure if it was from himself or Pink.  Now that the car stopped moving, he saw they were both drenched in red by an unknown source.  Pink’s heavy, limp body pressed upon David, who realized he was gasping for breath.  

Gasping.  

Gasping, like on the kayak trip with Jeremy.  There was a sudden flood of memories like snapshots.  There was the small yellow kayak that looked like a weird floating banana and the unexpected rush of rapids and slapping rain.  Jeremy was screaming at him.  David saw the rushing water and remembered losing his oar as it rushed down the current like scrap wood.  He’d twisted himself in the restrictive confines of the kayak seat, trying to get supplies.  Why did he need those supplies? Why didn’t he follow Jeremy’s lead?  

Mark and Rosie.

Where were they?  

They were at home on that day as he wrestled in the kayak, but where were they now as he needed to escape the wreckage of that car?  Were they with Olivia, wherever she was?  On the news, they’d talked about millions of missing people.

Now trapped in the Yugo, hands tied, with this man flopped on top of him as his arm was further swallowed up into that mysterious and frightening black orb, the air around him crackled.  He thought then of how Olivia always said his name. Not Dave, like some people did.  David.  

Then David thought of Jeremy again, of Saturday mornings watching cartoons in front of the television when they were younger, and the sudden wrestling matches between them that spontaneously started without warning.  One moment, they were staring at Thundarr the Barbarian.  Speed Buggy, maybe.  Jeremy was on top of him the next instant, laughing as David kicked. He could sometimes squirm his way out and pin his older brother in a short-lived victory.  They would roll across the living room like two rambunctious cats, knocking the coffee table and sometimes slamming each other so hard onto the worn shag carpet that their mother’s Precious Moments figurines would clatter on their shelf on the wall.

“Stop roughhousing!” she’d yell from the kitchen.

His mother, Charlotte, had now been drug away.  She and his father were beaten or worse, perhaps, by Pink Floyd and his cronies.  

David’s back pressed against the road in the wrecked car through the shattered passenger door window below him.  David’s jeans had been sliced with glass, and a dark patch of blood seeped through the fabric covering his right calf.

Twisting his head with blurred vision, he saw that the back window of the hatchback had also blown out. Though it was midday, everything outside the car was cloaked in black shadows under the endless cluster of trees.  

Pink Floyd, thin and gaunt with pointed bones and skin pulled tight around long skinny muscles, weighed no more than a hundred forty pounds, but his heaviness seemed to increase every second he lay limply on top of David.  Even though David’s now sixteen-year-old body outweighed his captor’s by a good thirty pounds, with his hands tied, it was impossible to merely shove Pink Floyd off with an overextended bench press.  Plus, he’d need to be careful he didn’t accidentally come in contact with the strange blackness coming out from the radio.

David craned his neck to see over Pink Floyd’s back and studied the pulsing black orb.  It had grown again, it seemed, and all that was between it and David was Pink Floyd’s barely breathing body.  Suddenly, a blue spark shot out from Pink Floyd’s nose and zapped David on the face.  

David kicked at the floor and tried to push away from the dashboard.  Another spark flashed out from Pink Floyd’s unconscious face, and the Yugo started to hum with electricity. 

David puffed out his chest and tried to flip Pink Floyd off of him with his shoulder.  Each time he tried to extricate himself from under Pink Floyd, the ominous black circle grew another inch in circumference.  

Scrambling, David managed to hike up his right leg.  His foot was now on the dashboard just above the glove compartment, and he pushed off like a swimmer in a pool.  His shoulders screamed as his arms, still tied behind him, pulled against the weight of his own body.  He pushed again, this time with his feet on the edge of the broken window below him, and twisted as he moved backward another foot.   With his arm trapped inside the floating black orb, Pink Floyd’s body finally poured off David’s.  With his back now pressed against the roof of the car on his right side with the passenger side flatted below him, David placed his foot on Pink Floyd’s back and shoved off again.  Paddling with his legs in the air, he searched everywhere in the darkness for another foothold toward the rear bucket seat of the tiny car.  

Squirming like a snake, David climbed over the front passenger seat and twisted his body into the tiny rear of the car.  He choked for breath as he rested for a moment.  

Then another bright spark lit up inside the car, crackling not from Pink Floyd like static electricity but like a semiconductor coming from the dashboard where the radio once was.  David pulled his knees under himself and pushed off again.  He squiggled over the backseat and pushed his head through the hatchback’s blown-out rear window.  The air was at least twenty degrees cooler outside the car, and David sucked in oxygen.  He was dripping wet with blood and sweat and lay gasping for air.  

David’s entire body shook from the shock of it all. His hands still bound behind him, he edged the rest of the way out of the car and pulled himself to a seated position.  He scooted onto his knees and managed to get first one foot and then the other under him, bracing against the car as he popped upright until standing.  

“I couldn’t do that a week ago,” he muttered, then laughed with relief.  

He’d escaped. 

Inside, the black orb doubled in size again, then once more.  David watched as the rest of Pink Floyd disappeared, then the front seat, and then the entire car itself, all within seconds.  

He was then overcome with sobs of grief as deep as he’d ever known as he stumbled backward, away from the car.  

Tears rolled down his face as he tottered forward, down through the canopy of shadows and trees away from the Yugo and the man who’d taken him and his family captive for no reason other than he could.  His arms still bound behind him, David aimed toward the pinprick of light at the end of the tree line far in the distance and ran. 

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