Eighty-Sixed: Chapter 71 - Journeymen

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Jeremy had insisted on driving the entire way from North Carolina to Cornerstone. After all that had happened at the farmhouse, they didn’t even discuss it when he slid behind the steering wheel to continue their journey.

“Just leave,” Grace had said, defeated. Whether she was discouraged as a result of her own behavior or by the still unexplainable presence of her once-dead son-in-law was unclear.

Mickey held the shotgun now. It wasn’t even a question. Grace looked worn out and hopeless, as if she’d lost far more than the confrontation between her and David.

“Are you okay?” Jeremy asked David as they slipped through the old, withered town until they reached the orange filter of dusk.

“Ask me when we get to Olivia,” David answered. He was edgy, and rightfully so. Though Chicago was typically only a three-hour drive from Cornerstone, considering the little they’d gathered from the news, the city was entrenched in unbreakable gridlock. It was a faint consolation that only mere miles separated them now. If they couldn’t get there by car, it may take days before they found Olivia.

The area around David’s left eye was no longer the deep blackish-purple it had been since receiving the beating he endured from his captors when they shoved him into the lake house closet and left him bound and gagged over a week before. Instead, it was now a faded, hazy green, almost yellowish, except for the very tip of his eyelid, which was the only area on his face with the remnants of a faint purple hue that left him looking like he was wearing eyeliner makeup.

He’d never had contention with his mother-in-law; their relationship was mainly congenial and little else. However, the complete change in her demeanor and her motivations were not unlike that of his mother, who had been distant and aloof when he and Jeremy left their childhood home in North Carolina. On their journey to Cornerstone, David noticed that while some people greeted them with kindness, it was as if others, like Grace and their mother, were missing something. There was an emptiness at their core. He’d seen it in their father, as well, who, before all this, was already a wilted shell of a man but now was nearly incapacitated and had surrendered to their captors without question.

So between the sudden appearance of black holes, unpredictable behavior from other normally prescient people who now acted contrary to their personalities — like his own mother-in-law who had just held him captive at gunpoint — the potential of traffic jams and who knew what else, David felt himself precariously balanced upon an unstable precipice. He was barely grasping onto his sanity. It felt like he was gazing into a deep chasm, and if he fell into it, he’d completely lose his mind right, just like so many others who had been served more than enough craziness than any sane person should be asked to bear.

Jeremy reached for the radio knob, but David moved with surprising rapidity, clutching his brother’s hand before he pushed a button.

“No radio,” he said. “Nothing electronic.”

“Right,” Jeremy answered. “But you know the headlights and whatnot? They’re electronic, too.”

“No choice there,” David said, thinking of the pimple-faced teen in the Pink Floyd shirt with his hand melded to the stereo knobs in the hatchback. “Let’s not push our luck.”

“Agreed,” Jeremy said, putting both hands on the steering wheel.

They were both exhausted, but David even more so. After the last few days, he was perpetually exhausted, but the confrontation at the farmhouse made everything even worse. He wanted to nap, to let the chaotic swimming mess in his mind seep out of his consciousness, and to wake with clarity, to be himself again or at least bear some close resemblance to himself and not this man stuck in the sixteen-year-old body that he saw with each glance in the mirror.

He wanted to sleep it all away and somehow return to the last good memories he could muster - of hugging Mark and Rosie goodbye as he was walking out the door to meet Jeremy for their trip, of the way Olivia kissed him, lingering an extra moment, the electric flick of her tongue on his lips.

“I love you,” she said. “We’ll be fine. You boys have fun.”

“I love you, too,” he told her.

And now, the thought of seeing Olivia again, of taking her into his arms and squeezing her as tightly as he dared, of whispering in her ear, “Do you realize how much I love you?” It was all too much, and sleep would not come.

“I remember walking out the door and driving with you to the airport,” David said as miles peeled away behind them. The backcountry roads allowed them to make good time before traffic would slow them as they approached closer to Chicago. “But I only remember little snapshots of the kayak trip.”

“In Minnesota,” Jeremy said.

“Of all places,” David answered. “I remember planning it. We came up with the idea at Mom’s funeral, and I even remember packing for the trip. But I can only remember very faint images of actually being out in the woods. I think my last clear memory was kissing Olivia and then walking out the door. And that’s it.”

“Nothing makes sense,” Jeremy said.

“Why was that my last memory, though? I feel like there has to be a reason other than it’s just so arbitrary. Why not the moment I supposedly died? Or three weeks before or a year ago? Why was it when I was leaving the house and then nothing?”

“I can’t remember everything, either,” Jeremy said. “I have a vague memory of seeing something like these black holes. I was at your house with Olivia and the kids, and then — bam - you and I were on that boat on the lake.”

David fell quiet again as the sky darkened, the summer evening drawing slowly onward.

Mickey, a bit of a hoarder based upon the sheer volume of duplicate hammers and screwdrivers that lined the walls of his work shed, also kept, among other things, a small library of phone books - Moline and Peoria, Springfield and Decatur, Cornerstone and Chicago - that were stacked high on the top of a rusted two-drawer file cabinet that itself was packed with years of operating manuals from tractors and equipment that had long gone dead and been sold for scrap metal. After David had been suddenly disconnected from his call with Olivia, they scoured through the four volumes of books for Chicago alone - two sets of white pages and two of the yellow - until finally tracking down the address of the mysterious ENH Initiative where Olivia had somehow found herself amongst a gathering of strangers.

Surprisingly, they made it to Chicago in five hours, arriving well past dark but still faster than expected in this time-warped world. Traffic stopped near Joliet and stayed that way for an hour before a single lane suddenly opened. Cars squeezed through one at a time, drifting slowly past a small contingent of people standing in the dark on the median, all looking terrified and some even screaming as headlights briefly illuminated their faces as they passed.

“What do you suppose happened here?” Jeremy asked.

David thought of his escape from the man in the Pink Floyd shirt, how the car they were in was suddenly swallowed up into nothingness as they raced down an empty country road. There was blackness, and then there was nothing.

In his brief glimpse of the faces of the half-dozen frightened transients on the side of the road, he saw a mirror image of the fear he had experienced only a few days prior.

“It seems like there’s some new tragedy every few hours,” Jeremy said, and David said nothing in return.

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