Ethan #3
They didn’t have a choice. When Hunter had stepped out of the diner’s kitchen and the older waitress fell straight on her ass, scrambling to get away from him, and Ethan followed his man outside, the fry cook had shouted after them.
“Frank is going to kill you faggots! He’s going to fucking butcher you!”
According to Jack Allen, the man Ethan had met in the gabardine suit, the road to the north led to Fort Stockton, base of operations for a bad man named Frank O’Shea.
According to the same Jack Allen, the fry cook at the diner worked for Frank.
If Frank was as bad as Jack Allen said, logic dictated that Ethan and Hunter had just made a dangerous enemy to the north. No going that way.
It went without saying they couldn’t head east either. That would just take them back toward Ellersby and all the problems they’d left burning there.
No choice, then. The southern road. The Dust Road. Fast as the truck could carry them.
Too fast, as it turned out. A few miles outside of Turner, Ethan heard a faint high whine from the engine that he realized, later, was the fuel line cracking. Hunter probably didn’t understand the sound, but it must have triggered alarm bells. He laid a hand on Ethan’s shoulder. “Easy there. Easy.”
As if he were talking to a horse.
Ethan shot a glance at Hunter. The black fire in his eyes was gone, but a dangerous tremor remained in the man’s voice. A vein pulsed dangerously along the jaw. “Do you think what I did was wrong?”
Oh, son. You have no idea what you’re dealing with, do you?
After a long, long silence, Ethan said, “No. That guy had it coming.”
“Good answer.”
Mark my words—
Ethan tightened his grip on the wheel.
This man is going to get you into the sort of trouble—
Ethan didn’t slow down. He drove.
Almost two hours later the road hadn’t changed at all. Same gold-brown desert. Same weathered blacktop. A kingdom of sky and air, empty of everything but them.
No animals. No birds. No sound but the rumble of the old Ford’s engine.
The longer this went on, the more Ethan had to fight memories of the gabardine man back at the diner.
They say that sometimes the road just goes on forever.
Why worry about old stories? There was more immediate danger inside the truck.
The fuel line had indeed cracked when they’d sped out of Turner.
Ethan could see a thin ribbon of gasoline in the rearview mirror, dribbling behind them like a blood trail.
They’d reached that town with most of a tank.
Even with the old truck’s awful mileage, the needle should not be this low.
Ethan had spent most of the last hour debating whether to tell Hunter. What to say. Hunter himself hadn’t said a word in ages, but he’d watched their mirrors plenty. Surely, he saw that black line on the asphalt. Surely, he knew what it meant.
The road goes on until your car runs out of gas and the cold creeps in.
The fuel gauge sank into the red. Ethan would have to say something. But what?
Outside, something finally changed. A hand-painted sign appeared on the side of the road.
brAKE INN MOTEL
GAS—FOOD—WARM BEDS
HIKE SCENIC MT APACHE
5 MI THIS WAY
Past the sign, in the distance, the shape of a tall black mountain came into view.
It was like the sight was too much for the truck. The engine seized up. There wasn’t enough fuel left in the tank to overcome the loss of pressure from the broken line, and all of it choked and stalled. Kicked once. Twice. Died.
Ethan was just able to steer the truck onto the shoulder. They rolled to a stop right at the foot of the motel’s sign.
“ ‘Gas. Food. Warm beds,’ ” Hunter read aloud, slowly. He’d never been the best reader. Ethan sometimes wondered just what sort of education the man had received as a child. What sort of childhood the man had endured, period.
Hunter added, “I’ll take all three.”
He grinned at Ethan, probably expecting Ethan to grin back, but Ethan was too busy telling himself he wasn’t afraid.
Nine empty rooms. Twelve cold beds.
Already the desert’s chill was creeping into the cab. The night falls fast out there.
“Ethan?”
Something strange happened in that moment.
Light passed over the sky, a bright silver flash like the glare off an enormous mirror.
The light was brilliant, unnerving, unlike anything Ethan had ever seen.
It only lasted a second, maybe two, but its afterglow shimmered for ages at the edges of his vision.
The light almost hurt his eyes, but it seemed to jolt Ethan out of a daze. His body felt like his own again. He glanced at his watch. It was four o’clock. Time was moving.
Hunter stifled a nasty cough. He rubbed his head like he was fighting off a headache. “I’ll carry the duffel bag. You get the gas can. Hold on to the Python while you’re at it.”
Ethan said, “What about the cops?”
“I don’t think the cops are our problem.”
“What do you mean? The waitress must have seen us take this road. Where else would they go to look for us?”
“If they were coming, they would have caught up to us by now.” Hunter hesitated, clearly more to say, but a cold wind struck the truck, moaning its way through the door seal. The temperature in the cab had already fallen five degrees.
“We need to worry about sunset,” Hunter said. “If we get stuck out here after dark, we’ll freeze to death before dawn.”
Ethan said, “I wouldn’t want to be alone out there when the dark rolls in,” and realized he’d heard those exact same words before.