Chapter 1 #2
Cara doubted that, especially as LaDonna began to loudly and unselfconsciously empty her bowels.
She thought longingly of the TOTO bidet toilet with the heated seat in the primary bathroom of what used to be her home.
Did state prison toilets even have seats, or were they all filthy, metal, wall-mounted horrors like those in processing?
After LaDonna flushed, Eve sat and pooped as well.
“Your turn,” she told Cara when she was done.
“I don’t think I need to go.”
LaDonna washed and rinsed in the rust-ringed sink using what was possibly the last powdered-soap dispenser in existence. “No telling how long it’ll be before we get there and how long they’ll make you wait once we do. Do yourself a favor and force out whatever you can.”
Neither woman had squatted or put toilet paper on the seat, so Cara didn’t either, not wanting to give them more fodder for their make-believe reality show.
She tried not to think about the superbugs hitching a ride as she popped the snaps on her jumpsuit and sat directly on the seat—something she had never done before on any public toilet.
Concentrating all of her willpower, she produced a small trickle of pee.
“This reminds me,” Eve said. “We’ve gotta do an episode on going to the bathroom in prison.”
“And the brutal constipation Goldie is going to have until she learns to poop on command!”
Cara wasn’t about to tell them how hard it had been even while sequestered, due to her notoriety, in her own cell.
The two of them laughed their heads off until they were interrupted by the rap of a gun butt on the door.
“Let’s go. Now!”
Back in the van, she discovered they’d been joined by a fourth transportee, a rail-thin girl with bleached-white hair, acne scars, and a sullen expression. She had taken LaDonna’s first-row seat on the driver’s side.
“She’s even whiter than you, Goldie,” cracked LaDonna as she took the empty bench across from Cara and behind Eve.
“She can play your assistant on the show,” Eve added.
The new arrival didn’t ask what they were talking about. Cara noted that LaDonna hadn’t reacted at all to losing her seat—apparently, there was no pecking order in transport-van seating.
They turned onto a side road and quickly slowed to a crawl.
For the first time in her life, Cara was thankful to be in bumper-to-bumper, destiny-delaying traffic.
From her cage, she saw the cars ahead of them making U-turns.
When the van reached a roadblock where two sheriff’s deputies were directing traffic, Poff pounded the steering wheel in frustration and then rolled down his window.
“Where are you headed?” asked the nearest deputy.
“Chowchilla,” said Poff. “These ladies have a date with the warden. We just need to get back to 99.”
“Cal Fire just closed this road due to a brushfire. You’ll need to keep going up 41.”
“Highway 41? That adds—”
“A hundred miles,” groaned Vozenilek.
“Why can’t we just turn around and cut over on Avenue 12?” said Poff, looking at the map on the dashboard screen.
The deputy was impatient, ready to end the conversation. “This thing’s blowing up fast around Irrigosa, between Fresno and Madera. Cal Fire wants to reroute everyone as far away as possible so they can fight it.”
Cara smelled a hint of smoke through the open window.
“No way to sneak through?” asked Poff.
The deputy raised his palms, nothing left to say.
Everyone fell silent and watched the hazy sky in the distance as Poff turned the van around.
During closing arguments in the chilly, utilitarian courtroom, the prosecutor had swung the murder weapon thirteen times as if hammering an invisible spike.
He ran his fingers along its sharp claw as he claimed Cara had raked it across Karl’s right cheek before “tapping” herself on the head to “pretend” she was a victim, too.
She wanted you to believe this was the work of a fictional stalker, he told the jury. Not the money- and fame-thirsty trophy wife who realized her financial tap was running dry.
All of it was news to her.
Every piece of so-called evidence also argued for reasonable doubt, and yet here she was, listening to LaDonna and Eve resume their complaints about hunger.
They grew more and more insistent until Vozenilek finally produced some Costco mini water bottles and MREs he claimed were “for emergency use only.”
“And you didn’t think this qualified until now?” said LaDonna, as the battlefield rations were passed out.
“Bon appétit,” said Poff.
Cara noticed the COs didn’t take any, even though they had to be hungry, too.
Each box contained a squeeze packet of chili mac, a kippered beef snack, processed cheese as orange as their jumpsuits, applesauce, and a bag of Skittles.
After her experience in the bathroom, Cara couldn’t imagine trying the chili mac, and anyway, it seemed impossible to eat with her hands cuffed close to her stomach.
Eve simply squeezed the packet between her palms, bent forward, and tore it open with her teeth before sucking down the chunky lava.
LaDonna tore open her kippered beef stick and the cheese. The new girl ignored her food altogether.
Cara didn’t dare to try even the applesauce, which was two years past its best-by date, but the Skittles seemed safe enough. Pouring a few into her hand, she decided to savor each flavor by picking them up one at a time with her tongue.
First a crunchy, chewy purple. Basic grape.
Then a delicious, lemony yellow.
She had just captured and begun to chew on a green one, the sweet but tangy lime flavor spreading across her tongue, when the van swerved so sharply the remaining Skittles flew out of her hand and rattled against the window like hailstones.
Poff swore and Vozenilek screamed. Her head jerked violently, and suddenly they were sideways on the road with two trucks bearing down on them.
Cara’s vision blurred as the van collapsed in a cacophony of crunching metal and shattering glass. Then they were spinning, whiplash fast, gravity simultaneously pinning her to her seat and trying to free her body from her chains.
Strangely, it wasn’t her own life she saw ending, but Karl’s.
His voice shouting her name as her skull flooded with blinding pain.
His voice growing garbled and strange as he seemed to fight back and her vision went black.
Coming to and discovering his body, heavy and cold, his arms and legs splayed stiff as she tried and failed to pick him up.
Her tears falling on his face. Her clothes soaked with his dark blood as she raced back down the path for help.
“Goldie! Cara Campbell! Wake up!”
Cara wasn’t sure she was still inside her body. Her hearing was muffled, and she couldn’t tell if she was upside down or right side up.
“Open. Your. Eyes!”
It wasn’t God, an angel, or even one of Satan’s little helpers who had come to take her away, but LaDonna, who was trapped by a twisted steel cage that had been part of the rear security door.
The actual back doors hung open, one of them off its hinges.
When Cara looked for the guards, she couldn’t see the front half of the van at all. Only asphalt. Broken glass, crumpled plastic, and torn metal littered the highway.
Her stomach twisted and brought her back to her body.
She dry-heaved.
“You have to get us out of here,” said LaDonna insistently.
As she looked down, checking to see if she was still in one piece, her bench wobbled.
It was then that she noticed Eve, who’d been seated on the first-row passenger side, was lying half in and half out of the van.
Her head was sitting on her body wrong. All Cara could see of the new girl was her bleached hair, which was now red and gray. Blood and . . . brains?
Cara vomited rainbow-colored bile onto her orange jumpsuit.
LaDonna’s voice was tight but calm as she coached her. “I’m stuck, so you have to get both of us free. Find the COs and grab their keys.”
Below them, something popped and started hissing.
Cara’s seat support had loosened from the floor, and the right side of her bellyband was pinned beneath it. If she lifted her bench and pulled the chain out from under it, she would still be shackled—but free.
“Hurry!”
The bench seemed to weigh a thousand pounds. It was awkward to lift, but she somehow did it. LaDonna groaned as Cara climbed over her and stumbled out of the back of the van.
Cara fell to her knees, then stood up into a scene of utter devastation. A mangled pickup truck rested on the center stripe. Beyond it, a jackknifed semitruck lay on its side. The front half of the transport van was in the ditch on the opposite side of the road.
Cara stumbled across the asphalt, her steps clipped by her shackles, smelling gas and an unfamiliar chemical smell.
The two COs were still buckled into their seats, but the front part of the van was face down in the weeds, all of its window glass destroyed.
She climbed awkwardly into the ditch on the passenger side and pulled the door handle. It fell open toward her.
Officer Vozenilek had been decapitated. His head lay in the footwell. Officer Poff was intact but unmoving.
If she had had anything left in her stomach, she would have vomited again.
She held her breath as she reached for Vozenilek’s belt.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered as she unclipped his bloody key ring.
Crouching in the rocky ditch, she tried every key until she found the one that unlocked her restraints. Without pausing to rub her aching wrists, examine the red rings around her ankles, or consider how good it felt to be free, she recrossed the road.
And was nearly hit by a car. A red sedan with a gray hood veered onto the shoulder and accelerated past the wreck without stopping.
“Thanks for helping!” LaDonna pressed her wrists against the damaged cage as Cara reached her. “Do my handcuffs and give me the keys, Goldie. I’ll do the rest.”
Cara’s hands shook as she fumbled to get the key into the lock. The cuffs finally opened with a satisfying click.
LaDonna was bleeding from her forehead and her arm but didn’t seem to notice as she unlocked her shackles. Then she kicked the metal grate out of the way like a bona fide superhero and quickly climbed out of the van.
“As much fun as it would be to costar in your reality show, I’ve got three kids, and I plan to see them again,” she said.
“You’re leaving?”
“When the Lord giveth a miracle, who are we to turn him down?” LaDonna said.
“Aren’t you afraid they’ll catch you?”
“If they do, I’ll say I had shock or amnesia. Both, probably.”
With that, LaDonna jogged across the highway, climbed over a sagging barbed-wire fence, and headed into the dry, brown grass. After a moment, all Cara could see were her head and shoulders. Then they, too, disappeared.
For a second, Cara wondered if LaDonna might have allowed her to tag along.
But then she surveyed the tangled metal and smoking mess around her.
Eve, New Girl, Poff, and Vozenilek were all dead, but there were two more vehicles.
If anyone was alive in them, there was no one but her to help.
The pickup truck in the middle of the highway was closer, so she made her way there first.
It looked like a tin can crushed with a brick. Through the open driver’s-side window, she saw a freckle-faced teen no older than seventeen pinned between the steering wheel and the compressed roof of the cab. She looked hopelessly trapped.
Dear God.
Trembling all over, Cara reached inside and brushed the girl’s lavender-tinted hair away from her blood-streaked face. She seemed only half conscious. Her eyes stared, unfocused, as she took rapid, shallow breaths.
“Everything’s going to be . . .”
She couldn’t finish. Because it wasn’t.
In what LaDonna would surely have pronounced another miracle, Cara spotted a phone in a purple sparkly case on the asphalt near the truck. She picked it up, turned it over, and saw a half-written text on the spiderwebbed screen.
Don’t worry Bree happy! it read. See u soo
Cara dialed 911.
“911, what’s your emergency?”
“There’s been a bad accident on . . . I don’t know where I am,” she said, the words rushing out. “We were just outside Fresno when we detoured from the fire. I think it’s Highway 41. People are dead, and there’s a teenager badly injured. Send help.”
She hung up before the operator could ask her to stay on the line.
“Help is on the way, Bree,” she told the girl.
Bree might have nodded. Or it might have been a spasm. Bloody bubbles were forming on her lips.
Cara thought about the Lord giving and taking.
She’d always considered herself spiritual, plugged in to the universe at least, but the past year had certainly challenged her belief that everything happened for a reason.
Yet here she was, still alive when a half-dozen people around her had died.
She’d been praying for justice every day since her arrest but had let go of hope after the crushing verdict.
Wasn’t that exactly when manifestations manifested?
Bree’s breaths, still shallow, were growing raspy.
Cara moved closer, gently rubbing the girl’s arm.
The tears she had managed to hold back for the entire ride from LA finally began to pour down her cheeks. Her body convulsed in racking sobs.
Karl, she thought. Oh, Karl. I’m so sorry. I miss you so much.
Then the freckle-faced, lavender-haired girl stopped breathing.
Cara expected to see a mystical vapor or to feel a cold rush as the girl’s spirit left her body.
Instead, a white-and-gold sedan pulling a trailer slowed and pulled onto the shoulder of the two-lane highway and stopped beside the overturned semi.
She watched, screened by the wreckage of the pickup, as the elderly couple cautiously emerged from their vehicle.
Urged on by his wife, the husband looked into the cab and turned away, his face drained of all color.
He seemed to steel himself before heading toward Bree’s truck.
Why couldn’t Cara claim she was in shock or had amnesia and simply wandered off, too?
Even if no one believed it, what could they do to her?
She already had a life sentence. If she ran, she’d be caught quickly, she was sure—she had no idea how to survive on the run—but shouldn’t she at least seize a few hours of justice in the meantime?
Cara leaned in and tenderly moved some hair from the girl’s face.
Then she ran.