“Don’t you even think about it,” he growls at me. “I have the gun.” He shakes it in my direction, his finger near the trigger.
“You wouldn’t shoot me,” I say, hoping that’s true.
“If it meant saving your sorry ass, boy, I wouldn’t bet against it.”
I expect the Strange Man to stop or even disappear completely as we approach
mile marker seventy-seven, so I’m surprised when he continues to disappear and reappear farther down the road, past the mile-marker sign. I slow and think about stopping completely (to do what, I don’t know), but the Strange Man beckons me again, this time almost frantically. He glances over his shoulder as if looking for something and then turns and waves to me again. A visible tremor goes through him, and he grimaces as if in pain. His movements become more staccato, his flickering more rapid. With a sideways glance at the river below where my father drowned, I press down on the gas and continue up the road, which rises up a hill into the Cascades.
“Where’s he taking us?” Abe asks. “Do you know?”
“No,” I say, watching as the Strange Man appears again, this time with his mouth wide open like he’s screaming as he bends over, holding his stomach. “Something’s wrong with him, though. It’s like he’s in pain.”
“Didn’t Cal say they didn’t have souls?” Abe asks, squinting ahead as if that’ll bring the Strange Man into view. “I didn’t think they could feel anything.”
I shudder at the memory of fear in their eyes and voices when Cal had opened the black hole back at Lone Hill Memorial. “They can feel things,” I say quietly as the Strange Man’s mouth stretches wide again before he disappears.
We round an almost blind corner. The Strange Man stands just before the Oakwood Bridge, a steel monstrosity that crosses over the Umpqua River churning angrily some fifty feet below in the gorge. The bridge itself is one lane each way, and a hundred feet long. Cement walkways line either side of the bridge for tourists to stop and take photos, blocked off by metal girders. The roadway is blacktopped, a dotted yellow line running down the center.
The Strange Man is now in the center of the bridge, jerking his arms at his sides. He looks as if he’s having a seizure, still upright but shaking violently, snapping his head back and forth. His white skin has started to redden, as if he’s heating from the inside. He rocks his head back, opens his mouth wide, and a little tendril of smoke rises from his throat into the air.
Any remnants of the sun have disappeared behind the approaching clouds. Even inside the cab of the truck, the air from outside feels electric, like the storm is ready to break open at any moment and plummet toward the ground. It feels more like dusk than m
idafternoon. I flip on the headlights and the Strange Man is illuminated briefly before he disappears in an intense flash.
And reappears, stock still, on the other side of the bridge.
He waves. And smiles.
Headlights are coming down the mountain road behind him. They hit him briefly and he is cast in shadow before he disappears. We approach the bridge at the same time. It’s another truck.
“Someone coming in for the festival?” Abe asks.
“Maybe.” I frown. The truck approaching seems to be a newer model, its headlights a bright blue LED. I can see a bar of the same LED lights across the top of the cab. A metal grill guard wraps around the front. The truck looks black. The windows are tinted, and given that, and the distance between us, and the lights in my eyes, I’m unable to see anyone in the cab.
Suddenly, everything feels wrong as we drive onto the bridge
I look down at the speedometer in the Ford. Thirty-five miles an hour. I glance in the rearview mirror. No one behind us. The Strange Man has not reappeared. It’s all wrong. Cal, it’s all wrong.
Everything goes to hell when the light bar across the top of the approaching truck abruptly flashes on and the truck shoots forward. We’re already a quarter of the way across the bridge and I can’t go left or right. I have a moment to decide whether to hit the brakes and try to reverse or to plow forward. I press down on the gas. The Ford gives a loud roar and I think about my dad, how he was so proud to find that V8 engine, how he hadn’t let the guy screw him over with the price, because that’s not how we do it around here. The Ford sounds like it’s alive, and it is angry. Big Eddie would have loved that sound.
“Oh my Jesus,” Abe breathes, beginning to brace himself for impact as the black truck crosses halfway over the center line, barreling down the road.
“Trust me,” I say through gritted teeth as I move over to meet it head-on.
As the trucks race toward each other, an eerie calm befalls me, belying the sweat that drips down my back. I can’t hear the wind outside or the scream of the engines. I can’t even hear Abe shouting next to me anymore. All I can see is the light, and it is so blue, everything is blue, and I think of Cal and everything I should have said. I think of everything I should have confessed to him. I open my mind as widely as possible and think Cal. I say Cal. I scream Cal.
I jerk the wheel to the right at the last possible second. It’s almost a good plan. It almost works. Everything tells me it should work. But physics is an impossible thing.
The Ford whines as we swerve to the right, the tires squealing along the roadway. The front corners of the vehicles miss colliding by inches. There’s a brief moment when everything around me slows down and I look into the driver’s window of the black truck and see the vague outline of a person. They seem to be looking at me as we flash by each other, and then they are gone.
Even as I look ahead to correct our path, there’s a jarring impact on the driver’s side truck bed. The steering wheel jerks in my hands, causing my palms to burn as I struggle to hold on. The bed of the Ford begins to fishtail to the right, toward the cement divider that separates the road from the walkway. This all only takes a second or two, but it goes on forever in my head. The black truck, I think. Must have hit the back. Won’t be able to buff that ou—
The right side of the Ford smashes against the divider, and Abe cries out as he is slammed into the door. There’s a moment when all motion seems to stop, but then the world tilts as the truck flips up and over the divider with a metallic shriek. The windshield shatters. I’m upside down in a haze of sparkling glass before I even know what’s happening. The world tries to right itself as the truck barrel-rolls into the metal girder. The seat belt snaps harshly against my hips, but all I can see is stars and all I can feel is heat and all I can see is blue because sparks have showered in through the broken windshield, pouring onto my face, like a—
cross your heart hope to die stick a
—thousand needles in my eye.