Sound in the Night

Black mist seemed to swirl around my mind. Fragments of events shot through my vision like flashbulbs, coming in then fading just as fast. An explosion of gunpowder, a slide lurching backwards, a hot brass cartridge spinning from an ejection port, a hand on my wrist, my hand on someone else's wrist, a sharp spray of fluid right into my eyes, blurs of light and shapeless hues, a fountain of cold white liquid.

I felt the world falling back into place, could feel my back cold and wet. Sounds were coming back, I thought I heard my name.

I opened my eyes, they felt dry and cold. Light filtered in, I could see the ceiling and walls,then a big tan blob filled my vision. I rubbed at my eyes with my right hand, then opened them again. The edges of the blur started to fill in, colors separated into shades and shadows. I could see her face now. I was still on the floor, surrounded by milk, and Amy was leaning over me.

"You're pretty," I said. My voice was week and froggy.
Her mouth tightened to a line, "You're alive."
"It would seem."

I lay there for a second, trying to remember why I was on the floor of a grocery store. It came to me in a second, and I stood up in one motion. The teenage store clerk was still standing there, his lower lip handing down and out. He watched me in silence.

"We have to get out of here," I said to Amy as she stood up on her own. I looked around and started toward the entrance, Amy falling in behind me.

"Shouldn't we call the police?" she asked in step.
"No," I said without thinking. She looked at me and stopped walking in the middle of an aisle. Canned fruits were on my right, Pyrex dishes and cooking utensils on my right.

"Why not?" she asked, her arms folding.
I looked at a few cans of peaches, some in light syrup and some in their own juice. "Because," I said, looking at a can of diced peaches. In light syrup. "We don't know if that guy wasn't the police for sure. And even if he isn't, he's a lot closer to us than the real police."
"Then we could stay in here, he's not going to come after us inside the store, with people all around."
"He's dressed like a cop," I said, "he could come in here and do whatever he wanted and say we we're drug dealers."

She scrunched her eyebrows and leaned her head back, looking up at the drop-tile ceiling. A black plastic bubble sunk from the ceiling like a pimple a few feet away, concealing a surveillance camera.

"So what's the plan, then?" she asked finally.
"Oh, you know me," I said. "I work better without them."

The night air outside was colder than I remembered, the chill amplified by the milk soaking the front and back of my shirt which made the fabric cling to my skin. Although I'd just recently run through here, it was the first time I'd seen the parking lot so I was disoriented for a second. I got my bearings and saw my car, a depressingly mangled white Civic parked in the wrong direction in the street past the parking lot. The trunk was ripped and bent into an odd triangle rather than a rectangle, where it had struck the police car. Cars driving down the road were honking and pulling sharply into the left lane to avoid the car.

We waited until traffic was clear, then Amy ran around to the passenger side and opened the door. I saw a white streak in the corner of my eye, and looked up to see a police cruiser with a familiarly mangled hood around the front passenger side wheel. The car was driving on a cross-street and ripping through the intersection about two hundred yards from where I was standing. It drove on through the intersection and nearly out of sight, then I heard tires squeal and saw the car make a hard U-turn back toward my direction.

"Time to go!" I said, hopping into the driver's seat and pulling the door shut. Amy followed suit. The keys were still in the ignition, and the engine turned and started cheerfully. I pulled forward and turned the car around and drove forward as fast as I could convince my car to go. I drove past the freeway on-ramp, knowing a highway chase never ends on a happy note. I saw the police car turn hard onto this road behind me, heard the car's engine roar and sputter in attempt to catch up. The road kept winding past businesses and intersections until the trees were getting thicker and thicker and the side streets and businesses were farther between. My car was managing around 60 miles per hour. I could feel the damaged trunk affecting my wind sheer and the steering was put off-kilter from the wheels impacting the curb earlier. The police car was close enough that I could see that the front passenger side tire was shredded and was practically running on the rims, which explained why he was running so slowly.

Not too slowly, though. He was practically on top of me, his front bumper occasionally scraping against my malformed rear bumper. I didn't know where exactly I was trying to go, and I knew I wouldn't be able to outrun him. All I could hope was to escape him, which wasn't going to happen on this road. The next side street I saw I turned onto, nearly skidding into a tree in the process.

The pavement soon ran out as I passed a small house set back behind a few trees, and the dirt road began winding through the woods and over hills. The police car wasn't handling the dirt road as well, it kept cutting to the right as the shredded tire couldn't gain any traction in the dirt. My headlights were cutting yellow cones through the pitch black, casting thick shadows through the trees running tight on each side of the road. The police car was about ten feet behind now, illuminated only by my tail lights. Either he didn't have his headlights on, or they were damaged during the collision that had happened no more than 20 minutes ago but felt like a lifetime.

I could see in the distance that the road turned abruptly to the left, blazing a trail through the woods. I tried to calculate the distance to the turn, then switched off my headlights. Once again, I was driving blind. The moonlight barely filtered through the bare trees. Amy asked what I was doing. I didn't answer.

When I was as sure as I could be that I'd gone far enough, I slammed on my brakes and skidded forward about thirty feet then cut hard to the left, barely following the turn of the road. My brake lights probably blinded the man in the police cruiser, and with his steering banking to the right, he had no chance of making the turn. I drove on in the dark, completely unaware of how the road moved for a few seconds before I heard the incredibly loud crunch of the police car crashing head-on into a tree. Then there were no noises besides those of my car.

I stopped and pulled over to the side of the road, and got looked out my back window toward where the road turned and where the car must have hit. It was only about a thousand feet away, but all I could see were a few odd angles and reflections.

I quickly pulled the gun from the cardboard and foam box in the back seat and started feeding rounds into the magazine with nimble fingers. I slid the clip back into the pistol, chambered a round, and handed the gun to Amy. She looked back with deep and inquisitive eyes, illuminated by my car's dome light.

"Take this and get out of the car and hide back in the trees. You know how to use it if you need to," I said.
"What are you going to do?" she asked, trembling with the gun still balanced between her two open palms.
"I have to make sure he's..." I was lost under the weight of the situation for a moment, then said, "make sure he's not still a threat."

She looked at me like she knew what I meant, then nodded, her hair falling over her face. She opened her door and stepped out, I saw her step into the thick of the woods, her head still low.

I turned off my dome light and pulled back into drive with my headlights still off, then drove forward far enough to turn around with a sloppy three-point turn. I then drove forward slowly in the direction I'd came and crept toward to the road's turn.

I heard a distant pop, like a marble being dropped on a sheet of aluminum. Then another. The sounds were coming from ahead of me, where I'd guessed the crash must have been. I heard the sound again, and a small hole appeared in my windshield. Tiny fragments of glass sprinkled onto my dashboard. I heard another pop, then my windshield grew another hole, a few inches from the first. The glass splintered between the two holes, a spiderweb of hairline cracks. They looked like bullet holes.

With new resolve I turned forward, and tightened the chest strap of my seatbelt. I tried to slide my seat back but it was as far as it could go. Then I pressed on the gas, as hard as I could.

My car rumbled forward, rattling and deliberate. Another piece of glass fell from the windshield. I accelerated onward, toward the source of the noise, toward the turn in the road, toward the crashed police car.

I turned on my headlights and then fingered on the high-beams, slicing through the darkness in an instant and illuminating the wrecked police car ahead of me. The hood and engine were split down the middle and wrapped around a rather unaffected tree just off the road immediately ahead of where the road turned. The car's door was open, and I could see the deflated airbag dangling limply from the steering wheel. Standing between the partially-open door and the car's body was the man in the police outfit, his face bloody and broken, gingerly holding a gun with his left hand, supported by his right. A long silencer jutted from the barrel of the gun, and from it spat more rounds, drawing new perforations in my hood and windshield. The switch from low-beams to high-beams blinded and startled him, and he drew backwards toward the car's body as my car drove straight into his door, into him, and into the police car.

I'd loosened all of my muscles before the hit, and when my car struck the other head-on I felt as if I were being punched from all directions at once. Something tugged at my chest, then something sprung forward at my face from my steering wheel like a battering ram as I lurched forward and struck it. The noise never seemed to end, echoing around the inside of my skull. Something wet dripped from my nose and down my mouth, tasted like copper.

Then I felt hands across me, groping at my face and across my chest. Something slid around my waist and made a clicking noise, then what felt like snakes slithered across my lap and chest until they were gone. I weakly tried to swat at the hands pulling me to the left, then I heard my name again, her voice, then saw her face.

"You're still here?" I muttered.
"I'm everywhere," she said, just as mysteriously as the first time, then she pulled again and I slid out of the car onto my back, into the dirt.

When my muscles began responding to my requests, I stood up slowly and wiped the blood away from my face with my milky-- and now bloody shirt. My arms and legs felt like fire as they moved, and my head seemed to have angry little mine workers hammering away at the inside of my brain. I tried to push through the pain, and rotated my jaw a few times until I felt like I could speak. I told Amy to stand back for a minute, then took the gun from her hands.

I walked in a wide arc around the back of my car until my eyes adjusted to the dark. It looked like the police car had a Siamese twin jutting from the left side -- my car. The two heaps of metal seemed fused together, my car's hood had cut into the side of the police car like a finger through a loaf of bread, buckling the top and bottom together. I walked around to the passenger side of the police car and looked through the broken window. It was dark, and I could see the top of our jolly police man spread across the bench-style front seat, his arms splayed out wildly. At his waist, his body seemed to be lost among the wrecked metal. He was dead, I could be sure.

I went to walk back toward Amy, and when I was standing at the former police car's trunk I noticed the lid bobbing up and down. One of the impacts had unlocked the lid, and almost like a miracle the inner trunk light was on, spilling some light from around the edges of the lid.

I lifted the lid with my left hand, the gun still in my right. A man's body lay folded and mangled inside the trunk. He looked to be in his forties, with a large belly and thinning brown hair. He was wearing a white undershirt, no belt, and brown pants with a black stripe down the side of each leg. The same colors as the police uniform shirt the other man wore. His body was contorted violently, from the crash I assumed.

"Hello, officer," I said to the body.