Burn. Chapter 2

The tires on the truck gave out a whimpering screech as John slammed on his brakes. “What in the Hell?” he muttered to himself as he took in the sight of a girl in a bikini top and jean shorts laying on the side of the road. His stomach did a flip, and he realized that he may have just come upon a hit and run victim, and that she may not be in too good shape when he turned her over. His mind flashed back to the time that he’d found a bat laying face down in the sand when he was a boy. He had flipped it with a stick, curious, and been met with a mass of bugs and an all too human looking skeleton with the skull of a tiny fanged dog. He remembered not being hungry for dinner that night, going to bed and dreaming of bugs in eyesockets, and human sized half-skeletonized bats hiding in the shadows of his room, scuttling across his ceiling. He paused for an instant, but then he came to and chastised himself for hesitating. He grabbed the ancient handle and swung the creaking door open, and cleared the ground between the truck and the girl in three huge strides. He stood over her and sputtered out “M-miss? Are you alright?” She didn’t answer, but he saw her breathing. He sighed in relief. He kneeled down and put his hand on her back. She flinched. He wondered if she was in a coma or something, maybe a car had hit her, and she had head trauma, or a broken spine. He vaguely remembered reading something about not turning injured people over in case they had a spinal injury because it could cripple them forever. As he was debating what to do, she sprung suddenly to life, and jumped up into a crouching position faster than he’d ever seen anyone move. He almost fell backward with the shock. She was a statue in front of him, silent, her hair covering her face, bloody and terrifying. If he wasn’t scared of women before, this ought to set him straight. His nightmares had a new, endless supply of fuel. She reached up quickly with one manicured hand and dragged her matted dark red hair out of her face. Wait. He knew this girl. He’d seen her for the first time last summer at the hardware store with her dad, the sophisticated new rich guy in town who went out to do errands in his brand new jeans and shiny new white F250 on Saturday morning. The guy who asked for a latte from the coffee house where everyone else just drank black drip and ate eggs and bacon and cherry pie. He remembered the look on the waitresses face when he asked for a double shot. She said something about Jim Beam and they both laughed, but his smile didn’t reach his eyes, and they narrowed coldly, revealing how much he resented her joke. He tapped his foot impatiently, and ran his finger across the greasy countertop. His nose crinkled slightly as he inspected it. His chiseled, handsome face twisted up into a polite, polished smile as the waitress brought him his regular old coffee in a paper to go cup. “Yuppy bastard,” John had thought, and when he turned to his best friend Hutch, he knew that he was thinking it too. They exchanged a little smirk and went back to their eggs and bacon, shaking their heads slightly as they ate. That was the great thing about best friends, they always hated the same people you did, without even needing to explain why. He saw the girl the first time a week later when the shiny white truck pulled into the dirt parking lot of the hardware store. Her hair was cotton candy pink at that point, she was the perfect picture of sexually explicit teenage angst. She was texting on her jeweled pink iphone and snapping her gum. She stayed in the car and kicked up her little white manicured feet to rest them on the side mirror, the sunlight gleaming off of her glittery pink toenails. She glanced up from her phone just long enough to roll her eyes at her dad as he slammed the truck door and strode into the hardware store, slapping his hand on his left thigh as he walked, trying to wipe off the remnants of his last distasteful exchange with his offspring. As he disappeared into the store, John took in the scene as casually as he could. Her makeup was done up like she was going out somewhere fancy, and her cleavage-showcasing white frilly crop top peeked over the edge of the truck window, her perfect pink hair falling in perfect ringlets around her perfect shiny pink kewpie-doll lips. The teenage kid sweeping the steps of the hardware store looked like a dog that had just spotted a squirrel. His entire body swung toward her like a weathervane around an axis. John tried to stifle a smile and worked hard to pretend to read the newspaper in his beat up truck parked a few feet away. Looking at her now, you’d almost forget that she was the same sweet little thing he’d seen that day. She looked like a wild animal set to spring, her hair matted against her dirty, scraped up face. John cleared his throat, trying to find his voice again. Her light green eyes gleamed at him menacingly. “Miss are you alright? Do you need me to call you an ambulance?” If she understood him she gave no sign of it. Maintaining eye contact, he slowly slid off his plaid button-up, revealing his sweaty white T-shirt covered beer belly underneath and offered the shirt to her like he’d offer a bone to a dog. She didn’t budge. He shook it at her, saying, “Come on, I ain’t gonna hurt you”. Slowly a little dirty hand reached out and snatched it, but she made no move to put it on. She just hugged it towards her stomach, covering her belly button piercing and her dirty white swimsuit top. She continued to stare at him, as if in disbelief, until the sobbing gripped her again, and she sunk down to touch her face to the pavement once more. John righted himself and shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot, he’d never been much good with women. They had too many emotions. “Well I can’t just leave her out here, and she ain’t walking anywhere soon” he thought. So he reached down and awkwardly picked her up in his arms, flipping her on her back like a limp rag doll. She didn’t have the strength to fight back, she just buried her face in his white, squishy t-shirt covered chest and sobbed. He stood there for a while, shocked at this sudden closeness to another human being. He felt her breaths, her heartbeat, her tears, her saliva soaking through his shirt and he realized it had been nearly 5 years since he’d been this close to a female. “What kind of a sick fuck thinks about himself at a time like this” his conscience spat in his ear. He opened the driver door and too-roughly slid her across the bench seat. She was surprisingly small, and seemed even tinier curled up in a ball in his truck. She looked like she was in danger of imploding, folding in on herself and just ceasing to exist altogether. He turned the key and his trusty old faithful roared to life. The truck swung around in a wide arc to point back towards town. As John drove along the bouncing two-lane road he noticed a long, thin, black tendril of smoke rising above the hills to the east. He wondered aloud, “What the hell is burning up there?” and was met by one huge gasping sob from his passenger seat. Then she suddenly went silent. Stone faced, wild again, nostrils flaring. She stared, transfixed, at the smoke reaching up into the sky and she tightened her grip on his plaid shirt, wringing it so hard that her knuckles turned paper white. As they pulled up to the police station, John saw the girl’s eyes widen, but she remained perfectly still, her hands gripping his shirt and her back so straight it looked like she had an arrow for a spine. He wondered if the smoke and the girl were connected, they had to be, nobody reacts like that to something they don’t have a part in. “Stay here a minute” he said, locking the drivers side door before slamming it. She didn’t look at him, didn’t budge. He walked into the police station looking for a familiar face, his old schoolmate Ben Hardy. Lieutenant Hardy now. He spotted him in the back of the station, filling out paperwork at a rusty old pistachio green metal desk. “Ben!” he loudly whispered over the sound of the whining air conditioner fan, and a three heads turned to face him. Lieutenant Hardy stood up from his desk and came over to the counter, looking quizzically at John. They had never really been friends, but they said hi to each other when they ran into one another at the bar or on the street. Even played pool once or twice, but what was he doing here? “I got a situation outside here, Ben. Can you come help me with this?” Hardy grabbed his hat and skirted around the counter, curious. As they covered the distance from the door to the parking lot, he caught sight of a half-naked dirt-covered teenage girl trying to squeeze out of the window of John’s beat up old pickup. She had made it halfway and was now stuck, squirming and pissed off, like a bobcat in a trap. Hardy turned and stared at John, waiting for an explanation. “I found this little thing layin’ face down in the road about 5 miles outside town” John offered. “She’s able to move ‘round, as you can see, so she isn’t that hurt, but she’s in a bad state and I couldn’t just leave her there, so I thought I’d turn her over to you.” Hardy walked up to the window and crouched down to look at the girl’s face, which was pointing downward in her desperate attempt to wriggle free from the window. “Miss, what’s your name?” he asked politely. She spat on his shoes and twisted again in the window, trying to wiggle her hips past the glass. It was a miracle she’d made it this far to begin with, the window was only open about 6 inches, and now her ribs prevented her from sliding backwards, and her hip bones prevented her from going any further. “Maybe drugs are to blame here,” Hardy offered, remembering the time a scrawny old hooker came in so hopped up on Meth it’d taken three officers to restrain her and throw her in the drunk tank. He snatched one of her flailing hands and expertly snapped a handcuff on it, waiting for her to punch at him with her other fist, and grabbing it out of the air as soon as she tried. She was cuffed, angry and trapped, so John reached in and lowered the window the rest of the way (you had to jiggle the handle as you were turning it, otherwise it’d get stuck exactly where it did). Hardy reached under her armpits and hefted her out of the window, righting her on her bloody bare feet before crouching down to her level again. “Miss, WHAT… IS… YOUR… NAME… and don’t spit on me again or you’ll be locked up for assaulting an officer” he warned. She swayed slightly, stared up at him with hate in her green eyes, embarrassed by the indignity of her recent position, a red line appearing across her stomach where the glass had been digging into it, and struggled against her cuffs, and then turned her face away in protest. “What’s burnin up there Ben, did you see that smoke over the hill?” John asked. “Nothin, just some old barn” Hardy replied, and the girl went stiff. “You know something about that missy? You and your druggie friends out starting barn fires on a Sunday morning?” She stayed frozen, silent, her face averted and her eyes shut, but a couple tears squeezed out through her thick black eyelashes, making little trails in the dirt coating her cheeks. “I’ll take her in for questioning, John, thanks for bringin’ her to me. I don’t know what she’s done but she don’t seem in her right mind and she shouldn’t be running around half naked like this in the middle of the desert. Good thing you found her before someone else did… I’ll let you know what I find out, give me your cell number.” Hardy said as he handed John a complicated looking smartphone with the “add contact” page open. John stared at it uncomfortably, then offered, “You know what, I’ll just call the station later to check in, thanks Ben.” John climbed back into his truck and watched as Hardy led the girl away, disappearing behind the glass doors of the police station. He turned the engine over and felt the truck come to life again. He patted his dashboard absentmindedly. “Good girl, still workin’ after all these years” he thought, and rolled out of the parking lot, glancing at the door of the station through his rearview. He almost didn’t see a kid on a skateboard whiz in front of the truck, but slammed on his brakes just in time. “Hey, watch where you’re going, you’re going to get hurt” he shouted at the kid, through his still open window. The kid turned around, adjusted his bright green headphones and gave John the finger before continuing on his merry way, jumping his board onto a bus stop bench before careening across the street without looking. He pulled out of the parking lot, shaking his head. What was it with kids these days? Skateboards, headphones, cell phones, pink hair, pink toes… pink lips… his mind trailed off as he noticed a smudge of red blood on the top of his driver door. He touched it with his cracked, scarred finger, and noticed that the wet spot on the left side of his chest was drying out. Her tears were cold against the hot dry air, and he rubbed his fingers together on the top of his steering wheel while wondering what it was about a beautiful woman, even a young one, that made men feel this helpless.