Tim Stevens - Delivering Caliban

‘She knows what to do.’

‘She needs to stop the car.’

‘Stop the car because she’s dead.’

‘Dead people can’t ride.’

‘If the car stops then she stops.’

‘If she stops then we stop.’

Stopstopstopstopstop

The voices rose to a roaring chant.

‘Stop the car. Stop the car. Stop the car. Stop the car — ’

Nina grabbed the steering wheel and hauled it towards her.

*

Through the windshield the night slewed abruptly sideways, the yellow sodium light from the streetlamps arcing by, the beaded headlights of the cars on the opposite side of the highway across the divide spraying like sparks. Below the taunting rhythm of the voices Nina heard the yowl of rubber on tarmac and the frantic Doppler dip of car horns.

The impact rammed her against the back of her seat so hard she felt as if she were being driven through it. An instant later she flopped forward, the seatbelt wrenching across her chest. Her lashing head flicked inches short of the tip of her violin, propped upright where it was in the footwell.

‘She’s crashing. She’s bleeding. She’s dying.’

The sudden absence of movement was nearly as jarring as the collision had been. Nina sagged against the seatbelt, her head lolling stupidly on her neck. It swivelled round of its own accord and she looked at Pope. He was mouthing something at her, but his words were drowned out.

‘She’s dead. She mustn’t think she isn’t. This is the afterlife. She’s died and gone to hell.’

Close to hers, Pope’s face was white, red shadows thrown across it from the lights beyond the windshield.

*

The voices took over then, Wagnerian in their intensity. Everything else happening to her was ornamentation.

She was dragged from the car, Pope turning to speak to another man, the man shouting silently. Through the noise she managed to grab her violin by the neck through the case and haul it out after her. Light blazed at her through the darkness as she felt herself stumbling across slick road surface, her elbow supported.

The voices were less distinct the louder they became. They’d melded into one, a sexless and even inhuman grating, unintelligible as spoken language. Like a blast at close quarters they rendered her deaf.

She squatted, huddled, clasping the violin to her like an oversized infant, and stared at Pope’s legs before her.

The voices were right. She’d stopped the car, and she was dead now, and in hell.

Interstate 95, between Washington D.C. and New York

Tuesday 21 May, 1.45 am

‘I don’t want your money, pal.’

The man looked cheerfully affronted. He was five feet four or so, rotund yet tough looking, with a peaked cap perched on a wiry pate.

‘Good of you,’ said Pope. ‘Thanks.’

He was using his generic American accent because although it was an effort to maintain, his grammar school vowels would be conspicuous. Particularly at a truck stop off a US interstate at a quarter to two in the morning, with a mute and shivering waif at his side.

They’d walked a mile up the road, the lights guiding him on. O’Connell’s , stuttered the pink neon when he was close to make it out through the thin steam from the blacktop. A pitted, oil-stained forecourt bristled at the periphery with seven or eight trucks of varying sizes and degrees of articulation. Below the neon sign was a low, long diner-style building with heaving movement beyond the blurred windows.

*

Pope had regained control of the wheel a second after the girl twisted it clockwise. He was almost, but not quite, quick enough to keep the Mercedes in the centre lane. As it happened, the involuntary pressure of his foot on the brake pedal caused the front to bank sideways slightly, carrying it across into the slow lane, where, as luck would have it, a car behind was accelerating to overtake.

The car behind — a Porsche roadster — rammed the rear door on the passenger side of the Mercedes at a thirty-degree angle, stoving it in and shunting the Mercedes back into the centre lane. Pope kept his foot off the brake and controlled the slide as best he could and the Mercedes stalled within a few feet. Behind and visible through Nina’s window, the Porsche too had stalled, its ballooned airbag filling the windscreen.

Pope did a quick inventory in the sudden silence. He was unhurt. The girl shuddered in the seat beside him but seemed to be moving all limbs. From what he could see of the Mercedes from the front seat, the rear door buckled inwards at a sharp angle and that side sagging awkwardly, to all intents and purposes the car was a writeoff.

He pulled the Heckler amp; Koch from beneath his seat and shoved it into his coat pocket, checked the road behind him — the cars were veering round into the fast lane — and stepped out. The meagre traffic was slowing to stare. One man leaned out his window and held his hand to his ear in a telephoning gesture but Pope shook his head, smiled and gave him the thumbs up.

One glance at the back of the car confirmed his suspicions. The rear wheel on the passenger side was flat and tilted inwards, the axle broken or at least bent. He moved forwards and opened Nina’s door. She didn’t look up at him. Gently, but with enough firmness not to leave any doubts, he took her by the shoulders and helped her out. She clutched at the violin case and he let her haul it after her.

At his side, a voice said, ‘You’re in a heap of shit, man.’

It was a young man, in his early twenties perhaps, his gelled-back hair only slightly rumpled. He was rubbing his face, his arms, his chest. His Porsche’s headlights backlit him.

‘Fucking asshole. Jumping lanes like that.’

Pope didn’t point out that the younger man had been trying to overtake in the slow lane. He calculated quickly. The fake UK driver’s licence he’d used to rent the car would hold up, as would the temporary insurance certificate he’d obtained; at least long enough for him to exchange details with the man and get going again. On the other hand -

The man had pulled a phone from the tight hip pocket of his jeans, wincing exaggeratedly as though discovering a pain in his torso he hadn’t noticed before. ‘My dad’s a lawyer, dickhead. Gonna sue your ass.’

Pope’s decision was made for him. The man stepped closer, invading Pope’s personal space, wordlessly daring him to push him or swing a punch. Still supporting Nina’s arm, Pope stiffened the fingers of his left hand into what he visualised as a shovel. He slammed the fingers into the young man’s abdomen below the breastbone, felt the gasp of minty breath as the man jackknifed. Pope caught him by the collar as he dropped, controlled his dead weight as he slid to the ground. Releasing Nina momentarily, Pope crouched beside the man, shielded by the Mercedes from the rest of the road, and twisted his neck sharply sideways.

Aware of cars sliding to a stop now, Pope ducked his head to minimise the exposure of his face and took Nina by the elbow and bundled her across the road to the hard shoulder. She squatted on her haunches when they got there, and Pope took a moment to orientate himself. The truck stop blinked in the distance.

The police would be looking not for somebody who had abandoned the scene of an accident — an offence in itself — but a killer. And they’d have eyewitness accounts of a man and a young woman carrying a case of some kind.

If he could make it to New York, he could lose himself there, even with Nina in tow. All he needed was transport to take them another hundred miles.

*

‘Fifteen minutes? Maybe twenty?’

The trucker was shovelling food into his face at a steady, leisurely pace. He sat at the long counter that ran around three sides of the service area, and had been chatting to two other men when Pope and Nina came in. the two men drifted away to a larger group further down the counter.