Ryan Westfield - Getting Out

Norma knew that taking the whole bottle would kill her. There was no doubt about that. She would simply slip away, fade away. It wasn’t like anyone would find her, here, deep in the forest.

There was no chance of being rescued, and that was the way she wanted it.

She took the bottle out and rattled them. As she opened it up, the pills started to get wet. But that wouldn’t hurt them.

She swallowed them one by one, taking sips from the plastic water bottle she carried everywhere.

After the tenth one, she was already feeling strange. Sleepy. Hard to describe… Her thoughts were a little fuzzy. Disjointed. A little odd…

Norma powered through, taking the pills one by one, diligently. She was taking her medicine. The pills would make everything go away. They would make everything better…

Norma didn’t believe in heaven. But she knew that she just didn’t want to exist anymore.

She thought of her family, of her friends. She thought of the opportunities she’d never taken. But she’d had a good life. In a way.

She thought of her depression, that depression that had haunted her even when things were going well, that dark yawning chasm that screamed her name in the night, that kept her awake and kept her heart pounding.

That chasm would disappear completely. She would never feel that pain again.

Norma was soaked to the bone. She sat down in the mud, no longer caring. The pill bottle dropped out of her limp hand.

She was still conscious, but it was fading.

She no longer was aware of the storm, of the intensity of the natural world around her.

She was no longer aware that she was in the mud. If she had been, she wouldn’t have cared.

Norma was high for the first time in her life, as high as she ever would be. Her body felt light and free. Her mind felt suddenly unencumbered by all the things she’d worried about.

Norma tried to move her hand, but nothing happened. She was losing control of her body.

Slowly, her breathing changed. It slowed to a snail’s pace. Her breaths were miniscule, barely noticeable.

Her mind was somewhere else, floating away, up through the sunshine that wasn’t there, up through a cloudless sky that had never existed.

Norma didn’t want to have to fight. She didn’t want to struggle. She didn’t want to survive.

She got what she wanted.

“Are you sure we’re going the right way?” said Mandy.

“No,” said Max. “But I don’t know what else to do. There aren’t any other roads here.”

“Maybe we should turn around,” said Mandy, peering down at the maps. Her flashlight had already died, so she was using Max’s, ignoring his pleas for her to conserve the battery as much as possible. “I don’t know. I just don’t have any idea where we are.”

“It’s hard to tell in this storm,” said Max.

The high beams of the Jeep were barely cutting through the night. The Jeep was wracked by the wind, shifting from side to side constantly. The rain pounded onto the roof and the windows, making so much noise they had to almost shout to be heard by each other.

“How do you think he’s doing?” said Mandy, looking back at Chad, who was passed out in the backseat.

“He’s fine,” said Max gruffly.

“I hit him pretty hard,” said Mandy. “I hope I didn’t hurt him too badly.”

“He deserved it,” said Max.

“Are you sure we shouldn’t turn around?”

Max didn’t answer. He kept driving. He was hungry and tired and his wrist was killing him.

Tensions were rising between Max and Mandy. Max had insisted that they keep driving all night, and then they could rest in the morning.

Mandy, on the other hand, had wanted to hole up in the Jeep and wait out the storm.

Max was feeling a constant urge, a constant pressure to push forward. He was done with being extremely cautious. They had run into too many problems already. In his mind, the sooner they got to the farm house, the better. There, they could relax, they could eat. They could rest up and plan for what was coming next.

Max didn’t know how long it would be before more people arrived from the city, provided they were able to get out at all. But he didn’t want to wait around to find out. He didn’t want to be traveling the open road when they came. He wanted to be safely at the farm house.

He already had plans for some rudimentary defenses that he was going to set up. A ditch surrounding the property, for instance, would slow down intruders. And once he ran out of gas for the Jeep, he might be able to use the car battery to create an electric fence. He didn’t know if there would be enough power or how long it would last for, though.

Unless the farm house had been raided, there was food there, and guns. But as far as Max knew, no one had been to the property in a few years. Who knew what had happened to it in that time. He didn’t have any idea what kind of condition it would be in, whether it would be boarded up. Would the water work after an EMP? Max simply didn’t know.

Max had wanted to save time, to push on through the storm. But even he had to admit that they were probably headed the wrong way. They might be headed farther away from the farmhouse now. He had no idea. But he was stuck somewhere in his own stubbornness, and his foot kept pressing the accelerator pedal.

“Look!” said Mandy. “Lights!”

Max peered through the windshield. He could barely make out some lights ahead.

“Headlights, you think?” said Max.

“I don’t know,” muttered Mandy.

He couldn’t see the road, and he didn’t know whether the lights were coming from the road or off the road.

He was so tired his brain didn’t seem to be working correctly. Lights… he was thinking. That’s kind of strange. Isn’t all the power out? He knew he was missing something, but he wasn’t sure what it was.

“They must be headlights,” said Mandy. “Should you pull over? We don’t want to run into them.”

Max grunted a negative.

He didn’t want to get off the road now. The sides of the road had become flooded mud ditches, from which the Jeep might never return if it entered there.

The lights got closer.

“They’re definitely headlights,” said Mandy.

“I think you’re right,” said Max. “They’re still really far off…”

“Wait,” said Mandy. “What happened? They’re gone.”

Sure enough, the headlights were completely gone now.

“Did they turn them off?” said Max.

“Shit,” said Mandy. “We’ll never see them if they have their headlights off…”

Max slowed down as he drove forward, doing his best to keep his eyes glued to where the phantom car might appear.

Turning their headlights off was a bad sign in Max’s mind. The car had been far off, but it must have seen their own lights. If they were good people, Max couldn’t imagine them turning off their headlights, However, if they were bad guys, maybe they’d turn their headlights off in an attempt to ambush Max and Mandy.

Max drove on. Ten minutes passed.

There was no sign of the oncoming car.

“That was really weird,” said Mandy, in a hushed and worried voice. “What do you think happened to them?”

“No idea,” said Max. “We just need to keep going. It’s better to get out of here, especially if there’s another car in the area. We don’t know anything about them or what they want.”

“That’s your solution to everything,” said Mandy. “You just want to keep going and going, even if we don’t know where we’re headed.”

Suddenly, the Jeep was filled with bright, powerful light.

It was the headlights again, but they were coming at them from the side.