Cooper sat up and winced in pain. Every fiber of every muscle in his body felt as if it had been torn. It was like the soreness the day after a brutal workout, only a lot worse. He took a few deep breaths, which made him feel only a little better. Wherever he was smelled musty and old. The air was stale, warm, and thick like he had been rebreathing it for a long time. On top of all those smells was a sharp odor he couldn’t quite place at first. It was so strong it hurt his head and burned his nose. Then it came to him, it was bleach.
He ran his hands over his body, kneading his muscles and feeling for injuries. Everything seemed OK except a tight, painful lump on his neck. It had to be a spider bite. California was lousy with biting spiders such as the brown recluse and the black widow. He’d been bitten before, and it hurt like hell and took forever to heal.
Cooper felt around in the darkness. He was sitting on a rough, short-pile carpet. His head still spun but was dying down, and he was just starting to feel good enough to be concerned about his situation. He was considering what to do next when a loud pop startled him. Soft light streamed in from an open door at his feet. He was in the back of a van. The light emanated from an electric lantern held up at the open door.
“I told you, you fucked it…” It was a male’s voice and he seemed to be speaking to someone else, but then he clearly turned his attention to the interior of the van and to Cooper. “Hey, man, I thought I heard you moving around.” It was a guy with dreadlocks. He looked like the hermit on a tarot card as he held the lantern above his head. A young woman stepped into view next to him.
“Hey, you OK?” She looked to be in her early twenties, but her appearance was rough and earthy and had the effect of aging her. Her eyes were slightly unfocused as she looked at him. Her head was a dirty mop of dreadlocks tied back with old ribbons, and her skin glistened with oil in the light of the lamp. She was wearing a tight white tank top, and he could see the outlines of large rings hanging from each nipple.
The guy was much the same in appearance and hygiene. He was taller and stood as if he thought he was a badass, counter to his peace-and-love attire. His eyes were glassy and dead. He looked very stoned and sounded it when he spoke. “Yeah, you OK man? We were like, worried.”
He leaned on the van door, blocking the opening, and as Cooper tried to exit it seemed he wasn’t going to step aside. Maybe he was so stoned it didn’t occur to him, but the girl pulled him away by the arm.
“Let him out,” she said in a way that sounded like not letting him out was an option. Cooper thought that maybe he was just being paranoid because of the wreck. Hell, the condition of the whole world would make one paranoid.
He stepped out into the night air. It was cold and fresh and made him feel better. He breathed deeply, feeling the dizziness passing but not the sore muscles and the painful bite. He was on the edge of a wooded clearing ringed by tall fir trees. The van was parked so the back doors opened onto the edge of the clearing. He could be anywhere along the coast for hundreds of miles.
If it weren’t for the circumstances, the place would have been beautiful. The glade was a pool of moody light in the otherwise pitch-black woods. There were candles, lanterns, and a fire in the middle that cast an even, soft light all around.
“What happened?” he asked.
The guy hadn’t backed off too far and was standing, arms folded, expression deadpan, as he recounted his version of the events. “You fucking trashed that little car, man. Totally fucked it up.”
“Yeah, I saw that much. I mean…where did you guys come from? Where are we?”
The girl spoke calmly and with a hint of beguilement in her voice. “We were hanging in the park, you know, trying to stay away from the, you know, the dead people.”
“Where am I now?”
“A safe place.” She was close by and reached up to rub his shoulder. The guy just nodded. Cooper realized they were both standing really close and hadn’t stepped back to give him any room. But he wrote it off as bad social skills.
“Yeah, real safe. No deadheads around, no people, nothing.”
Cooper slumped back and sat on the van’s bumper. The guy stood there, arms folded. When the girl left to get him some water, Cooper noticed that the guy moved a little closer as if to block him in. That felt suspicious.
The girl returned with his water in an old plastic cup. He didn’t drink it—she seemed to take note of that. She pulled a joint from the folds of her dirty, multi-patterned skirts. She lit it up and offered it to him; he declined. She looked at him with her head tilted to one side, smiling.
“I’m going to figure you out.” She was smiling. “C’mon, let’s all get cozy in the van.”
Cooper hated when people spoke that way. What was there to figure out?
I don’t drink dirty water and smoke shit a skank asks me to, and I need figuring out?
He insisted on entering the van last. He sat by the door and left it open, claiming to need the night air and that he was claustrophobic. The girl shot a glance at the guy, a quick glance that seemed to be asking for direction.
Cooper sat on the edge of the open door and halfway in the van. Now they were all in closer proximity, and the electric lantern more clearly illuminated the couple’s faces. Cooper could see just how ragtag these two really were. They looked as if they had been on the road for a long time. It was a lifestyle for them and not just a short-lived adventure. They were barefoot, and the bottoms of their feet were black. The girl had more hair on her legs than the guy. She had a nose ring and he a skimpy beard that looked as if he had been growing it out for years but didn’t have the coverage for a full beard. And, of course, they smelled like shit.
“I’m Willow.” She smiled. “And that’s Ben.”
“I’m Cooper. How did I get here?” He cut to the chase; he had no patience for dirty druggies. They might be trying to be nice and he shouldn’t judge and all that, but he got the strong impression that they were just simply shitbags. He had never met anyone who looked like this who was normal in any sense of the word. Not that he wasn’t sympathetic to people in need; he’d spent many, many hours in school and as a scout helping the truly unfortunate. The people who really needed help were usually the unseen ones and not the ones you saw on the street collecting money all day every day.
He had grown up in the small, safe town of Monterey. But the town was also a stopover point for transients who traveled up and down the coast. There were seasonal travelers, kids on an adventure—most were on the road for some negative reason such as abuse, neglect, drugs, or mental problems. He grew up seeing, and often interacting with, many of these people. He had gotten good at reading them, and most were nice, but none were to be trusted because of the desperation of their circumstances.
Downtown was especially bad because the passenger bus lines and city buses stopped at a big stop in downtown Monterey. Between Los Angeles and San Francisco there wasn’t much in the way of cities and towns other than Monterey and Santa Cruz. Here was where a lot of the drifters got off and then hung out for days, weeks even, panhandling, stealing, and getting into trouble.
The citizens tolerated, even encouraged, the homeless, the panhandlers, and transients. By the time the feel-good citizens got tired of the problem, it would be a huge mess. There were large homeless camps all over the peninsula. There were also churches and shelters that fed and clothed them. And there was no end to the idiots that would hand cash out their car windows. And the real troublemakers were the cash collectors, not the family living in their car or the mentally handicapped vet.
“We saved your ass, bro.” Ben was dead-faced.
Willow nodded as she looked at Ben and cracked a small smile.
That little smile made Cooper uneasy, but what really made him nervous was what caught his eye just behind Ben in the shadows. He would have never seen it if he were inside the van and if Ben hadn’t leaned over to take the joint from Willow. There was a metal loop, a simple cargo hook, welded to the floor of the van next to the wall. It was a common enough thing for a van to have, but there was about an inch of chromed silver chain looped through it that ran under the carpet. It looked like the chains found on handcuffs. He knew he might just be paranoid, but there were too many little red flags, an uneasy feeling about these two. They were off, had a vibe about them he didn’t like. Maybe it was waking up in the dark in the woods during an apocalypse, but he knew it wasn’t. There was something off about these two.
“We saw you get shot at and then hit that car. We had to help.”
“Did you see who shot at me?”
“Nah, but whoever it was has been at it all day. We saw a few people get hit, and we’ve been laying low until this shit blows over.”
“Do you know who I hit?”
Ben chuckled. “Some bitch. We waved her down, but she refused to give us a ride. Said we were too dirty. Can you believe that? End of the fucking world and she’s worried about her interior.”
Willow just nodded. “Where were you headed?”
“North, to San Jose.” Cooper answered but was wondering why they flagged the woman down for a ride when they had a van.
“You won’t make it. Everything is blocked for miles.” She was digging in her dreads with one finger. “We tried to ride out a few times and almost got killed. We’re trying to get up to Washington.”
Ben lay on the floor of the van. He looked like he had fallen asleep, but then he spoke. “You’re welcome to hang with us for as long as you like.”
“Thanks, but I need to get moving. Did you ever see who was shooting people?” Cooper asked again as he was worried about avoiding them.
“No, but he’s been on that overpass for at least a day,” Ben said as Willow closed her eyes.
“At least,” she added, “I think we are going to crash.” They both seemed to fall asleep.
Weird druggies,
Cooper thought. He wasn’t comfortable with them, but he was hurting, and almost as if she could read his mind Willow opened her eyes.
“You look like you’re in pain from the wreck. Do you want something?”
“You have a painkiller?” Even as he asked the question he realized how stupid it was because there was no way in hell he was going to take some shit these two gave him.
“Oh yeah.” Her eyes were twinkling.
“Oh yeah,” Ben echoed.
She stood and grabbed a backpack from the front seat of the van. She pulled a large plastic storage bag out that looked like it was filled with candy. There must have been a few thousand pills in the bag. She started digging through them.
“I was thinking more like Tylenol or Advil.”
She wrinkled her nose, “that stuff’s bad for you. I’ve got oxy, percs, deads…”
“I’m fine, thanks.”
“Half a codie will just mellow you out, let you sleep.”
“I’m good.” He tried to be gracious, but she wasn’t giving up.
“I can see you need it. Why would you suffer like that?”
“Really, I’m fine.” He tried to change the subject. “So where are you guys from?”
“C’mon, pussy.” Ben decided to open his eyes. “Don’t be such a fag.”
“Stop it, Ben. Don’t mind him; he’s just cranky.” Willow scooted over closer to Cooper. She put her arm around him and pushed her breast against his arm. She could have been really hot if she were clean, but she was so ripe and skanky it was beyond a turnoff, it was aggravating. “C’mon sweetie, just half. Don’t you want to party with me?”
She held a pill pinched between her fingers up to Cooper’s face. “C’mon,” and she was waiting for him to open his mouth.
Her breath was foul. He could see all the whiteheads across her face. Ben was lying back as he had been, but now he was watching what was happening intently, like a predator. Red flags were going up by the dozens, and Cooper wanted to bolt but thought they might try to overpower him and pull him back into the van. She was clearly trying to be seductive, and neither one had been more than three feet away from him since he awoke.
He smiled, relaxed, and said, “Let me go piss first. If I get too relaxed, it’s going all over your van.” And just for good measure he put his hand out. “What the hell, half. I am hurting and wouldn’t mind getting fucked up right now.”
“Good idea.” She smiled and rubbed his shoulder. She broke the pill in half and held it up to his mouth. He smiled and let her put it on his tongue, making a mental note to scrub his tongue later where her bitter-tasting fingertips touched him.
He turned away and was amazed because there was a whole pill on his tongue. She somehow had switched the half pill with a whole one in a split second as they were talking. He held the pill on his tongue, but it started dissolving instantly and it was bitter. Actually, it wasn’t bitter, it was astringent like a chemical. It was burning his mouth, and he began to salivate immediately and in surprisingly large quantities. He didn’t want the two to know that he hadn’t swallowed the pill, so he didn’t react. He let the pill, along with all his saliva, just ooze out and down his chin. Within a few steps he was wiping his chin with the back of his hand. He couldn’t wait to really work on getting the taste out of his mouth with something, anything.
He walked toward a clump of trees in deep shadow. It was pitch black, and he didn’t know where the hell he was. He planned to keep walking straight into the darkness and away from this weirdness.
He heard quick footsteps behind him and quickly turned, alarm bells clanging in his head. Ben was a few yards back, walking quickly toward him. Cooper stopped and faced him, smiling. He wasn’t going to turn his back to him.
“Had to go too.” Ben smiled.
He’d been heading straight for him, and Cooper noticed that he kept his hands hidden. He didn’t want to appear paranoid, but he didn’t want to turn his back either, so he improvised.
“Are there bears or anything out here? Maybe a mountain lion that might bite my dick off?”
Ben chuckled. “Nah, you’re safe.”
He noticed Willow back at the van just watching like she was waiting for something to happen. Ben veered off to a tree and faced it, but he didn’t look like he was doing anything. Willow started walking over toward Cooper, and it looked like she was trying to flank him.
Hmm, the skank flank,
he thought.