Chapter 4: The Puking Stranger

Khalidi lay in bed for hours but did not sleep. He stared at the ceiling, wondering if the crack above his bed had widened since he last noticed it. He was surprised when his smart watch began to beep. Surely it was too early for his regular 6 a.m. alarm. It was still dark outside. 

But the watch was not telling him to wake up. It was telling him that something was wrong.

“Your heart rate rose above 120 while you appeared to be at rest,” it said, suggesting breathing exercises and meditations that would never ease his mind.

He looked at the clock beside the bed. It was 2 a.m., and his heart still pounded. The warning from his watch did not help his state of mind. Khalidi was not an unhealthy man. He ate too much fried food and drank too much when carousing with his degenerate friends, but that was not often. He followed the demands of the fitness app on his watch, and made sure to get his steps in, to spend an hour a day in some form of exercise, to  stand up when his watch told him he’d been on his ass too long.

Khalidi would normally be concerned about the high heart rate, but he knew the cause. It was the same reason he had lain in bed all those hours staring at the crack. He couldn’t get that voice out of his head, the one from the ravine that cried “a little help down here” when he’d tipped the van over the edge of the trestle to crash noisily into the ravine.

Khalidi had puked at the sound of that voice, perhaps even on it. Then he had run – he was ashamed of his actions now – until he could not breathe. He’d stopped running when he reached the BooBu Patch. He considered going inside, but decided against. There would be too many questions, and he was not eager to be seen. He summoned an Uber from the parking lot, and waited for 35 minutes until a pasty driver named Bubba rolled up in a outside the BooBu Patch, friendly and talkative and curious what a man like Salem Khalidi was doing in this desolate part of the county. Khalidi was probably too short with him, making him memorable and suspicious. His fears were well-founded. He noticed as he went to bed, glancing at his Uber app, that his star rating had dropped below 4.95 for the first time ever. It was 4.87, and it pained him.

He heard Rapier’s voice in his head, too, telling him to get rid of that van in a place where no one would ever find it, to wipe it down and make it vanish.

Rapier told Khalidi to store the phones safely, preferably in a remote location, to wipe down the van and dispose of it in a place it would never be found.

“Gone,” Rapier had said. But now it was at the bottom of a ravine with some other human who may or may not be covered in his vomit, his DNA. A human who knew not only that the van existed, but that it came to rest on the forest floor in the most suspicious of circumstances. This human might have seen him. 

Khalidi wondered if he had wiped the car properly, if he had worn his gloves when he pushed the car over the side. He simply could not remember. He sat up, swung his legs over the side of the bed and began to put on his shoes. He had to go back to the trestle.

–

Hubie Flynn still couldn’t believe he was alive. From the moment Slick Hogg had touched his back on that trestle he had counted himself a dead man. The whole ordeal was frozen in his mind. The smell of Hogg’s breath and the oily pomade in his hair, the gentle touch, the shove, the feeling not so much of flying, but being suspended in air, of having the thought he believed to be his last – “what an asshole” – before plummeting to his certain death.

But Flynn did not die. Obviously. He had landed on a bough covered in vines. Honeysuckle and kudzu and English ivy so intertwined it was almost like a trapeze artist’s safety net, only full of sharp sticks. A branch from a pine tree stuck him through like a spear just above his right knee, another beneath his left knee. He was in tremendous pain, and had no hope of climbing out of the ravine, but he was alive.

Hubie was lying on his back atop that bough when the van tumbled over the side, crashing to the ground mere feet away from his bough. But he had seen a face peer over the side after it fell. He did not know that face, but would never forget it. He knew it was not Hogg.

He had yelled something, he could not remember what, before the man lost his lunch. He wondered if it had been a fatal mistake. But then, he was literally stuck in the bough of a tree in a ravine that would soon be filled with water, if he even lived that long. He didn’t have much choice.

His only hope, he thought, was the puking stranger.