Chapter 3 - The Highway of Ash
“Boyd,” I choked out, not taking my eyes off the infant’s face as I reached out with a trembling, calloused index finger. Hazel’s tiny hand clamped around my knuckle with astonishing strength, warm and impossibly fragile. “Take Tiffany and Walter into the library. Lock the heavy deadbolts from the outside. If either of them moves toward a window, break their arms. Nobody leaves this property until I bring Megan home.”
“Boss, what about the nurse?” Boyd asked, his voice thick with uncharacteristic emotion.
“Keep her on the clock. Pay her ten thousand dollars cash from the master bedroom safe to stay right beside this child every single second. If Hazel’s oxygen drops half a point, have the medical chopper land on the back lawn.”
I didn’t wait for an answer. I sprinted back out into the humid southern night, vaulted into the cab of my truck, and threw the transmission into reverse. The tires shrieked against the gravel as I whipped around the fountain, tore past the iron gates, and flattened the accelerator down the winding road toward Charlotte Pike.
It had been four hours since we had passed Megan on Highway 70. Four hours of suffocating, ninety-degree heat with no water, no food, and two eight-month-old babies strapped to her ribcage. The image of her cracked plastic sandals, dragging along the broken asphalt shoulder of the road, burned behind my eyelids like white phosphorous.
I had laughed at her. When Tiffany tossed that twenty-dollar bill into the ditch, I hadn’t even flinched. I had sneered at her brokenness, convinced she was an adulteress paying for her sins. The memory was an acid bath in my brain.
I pushed the heavy truck past eighty miles per hour through the dark hollows between Nashville and Kingston Springs. The road here was unlit, bordered by dense thickets of kudzu, rusted scrap barns, and forgotten mobile homes. I rolled both windows down, searching the darkness with high-intensity spotlights mounted to the truck’s roll bar.
“Come on, Megan,” I muttered aloud, pounding the steering wheel until the leather horn pad bruised my palm. “Please, God. Just let her be breathing.”
Three miles past the Cheatham County line, near an abandoned Sinclair service station overgrown with honeysuckle, the beam of my auxiliary lights caught a flash of yellow reflective tape. It was an overturned grocery cart resting against a collapsed wooden culvert. Scattered in the tall weeds were dozens of flattened aluminum soda cans, glittering like cheap coins in the beam.
I slammed the brakes so hard the anti-lock system shuddered violently through the floorboards. I jumped out before the truck had fully stopped, plunging through the waist-high weeds and blackberry briars that tore through my denim jeans.
“Megan!” I screamed into the humid silence of the woods. “Megan!”
A low, muffled whimper answered from the rusted shell of an abandoned dairy delivery van parked fifty yards behind the gas station’s cracked concrete apron.
I kicked through the rotting wooden pallets blocking the delivery van’s side door and wrenched the rusted iron latch back with my bare hands. Inside, lying on a stained, moldy moving blanket spread over the corrugated floor, was Megan.
Her skin was pale as tallow, coated in a cold sheen of sweat. Her lips were cracked and bleeding from severe dehydration. Strapped securely to her torso with strips of torn bedsheets were the two boys, both sleeping fitfully against her chest, their tiny faces flushed red from the heat. Beside her lay three empty five-gallon plastic buckets, half-filled with scrap metal, and an unopened twelve-ounce bottle of water. She hadn’t drank it; she had saved it to wet the rags resting on the boys' foreheads.
May you like
Megan opened her eyes slowly, squinting against the harsh glare of my flashlight. When she recognized my silhouette, she didn’t scream or cry. She merely tightened her arms around the babies and dragged her heels back into the rusted corner of the van, using her own emaciated body as a shield.
“Don’t take them,” she whispered, her voice like sandpaper rubbing over stone. “Garrett, please. They’re too young. They don’t know anything about your family. Take the cans. There’s eight dollars of copper in the buckets. Take it and leave us alone.”
