Page 48 of Backpacking through Bedlam

Looking almost giddy, Thomas moved past me to open the front passenger door and slide into the car, settling his valise between his feet. None of us were carrying enough clothing for any sort of long stay, but we were armed, and I’ve learned that if I have the weapons I need, everything else is pretty much negotiable.

“And you are, miss?” asked Darius, looking to Sally, who was frowning as she worked something over in her head. Sally looked back at him, a line between her eyebrows as she kept working at whatever was distracting her. Then she smiled, bright as the sun that was still inching upward in the sky.

“Sally Price,” she said.

Darius nodded, obviously taking this in stride. I glanced at Sally and smiled as she blushed and looked away. Too late now; she’d said it out loud. She had been acquired.

We piled into the back, arranging our bags and road snacks between us, my pack on top to avoid squashing the mice. They were keeping low and quiet in the presence of a stranger, but that wouldn’t last once they realized he was a routewitch; the Aeslin had a tendency to reveal themselves at inopportune times when they felt like it was safe to do so.

“We’ll need to stop for breakfast, if you don’t mind,” Thomas said apologetically to Darius. “There isn’t much food in the house as yet, and our dinner leftovers didn’t survive their encounter with the local wildlife.”

“No trouble,” said Darius. He tilted his head back, smiling at me and Sally in the rearview mirror. “You ladies all right back there?”

“We fit,” I said. “Sally hasn’t been in a car for about ten years, and Thomas hasn’t been in one for fifty.”

“He looks good for his age, then,” said Darius, and laughed, a rich, rolling laugh that filled the car almost as pervasively as the smell of the pine tree air freshener hanging from the mirror. “Well, then, here we go. McDonalds all right with you?”

“I would do crimes for a McMuffin,” said Sally, almost reverently.

“Luckily, you won’t have to,” said Darius, and started the car.

Sally didn’t have to do crimes for a McMuffin, but she put four of them away so quickly that I thought she might have done crimes to a McMuffin by the time she was done. Sadly for her and fortunately for my sanity, the milkshake machine was broken. The mice had yet to show themselves, but Darius only looked at me curiously in the rearview mirror as I tucked three hash browns and two Sausage McMuffins into my bag, settling to eat my own breakfast while the mice silently devoured theirs.

Thomas, meanwhile, had an expression of almost orgasmic relief on his face as he sipped his first cup of coffee in fifty years. It was probably a good thing it was crappy fast-food coffee; if we’d managed to get him the quality stuff, he might have expired on the spot. I hadn’t spent half a century hunting for him to lose him to a pot of Kona.

Darius turned off the highway once we’d all been fed, sliding easily onto a frontage road, and that was where the fun of riding with a routewitch really began. He drove like he’d been following these specific roads every day of his life, steering around potholes and avoiding construction areas with a local’s learned ease. He never slowed, save for when he approached a red light or a stop sign, and he never broke any traffic laws I could see. And even with all that being true, we were halfway across Pennsylvania before it even approached lunchtime.

Sally leaned forward. “Fun as this tour of the backroads of America has been, are we going to stop for lunch?” she asked. “I thought we’d have stopped to get gas by now.”

“You need the bathroom?” Darius asked. “We can stop if you need the bathroom. Seemed like you had enough snacks back there, didn’t need to hit a service station. This sweet girl can run another three days on the fuel she’s got in her tank, and I don’t really feel like having steak for dinner tonight.”

He caressed his dashboard with a proprietary hand, and the timbre of the engine’s purring changed for a moment, like an animal being stroked by a beloved human. I put a hand on Sally’s arm before she could ask what he meant about the steak, giving her a small but pointed shake of my head. She didn’t want to know. Not while we were still in the car.

Maybe it’s the result of spending so much of my youth around Cynthia, but I know a sanguivore when I see one, and I didn’t think Sally was quite ready to deal with the idea that she’d been riding around inside of a vehicular vampire.

“Yes, I need the bathroom,” said Sally sourly.

Darius smiled. “Of course,” he said, and turned at the next intersection, pulling into a neon-decked truck stop parking lot. Sally was out of the car almost before it stopped rolling, flipping a wave over her shoulder at us as she booked for the main building. Darius leaned back in his seat, turning off the engine.

“Either of you needs to go, you should,” he said. “I don’t plan to stop again before we hit the city.”

“That’ll make this a what, four-hour drive?” I asked.

“About that.” His smiled was radiant. “I don’t believe in wasting time when the Lady asks me to do something.”

I wanted to ask a lot of questions about how a highway could ask him to do anything, much less ask him to hop in his vampire car and drive a bunch of strangers to what seemed like a remarkably specific location. Under the circumstances, it didn’t seem quite politic. I undid my seatbelt.

“I’m going to head in and hit the ladies’ room,” I said. “You two have fun out here.” I shifted my attention to my bag. “And you be good while I’m inside.”

My bag didn’t respond. The mice were still in hiding mode, then. Darius gave me an odd look but didn’t say anything. I guess when you’re a witch of the living road serving a goddess who’s also a highway, you learn not to ask too many questions.

The air was cool and crisp and smelled of diesel and frying potatoes, that particular mix that screams “truck stop” all over the country. I stretched my arms up over my head as I walked away, enjoying the late-morning sun, the cool air on my skin, and the fact that I was walking away from Thomas, not running frantically toward him, trying to keep convincing myself over and over again that I wasn’t wasting my life on a fruitless quest for something I’d never find. It was weird not to be scared all the time. We were heading into what Rose called a war, but compared to the last fifty years of my life, it felt like a vacation.

I wasn’t sure I’d ever had one of those. The doors slid open at my approach, and I stepped inside, scanning for the bathrooms. They were on the other side of the wide, open room, set up as a sort of pseudo-food court, with the usual assortment of halfhearted options hawking their wares in direct visual and olfactory competition with each other. Sally was standing in front of the Sbarro, staring at the glass case of cheap, over-cheesed pizza like she hadn’t seen food in years. I drifted over toward her.

“Bathroom’s this way,” I said.

“Pizza,” she said, sounding distracted. I wasn’t entirely sure she was responding to me, so much as just . . . talking when she thought someone might be able to hear her. “I forgot about pizza.”