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As they passed the dried-out streambed, a large figure dressed in grubby work clothes stepped out of the shelter of the trees. He breathed heavily as he watched the VW disappear around a bend. It was happening again. Just like the last time. These people were exactly like the others, the ones who had hurt his mother. A raging fever began to burn within him; a white-hot fire of hate threatened to consume him. And there was only one way to quench the flames.
“Hey, let’s go for a swim,” said Debbie, pulling on Andy’s arm. All afternoon, he’d wanted to do nothing except lie around in the sun.
“I don’t know . . .” he said lazily, as if i
t would be too much of a bother to walk all the way down to the lake.
“We’d be all alone,” Debbie said seductively. “We could do anything we wanted and nodody would see.”
Andy grinned. “Sounds disgusting,” he said. “Let’s go.”
“I’ll grab a couple of towels,” she said, smiling at him. “I’ll see you down there.”
She went over to the van and slid open the side door. It was really strange, but ever since she’d found out that she was pregnant, she’d been really horny. And it kept getting worse and worse. She had expected to feel positively ill. Well, there was the occasional bout with morning sickness, but other than that, she felt terrific. Chris had even commented on it. “You’ve got a glow,” was the way she had put it.
She remembered her mother always complaining about it, always bringing it up each time they had an argument. Rolling her eyes in agony and saying, “I carried you for nine months! You don’t have any idea what that’s like! You should only have to experience something like that and then wind up with an ungrateful daughter!”
From listening to her mother, Debbie had expected this to be a terrible experience, but so far it was wonderful. She couldn’t even tell that she was pregnant yet, at least not by looking, though she checked herself in a mirror every day, but she could feel the changes taking place inside of her. She knew the experience would not be terrible at all. It was something wonderful.
Andy was taking it in stride. The responsibility didn’t seem to frighten him. He knew it would be hard for them, especially at their age, but he had simply accepted it and decided to make the best of it. A lot of guys would have freaked out, but not Andy. He stuck by her, just like she knew he would.
“The way I see it,” he had told her, “the important thing is that we really want this baby. It’s gonna be tough for us and money’s gonna be real tight, but if we stick together, we can make it. We didn’t plan on this, but since we’ve decided that we’re gonna have this baby, we’ve got to make sure we really want it. We can’t go blaming the kid if things get tough. The baby didn’t make things tough for us, we made things tough. Now we just gotta go for it and do the best we can.”
If she ever had any doubts about him, they had disappeared right then. The important thing, she thought, is that we remember the mistakes our families made with us and not make them with our kid. She knew it would be hard. But she also knew it would be worth it.
She was so preoccupied with her throughts, she didn’t hear the soft crunch of gravel beneath the heavy black engineer boots on the other side of the van. She pulled several towels out of her beach bag and zipped it back up, then trotted off toward the lake just as the punky-looking biker from the roadside convenience store slowly came around the back of the van.
He stood still for a moment, looking around with a cigarette drooping from his lip. Then he gave an animalistic grunt to signal the others that the coast was clear.
“Maybe we shouldn’t do this, Ali,” said Fox, the hard-looking young black woman in the skintight leathers.
“We gotta even the score, don’t we?” said Loco, the white biker with the spiky hair.
“Nobody’s gonna get hurt, baby,” said Ali, the biker with the shaved head and goatee. He glanced at Loco and grinned. “Righteous!”
He stuck a siphon down into the fuel tank and set one of the large metal gas cans they had brought down onto the ground. Loco reached for the siphon hose.
“Let me do it,” he said.
“I know what I’m doing,” Ali said, backing him down with a stare.
He had to stay on top of Loco all the time. Loco was so spaced out, he’d probably wind up drinking half the gas if he let him siphon out the tank. He wasn’t called Loco for nothing. That boy was truly bugfuck. He did things on that motorcycle that no sane man would ever do, and when he had seen what that fat little turd had done to his scooter, he’d been ready to do murder.
Ali just couldn’t believe that fat little creep had the balls to do what he did. Luckily, Ali’s bike hadn’t suffered too badly. It would need a new front rim and fender, handlebars, and a replacement clutch lever, a headlight, and a few other odds and ends. He wasn’t going to worry too much about the paint since, they were both sort of rat bikes to begin with, and he could always do the paint himself, but Loco’s machine had taken a real bashing and it would be in the shop for weeks till they could run down the parts from someone who specialized in old British bikes, since it hadn’t been manufactured for years.
Loco was ready to tear that fat little bastard apart with his bare hands. He probably would, too, thought Ali, only there was no point in letting Fox know that. She acted real hard, but when it came right down to it, she was pretty soft on the inside. She was even a little squeamish about burning down the barn. Hell, the barn was going to be only the beginning, Ali thought. Nobody trashes my scooter and gets away with it. Nobody.
As he siphoned the gas out of the van’s tank, Fox wandered over toward the barn. There didn’t even seem to be anyone around, so she went inside. She could understand Ali and Loco wanting to get even with those kids for what they did, and trashing their van, or ripping it off, as she’d suggested was one thing, but burning down a barn was getting a little heavy.
Suppose the flames got out of control and spread to the house or started a forest fire? The area was heavily wooded. Cops might not look too hard for a stolen van that was probably insured anyway and they could have it miles away before the cops could even start to look for it. Hell, she thought, by that time, the boys could have it in the shop, repainted and the old numbers ground off, and they’d have it sold before anyone could ever trace it to them. But arson, that was something else, again.
It was that Loco, she thought. Ali was fine when he wasn’t around, but when the two of them were together, Ali always had to be harder and badder and meaner, and what made it worse was that Loco simply did not know when to stop. Things could get out of hand with him really fast. She could tell he really wanted to kill those kids, and it was all her fault. If she hadn’t started messing around with that Chicano girl, none of this would’ve happened. Well, it was out of her hands. There was nothing else to do but ride with it.
She looked around to make sure that there was no one watching and cautiously pulled open one of the barn doors. Shafts of fading sunlight cut through the gloom within, softly illuminating the straw-strewn, packed earth floor. She grinned as she looked around. It was an old barn with lots of tools and stuff stored inside it; horseshoes and old bells and blacksmith’s tongs hung on the walls. A weather-worn western saddle and girth were slung over the wall of one of the two large wood-framed horse stalls with wide, swinging wooden gates. She ran her hand over the saddle. The leather was cracked and discolored.
Several wooden benches were set against the walls and a couple of old saw horses had dusty, faded woolen blankets draped over them. There was an ancient, rusty army canteen hanging from a peg, as well as an old, olive-drab, World War II canteen belt. She decided the belt looked kinda funky. She’d grab it on the way out.
It was the first time she had ever seen the inside of a barn and she felt a little like a kid turned loose in a toy store. She completely forgot about the guys outside planning to burn it down and lost herself in the fascination of rummaging through all the junk, the rusted tools, the various items of old clothing and camping equipment and worn-out riding tack that had been left hanging in there. She found an old brass cowbell, struck it to hear its tone, then decided to also grab that on the way out. Then the high heel of her boot caught on something and she fell sprawling, facedown, to land with her eyes scant inches away fron the upturned tines of an old pitchfork.
