As Nights Grow

The hills had been rolling for one whole day. She’d never in her life seen such a stretch of fertile land; coming from farmland herself, she considered this an interesting twist.

The thousands of miles of dirt, however, had to interject that they were not interesting.

Art had to agree. After eight hours, they switched seats, and she drove. The wind was hot.

“Quiet, aren’t you?” she said, the walls of her throat coming unstuck from one another after hours of staying collapsed; her body was using no energy to speak, channeling it into staying cool. Art shrugged in slow motion.

“We’ve gone half the miles we thought we’d cover today,” he mumbled, lurching from his slouched position to grapple with the handle of the old car’s glove box. He pulled out a map, stained with splashes of coffee, and slung it open across the dashboard. “Still headed east.”

“The sun’s going down,” she noted.

“We need to make it to Iowa by midnight to stay on schedule.”

She said nothing, stared ahead, squinting down the endless road, straight as a pin and small as its point on the horizon. The wind was so humid it felt as if the windows should be fogging up, old water spots showing and their skin curling like photos from water damage. And Art remained silent as he often had no trouble doing.

She, however, had words fighting through the thin dam of her lips, threatening to flood the sometimes terse silence of the car. Questions, analogies, promises, searches for promises in return.

“Seven o’clock,” Art said, much later.

“Do you think we’re far behind schedule?”

“I don’t know,” he said, voice dropping back to a mumble. This meant that yes, they were behind, when being behind could mean having to actually put up a fight for life or death. Neither of them knew for sure if they could. Art didn’t know if he wanted to anymore. He was so tired of running.

But that’s why they were still going east. So they could stop running.

He looked at her. She’d tied up her hair earlier that day, but she said that the heat had made her scalp itch, so she flung the rubber band into the backseat, and now her hair spilled onto her back in deep auburn ringlets, oily from not showering and limp from stress and sun. Her freckles had seemed to darken. Everything seemed that way in the dusk.

She loved him. He took secret pride in that; loving her back but loving more the feeling of counting on someone to do anything they could for him.

Of course, everything they did for one another served their own interests, too.

She licked her lips, the skin glistening for a moment before she looked over at him. “Did you hear that?” Eyes flicked to the rearview mirror, the side view mirror, the windshield, back up again.

He hadn’t. “What? Hear what?”

“Uh…I don’t know. God. It sounded like…I don’t know.”

“Like what, Lily? Would you just say it?” His voice was raised and so was he, sitting bolt upright, turned sideways.

“Sirens.” Her voice ached as she uttered these last syllables, her heart leaping as if she had just caused some sort of jinx.

“God dammit, you’d better be sure.”

“I don’t know. I—”

She looked back in the rearview mirror, then back to the front. “I don’t know for sure. It could have been a coyote.”

He swept his eyes over the barren horizon. Where was Iowa, with its tall cornfields and aquifers and places to hide until something came to them? They passed dark rocks sitting on top of the dusty earth and Art cursed to himself.

“You can’t hear it?” She was nearly whispering.

They both fell completely silent, neither of them even daring to breathe.

He heard it. He had wished for it to be a coyote, knew that if it had been he would hate coyotes with a passion for the rest of his days as the one thing that could make his heart leap into his throat. But they weren’t that lucky.

Those were definitely the wails of approaching police cars, with hard colors and harder eyes behind their windows, almost an entity that existed only to hunt and destroy them.

“Lily.”

She didn’t reply, was too afraid to reply.

“We need to get out.”

She was pushing on the gas and their speed was rising quickly—they had been abiding the laws of speed on the road since they’d left California, the place where everybody runs to.

The fading light highlighted the lights of the police cars, the blue and red reflecting off every bad memory Art had ever held. They were nearing one hundred miles an hour. Iowa had to be here somewhere, but he was frozen in place, staring doe-eyed trough the back window, unable to look at their map in the dusk anyway.

They were catching up, and fast.

How fast did police cars go? He looked at Lily, her face strained, barely visible in the gray. She was sweating, her white blouse probably clinging to her back in the way she always complained of when he drove. There was no way this yellow car could beat a black-and-white.

“We can’t outrun them,” he said, just loud enough to be heard over the roar of the speeding car.

“There’s nowhere to go but forward,” she argued.

Art looked around them, his muscles singing with adrenaline. She was right, it seemed.

They were going so fast that the seats were vibrating slightly. Art didn’t look at the dirty speedometer.

“We have to be close to the state line,” he cried. “We’ve been driving too long—”

Lily interrupted him with a turn of the wheel, surging them from pavement to dirt and rock and tiny clumps of dried grass. He slammed himself into his seat, grasping for his seatbelt buckle, then letting it go once he realized there was a good chance he would have to get out of the car and run.

Run.

Where?

His heart was crashing beats in his chest, his ears buzzing with the sound of pebbles stinging the underbelly of the car. “Where are we going?” he shouted.

“Hell if I know! This isn’t exactly my favorite vacation spot!” she yelled back, driving them into the dust.

The sirens were following easily. Now they were clearly running away, not that it mattered if they got caught sitting or running. They were dead either way. And the lights were nearly on top of them, the earth dry, its top layer crumbling under the weight of cars barreling over it. Art closed his eyes and let out a breath in the chaos.

When he opened them, the cars were there. One coming up on the side, four behind them. “Faster!” He screamed, knowing that it was useless.

“I can’t!” she screamed back, and he wanted to tell her that he knew.

Then they struck. There was a loud burst of noise, a crack, pulling the old car sharply to the left.

The tire. They’d shot the tire.

Lily struggled to keep going, driving towards what looked like nothing but a short wall of darkness far ahead. Maybe it was a wall. Dear god, maybe it was some stupidly placed wall that would allow them to die running instead of dying in the cuffs he’d fought against for so long.

They were swerving, Lily cursing at the top of her lungs. Art closed his eyes, barely able to handle hearing without seeing.

It was then that he remembered the gun.

The gun under the seat.

He immediately flung himself forward, bending down, hands working blindly under the seat to grip the shotgun he’d shoved there back in California. He found the metal and pulled it out, hoping it wouldn’t somehow go off and shoot him in the foot.

Art never had a chance to use his gun.

The tire lost its last piece, ripping from the rim. Lily screamed, although Art wasn’t sure if she was screaming in fear or yelling in anger. Then came the other bang and crack, and Art knew the other tire was done for.

They flew into that black wall, toppling, turning in a ridiculous circle, rolling over and over, their bodies thrown around the old car that had gotten them so far from justice.

The wall hadn’t been a wall after all.

The car settled on its roof, wheels spinning. The sirens were still on, the cars stopped around them, the stalks of what Art had thought was a wall trampled down around them, crushed.

Police stepped out, guns raised and shouts echoing.

They entered the lush cornfield that Art had thought was a wall, the thing that had saved him from dying in the cuffs he had fought against for so long. His lifeless body was crumpled in the car, Lily’s ejected feet away from the wreck.

Welcome to Iowa.