Kailey Walsh turned the key and let loose a fluid string of curses as the car offered nothing more than a click.
Useless piece of rusted shit.
Giving it another couple twists, she knew already it would be pointless. She yanked the key with its fuzzy red Chiefs lanyard out of the ignition and tossed it onto the passenger’s seat. She didn’t know what the fuck was going on with this thing. Mechanic told her it was a problem with the car’s security system. Common issue with these older models, it would cost more than the car’s worth to fix.
No sense getting upset over it, her languid thoughts insisted. Instead, she pried her box of ciggies out of the map pocket and lit one up with smooth, practiced motions that would have put one of the riverboat casino whores to shame.
This, too, was pointless; ever since contracting, the nicotine couldn’t really do much for her. Metabolism was too fast for it to make much of a dent… unless she tried really fucking hard. Like, really hard, like sucking down a few sticks in as many seconds. Some of the other girls she talked to complained similarly about booze or pot, having to spend stupid amounts of money on their vices in order to feel them like usual. Would have been nice if she hadn’t developed this habit before becoming an MG, but no sense crying over spilled Jim Beam.
Kailey took the whole thing down in a few long, sustained drags, relishing in the taste of tar and smoke and ash that grew uncomfortably hot in her mouth and throat, sticking to her tongue and the roof of her mouth. It didn’t really help, but she felt like it did, and that was good enough really.
She expelled all of that sweet nastiness, a stream of pale blue smoke jetting out of her mouth and nose that coated the interior of the 97 Buick LeSabre. Just another layer on top, a little more yellow on that cracking plastic if you please. She leaned her head back on the rest, letting her wild black hair splay out into the back of the tarnished mess that was her bread and butter.
Whatever. She let a few minutes pass like this, soaking in the muffled silence of the overheated interior. She could have forced her windows down to let some of the air out, but she didn’t feel like it. The cigarette was exhausted by now, but rather than disposing of it she just held onto it limply, a few skeleton wisps clinging to the smoldering butt between her fingers.
For a golden moment, it was just her and the stuffy, pregnant air. Tranquility manifest, here inside of her beater.
She could almost feel her Soul Gem clearing up a tiny bit.
As if by some unseen signal, Kailey finally put the butt out on the armrest and flicked its carcass into the back, where it landed on top of approximately fourteen million others just like it. She prayed privately that the car would start this time, lest she endure yet another repetition of this nonsense. Inserting the plain steel key into the ignition, she cranked that shit like it owed her money and the rent was due.
The engine roared, the lights flickered unevenly. The shoddy analog radio shattered the silence.
”--101.1 THE FOX, THIS IS CHUCK NASTY THE NASTY MAN–-”
God dammit, she had left it on high again. Always forgot to turn it down when she got home. Chuck Nasty howled over the speakers, literally howled like a shitty 70s B movie werewolf. She kinda hated this motherfucker, had no idea who found his casual sex pervert day drinker schtick endearing.
It was one of her biggest regrets that he hadn’t died during the Unveiling. Chuck Nasty played decent music most of the time, but she had no patience for it today, toggling the radio immediately to 94.9. Mercifully, she was greeted with actual music and no hackneyed two bit radio announcer.
Plus, the car was on. Time to get going, she had shit to do. Put it in reverse, swivel smoothly out of her expensive parking spot at her overpriced apartment, and slap the stick into drive to get out onto the road. That's it, smooth as warm butter.
It was starting to rain outside, but she flicked the window switches to open all her windows so all the milky air swirled out, mixing with the wind that gushed in to replace it. Disco emitted from her decaying speakers, the sound a little fuzzy as always. She knocked her knee into the door to fix it, without success. Despite the roughness, her ears picked up “If I Can’t Have You” nigh instantly as Yvonne Elliman’s empyrean voice floated into her head and teased the last of the nicotine fumes out of her ear canals.
Don't know why I'm surviving every lonely day
Screaming down the twisting and turning suburban offshoots.
when there's got to be no chance for me.
God, she had to go all the way to Kearney .
What a fucking drag, she hated going to the Northland. North 71 sucked and 435 wasn’t much better. Going through the city sucked, going over the smelly ass river sucked. The Northland wasn’t much to look at either, all the trees were clustered too tightly to the road. No nice views. Rolling the windows back up, she grimaced as she swerved between patiently waiting cars and oncoming traffic, her car fucking screaming at her to slow down as she took the onramp onto 49 to start the hour-long peregrination proper.
Well, normally it was an hour. Kailey could probably cut that down to half, even less depending on traffic.
Her powers were fairly simple, not especially powerful, but she felt like she put them to good use: the midnight blue of her enchantment suffused her Buick, rendering it effectively invisible. Neither eyes nor sensors of any sort could detect it, or anything inside-–it even befuddled magical girls, had gotten a few of them just by rolling up on the fuckers.
It was a dangerous game, cops and other drivers couldn’t see her and she had carte blanche on the road. No delays in traffic if she could get to the shoulder, no getting pulled over. Some rudimentary experimentation had shown that wouldn’t hold up if she, say, totaled her fucking car or hit some hapless pedestrian. She still had to be careful. This thought passed through her head as she ended up weaving between cars and trucks at 90, pushing 100.
This was actually her third car. She hadn’t actually wrecked one yet, she just ended up driving them into the ground because she pushed them so hard. Kaycee so far had wound up buying her another beater each time.
The song faded out and, she uttered a silent thank you, no ads broke the serenity as the station moved right on to Bob Seger’s “Night Moves.” She bobbed her head variously with and against the rumbling of the car, awash in the easy strokes of the guitar and the trilling dance of the piano. Bobby talked to her about the summer and getting laid by some sassy chick. Yeah, whatever you say Bobby. She dragged over the rumble strip near the median and spooked herself with machine gun vibrations.
Her thoughts vibrated inside her head, too. She was kind of rushing for this job, and while Kaycee had made the details clear, she hadn’t made it sound time sensitive. No, Kailey could relax and cruise at roughly five miles over instead of 30. Marginally less stupid use of her powers today, thank you very much. She really hated getting ash on her dress whenever she had to jerk the wheel around.
She gave a little flick of her head, looking out to her left. The sun, a mass of firey red still faintly visible through the rainclouds, was just now beginning its descent towards the horizon. It would be covered by trees long before it actually sank to the ground, which gave her a mild twinge of disappointment. She loved the sunset, when she got a chance to see it.
Unfortunately, most of this area was a sort of loosely tamed forest. The second and third story buildings of suburban living sprawled out in patches which only pretended to clear the land, leaving most of it an infuriating pseudo-savannah that frustrated most attempts to get a glimpse over the next hill. You had to be lucky: certain highways rolled over peaks and valleys and you could get bare glimpses, little fragments of the sun turning orange and wine-red as it crawled under the dirt and soil.
How Kailey yearned for Kansas.
Hundreds of cars swept around and behind her, heedless as she shot up towards the city center. Every second she actually had to pay attention to the traffic around her was another second out of the zone, and every second out of the zone meant the trip was just a little worse. She didn’t have this problem out on the long, infinite stretches of highway out west, where she could just cruise endlessly in the right lane at a cool seventy.
Considering she didn’t even like driving all that much, it was something she thought about a startling amount. This was almost always stressful, though that was usually her own fault. Driving in the city especially was like having bamboo shoved under her fingertips. During rush hour? Fuckin’ forget it, dude. But she had taken a scant few trips out to the prairie, out to the Flint Hills where trees were sparse and all you had to look at was endless plots of farmland. Corn and cows. Cows and corn.
Kailey had taken 35 like that once, one day when Kaycee had asked her to take some poor girl across the state border. Got up at like… noon. Picked up the little chick, some snot nose who had stumbled in from out east somewhere. Skipped past Ottawa all the way to Emporia. Dropped off the brat, got some gas in her car (at that time some Kia model she burned out in record time), ate a burger at some shit shack called Spangles. Milled around town looking at all the old buildings cuz she didn’t quite feel like going home yet.
All the while the sun had dipped down low, a seraph kissing the earth and setting the sky ablaze as its radiance reached out at her from down the road.
Kailey couldn’t have told anyone why it caught her attention like that, but despite not being a SP.ED and knowing you’re not supposed to look directly at the sun, she found herself watching it sink down for like 10 minutes. She felt its heat licking at her cheeks, the smell of it rising from the old and cracked brickwork which surrounded her. Watched it transform from an orb into a half-circle into a waning crescent, a sliver.
And then it was gone, so that shadows rose all around her and made the world cold.
God damn.
So Kailey had gone back out on her next day off. Waited until like an hour before sunset, the time of which she had gone through the extravagant effort of looking up; it was an honor she did not usually bestow to most pieces of information. Took off on the same route and managed to time it just so that she was cresting over the first mound of the Flint Hills as the sun became something she could look at without instantly going blind, a mauve or violet shard which looked down at her from almost a hundred million miles away. She parked the car on the shoulder of the highway, getting out so she could drink its vermilion light.
Great, pillowy mountains festooned the sky and caught the fading sunshine as it scattered through the atmosphere. Every cavity, fold, and twist in those clouds emanated their own distinct color: pinks and oranges and reds shone bright on their own or blended together with infinite variation. An assortment she had had little cause to think about through her life was arrayed here, the awesome force of their brilliant hues striking something deep inside her.
She sat down on the asphalt emitting its absorbed heat from the day, and soaked in the air aglow.
The polite beep of a car horn next to her brought her back to the present. Yeah, she sighed, that’d all be nice to see again. Maybe in a couple weeks if Kaycee didn’t need anything. But she often did.
It was always something around here.
Forty-five minutes later–-not a bad time for the distance–-saw Kailey pulling into the extended lot of a McDonald’s just off the highway. She pulled her phone out and checked the last message from Kaycee: mousey girl, brown hair, small glasses, drab baggy clothes, near the dumpster at the back. Casting her eyes around she saw the dumpster in question, and then the person. Kailey wondered how long she’d been slouching there in the rain. A pitiful specimen if she’d ever seen one.
Just let me know if you wanna go
To that home out on the range
They gotta lotta nice girls
ZZ Top seemed to think the newcomer was alright.
Have mercy.
Oop, wait. There was a new message, sent while she was driving. She never looked at her phone while on the road. Arrive Alive, kids.
“ Meeting at the usual place, starts at 8. Come ASAP. ”
Well, “as soon as possible” was either going to be half an hour or two hours depending on this chick.
... And I hear it's tight most every night
But now I might be mistaken.
She turned the radio down as she coasted up next to her charge. Not her favorite of theirs anyway. “Need a ride?”
The girl nervously whipped her head up to stare, making no other move. Not a good start. “Whoa,” Kailey coaxed her, “take ‘er easy. I’m Grandview. Kaycee told you I’d be comin’, right?”
A gray gem glittered at the girl’s throat. Her voice squeaked out with an absurd little quaver. “You weren’t followed, were you?”
Weird questions, weird behavior right off the bat. “Nah, I never am. Get in.”
Without ceremony she whipped her Buick back onto the road as the girl belted in. A couple minutes later found them loping southbound on the highway again. “So, uh. What’s the story? You on the lam or something?”
“We shouldn’t waste any time,” the girl ignored her. Strike two. “Take me to Kansas City, I have important information she needs to hear.”
“Damn, alright.” Kailey gave a silent thanks for keeping things speedy. “Where’s the fire?”
“I’ve just come from Leavenworth,” the girl said. “I need to-–”
The words seized in her throat as the girl fell forward and slammed her head into the dashboard. Shattered by the push dagger in Grandview’s right hand, the cloudy remnants of Leavenworth’s gem fell to the floor.
Alone again, Kailey sighed: more for the pigs. The first few had been way less obvious than this somehow.
Unconsciously she moved back into the right lane, looking for an off ramp to turn around back north. This time would be the farm near Ponderosa, she supposed. The rain thickened and the last of the sun’s warmth was swallowed up by yet more pregnant clouds. The Police were rudely telling her not to stand so close, so she snapped the radio off.
Grandview hated cleaning this shit up, it always took forever. She hoped the meeting wasn’t too important, she was definitely going to be late. Had to get some cigarettes first.
Chapter End Notes
"Masquerading as a man with a reason /
My charade is the event of the season /
And if I claim to be a wise man, well /
It surely means that I don't know"
Sometimes if a really good and energetic song pops on the radio, I'll crank that shit up so much it hurts my ear drums. Today it was "St. Elmo's Fire" by John Parr, though I have a particular fondness for singing along to Billy Joel's "Uptown Girl." Rest assured that I do not actually drive like Grandview.
Classic rock is essentially all that I listen to on the radio. I have six channels favorited on the console, the current setup is thus: 1. KCUR, which is the local public broadcast station that works in cooperation with NPR; 2. 94.9, a Cumulus Media station that has no real heart and soul in it but consistently plays top 40 hits from the 60s through the 80s. They have a profoundly offensive section on the weekends by some reprobate named "DJ Kirby" where it's disco, pop, and rock hits but they're """edited""" (I use this term graciously) into one long continuous mix. I fucking despise it; 3. 97.7, a weaker signal coming out from near Columbia that I use when the local ones aren't playing anything good; 4. 101.1 THE FOX WITH CHUCK NASTY THE NASTY MAN, though he only hosts later in the afternoon and evening. This one has plenty of actual personalities, none of which I actually care about that much; 5. 102.1, a variety station that sometimes play classics but also has modern stuff. I use this one when I feel like treading off the beaten path or as an emergency when 2, 3, and 4 are all on commercials; 6. I forget the frequency, but if the universe aligns and cosmic tragedy strikes so that all four of the previous stations are on commercial, then I put this one on. It's classical music, which I like plenty, but it's not my preferred mood for driving. An extension of KCUR with no commercials, and that's the important part. Sometimes if I let my sibling drive my car, they leave it on some station that speaks in Spanish and plays Mexican hits. I don't favorite it but I will leave it on until the first time I hear a commercial break, and then it's back to normal.
Chuck Nasty isn't all that bad actually. I don't care for the radio personality but I get the impression that the guy himself is actually fine. I really don't like it when he howls though. He actually just earlier this year started releasing a podcast called "Inside the Double Wide." Apparently Chuck Nasty has actually been a radio announcer all over the fucking country, including Guam of all places. I haven't checked out the podcast yet but I should probably do so at some point. gazemaize was particularly amused with his inclusion in the story, and I have to admit the personality is kind of infectious.
A lot of these details, specifically the car make/model and its deficiencies, are based on a vehicle owned by the above mentioned sibling, which is why they end up driving my car sometimes. That Spangles in Emporia is not very good, I don't recommend it. I do recommend going to the Flint Hills and watching the sunset over the prairie though, it's a visual experience I wish I had the chance to see more often. I will purposefully stop my car on the side of the road to watch a good sunset if I happen to catch it. The imagery of enormous clouds illuminated by the setting sun is exceptionally important to me. I took a crappy picture of a nice one on 5/26/2024:
A man may die happy once he's seen the Midwestern sun setting, wreathed in the lavender of wandering mountains.
This chapter is the first time during the course of the first draft that I actually stopped to take a much closer look at what I was doing, paying greater attention to how things fit together and why. There was a version of this where Kailey stops at a specific park to hike up into a prairie to watch the sunset instead, but it was way too lengthy and involved for what I was trying to convey.