Headlights(69)

Who the fuck is this woman?

I surge forward again, and she turns to me.

“Thought you’d never catch up,” she says, not breaking pace.

“Seems like you didn’t want me to,” I say.

“I don’t,” she says, and she surges forward again.

I let her run just ahead for five miles, maybe six, but keep close enough behind her. The landscape changes around us as we get farther from town. We gain elevation, the river dropping so far below us down a cliff’s edge on the left that I wonder a few times if maybe she brought me up here just to push me off it. Though I guess she could have done that back up at her shelter on the mountain. The sun is high in the sky now. I pull out the phone and glance at it. It’s almost eleven. Haven’t slept. No closer to finding out what’s going on. Chasing after a woman who makes my head spin. And my mom. The river, John Denver Sanctuary. That memory, somehow a memory in a place I don’t remember ever— My muscles burn, and I watch Hannah Lawrence running in front of me, and I can’t fathom how Rose and I could have been here. How any of this is happening.

But for one second, I think, my legs hurt, my lungs burn. And despite everything, it feels so fucking good, to feel the pain. To move through it. To push in the altitude and cold. Physical pain can take something from the mental. Is that what she’s doing? Does she need it too?

Maybe we’re just wasting time. Probably. Precious time we really don’t have. I lean forward, tell my legs to go. I meet her, then when she picks up speed, I push forward again, pass her. She passes me. A foot from me, that’s it.

We do it again. She passes, then I do. I don’t know how many times. I don’t know because maybe I’m not thinking. I’m running and sweating and working and breathing.

The next time I surge ahead to pass her, I make the biggest mistake of my life. I turn to look at her straight on. Just once, just one moment. I catch sight of her face. Skin flushed and red in the cold, eyes bright and electrified and wild. A small smile there.

Something running toward me, from ahead. But my eyes are on her.

Hannah Lawrence is smiling at me. And— I look forward. The thing running toward me, it’s a shadow.

It collides with my body, shoves its arm down my throat.





3



I blink, and I’m in a restaurant. Sitting at a booth. Hannah across from me, adjusting her nose plug, her sweatshirt lifted to cover the lower half of her face. She sinks deeper into her side of the booth. John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads” plays on the speakers. I close my eyes and take a breath. Will my heart to slow. Against the music, against everything.

I sort of remember coming in, the WOODY CREEK TAVERN sign outside, Hannah bracing when she learned the outside tables were closed, making herself step into the small indoor space. The onslaught of music as we walked inside. The low-ceilinged lively restaurant wallpapered with labeled photographs of patrons, eating, partying, laughing. Over the photos, framed posters of Hunter S. Thompson’s campaign for sheriff, framed art and photos of him and his friends. A disco ball hangs from the ceiling in the middle of the room, and on the other end by the door, there’s a bar with six stools, a TV playing the news behind it.

I scan the space for security cameras. I don’t see any. On the wall to our right is a wooden shelf with a fishing trophy; another portrait of Hunter S. Thompson, who seems to be staring at us from behind his sunglasses; a frog lamp; a naked baby doll; and, because everything feels like the biggest fucking joke, a framed photo of John Denver holding his acoustic guitar.

I turn and clock the other diners. No one’s paying any attention to us. Aspen socialites with those ridiculous wide-brimmed hats, a Hunter S. Thompson fanboy with a notebook and pen, a few grizzled old mountain men, and a table of three mountain bikers. A shadow lingers on one of the barstools, another by the door. The TV behind the bar says a storm’s coming, blizzard, across the state. Severe weather warning, stay safe.

Hannah’s anxious. No trace of the woman on that running path, the wild freedom of her. Even huddled in the corner, in arguably the safest spot here, her back and side covered, seeing her indoors is like seeing someone entirely different. I think about her three-sided shelter. Cover, safety. Only one exit to defend. She thinks like a soldier. She thinks like someone who’s had to fight for her life.

When the server comes to take our order, Hannah shrinks back from him. I ask for a burger. Hannah points to the salad on the menu. We both get coffee—her voice just audible through the sweatshirt to order it. If it were any other circumstance in which I’d find myself here, I would be getting a drink. Could really use one now.

Hannah excuses herself to use the restroom, and I almost protest after seeing how fast she can run, but at that same moment, an unfamiliar chime sounds on my person. Also, the bathroom door is right in my line of sight. I pat my outer layer and pull out the burner phone, shrug the jacket off in the warm restaurant. I have an alert: new post in the chat room from Wizdumteller.

Seems our last clue went a little OVER THE HEAD. Have they tried the wolf of no name?

I read over the post again. Over the head obviously calling back to Sky clue, right? For the life of me I still don’t know what it could have anything to do with. Screw it. I don’t know what else to do.

I close my eyes in the bar, reach out through my senses into the other-place. The one that doesn’t exist. The one that my stupid brain says it feels, even knowing that. I repeat the phrase under my breath.