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Dark Delight

Chapter 4: Road To Recovery

    Laura noticed the headlights from the car that was approaching from behind, and in turn flipped on her lights. It wasn’t terribly dark, but the clouds were beginning to come together for another round of rain. The reflected lights grew brighter. I lifted my arm up from the armrest, reached over with my other hand, pulled back my sleeve, and checked my watch. It was only three in the afternoon.

    “How long until we get to Buffalo?” I asked. Laura shrugged, and replied that it would still take an hour or two. Apparently Gates was a bit out of the way, and we had yet to get back onto the main highway. “I think I’m going to need more coffee,” I mused in the most dazed voice that I could muster. Laura giggled in reply, but quickly froze.

    “What’s wrong?” I asked as I sat upright. Laura continued to sit still, eyes fixed ahead, like a deer in headlights. “What’s wrong?” I asked again. I began reaching for her shoulder to shake her, fearing that she was going into some kind of voodoo trance or something. As soon as I started lifting my arm, she calmly whispered, “Hang on tight, and look back at the license plate on that car.”

    “Huh?” I frowned, not at all understanding what could be so special about a license plate. They all looked the same to me. But as I sat wondering about her request, her right leg shot forward and forced the accelerator to the floor. I should have taken her advice. I lost my balance as the car sped forward, slamming the side of my head against the seat. As I bounced forward, I reached out with my right arm and braced myself against the dashboard, turning my head back to see the car behind us fall back. I hadn’t realized that it had been no less than fifteen feet behind us. It was rather pimped out with black tinted windows, but oddly no hood ornament. Then the license plate came into view, and I turned back to face straight ahead, frozen, as Laura had been a moment before.

    “Well?” she asked.

    “Not normal,” I replied. Every license plate that I had ever seen in New York had three letters on the left side, and three numbers on the right. But this plate had only two letters, and a few small numbers written down the side. I looked back once more, and the other car had closed the gap and was now riding our ass once more.

    “What’s going on?” I yelled. Laura’s face contorted into a frown. Her eyes narrowed, her lips pursed. She looked as though she was focusing on something way off in the distance, farther away than I could see. All that I could make out were a few taillights, and we were approaching them quite quickly.

    I saw something red flash in the rearview mirror. I looked back again, and saw that it was the only thing visible from the darkened interior of the car behind us. Police? FBI? I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life in jail. What the hell had I gotten myself into? The taillights grew closer; we would be right on top of them in a few moments.

    Laura jerked the wheel to the right as we overtook the first car. The driver honked as we flew past, the sound of the horn draining off behind us, consumed by the dusk. Our pursuer swerved around on the left side of the car, then cut across to the right, getting back in line behind us. Two more cars fell out of the crowd before us, and Laura jerked back to the left to make a pass, our pursuer hot on our heels. More cars came at us, and Laura twisted the wheel side to side like she was playing an arcade game. Tires squealed. Horns beeped. Our pursuer stuck to us like glue as Laura weaved in and out of traffic, easily maneuvering through the other cars. The road might as well have been wide open.

    I looked off to the right. We were driving past an off ramp that we had missed somewhere in the midst of dodging the non-speeding cars. The off ramp connected to some city street, where an array of police cars was heading toward the next on ramp, lights flashing and sirens blaring. I thought we were done for.

    “There’s more police coming up!” I shouted, turning back toward Laura.

    “I know,” she said coldly, not moving, her eyes still fixed on that unseen thing in the distance. I turned back to the right to see that we were passed the on ramp. I ducked down to peek into the side mirror, and saw the tiny police cars around the side of the black car, which appeared to be on top of us.

    I looked back at Laura. I needed an answer. I was too young to go to jail. I still had to finish college! Her icy stare suddenly broke, her eyes shooting wide open. I looked ahead, but couldn’t make out anything that seemed out of the ordinary. Laura slowly slid her right hand down around the steering wheel, stopping at the very bottom of the wheel, gripping it tightly. She seemed to be calculating her movements. Then she slid her left hand over to the right side of the wheel, again gripping tightly. “Hold on,” she grunted through clenched teeth. This time, I was wise enough to heed her warning, and grabbed the armrest with both hands.

    Her left and right legs exchanged lengths, as she threw the wheel to the left with all her strength. My ears split with the screeching sounds of the tires. Smoke rose up from the sides of the car as we spun around to the left. Our pursuer flew past, slamming brakes and throwing up its own smoke cloud. Then the police squad, apparently not as used to such extreme driving, flew past. My heart skipped a beat as we careened toward the guardrail. But then, I realized what Laura had been focusing on. The guardrail had a small break, no more than thirty feet long, with a No U-turn sign. But our angle was wrong, and we were heading toward the back end of the guardrail. We would smash it with our hood and bounce past!

    Laura eased off of the brake slightly, changing the pitch of the squealing tires. The world went into slow motion. I could see the traffic that we had passed, feeling the confused stares of the drivers. I could see the oncoming traffic on the other side of the highway, feeling the same confused stares. The smoke rising from the tires seemed to hover fixedly in the air. The back end of the car swung around. The hood missed the end of the guardrail by an inch. We were through the hole and onto the eastbound lane. The tires gripped, sending us forward.

    Rush hour. Hundreds of automatons heading home from work, expecting to be greeted by microwave dinners rather than speeding cars. The poor fools had no idea what was going on. Laura began jerking the wheel back and forth, dodging between cars. To the left, zoom. To the right, zoom. Three cars lay ahead, filling the entire road. She took her foot off of the gas, leaned to the left with the wheel, and jumped into the shoulder of the road beyond the left lane, inches away from the guardrail. The sounds of horns droned off behind us as we skidded back to the right, toward the off ramp. The ramp leading to the same place that the police had entered from moments before.

    We slowed down as we approached the city street. Laura was surprisingly good at adjusting her speed. Seeing her drive the city speed limit, you wouldn’t have been able to tell that she had been driving nearly one hundred miles per hour only a minute ago. She went around the first corner onto a side street, attempting to get as far away from the highway and other motorists as possible. My pulse settled back down to a normal level as we turned into the large parking lot of a department store. Laura swiftly guided the car in between two parked vehicles, then turned the car off, undid her seatbelt, opened the door, and jumped out, all in one fluid sequence. I fumbled with my seatbelt, still wondering what the hell was going on. I opened the door and got out to join her. She had her arms stretched out over the roof of the car, her head down against the metal.

    “Do you mind explaining to me,” I began, but she looked up and cut me off.

    “You don’t get it, do you, Rich? We’re not welcomed here.” I was caught a bit off guard. She shook her head and looked back down. “I’m sorry, it’s just that… I’m sorry, I shouldn’t get mad at you.”

    “It’s alright, just please tell me what’s going on!” I said. “Why are we being chased? Where are we?”

    Just then a bus pulled into the parking lot. It looked more like a local transit bus, and a rather unpopular one at that. There were only a few passengers riding inside. Laura pushed herself off of the car and started running toward the store, yelling, “Let’s go!” I ran after her. As we reached the store, two passengers disembarked. The bus doors were still open as I chased Laura around the front and up the steps into the vehicle. She grabbed a wad of money from her pocket and paid the driver, and we made our way into the empty back of the bus. Laura crashed into a corner seat, her arms outstretched. She let out a huge sigh of exhaustion. I sat down in the seat behind her. “Alright, will you tell me now?”

    “What’s to tell?” she asked as she turned toward me, her eyes narrow with exhaustion.

    “Well, first of all, what are you going to do about your car? Are you going to just leave it unlocked like that?”

    “My car? Oh,” she paused thoughtfully, “you mean that old thing?” She started giggling. “Honey, I don’t even own a car,” she grinned.

    “What?” I asked, dumbfounded.

    “I just needed something to pick you up with, that’s all. Last thing I needed was for some cab driver to go telling the police where we were headed.”

    “Why are the police after us?” I asked.

    “Don’t worry, they’re not after you,” she replied, seeming a bit stricken with grief. “At least, not yet, they aren’t.”

    “Alright, then. Why are they after you?”

    “Drugs, mostly.” She looked up toward the ceiling of the bus. “I’m involved in a small-time ring.” I gasped. Was I really in the presence of a drug dealer? “It’s nothing major, we don’t move very much of it. Just enough to survive and make contacts.”

    “What kind of contacts?”

    “The kind that can make things from scratch in their own labs.”

    “You mean like LSD and whatnot?”

    “No, more like DD.”

    “What’s DD? Not that I know much about drugs, but I’ve never heard of it.”

    She turned backwards in her seat, crossing her arms on top and resting her delicate chin on top of them. Her lavender hair flowed over them and into my face as she smiled down at me. “DD is what’s going to save you from your dreams.”

    I smiled back, glad to know that there was something out there that could help me. “It’s a homemade brew that one of our chemist friends figured out how to make. He did a bunch of tests on some kind of psycho-drug that some corporation had come up with, and ended up creating DD. We had to pay him top dollar for it, though. But it’s well worth it. We’ve saved so many people from insanity with it.”

    Insanity. So it was possible for someone’s dreams to drive them over the edge, just as I had feared. But I was going to be saved. I would never have to deal with the dark side of my mind again! I sat back and smiled, content that I was headed for better times. “Don’t worry, kid, you’re going to be fine,” she said.

    The bus stopped. We looked out the window, and found that we were outside another bus station. We got off and walked inside the station. It looked similar to the one in Gates, but it was a bit more spacious. And definitely a bit cleaner. Laura approached the ticket counter and acquired two tickets for Buffalo. We had a few minutes to kill before our bus would arrive, so we went over to the small cafeteria to grab a bite to eat. Prepackaged sandwiches had never tasted so good. I grabbed an extra large coffee for the ride. A few minutes later, we walked out into the night, guided by the overhead lights above the bus parking area. We climbed aboard our vessel, found seats in the back, and after a few minutes we were on our way.

    As we cruised down the road, I looked out the window at the night sky. The mountains off in the distance glowed with a purple hue. A line of lights rose up along one of the nearer crags, illuminating a ski trail. The artificial snowmakers were setting up for the coming ski season. I looked down at Laura. She sat curled up in her seat, arms tucked under her head, knees together against her armrest, legs hanging off the seat. Her chest slowly lifted and fell. I took a swig of my coffee, wishing that I could sleep like her. I could barely feel the heat of the drink. I had a feeling that it would take a few weeks before my tongue healed enough to taste anything, badly burned from the coffee. I drank again, ignoring the pain, and set my drink down in the cup holder embedded in my armrest. The interior lights of the bus dimmed for the sleeping passengers, leaving only the aisle slightly illuminated.

    My thoughts drifted back to college. I wondered what was going on in my room. I could just imagine my roommate and his girl enjoying having the room to themselves for a whole weekend. The stories he would tell me when I returned. I could just picture them alone with each other. The thought turned my stomach. Or maybe it was just the coffee. I looked back down at Laura. I fought hard to resist the urge to run my hand through her lavender hair.

    She sat up and looked at me. “What’s wrong?” I asked, afraid that she must have known what I was thinking. She shook her head, and lay back down. I let out a sigh of relief. I didn’t know what to make of this girl. She was amazing. Somehow I felt drawn to her. I couldn’t explain how, but somehow I just felt it. I took another drink of my coffee.

    A few hours later we entered Buffalo. From the bus station we caught a cab to the university library. It was lit up and bustling with students studying for their midterm exams. Laura led me down into the basement level, where a few students had fled to escape the relative noise of the upper levels. We walked through a study area and into a room filled with small green lockers. Laura knelt down in front of one, gave the lock a few quick twists, and opened the door. She pulled out a small bottle and stood up, looking over my shoulder and into the study area. She closed her eyes and remained still for a few seconds, then opened them and smiled. She motioned me over to the back corner of the locker room. She then sat down and crossed her legs, and I sat beside her against the wall.

    “Now, you have to understand that once you’re in,” she whispered, barely making a sound, “there’s no turning back. You’d find it extremely difficult to get back into your normal daily routine. The dreams would drive you batty. You’d grow to crave the drug.” She rubbed the side of the bottle with her hand, smiling. “This stuff can make your life easier, but it’ll cost you.”

    “Not much of a choice here,” I reasoned. “Either I pass it up and lose my mind, or I take it and everything gets better.”

    “You can’t just assume that this will make your life perfect,” she whispered. “Far from it. You’re going to need to take a dose at least once each week for the first few months. After that, one hit every few days. If you practice some mental exercises, you can stretch the doses out a bit, but you’ll still come to depend on them to get you through the hard times.

    “And this stuff doesn’t come cheap, either. As I said, we have to pay for the stuff. Most of us aren’t stable enough to hold real jobs in society anymore. You’ll be lucky if you can finish school in your state. What are you studying, anyway?”

    “I’m technically undecided,” I replied, “but I’m thinking about going into electrical engineering.”

    She chuckled. “Well, good luck keeping your thoughts straight long enough to study for anything. I guess you’ll have to get back to school for your midterms.”

    “No, actually I got a leave of absence when I started therapy. I’m done for the semester. I don’t even really have to go back right away.”

    “So, you’re saying you could stay out here for a while?” she smiled. “That’s awesome. I have some friends I want you to meet. You can crash at my place until you’re ready to go back.”

    I was a bit surprised. I’d never had a girl invite me to stay with her before. Perhaps she was returning my interests. It seemed too good to be true.

    “Now then,” she whispered, “you have to solemnly swear never to tell anyone that I’m giving you this. Not even if you’re tortured and left for dead. OK?”

    “OK,” I uneasily replied. She opened the bottle and produced a dark purple colored pill, placing it in my hand. I popped the pill into my mouth, took the last gulp of my coffee, and swallowed. I was on the road to recovery.

    We left the library and hailed a taxi at the street corner. We drove away from the campus and through the uptown area, stopping in front of an apartment building. Laura paid the driver and we exited onto the sidewalk. The building looked just like the others around it. Dark stone, with well-defined ledges under the windows. We walked up to the door, and Laura pulled her keys from her pocket. I heard someone yelling back behind us, and turned around to see what was going on. Two men were arguing across the street. I couldn’t determine the source of conflict, but I figured that it probably wasn’t anything terribly serious. I turned back toward the door, and Laura was already entering. I quickly hopped up the stairs and followed her inside. She unlocked her mailbox and pulled out a few envelopes. She flipped through them quickly, and then turned toward the large stairway that led up to her floor.

    We clambered up the stairs and reached her room. She paused, and as before, closed her eyes for a moment before unlocking the door. We walked into a dark jungle of wires and mist. Her humidifier had been running while she was away, and my lungs were relieved to take a break from the dry air. I looked up at the ceiling, where several wires ran in every direction. I followed the wire trail to a doorway to the left, which Laura was heading toward. I walked behind her, when she stopped and turned back toward me. She extended her arm to point over my shoulder.

    “You can sleep on the couch over there,” she said, pointing toward the old sofa against the wall, covered in small pillows and random articles of clothing. “Just toss that stuff anywhere and make yourself at home.”

    “What are all these wires for?” I asked, looking up at the tangled spaghetti mess covering the ceiling.

    “Data cables,” she said. “High-speed Internet. Good for staying connected and transferring massive files.”

    “What kind of files?”

    “Mostly porn.” My jaw dropped. “Lots of music, too. But mostly sending and receiving porn.”

    “So, you’re a drug dealing porn star?”

    “No, silly!” she giggled with a look of surprise. “It’s not porn of me, I’m only selling it.” This was getting stranger and stranger. “It helps keep the bills paid.” I figured it must be difficult paying for so many wires.

    Laura turned around and walked through the door, saying, “I’ll be back in a second.” I cleared the clothes off of the couch and into a pile on the floor, and arranged some pillows at one end. A minute later she came back in, dressed in some loose flannel pajamas that hugged her hips, yet completely concealed her chest. She carried a pile of clothing that looked to be the same as what she sported. “I saw that you didn’t bring anything. Hope these fit.” She handed me the pile, smiled, and turned around, saying “Good night,” as she walked out of the room.