Summer 2009
page 4
Short Story:
Escape From Stockholm
by
Lynn Spreen
                 Escape From Stockholm

 

 

It might have been the morning breeze.

Annemarie felt goose bumps on the back of her neck as she shoved the hoses into their compartment and stood up, knees crackling. So intent had she been on preparing the RV, she wasn’t sure if she had heard it or not.

Dried brown leaves scrabbled past in the chill wind. As far as she knew, the campground was deserted. The tiny store was closed, and the office wouldn’t open until noon. Lula had decamped hours ago in her big motor coach. Annemarie heard her slamming compartments and cursing well before dawn. Now it was just Annemarie and Evelyn, and the older woman seemed to have taken up residence in the camp restroom.

Annemarie peered around the back of the camper van. A couple hundred yards away, a pocked and peeling Ford Bronco had pulled into a campsite near the ladies’ room. A man in a hooded sweatshirt sat at the picnic table and, hunched against the wind, fired up a small glass pipe while his friend waited. A third man urinated against the restroom wall, while a fourth, a leather-clad skinhead, hopped up on the table top. There he danced and played air guitar to the ass-kicking concert in his brain, screaming out the lyrics, pausing only to bend down and finish off his buddy’s beer. The buddy jumped up and pulled something out of his sagging pants. A switchblade flashed in the bright morning sun, but the skinhead laughed and kept dancing.

Annemarie ducked behind the van. Where the hell was Evelyn?

The skinhead jumped to the ground, picked up a metal trashcan, and, shouting at nobody in particular, threw it against the wall of the restroom. The small building shuddered, the noise echoing through the campground.

Evelyn was probably hiding, afraid to come out. Annemarie should go get her, but what would the men do when she appeared? She touched the edge of her parka, measuring its length in relation to the coverage it would afford her hips. Not good. She pulled the hood up over her head, hiding her blond hair.

Bored with the music, the skinhead strutted to the back of the Bronco and opened the tailgate. Dozens of empty beer bottles fell to the ground. He picked up as many as he could hold, lined them up in the roadway, and pulled a gun from his waistband.

Annemarie flinched as the gun boomed and bottles shattered. Back in Fargo, she had laughed at her cousin Curt’s gentle urging that she borrow his pistol, amused at his typically male proposal. She could never shoot another human being, come right down to it. The only time she had ever fired a gun was at an indoor range with a cop friend who wanted to teach her how to use it, but the lesson didn’t take. Her hands shook with the violence of it all, and even the heavy duty ear protection couldn’t muffle her aversion.

The restroom door slammed.

The men stopped what they were doing to watch Evelyn limp toward the RV. She walked with her head down, her shoulders hunched forward as she picked her way across the uneven blacktop.

One of the men fell in behind Evelyn and began mimicking her halting gait.

Annemarie watched, in denial about what might happen next. Evelyn was almost ninety, and barely four-eleven. Who would torture someone so tiny and helpless? But when he reached for the shoulder strap of the purse, Annemarie stepped out from behind the van. The wind grabbed the hood of her jacket and pulled it off her head.

The urinater hooted. “Hey, lookie, I see nookie. Hey, blondie, whancha come on over and blow me?”

“Money or beer, ladies, whatever you got,” said another.

The skinhead stood in the middle of the roadway fondling his bare belly, his eyes cold as hematite.

Annemarie stared back. “Get in the van,” she said to Evelyn, who clutched her purse to her chest and climbed into the RV.

“Fuck money. I want some a’ at thang right there.” One of the men pointed at Annemarie’s crotch.

Annemarie got in the van and put the key in the ignition with shaking fingers.

“Fuckin’ bitches are leaving.”

“No, they’re not.” The skinhead pulled the gun from his waistband and lined up a shot. Evelyn’s plastic flamingo exploded into tiny pink shards. When he turned and aimed the gun at the windshield, Annemarie slammed the shifter into drive and stomped on the gas pedal. For one sickening moment the motor lugged out, but then it hurled the van forward, knocking the skinhead to the ground. One of the men smashed a beer bottle against the window, cracking the glass.

As the van roared off, the men dashed toward the Bronco, barely slowing to collect their injured friend.

Annemarie powered through the gate. “Put on your seat belt.”

Evelyn obeyed as Annemarie whipped the van around the corner and onto the highway. The road was clear in both directions as she accelerated away from the campground. She took a deep breath and exhaled, trying to think.

Nothing in her life had prepared her for the experience of being shot at, certainly not thirty years of shuffling papers as the secretary at Lincoln Middle School. She had spent a lifetime accommodating others as she had been taught, avoiding conflict and conducting herself with courtesy and grace.

Now all she could do was run.

And run they did. In seconds the van reached top speed on the two lane highway toward Denver. Annemarie said a prayer of thanks to Evelyn’s husband, who kept the old Roadtrek 190 in pristine condition right up until the day he died. With a half-mile lead, she hoped to elude their pursuers long enough to reach a more populated area.

She saw Evelyn’s boney fingers gripping the armrest, and felt pain for putting the old woman in peril. What the hell was I thinking?

In truth, Evelyn had pushed her pretty hard at the wake. Annemarie’s mother was barely in the ground when Evelyn approached with her plan. She needed a ride south to see her family and Annemarie needed a way to bring home her mother’s precious heirlooms. When Evelyn offered her camper van, the deal was sealed.

Bob went nuts when Annemarie called to tell him. “I can’t believe you’d cook up a scheme like this,” he said. “I knew I should have come along.”

“But you couldn’t, sweetie. You had to work. Don’t worry, we’ll be home in three days, max.”  

Bob hung up without saying goodbye. Annemarie tried not to let it bother her. She knew he didn’t think her capable of traveling six hundred miles across the high plains without him. As she had for the past thirty years, she stifled her desire to tell him to shove it up his ass, because she was a nice person.

The beginning of the trip seemed idyllic. At first they camped in the Black Hills of South Dakota. During the day they went sightseeing or if they felt lazy, simply hung around the camp, reading, napping or listening to the wind roaring through the pine trees. In the evening they whipped up meals in the van’s small galley, and after dinner sat near the campfire, Evelyn listening patiently as Annemarie grieved for her mother. Annemarie called home each day after Bob was already at work. She left a message on the answering machine in order to satisfy her feelings of guilt but also to avoid actually speaking with him.

Today, though, racing for their lives on the narrow highway between Cheyenne and Denver, it looked as if Bob was right. If she had just walked away she could have boarded a plane out of North Dakota after the funeral. She would be home by now, serving breakfast and listening to Bob’s diatribes on the state of the economy and the foolishness of Congress. She would sip her coffee, a practiced look of interest on her face while her brain worked away at a hundred other topics.

 

 

 

 

“I’m sorry, dear.” Evelyn was shaking.

“It’s not your fault. I’m the one who couldn’t live without the antiques.” Annemarie could barely hear her own voice over the rattling of their cargo. Just to be safe, she pushed the speedometer to ninety.

“As long as we keep moving, I think we’ll be okay. We got a head start. Their truck is old. It can’t be that fast.” Annemarie doubted her own logic but couldn’t stop talking. “We’ll find a place where there’s a lot of people and we’ll wait them out.”

“If we live that long.” Evelyn looked in the side mirror. Behind them, the Bronco turned onto the highway. 

Annemarie realized that she made a mistake heading south. Why hadn’t she turned north and fled back toward Cheyenne? They might have made it to a mini-mart or gas station by now. I’m an idiot. I deserve to die, and I’ll go to hell for getting Evelyn killed.

She checked the rearview mirror. The Bronco was gaining. Of course it would be fast. They probably did this for a living. Annemarie pressed down on the accelerator, trying to keep the van steady on the narrow road. Luckily she had a tailwind, but so did they. Behind her the Bronco closed, its massive grille a metallic snarl.

“Get my phone out of my purse,” she shouted. “Dial 911.”

Evelyn tried. “No reception.”

Annemarie could not allow them to catch up. If the men forced the van to the shoulder, she and Evelyn would become their toys. She cursed herself for not bringing some kind of weapon along. Even bear spray would have been better than nothing. Evelyn had found Annemarie’s rosary, and now she fingered the beads, her lips moving.

The Bronco was coming up fast. If only there had been traffic in the other lane, Annemarie would at least be able to maintain her lead, but the road ahead was deserted. Suddenly the Bronco jerked into the other lane and began moving up as if to pass. A meaty arm waved a pistol out the side window.

Could she slam on the brakes and surprise the driver, maybe turn around and head back to Cheyenne before he could recover? No. If she could get away with such a cockeyed television maneuver, they could too, and probably better. The Bronco was much more nimble than the van. As overloaded as it was, it would probably roll.

The Bronco swerved, nearly sideswiping the van.

Annemarie kept going, her arms rigid. When the Bronco pulled even, she glanced over. Inside the truck, four bald and bolted young men brandished guns and obscenities. One made a “v” with his fingers and waggled his tongue between them. A whiskey bottle sailed through the air and smashed against Annemarie’s window. She flinched, nearly losing control of the van. The men whooped and hollered with joy. They hung out of the windows shouting obscenities.

“Annemarie!”

Annemarie saw it at the same time: a couple of miles south, an eighteen-wheeler had crested a hill and now bore down on them at high speed.

The driver of the Bronco, seeing this, honked his horn and laughed. He eased the Bronco closer to the RV.

Even from that distance, Annemarie could hear the blaring horn of the eighteen-wheeler and saw the headlights flashing frantically. Forty tons of cargo would not slow quickly. The Bronco raced alongside, inching forward but not able to pass.

“We have to let him in,” Evelyn cried.

“Holy shit.” As the eighteen-wheeler drew closer Annemarie saw that it wasn’t just one truck. It was the lead truck in a speeding convoy.

Yet she had to keep the Bronco at bay. If it pulled in front of her, the men would be in control of what happened next. She couldn’t slow down; neither could she speed up. The van was floored. As if to dare her, the driver of the Bronco refused to back off, to retreat from danger.

You could die, she told herself, trying to raise a sense that this was an important fact, and that some emotion should rise from it, yet she felt nothing but curiosity at the level to which her life had devolved in the service of anger.

The problem at the moment was that she didn’t fear death. She nearly died years ago, at seventeen, on the last day of high school. With Fran, her best friend, driving, they had talked of final exams and boys and summer jobs and vacations, drinking coffee and heading east into the rising sun, jabbering away. Then Fran turned directly into the oncoming rush of commuters, two lanes worth, dozens of cars rushing at them. Right into the pack. Annemarie never screamed – there was no time before the first car hit them.

Back when seat belts covered only a lap, and nobody wore them anyway, and head restraints hadn’t yet been invented, the impact spun the little Chevy around in a circle three times, pushed the motor up through the floor, and flung the girls out onto the pavement. Annemarie felt nothing as her body barreled down the highway like a human bobsled, blind but for the kaleidoscope of orange-red triangular shapes churning in front of her eyes.

Felt nothing.

She could have died then. They could die now.

Annemarie mashed the pedal to the floor and kept it there.

What does it mean, she wondered, as the sound of Evelyn’s begging receded, and the lights and the horns faded, and she drifted into the silence within, when you’ve been good all your life, and you’ve done everything right and played by the rules, and you lose everything anyway?

I was good. I was always a good kid. That’s what Mom used to tell me, when Dad got in one of his moods. “Try to be good,” she pleaded, as if that would stop him from beating the shit out of both of us.

And then when I got older I was a good wife and a good employee, keeping my mouth shut and working long hours, and taking care of everybody but myself.

Why?

“Annemarie!”

Where did it get me, being good? Suddenly an epitaph, her own, appeared in her mind: “She was a good girl.”

Fuck that.

Her elbows locked, Annemarie held the wheel steady as the convoy roared down on them, the men jumping around inside the Bronco like scalded chimps. At the last second the Bronco braked and swerved hard to the left, careening off the shoulder and out of control, the convoy splitting the space between them. As the eighteen-wheelers roared past, Annemarie glimpsed the Bronco cartwheeling across the prairie, spewing a roostertail of dirt and carving a swath through the sagebrush.

Evelyn, her face white, clawed at the seat and twisted around to see the wreckage behind them. The smoking Bronco lay upside down in the scarred landscape a hundred yards from the highway, its wheels spinning, roof crushed. The last eighteen-wheeler had pulled to the shoulder and the driver was running toward the wreckage.

“Aren’t you going to stop?” Evelyn’s voice, thready and high-pitched, barely reached her.

Annemarie, arms straight, muscled the speeding RV into a sweeping curve. The tires screamed in protest.

“Annemarie.”

“What.”

“Dear, I think they’re hurt.”

The van slowed slightly.

“Good.” The silence expanded between them.

“But in the eyes of God – ” Evelyn pleaded with her eyes, her fingers clutching the rosary.

“It was us or them.”

Evelyn looked back at the road ahead, deserted once more.

“But guess what? This time, it was them. And don’t worry about God. It was my decision.” Annemarie began to shake. Her elbows seemed to float away from her body, and her hands felt numb on the hard plastic of the steering wheel. She rolled down her window, gulped the cold air, and kept driving.

 

          END

After a career in human resources, Lynne Morgan Spreen is now a freelance writer living in southern California. Her writing has appeared in the Riverside Business Journal, Palm Desert Magazine, and the Desert Woman, and she is a member of the National League of American Pen Women. The following story won an award recently from the Palm Springs Writers’ Guild.
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