College Road Trip (Z-Fic Novella Honorable Mention) [COMPLETE]

CHAPTER 12: ESCAPING MR. SALUCCI

"Lynette. Lyn. Wake up. We need to go," I whispered, shaking her awake. She was clinging to a pillow because I wasn't there. "Goddamnit, Lynette. Get up."

Peter was doing the same with Lewis, who was still on the floor across the room. It was hard, getting these two up without drawing any attention to ourselves. Lynette opened her eyes groggily and squinted at me in the darkness.

"What's going on?" she croaked.

I shushed her. "I'll explain later. Just pack up your shit as quietly as you can. We need to get out of here."

Minutes later, we were in the car, driving. We left behind everything we had piled into the kitchen (except a bottle of ginger ale that Peter nicked on the way out and the first aid kit, which he had the good sense to take with him). That meant that, on top of having been Will Graham-ed by a person we thought was a sweet widower, we were also out an entire case of water, a package of toilet paper, and a roll of paper towels.

Even after we were in the car, I was haunted by the sight of those heads in the freezer. The frost on the eyebrows, the slack expressions, the rot that was being slowed down by the cold... It was all there, lingering in the dark swamp at the back of my skull. I stared out the window, not wanting to believe or think about it.

Lynette wasn't about to let that happen though. She demanded once, then twice, then enough that it became annoying, "What happened? Why are we leaving?"

I took in a deep breath through my nose, trying to summon some sort of patience. Why couldn't she, for just this once, not want to take charge? (Lewis was sleeping with his head against the cool glass. Of course he wasn't asking questions. He wasn't hearing any of this.)

Peter answered for me. "It was human."

"What was human?"

"The meat. It was human--"

"Pull over," Lynette said. She was about to clamp her hands over her mouth. "Pull over now. Right now."

Peter did as he was told, moving us over the side of a lonely near-desert road. Under the cover of stars and night, Lynette forced her door open and leaned out of the truck. I plugged my ears as she emptied her guts into the sandy dirt and sagebrush; I plugged my nose as she wiped her mouth on a paper towel from the roll inside the truck. She was using those to help clean us up earlier; now it was her turn to be cleaned.

"Are you okay?" Peter asked.

Lynette nodded. "You can drive again. I'll let you know."

"It's probably best to keep moving," I agreed. I wanted to cut myself off before I started to babble, but, of course, the words were all cheddar broccoli soup on a shitty Panera table. "When I opened Mr. Salucci's stupid fucking freezer, I expected to find some chicken breasts, some meatballs, or maybe some Otter Pops. Who doesn't love Otter Pops? Yeah, no, the heads were totally unexpected. What was up with this, then? Mr. Salucci absolutely fed us human flesh. There's no question about that."

"Kurtis, you're narrating out loud again," Peter pointed out, right in the middle of what I expected to be a lengthy monologue.

I squinted at him, scrutinizing his face in the dim green light from the dashboard. "How the fuck are you not freaking out about this? We just saw two frosty heads in a freezer. We were just fed-- without our will, Peter! Without our permission!"

"I have enough to worry about. I'm turning into a zombie, remember?" He reached over, unscrewed the top of the unrefrigerated ginger ale bottle, and took a swig. He stuck it back into the cupholder without looking and continued, "And I didn't eat it. I didn't eat anything. Today has been fucked-up enough already, and I can write some poetry about this later, yadda yadda yadda. There's enough to think about, enough to worry about-- this is at the bottom of my pile. I can put it away later."