Ferocious

22. Sinkholes

"You'll be good, right?" Todd asked.

The end of the gun barrel bobbing up and down in slow motion, mouth wide in a silent 'oh', told me I had better.

"Yeah. I'll be good."

"I like you a lot more than your bitch friend Alicia. You know she's not your friend, right?" He kept one hand one the steering wheel and the gun pointed vaguely at my face. I watched his face as he studied the road and oncoming traffic. I could try to time something – push the gun and wheel at the same time, but even at thirty-five, I was in danger. Especially if we hit a car in the opposite lane.

I didn't answer his question.

"You seem like a smart girl to me," he continued. "Are you a smart girl?"

That gun was still nodding his head.

"Yes, sir, I am."

"For a smart girl, you do some dumbass shit."

There had to be good reply to that, something to appease him, but my neurons were short circuiting.

Run. Run. Run.

"Sorry." I choked the word out.

"I said, for a smart girl, you do some dumbass shit." He must have thought I had asked him to repeat it.

His hand swiveled with the wheel to turn onto a side road. We were leaving town. Headed for the woods.

His car, or the car we were in, had a long bucket front seat and a dangling air freshener in the shape of a pine tree. It danced and danced and danced as the road got rougher and we went deeper into the trees.

No one came back here except for hunters and campers or high schoolers looking for a place to party. I stole a glance at the back seat, hoping to see clues of his intentions. It was clean. Weirdly clean. Too clean to kill someone in.

I had to correct my weird thoughts; he might have cleaned up for the special occasion of killing me in it. Several minutes passed while snakes bit my insides with venomous fangs.

"The closest I can come to explaining it all is sinkholes," he said.

I jumped in surprise at his voice.

For a split second I pictured drains in sinks. Holes were in the sinks. But then my brain kicked in and I understood sinkholes as in geographical phenomena.

"How do you figure?" At least it got him talking.

"Would you build a house over a sinkhole?"

"No, I wouldn't."

"The whole town is built on a sinkhole. With a whirlpool around it. Or maybe a bunch of sinkholes. They've got..." He squinted at the road and maneuvered around a craggly pot-hole. "They've got small openings. For the rats."

My forehead furrowed. Rats in the forest. Rats in the apartment building? "Do you hear them in the walls?"

"Walls?" he asked, peering watchfully into the forest as it flew past us.

I leaned closer. "The walls. Do you hear things? Do the scratched words appear on your walls?"

He shook his head. "I'm telling you, the whole place is a goddam sinkhole. I need you to see something."

"What? A sinkhole?" Did he know something? Really know something?

He shook his head, eyes cutting a path straight through the car. He turned to me and that gaze carved me up and left me for dead.