Escape From Norriswood

CHAPTER NINE

Terry stood up from his seat at the booth, and grabbed Tara's arm. "Come on," he said. "We're getting out of here."

The fire alarm yelled into Tara's eardrums. Terry had a grip on one of her arms, and pulled her toward the hallway where the washrooms were, and the other arm Tara used to pry into her right ear canal.

As they reached the hallway, the men who had been sitting near the window got up, and moved towards the front door. Tara watched them, the way their bodies moved, like their joints paused after every footstep, no fluidity to the way they walked.

"Come on, Tara!" Terry yelled, and Tara turned and jogged after him as he ran down the hallway, and out the fire exit.

When they reached the front of Barney's, Tara heard the men in raincoats yelling at someone down by Terry's pickup. One of them heard Terry and Tara approaching, and turned to look at them. "Hey," one of the men said. "Is that your pickup? I think someone just broke in."

"Great," Terry said. He grabbed Tara's arm again, and began to jog towards the truck. Tara felt the strength in his fingers, the way they wrapped around her wrist entire.

Terry hopped in the driver's door, and yelled at Tara to get in. She opened the passenger door, and climbed in. "What did she take?" she said.

"My phone." Terry cursed, and popped his key in the ignition, and turned. He popped the gearshift down to reverse, and slowly backed up within the parking lot, and then peeled out, onto the main road.

"Which way would she go?" he said, but Tara wasn't sure. When she'd heard the fire alarm screech through the building, she instantly thought Rosalyn, but didn't even know why. Breathing now inside Terry's cab, she felt her stomach relax for the first time in about three days. How had she known she'd made a mistake in trusting Rosalyn? How had she known she was going to try and abandon her?

Terry took a right off the main road, and onto Spenser Avenue, a quiet suburb that ran parallel to the old ball field, and behind that, the river that ran all the way through the town. He slowed the truck to a slow roll, and Tara watched his eyes scanning out in-between the parked cars on the side of the road. In-between the houses, their siding shadowed, their driveways hidden.

When they reached the end of Spenser, Terry took another right, and began the climb up McDonald.

"I know why you wanted to get out of Norriswood," Terry said. It was like he had picked up on the strange silence between them in the exact same moment Tara had.

Tara wished she had managed to take her drink with her from Barney's, the fries she had eaten left her throat feeling dehydrated. "Terry, please tell me how you know that. Please tell me how you know anything about me, and what you know about this place we're in."

She could hear the food digesting in Terry's stomach beside her, the gurgle of gas within his intestines.

"I know about you because I'm also from Norriswood, Tara. And I know about you because I work with your father."

At the word, the image of her dad came unannounced into her sight. The plain white t-shirt he always wore, tucked over a potbelly into the blue denim he'd worn forever. "You work at the mill, then?" she said.

"Not at the mill," Terry said. The truck approached a red light, and Terry braked, slowed the shaking pickup toward the intersection. "But for it. I work with one of the landscaping crews in charge of cutting down all the logs."