Now that she’d decided on her next move, she needed to find a way back to the real world, and more specifically to Oakmont. She needed an exit.
When she told this to Edgar, he said, “I’ve been looking for one since we left the Garden. What did you think I was doing? Psychically jacking off?”
“Is that really a thing?” she asked, intrigued.
Edgar sighed.
“You can help. Keep your eyes peeled for any place that looks like heat distortion. You know, the way the air seems to ripple above a road when it’s really hot out? That’s a sure sign of an exit. Or an entrance. You’ll get a tingly feeling on the back of your neck, too.”
Lori tried to concentrate on looking for an exit, but she couldn’t stop thinking about what she’d learned in the Garden. In one way, it was a relief to have her memory of that day on the porch with Aashrita back. She felt as if a piece of herself had been missing for years without her realizing it, and now she felt whole. She hardly felt good about it, though. The denial she’d engaged in for so long had caused her to become a person who went through life unaffected by the events that occurred around her, by the people she interacted with, because what did the present matter when it would soon be the past? She thought of Edgar’s explanation for Shadow, how it was a realm where time went to die, a place where each tick of the clock passed through before being ultimately swallowed by entropy. She was like that too in her own way. Not only did she not try to hold on to the present, she actively consigned each moment to the past as swiftly as she could, and did her best never to think about it again. She’d always considered her forward-looking approach to life to be one of her strengths. But now she saw that it was the reason why her life was, if not exactly a mess, then stagnant. She’d let go of her romantic relationship with Larry without any great difficulty, and she’d fallen into their currently ill-defined friendship just as easily. She’d started dating Justin, but she wasn’t really committed to that relationship, even to the point where the revelation of his cancer hadn’t affected her all that much. She loved Reeny, but she didn’t spend much time with her or her husband, Charles. And while she liked being an aunt, she didn’t spend a lot of time with Brian, either. As for her parents, even though she lived in the same town as them, she hardly ever saw them. Not because there was bad blood between them, but because she rarely thought about them. It was almost like they’d ceased to exist the day she’d left home for college.
Everything that had happened since Goat-Eyes had confronted her in FoodSaver had been a nightmare, but one thing her experiences with the Cabal had done for her – they’d kept her grounded in the here and now, prevented her from dismissing and forgetting them as she’d done to so many events in her life. She knew it was possible to become too focused on the past, though. If someone wasn’t careful, they could become obsessed with it, could end up drowning in guilt and remorse. But if a person ignored the past entirely, they never learned from their mistakes, left behind wreckage as they plowed through life at full speed. Forgot friends. Forgot the hurt they’d caused them, the insults, slights, disappointments, and betrayals. The deep, deep wounds, which were sometimes fatal.
Like with Aashrita.
She would find a way to atone for what she’d done. Not for herself, and not for the fucking Cabal, but for the girl who had once been her very best friend in the world.
“Shit,” Edgar muttered.
Lori looked at him.
“What?”
“Don’t you hear that?”
At first she had no idea what he was talking about, but then she realized the wordless voices on the radio, which she’d gotten so used to that she didn’t pay attention to them anymore, sounded different. They were louder, faster, higher pitched. They sounded distressed, alarmed.
“What does it mean?” she asked.
“That someone’s coming – for us.”
An instant later, light shone in the rearview mirror. She turned around to look out of the back window and saw a pair of headlights off in the distance.
“And there they are,” Edgar said.
“It could just be someone else traveling the Nightway,” Lori said.
“Could be,” Edgar said. “But it isn’t. Forget about them and keep looking for an exit. We’re going to need one sooner rather than later, I think.”
A lone beetle emerged from the corner of his mouth, as if it was concerned about what was happening and had decided to emerge and check on the situation on behalf of the others. Edgar swept it up with his tongue, brought it back into his mouth, and sealed his lips tight to keep the little bastard where it belonged. The sight nauseated Lori, and she started to thrust it from her mind, but then she stopped. She didn’t want to forget things anymore, wanted to deal with them head-on, no matter how unpleasant they might be. She owed it to Aashrita.
She did her best to focus her attention on the road ahead of them and keep watch for the rippling in the air that Edgar had said marked an exit. She couldn’t help taking a look backward now and then, and each time she did, she saw the headlights of the vehicle behind them were closer.
“Can you go any faster?” she asked Edgar, worried. “Like, even a little?”
The van’s engine was already rumbling loudly, and the vehicle shook and bounced as it flew down the Nightway.
“This is all she’s got. It’s an extermination van, not a goddamn race car!”
Edgar held the steering wheel tight, and despite his earlier advice for Lori to keep looking for an exit, his gaze kept flicking toward the rearview mirror to check how close the vehicle pursuing them had come. And it was pursuing them, she believed that now. The radio voices were practically screaming with urgency.
She turned around to look through the rear window once more. It was hard to judge distances on the Nightway, given the darkness and lack of visible landmarks. The vehicle was close, though. A couple of hundred feet, maybe closer. She couldn’t make out the shape of the vehicle yet, but the headlights were set low and far apart. A car, she thought. A big one. And who did she know traveled the Nightway in a large vehicle, one resembling a midnight-black Cadillac? It had to be the Driver. How had the eyeless fucker found them? Edgar had said the Cabal had a more difficult time locating people on the Nightway than they did in the real world. Maybe the Driver had gotten lucky, or maybe they’d stayed at the Garden of Anguish long enough for the Cabal to get a fix on them. Or maybe the Cabal had guessed where she’d go in search of the answers she needed, and the Driver hadn’t managed to reach the Garden before they departed. It didn’t matter how the Driver had found them, though. It only mattered that he had.
“There!” Edgar shouted.
Lori whipped around to face the front, expecting to see another pair of headlights barreling toward them. Instead she saw a shimmering curtain of distortion ahead, on the left side of the road. They’d found an exit. Edgar yanked the steering wheel hard to the left, and the van’s tires squealed. Lori could feel the van tilt to the right, and for an instant she thought Edgar had turned too sharply and the vehicle would tip over.
And that’s exactly what it did.
The passenger-side window’s glass shattered as the van hit the ground. The side of Lori’s head smacked the remains of the window, and she felt sharp pain from the impact, as well as from glass cutting her skin. Canisters of pesticide clanged as they bounced around in the back, striking one another. What would happen if the chemicals were released? Would she and Edgar be poisoned? Could they die?
The van slid along the slick surface of the Nightway for a dozen feet before coming to a stop. The engine died, and the voices on the radio – which were shrieking now – cut off. Lori and Edgar were both belted into their seats, a fact for which Lori was grateful; otherwise Edgar would’ve landed on her. Edgar tried his seat belt release and found it jammed.
“Get us out of here!” he said.
Lori thought he was speaking to her, but then his beetles surged forth from his mouth. Half of them scuttled onto his seat belt and began furiously chewing at the tough fabric. The other half crawled down toward her and began working on her belt. She hadn’t tried her release yet, but as fast as the beetles worked, she knew she’d be free within seconds. While the beetles chewed, Edgar tried to open the driver’s-side door, but he couldn’t get any leverage and was unsuccessful. He hit the window control, and luckily, it still worked. The window went down, and he grabbed hold of the doorframe just as the beetles finished chewing through his seat belt. He dropped some, but his grip held. Grunting with effort, he maneuvered his body around until he was able to pull himself through the open window and out onto the side of the van, which, Lori supposed, now counted as the vehicle’s roof.
The beetles working on her seat belt finished, and then they all took to the air, flying up and out of the open window, presumably to join their master. A second later, Edgar reached down for her.
“Take my hand!”
As Lori contorted herself into a position where she could do as Edgar wanted, light flooded the van’s interior. The Driver had arrived.
Lori popped open the glove box and grabbed hold of the Gravedigger Special. Then she took Edgar’s hand, and the man pulled her up. She used her feet to help propel herself upward, and a few seconds later she was outside, crouching on top of the van next to Edgar, gun held tight. She hadn’t been able to grab hold of the blanket as she exited the vehicle, and she was naked and cold. She hadn’t grabbed her purse either, which meant it – and her phone – were still somewhere in the van. She didn’t remember seeing her purse as she climbed out, and even if she had, retrieving it hadn’t been her first priority. Getting the fuck out of the van had.
The beetles hadn’t re-entered Edgar’s body. Instead they buzzed angrily around his head, as if ready for battle. Lori thought that if she survived this, she might actually grow to like the carnivorous little fuckers.
She saw the car that had pulled up close to them was indeed the Driver’s vehicle. He got out, leaving his engine running and the headlights on, and he walked toward them. He wore his crimson robe – Must be a pain in the ass to drive in, Lori thought – with the hood back. He had on a pair of sunglasses, but he removed them and tucked them into a pocket, revealing the smooth, pulsating patches of flesh that covered his eye sockets.
