Zed’s Escape
The rain was cold and punched Darnell’s face with tiny cold fists as he ran. The rhythmic pounding of his boots on the pavement accented by the splash from an occasional puddle. It could have been an almost enjoyable run if it weren’t for the sounds coming from behind him. He was otherwise in a pretty terrific mood, since his friend-zone girlfriend Zed was at his side. Her shoes didn’t seem to make nearly as much noise as his boots did, but he was dressed to look tough. Zed actually was tough.
“So, do you think we’re gonna make it, Z?”
“Will you shut up, ninny? Only a dead-man asks that. Haven’t you ever seen a movie?”
“C’mon now, take it easy. I’ve never been in a spot like this, so I’m counting on you.” There was a blood-curdling howl from behind them.
“Looks like they found Harald. Poor bastard. I doubt there will be much to clean up, huh?”
“Z. Stop it please. You’re starting to freak me out.” Zed pointed to an alley between two commercial buildings, and forced Darnell to turn left into it. Darnell’s heart was in his throat, but he looked over at Zed as they ran with a big, dumb grin.
“Crap, Darnell. Are you that useless, really?” They darted between a giant commercial cardboard box compactor and a shipping container, hoping their pursuers would either lose them, or not make it through the gap. Zed couldn’t decide if either was likely. Darnell couldn’t stop thinking about kissing Zed.
“Seriously. Z, when we get out of this, let’s go get beers, okay?”
“Jesuit Monk-brew! You’re exhausting, Darnell. I’ll probably be three beers in wondering why it took them so long to catch you. Then I’ll remember that it’s because you’re such a little bitch.”
“Ha! Very funny. Where to now?”
“See? A little bitch, but you’re my little bitch aren’t you, Darnell?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
They stopped for one second to survey their options. Zed decided, and took off to the right, around a small one-story office building, and up a muddy hill behind it. Darnell, had to speed up to catch her, but his boots gave him better traction in the wet, muddy weeds on the incline. They were even at the top.
“Glad to see you made it. You done screwing around so we can get out of here?”
“Getting out of here is my only… well not my ONLY goal, but…” Zed was already gone up through a small wooded area full of tangled undergrowth and probably poison ivy. She never hesitated.
“What kind of beer do you want, Z?”
“Mmm. I love a good red ale, and sometimes honey beer. You?”
“I’m a Pale Ale guy.”
“I should have guessed you’d like bug spray.”
They cleared the woods and were fully exposed in a parking lot, sprinting for cover. Zed didn’t glance over to see if Darnell was there. Darnell kept his eyes on Zed, at the risk of tripping and falling. He couldn’t help himself. Watching her run in wet jeans was enough to distract him for hours.
“What makes you think you’re going to get out alive this time?” Zed poked at Darnell and grinned, but kept her eyes on the terrain. They passed behind a fleet of delivery box-vans hoping to stay hidden, then jumped a fence into a steel-yard.
“I have total confidence that you will save me.” He smiled broadly. “Besides, I’m not much of a catch, you know? I’m pretty sure they’ll pass on me. You’re the one that looks tasty.” He didn’t try to conceal the compliment.
“Really, Darnell? Now? I mean. Thank you. That is a really nice thing to say, but maybe now isn’t the time for that.”
“You’re right. Running for our lives like this just makes me think, ya know?”
“Ah yeah. Difference is EVERYTHING makes ME think. You need adrenaline to even start, or at least that’s what it looks like.”
Darnell was still looking at Zed as they ran, and clipped a steel angle-iron that was sticking out into the walkway, tearing his soaked flannel shirt and cutting open his shoulder.
“Dog biscuits!” He growled, hoping the noise wouldn’t attract too much attention. There was blood running down his arm, but he continued to run. Zed finally glanced over and saw his sleeve soaking with blood.
“Moron!” She stopped running and threw her arm out to stop his momentum.
“You are really more trouble than you’re…” She stopped herself when she noticed a piece of steel from the top of a rack nearly fifteen feet in the air vibrate, and then fly up and out of the yard.
“Sorry for this. It was clumsy. I know. You probably should leave me and save yourself.”
“I was saying… you’re more trouble than your momma, and and she’s doing ten life sentences.” She was deflecting now from the second piece of steel flying away, and now several racks were vibrating. She quickly tore his shirt sleeve off, and tied it tightly around his wound. “Let’s go.”
The other racks began to shake and shimmy as they were running down the central corridor between the racks, and toward the building. A forklift turned out of the main building, heading toward the racks, and the pair ran directly past it. Darnell thought for one moment that the man could help, but Zed was still running at a steady and fast pace through the rain. Zed knew the man was fodder and would be one more casualty in their escape.
“Poor Harald,” she thought.
They slid around the corner of the open bay door, and raced down the high racks between boxes of pipe fittings and countless small, odd steel parts. They were about to reach the front, when a huge muscle-bound man in overalls, flannel and a beanie cap turned the corner to face them. Zed slid to a stop quickly. Darnell ran into her and bounced off, falling on his ass. He was little more than skin-and bones compared to her strong, athletic build.
“Where you two come from,” the man asked?
“It’s where we’re going that matters. You don’t wanna know where we came from.” Zed had a way with words, Darnell thought. He scrambled to his feet just in time to see Zed land on the ground like a cat, and the big man fall backward unconscious on the floor.
“C’mon! Quit rubbernecking like a zombie and move!” She looked directly into Darnell’s eyes. He melted a little bit inside, but somehow his feet started moving. They jumped over the man’s inert body and through a doorway into an office.
“We should hide in here.” Darnell’s idea blurted out, stopping them both in a hall between cubicles.
“Wait. What? You want to stay here in the middle of a gazillion sharp pieces of metal while those things are out there chasing us, and flinging thousand-pound steel beams through the air?”
“Whoa. They did that?”
“If only you had a period, too. Bleed a little and you’re entirely useless, instead of just mostly useless. Hell no, we’re not staying in here. I’m not anyway. I’m stealing a truck and making for the hills. Here there’s no chance. We’re so dead if we stay. Do what you want.”
“I love stealing trucks! Let’s do that.”
Suddenly, Darnell had a purpose and a meaningful skillset. Zed was entirely uncertain how to steal a truck, but Darnell appeared to be an expert. Fourteen seconds later, Darnell was firing up a Ford F-250 with Miller Metals, Inc emblazoned across the door. Zed jumped in, pushing Darnell to the passenger seat, and they were careening out of the driveway.
“Not entirely sucky, there Darnell.”
“Thanks, Z. So how ‘bout that drink?”
“You’re pathetic. Can’t you see I’m driving?”
The road she took was unfamiliar to them both, so she guessed which way to go, and away from danger seemed the only sensible option. There was really no straight roads to follow, so she started with a left, and when the road bent right, she turned left again. She was about to make her third guess when a sixteen-inch I-beam suddenly appeared in the road directly in front of them. They crushed the front of the truck on it, but the angle was just right to flip the truck on it’s roof-rack without sending them both through the windshield.
The truck came to a stop thirty feet away and was spinning on the rack slowly.
“That’s not how I imagined my afternoon would go. You?” Zed couldn’t take the moment more seriously than that.
“Mummrublrum.”
“You better quit mumbling and get your skinny ass outta the truck, or they’re gonna catch you.”
Darnell was soaking wet and terrified, and not all the moisture was from the rain now. “Ah… no? Me either.” He scrambled to get out the shattered front window without further bleeding, but he could clearly count two bodily fluids ruining a really sharp outfit. He knew he needed to get back in the rain so it would hide the second one from his soon-to-be lover.
As he emerged from under the upturned truck, there was a hand reaching to help him. It had purple and black nail polish, and he knew he loved that hand. Zed helped him to his feet and they both looked around for where to go next.
“So. It looks like you really pissed them off.” Zed was only partly kidding.
“They should have known I wasn’t serious. I’m always kidding around. I mean. Look at me. Exactly zero people have ever looked at me and thought, ‘Yeah. He’s a threat.’”
Zed turned to him, her soaking wet, jet black hair stuck to her head, mascara running down her face, with a smear of deep red lipstick across her cheek.
“You’re alright, Darnell. For a little bitch, of course.” She smiled and the lipstick made her look a little like the Joker. Darnell went in for a kiss.
Neither one of them expected it, least of all Darnell. Zed, being a Jackie Chan fan, reacted instantly, and before his overly puckered lips reached hers, she slapped him so hard the idea of a kiss fell directly out of his mind and onto the ground with a splat sound.
“That way!” Zed was already running toward a hedge row on the side of the road. She got there, and turned around to first hear, then see another giant I-beam drop from the low deck of clouds and skewer the road. She could no longer see her companion, and a moment of fear hit her chest for the very first time. Two long seconds later his head popped out from behind the beam.
“Daaaaamn. That would have left a mark.” The urine stain on his pants was not ignorable.
“Ya think?! Would you quit pissing yourself and get over here?”
“I can’t promise I’ll quit pissing myself, but here I come.”
When he arrived at the hedge row, she took a moment and made a motherly gesture of checking his head over to see if he was bleeding. He wasn’t.
“Do me a favor, okay?” Zed looked at him straight in the face. “Don’t die out here. You owe me like three beers, remember?” She turned on her heel and shoved through a slight gap in the hedge row, emerging on the other side with a few little rips in her shirt, but her jeans intact. Darnell followed much more slowly, managing to escape further injury, but he was so thin that if he turned sideways he nearly disappeared. This might have been the first time it actually gave him an advantage.
“Baby. I’m not going anywhere. I’ll be there for you no matter what.”
“Oooh. You’ll have to pardon me if I’m unimpressed.” She smiled and looked around the residential neighborhood they had emerged into. Suddenly a thought occurred to her. Maybe they could hide in one of these houses and leave once it got Darnellk. Maybe it would be done raining by then as well. She was planning which house to break into, or maybe knock on the door even, when she heard a diesel pickup roar to life.
“Need a ride, Baby!?” Darnell was yelling from the drivers’ window of the massive, lifted pickup with smokestacks coming through the truck bed.
“You know what? I would normally say no to a creep in a jackass truck like this, but I think you’re kinda cute with your bleeding war-wound and…”
“Shut up and get in!”
“Right.” Zed wasn’t used to anyone talking to her like that, especially this tiny worm of a guy, but something about the truck and the way he called her ‘Baby’ was appealing in that moment.
They sped down the residential street parallel to the industrial park they had just escaped, running stop signs, and cutting across a few lawns. Darnell wished he had meant to do it, but the effect was all worth it, he figured.
“That’s TWO trucks you stole this afternoon! What kind of maniac bad-ass sonofabitch did I end up with here?” Darnell just turned to look at her and smile. That’s when he smashed into, and more like on to, the little Toyota sedan parked in front of a pale blue tri-level house. Both front wheels were off the ground, and the back wheels were slipping on the wet pavement, so they were going nowhere. He looked back at her and shrugged with his hands out, palms up. There was a weak smile that just said ‘oops.’
“Well now I know,” she said.
They jumped down from the lame, towering beast and ran in different directions. Zed was the first to realize it and screamed through the downpour at him.
“Dumbass! Hey, moron! That’s where they are coming from. Get over here.” He stopped his legs from churning, and his boots slid a little bit on the pavement before he came to a stop. By the time he had reached her, they could see something pushing on the hedge row where they had come through a quarter mile back. “Let’s be a little bit less, um, obvious, okay?”
“Yep. You might need to quit yelling so much. Just saying.”
“Screw you.”
Darnell smiled. “Anytime. Right here and now, if you like.”
Zed just rolled her eyes, and took off up the street perpendicular to the hedge row, hoping they would get out of sight before those two things could see them. They sprinted up a slight hill leading away from the industrial park into the neighborhood. Darnell’s boots were thump-thumping, and Zed’s made an occasional squeak or sqoosh sound, but otherwise she was nearly silent. After two blocks, Zed realized that Darnell was keeping pace with her, and really not breathing heavy.
“Darnell?”
“Z-Baby?”
“First, you’re a presumptuous ass. Second, how do you run in those boots and never seem to get tired?”
“I run ten miles every day. Two miles in boots isn’t even gonna make me break a sweat. I can go for an hour, easy. You’ll find out soon enough.”
“Dick.”
“Exactly.”
“Aaagh. Pig.”
Just then Zed shoved Darnell toward an open gate, and he nearly fell, but caught himself on her arm, pulling her with him down into the cold, soaking wet grass. They fell awkwardly, and ended a few feet apart. Zed gave him an angry look and just pointed to the cellar entrance they could clearly see through the fence. Darnell smiled.
Silently, they got to their feet and snuck into the back yard, but the cellar door was locked — with a key. Zed looked at Darnell, and for the first time she wore an expression of possible defeat. Darnell didn’t miss a beat.
“My turn to save the day. Give me your bra.”
“What,” Zed hissed!
“Keep your pants on — for now. I need the wire. We can play later.”
Zed turned her back to Darnell and reached down the top of her shirt, squirmed for what seemed like forever to Darnell. She eventually pulled off her bra using that magic trick only women understand where her shirt stayed on and the bra came out the sleeve. She turned and handed it to him with one arm covering her breasts. He nabbed it from her hands with no acknowledgement of her attempt at modesty. He was focused on something other than her for once.
He rubbed the ends of the wire on the driveway, tearing a hole in the end of the channel holding the underwire. He slid the wire out, bent it in half, and used the two ends to pick the lock like he had invented it. She stood agape at this hidden skill. He motioned to her to follow him down into the cellar.
She jumped in behind him, pulling the angled wooden doors closed behind her. She barely turned around and found Darnell directly in her face.
“Hey.” Darnell’s tone was deeper.
“Hey.” Zed’s tone was higher.
“This will do.”
“Mmmm. I guess we’ll see.” She leaned down a little and lightly kissed him on the end of his nose.
And there they are. 26 short stories for the month of April, 2021. Some more science-fiction, and others more mystery or fantasy. I hope you enjoyed reading along with my writing for the #AtoZChallenge this year! If all goes well, some of these will grow into larger pieces or even novels. Stay tuned to A Writer Darkly!
