“To hate them,” she said.
Who was Walter in this situation?
Walter felt like he was on a precipice, on a road that had only two ways to go with no alternatives. If he turned back from the stop, from Rebecca, and went out to his truck, would the others follow him?
He could attempt it. He could get back into his truck and leave Rebecca and her family here to deal with their own problems. What the hell was he supposed to do anyway? According to her, he was a few years away from a slow death via a brain tumor, and normally he would have ignored something like that, but when the person telling you that can do all of the weird things that Walter had seen all of them do over the last day, then he figured it was best to listen, regardless of what they said.
So he couldn’t do anything. If he left, he might be taken hostage. These people didn’t seem like awful kids, but they seemed desperate to Walter, someone who had seen what desperation looks like at every AA meeting he had attended over the years. He knew how dangerous that sort of thing was. They might not like what they were doing, but when it came to desperate people, liking things and what they might do doesn’t have to be on the same menu, or even in the same ballpark. All you had to do was look at the local addict to know that, and these kids were addicts of the worst and most desperate kind. They were addicted to the one thing that is intoxicating above all else, the one thing that no one can resist.
They were addicted to life.
And now Walter had to decide which side he was on. Why did this have to be him? Truly, God could have set the day’s actions and events in a different motion. He hadn’t had a drink in almost thirty years, though he thought about one every day. There was no going around that. He had been faithful to Beth, hadn’t even thought of trying to remarry. He paid his taxes, even the high New York state ones, stayed out of other people’s business, and tried to leave good tips whenever he ate out (the times of which in the last few years he had done so by himself and not with buddies from AA were less than the number of fingers he had). He helped people, tried to steer their lives back from the place of no return, to one where their dark seeds would have to be carried with them, but they could at least still walk their path to the future.
And for all of that, he got placed into this whole conundrum.
His heart was beating fast in his chest. It was only right that he should die of a heart attack right here and now, with these kids to bear witness.
The blizzard didn’t look like it would be stopping anytime soon. The plows would be out, but they wouldn’t stop at a rest stop now. And besides, Matt’s gang had blocked off the road. No one would be coming to save them come till morning, and even then, who knew what would happen. Even if Walter got the police, what would he tell them that a group of kids with lava lamps under their skin were causing havoc at his rest station and that it would be best if they came out here and took care of them? Even if they did believe him, the people on the other side of the force field would have no problem dealing with a few cops. They might not like what they were doing, but they were desperate. Of everything they told him, and everything that Rebecca told him, he felt the desperation in the air.
“Oh, Beth,” Walter said, “If only you could be here now.”
He didn’t usually like to say that about Beth. His wife had reached the odd precipice and moment in one’s life where death seems to come only naturally to them. She died quickly in her sleep. No pain, no nothing. The doctors said that she had a blood vessel burst in her brain when she slept, and that she didn’t feel anything. She went to bed one night with him and then drifted off into the unknown.
Beth might have known what to do in this situation. It was one of the reasons that he both loved and eventually married her. She had a knack for keeping him on track, and knowing full well that whenever someone was in the rough and wrong that the best thing you could do for them was to let them dig themselves out of that ditch. He might never have stopped drinking if Beth had made him stop. She knew that change could only come from the inside and not the outside.
And that’s why, deep in his heart, he knew he wouldn’t survive the night.
Beth might have been able to do it, might have been able to convince Becca to either turn herself over to the people on the other side of the force field, or perhaps she could have convinced Matt and his gang that Becca living was the best scenario for all of them. She could have bridged that divide.
That wasn’t Walter.
“Who knows,” he said, laughing a little. “This could all still be a dream.”
He could still be hunched over in his office at the moment, dealing with a stroke or one of the hundreds of other illnesses that seem to plague someone when their ticker is past expiration. Maybe a blood vessel of his own had burst in his brain, and all of this was the result of it.
He looked into the sky.
In the distance, the sky had turned bright blue, as though someone had shot light up into the clouds. The clouds in some parts seemed to be burning, which was an odd enough image. They were water
