The Reaches

[Near]

As Jude approached the cab door, the driver’s expression, so far dangling over a chasm between wary and curious, plummeted into a frown.

“You can sit in the back, boys,” she said, reaching her hand out the window to jut a thumb (nail crackled with black polish) violently toward the truckbed, as if that were the only conscionable choice of seats for their kind, and Near laughed -- loud -- at the idea of prissy Jude huddled in the back of a truck like a day laborer picked up in front of Home Depot. The sudden, open, utterly inappropriate hilarity lasted about as long as a kick in the ribs, then faded away into the more pressing existential ache of the wrecked car, and (oh, right) the physical ache of his bitten lip and whatever else he might have damaged in the crash but hadn’t separated out from the static yet.

His own previous hitchhiking experience, a fairly uneventful one in the grand scheme of … this, had come with the perk of a roof, but what the hell: he turned his back to the beached whale of the car and, with a balding tire as stepstool, gamely hefted himself into back of the truck -- damp with the rain and already occupied by half a dozen plastic bags of dirt, a large metal toolbox, and what appeared to be a dead owl on a tarp. The latter startled first, then spurred remembrance of the absent Lew.

"Hey -- you didn’t see a dog, did you?" he called up to the woman, and if the thought of leaving his tragic-eyed abductee to the perils of the woods or a callous road crushed part of his heart, he did what he could to keep the crush from getting into his voice.

"Not around here," she answered.

[Jude]

Jude stopped on one foot and swayed, pausing to process. The back. The back back. He looked to the truckbed like a kicked dog, one that had pissed (or vomited) on the carpet. The laugh, correctly assumed to be about himself, triggered a visible wince. His resentment dug itself a notch deeper. Near was allowed to go first, and then Jude followed, tossing his backpack ahead of him before clambering up. Luckily he was tall, and his height balanced out the lack of drunken coordination. Once there, he scooted to the back, closest to the window, and wrapped his arms around his backpack. He closed his eyes.

Even with his eyes closed, he could still see the crashed car. It was like a beacon, a ray of unseen light erupting into the sky, broadcasting his last known position through its ultra-turbulence. He pressed his face harder into his bag. He hoped that if he curled up and did nothing, said nothing, remained motionless, that the waters would still and his trail would cool.

As the shitty suspension of the truck jostled him, Jude cracked open one eye to glare at Near. This is your fault. But it didn't matter. Near could go back to his life. He could get a new dog. He could get another rental car. He could sell the Farr estate.

Again it was too much, too much to think about overall, and especially too much to think about at the edges of alcohol poisoning -- not to mention it was still night. On second thought, Jude laid his backpack down and put his head on it. Maybe he could sleep.

[Near]

Near hunkered high atop the roundish bump of the right wheel well, the bed’s raised edge digging into the small of his back. A poor choice of roosts, since once the truck lurched back to life, he found himself worrying about being thrown off at the first pothole. But it was either that or a soaked ass and an uncomfortable intimacy with what was almost definitely (following a puzzled examination) a dead bird, which would have been something to comment on yesterday but right now felt like the least weird thing that had cropped up in … however long it had been.

A glance up from its outstretched wing found Jude giving him the evil eye. Jude who would probably find his falling backward out of a truck the pinnacle of gratification. Well, Near found some gratification in Jude looking like he had just crawled out of a car wreck and thrown up in the grass. So.

“This isn’t all my fault,” he called down the way, just in case a spoken rebuttal of the implications carried in that glare might negate the growing sense that it probably was all his fault and in fact the sight of dazed and bedraggled Jude was less inspiring of gratification than guilt. “And you know what, even if it is, you haven’t exactly been helpful. And now you think you’re just going to, what, take a nap? Better hope you didn’t hit your head.”

[Jude]

Jude, being very used to dead animals, did not even notice the bird. The life had since drained out of it, rendering it useless for his sort of magic, and the smell was not particularly strong. Smell as a sense was not very high the list of senses. Nausea and fever continued to conduct their background symphony, while the beginning of a dehydration headache began to coalesce. The adrenaline of the accident was fading into a crash of exhaustion.

He wanted a do-over. He wanted to wake up and start at the beginning of his adventure, when he had been mapping which places to go first, and he wished he had put this place at the bottom of his list.

He cracked his eye open again when Near spoke. Stupid to argue, he thought to himself. Stupid to argue with a stupid man. Of course reason was no match for the uninhibited anger of a sick drunk. "You tell yourself that," Jude croaked back. "You're an idiot." He still lacked the smooth presentation of his keepers, the ones who were able to frame magic and monsters and space and time in a way that dissolved resistance, but now he at least conceived of resistance. He had never before known that people could really disbelieve what had always been so manifestly true for him.

Knowing nothing of concussions, the warning was lost on him. "You're so annoying. No wonder you were in that house alone." Because no one wanted to come with him, Jude thought. No one would come even if Near asked. Even the dog ran away once she had the chance.

[Near]

There we go.

Jude’s knack for indefatigable asshattery was just what the doctor ordered, a tailor-made salve for the itchy sensation of fault that had been spreading up the breadth of Near’s conscience like a contact rash.

“I’d rather be an idiot than a worthless spoiled fucking kid,” he clapped back, though in his indoor voice that he didn’t imagine would penetrate the road and rattling truck ambience deep enough for Jude to hear.

That was all. If his drunk and obnoxious traveling companion were concussed, so be it. For his part, he closed his eyes against the fingers of wind working his already-messy curls into impenetrable tangles and meditated for a while on the nature of rigidity and on deja vu. How many times had he performed exactly that argument -- who was worse, who was wronger, who was stupider -- fed by exactly that same feeling of inutile exasperation like he was arguing with a child and ending with exactly the same dissatisfaction by the end. As if petty name calling had ever accomplished anything, from the playground to today. Usually at least the various iterations of the argument led, immediately or after some cooldown time, to sex, but there wasn’t even that to contemplate with Jude, there was just mutual dislike feeding off itself, and it was strangely uncomfortable to think that he was playing out his habitual lovers’ spat without any of the love.

The truck continued sloggily up the road for a while, then swung left (Near clinging to metal), and kept going through what several scattered glimpses proved to be trees and trees and trees. Another turn led to what read like an unpaved stretch of road, and eventually they whined to a halt in a place that didn’t look like it was worthy of any name, even one as unimpressive as Burley: a single wooden cabin in a clearing between the crowded trees.

[Jude]

Jude opened his mouth to argue more, to explain why he was a spoiled fucking kid, but his brain tripped over the beginning of the story like a rucked-up rug. Did he even know why? Was it something he had the words for? His teeth came together with an inaudible click. It was just one more thing Near wouldn't understand. He wouldn't understand that Jude's job hadn't been to work out all these words, these stories, these rules of what to do and how to do things, where and when and why. His only job was to listen for voices beyond this world, to find the places where the stitches between worlds could be picked at and eased apart. That job he was good at.

With an aggressive sigh, he shut his eyes again. Soon this would be over -- this terrible truck ride, this burdensome company. Jude went around and around in his head, trying to reason with himself, practicing the argument he would one day have with someone else, someone who might listen. What did it mean to sound smart? What would make all this easier to believe? Sometimes it felt like he had a clear thought, but then sleep would encroach, and then a bump in the road would interrupt his dozing, and there was nothing, nothing, nothing at all.

The lack of motion did not rouse him immediately. It was some other extrasensory input, whatever weird ways Jude had of knowing what was happening. He opened his eyes without sitting up, wanting to confirm they had arrived. Instead, they were -- nowhere.

Hmm.

Deciding that this was, once again, Near's fault, Jude fixed him with another surly glare. Do something about this. Since Jude was the worthless one.

[Near]

The engine stuttered quiet and dropped them deeper into the soundscape whose edge they had been treading on the roadside, a full chorus of crickets and tree sighs and weird misplaced whistles in a canopy that blotted out the sky. There were people on this earth, maybe a lot of them, who dragged themselves out to places just like this, put up tents, and stayed to soak in the atmosphere or something. Near found the atmosphere alarming. Humanity invented cities for a reason. His heart longed for the ugly comfort of buzzing streetlights and the distant howl of police sirens.

He wrangled the wandering bits of his attention toward a suspiciously quiet Jude, and found him not asleep, dead, or miraculously disappeared but still there, alive, awake, and looking daggers at him. Butcher knives. At a loss for anything to say, he lifted arms, hands raised, in a puzzled gesture of “I don’t know and what the hell am I supposed to do about it?” as the cab door seemed to pitch a fit at being opened and then was shoved violently shut.

The driver, a short, solid-looking woman who was almost certainly older than Near but might have just lived harder, came back to pound the side of the truck bed twice with the side of her fist. “Little detour,” she offered. “Wanna hop on down from there?”

[Jude]

There was not a drop of trust left in Jude after his experiences of the past twenty-four hours. No one said what they meant, and no one did what they said. He too was ill at ease with the emptiness and the animal sounds, the aliveness of this place. No, not just that -- the stillness. His mind was still porous while drunk, and in a place with fewer distractions, he was more conscious of the things rippling just beyond the veil, of the things beneath and through the atmosphere. He was not necessarily fond of cities, but the shack did not speak to him of solace.

Useless Near apparently could read minds or signals. The cab door creaked and Jude winced. He was not a believer in horror movies, but the operative word there was 'movie', not 'horror'. He had killed enough things dispassionately to grasp the basic idea of a place where things go in and don't come back out. Having been barred from the backseat of the cab, he saw no basis for meriting an invitation into a cleaner, more dignified place.

"I think I might be sick again." He stared at the woman with hollow eyes. It was strange to come up with a lie all on his own, one that no one had told him to tell. Was it believable? He didn't know. Instead he lobbed the proposition of further vomiting at this stranger, attempting to determine the basis of being asked to disembark. Detour. De-tour. He didn't know what the word meant, but he didn't want to 'de' from their 'tour'.

[Near]

Fuck it.

Near hopped. (No “how high,” but maybe that only went with jump ...) Or: he maneuvered himself out of the truck with as much springy grace as he could muster, which at this point was somewhere between zilch and zero. It made for, he suspected, a more ludicrous show than if he hadn’t put the effort in and just rolled out and fell on his half-numb ass, but it wasn’t like there was anyone whose opinion he cared about in the general area. He brushed himself off from his skewed landing on a patch of spongy dirt and shook his head.

Jude, honest to god.

“If you need to hurl, go hurl,” he muttered.

The woman winced and barked, “Not in the truck.” Because obviously a few bags of dirt and a dead bird would be worse off for a little vomit. But then Near was more inured to a little vomit than most. Hell, on the grand scale of things he was practically a vomit connoisseur; late nights in cheap bars offer an expansive education and tend to knock the squeamish out of you fast. What he was not was a dead owl connoisseur. Maybe it would ruin the feathers.

“Need help?” Near presented the question in the form of a threat. They were in the middle of the woods with a woman who picked up bleeding hitchhikers; they didn’t need to push their questionable luck with Jude’s patented infuriation techniques.

[Jude]

It was a truck bed. It was metal. Were he to vomit again, Jude reasoned that all it needed was a hose. Short of leaving the keys in the truck, there was nothing here for him to steal -- unless the dead bird was some kind of prize. Why? Why make Jude get out of the truck? Stupid Near, all elbows and knees as he clambered out. Useless! Useless and blind! Because apparently Near had never seen a horror movie, or had never seen anything die. Had he been anywhere near Courtland when he died? Was death anything more to Near than a new big house and more zeroes in a bank account?

For a moment, he buried his face in the top of his backpack once more. In his mind's eye, he opened his mouth and screamed. Externally he looked like he was trying to steel himself through another wave of nausea.

Near would be no help. It was up to Jude to ensure he did not get murdered. If bloodshed began, Jude vowed to find some way to use it to his advantage. He was not going to get murdered in the cabin in the woods. No no no.

"No," he grumbled, lifting his head and sliding the pack around to his back. He scooted along the bed and carefully dangled his feet off the edge, shifting his weight until he softly landed on his feet. He made no attempt to look any less surly, calculating that friendliness signaled weakness and made one more murder-able.

Jude wished he could hurl again. He'd hurl right on Near's feet.