June 6, 1974

The van’s fuel gauge read half-a-tank, but Russell felt like he was running on fumes. He was tired and he was wounded and he was driving a stolen rattletrap down a dark country road, and his last working headlight was losing its fight with the fog. Skin kept rolling over his eyes.

Maybe I should have stuck to the freeways, he thought. Fall asleep at the wheel on I-85 and the next day you’re all over the news, the linchpin of a ten-car pileup. Everyone remembers you. But pass out on a backwoods stretch like this one and you end up at the foot of an uncharted gorge, unnoticed and unburied until a decade later when some hikers or bootleggers stumble across your skeleton and kick some dirt over it.

He considered closing his eyes. To hell with it, he thought. Let gravity and momentum figure out what to do with me.

Then the van hit a pothole at seventy miles-per-hour, and the corpse in the back bounced three feet into the air. When it landed it splattered blood all over the bricks of cocaine stacked beside it. Russell chided himself. Dumb move, putting it back there with the drugs. Now there was blood in the coke, and some poor fuck would have to snort some other poor fuck’s DNA.

“Jesus, Russ. Watch the road,” said Eddy from the passenger seat. “You’ll blow out a tire.”

“Let me worry about that,” said Russell. “You just figure out where the hell we are.”

Eddy shifted his gaze to the street map sprawled across his lap. Atlanta’s outlands were a tangled patchwork of suburban highways and farm roads, a logistical purgatory dividing the South’s largest metropolis and an endless agrarian void. Russell doubted that Eddy had the faintest idea where they were.

Rise already, you lazy goddamn sun, thought Russel. Then at least they’d know their heading. He tried to remember what time it was. But time was as nebulous as space in this nightmare. Morning was hours away, for all he knew.

He poked at the makeshift bandage just below his rib cage and grimaced when blood oozed out. Blood was supposed to be red, wasn’t it? His looked black, now. It’s just the night playing tricks on you, he told himself.

“We really made a mess back there, didn’t we?” asked Eddy.

Back there? What do you call things in here? “It’s all right,” said Russell. “Everything is going to be okay. Let’s just get to Atlanta. Dennis has the plane waiting. Soon enough we’ll be a thousand miles away from that godforsaken place and we’ll wake up in our beds tomorrow and all this will have been like a bad dream.”

“A bad dream.”

“A real bad dream.”

People don’t die in dreams, though. They open their eyes and they wake up in a cold sweat before that happens.

Tonight, three people had done the scary dream routine in reverse: opened their eyes real wide, then fell asleep forever. Three, before Russell and Eddy had hightailed it out of there. Maybe more, afterwards.

They weren’t bad guys, Russell and Eddy. They were peaceniks. Conscientious objectors. There was a framed portrait of Mahatma Gandhi in Russell’s bedroom to prove it.

They moved drugs around, that’s all. Smoked some grass on occasion. But they didn’t sell the stuff. Didn’t grow the stuff. Just drove it or flew it or boated it where it needed to go. They didn’t deserve this shit. No one did.

“I don’t understand it,” said Eddy. “How could that old lady have known–”

Russell slammed on the breaks and pulled the van to a stop in the middle of the road. He shut off the engine and let the crickets demonstrate just how quiet it was — how quiet Russell wanted it to be — way out in No Man’s Land, Georgia.

“For Christ’s sake–” started Eddy.

“Listen,” boomed Russell. “No more talking about what happened in that town. No talking about it now, and no talking about it ever again. Got that?”

Eddy paused. “Okay, Russ. Relax. I got it.”

“I’m not sure that you do, so I’m going to be perfectly clear: If I hear you so much as whisper ‘Elberton’ ever again, it’ll be the last word you speak.”

When he turned the key in the van’s ignition, the single working headlight flickered to life. Russell found himself cheering it on. If a two-dollar, mass-market Chinese bulb could make it to Atlanta, he and Eddy had a fighting chance.