{"id":174,"date":"2014-01-01T14:18:27","date_gmt":"2014-01-01T21:18:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/wordpress\/?p=174"},"modified":"2014-01-01T14:22:12","modified_gmt":"2014-01-01T21:22:12","slug":"another-mans-will-prologue","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/?p=174","title":{"rendered":"Another Man’s Will: Prologue"},"content":{"rendered":"

June 6, 1974<\/strong><\/p>\n

The van\u2019s 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.<\/span><\/p>\n

Maybe I should have stuck to the freeways<\/em>, he thought. Fall asleep at the wheel on I-85 and the next day you\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n

He considered closing his eyes. To hell with it<\/em>, he thought. Let gravity and momentum figure out what to do with me<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s DNA.<\/p>\n

\u201cJesus, Russ. Watch the road,\u201d said Eddy from the passenger seat. \u201cYou\u2019ll blow out a tire.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cLet me worry about that,\u201d said Russell. \u201cYou just figure out where the hell we are.\u201d<\/p>\n

Eddy shifted his gaze to the street map sprawled across his lap. Atlanta\u2019s outlands were a tangled patchwork of suburban highways and farm roads, a logistical purgatory dividing the South\u2019s largest metropolis and an endless agrarian void. Russell doubted that Eddy had the faintest idea where they were.<\/p>\n

Rise already, you lazy goddamn sun<\/em>, thought Russel.\u00a0Then 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.<\/p>\n

He poked at the makeshift bandage just below his rib cage and grimaced when blood oozed out. Blood was supposed to be red, wasn\u2019t it? His looked black, now. It\u2019s just the night playing tricks on you<\/em>, he told himself.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe really made a mess back there, didn\u2019t we?\u201d asked Eddy.<\/p>\n

Back there? What do you call things in here?<\/em> \u201cIt\u2019s all right,\u201d said Russell. \u201cEverything is going to be okay. Let\u2019s just get to Atlanta. Dennis has the plane waiting. Soon enough we\u2019ll be a thousand miles away from that godforsaken place and we\u2019ll wake up in our beds tomorrow and all this will have been like a bad dream.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cA bad dream.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cA real bad dream.\u201d<\/p>\n

People don\u2019t die in dreams, though. They open their eyes and they wake up in a cold sweat before that happens.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

They weren\u2019t bad guys, Russell and Eddy. They were peaceniks. Conscientious objectors. There was a framed portrait of Mahatma Gandhi in Russell\u2019s bedroom to prove it.<\/p>\n

They moved drugs around, that\u2019s all. Smoked some grass on occasion. But they didn\u2019t sell the stuff. Didn\u2019t grow the stuff. Just drove it or flew it or boated it where it needed to go. They didn\u2019t deserve this shit. No one did.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t understand it,\u201d said Eddy. \u201cHow could that old lady have known–\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s Land, Georgia.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor Christ\u2019s sake–\u201d started Eddy.<\/p>\n

\u201cListen,\u201d boomed Russell. \u201cNo more talking about what happened in that town. No talking about it now, and no talking about it ever again. Got that?\u201d<\/p>\n

Eddy paused. \u201cOkay, Russ. Relax. I got it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m not sure that you do, so I\u2019m going to be perfectly clear: If I hear you so much as whisper \u2018Elberton\u2019 ever again, it\u2019ll be the last word you speak.\u201d<\/p>\n

When he turned the key in the van\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

June 6, 1974 The van\u2019s 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. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":253,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-another-mans-will"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=174"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":175,"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174\/revisions\/175"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/253"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.vincentmaling.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}