Meminisse

Sunday August 12, 2001 - Afternoon

There is a rhythm to the road. A feel for driving long distances is a communal sacrament known to the long haul trucker, the travelling salesman of yesteryear, and the itinerant wanderer. If one isn’t careful, that siren song of the journey, of travel becoming home, can suffuse someone with its wanderlust. To some the hum of the asphalt beneath the tires can become therapeutic. The music of the radio and its soft static underpinnings are conducive to thoughts, both those that can heal and harm. That is, if a person’s mind is susceptible to such.

The drive just to depart the United States was going to come out to just under a thousand miles all said and told. Several hundred of those miles were already behind her. High-Tide was well into the second day of driving. At Floyd’s Frosty in the lee of Mount Shasta, she leaned against the hood of the beast. Her road atlas spread open on the expanse of yellow and black metal. Her milkshake was sweating condensation in its foam to go cup. Her burger held in her left hand as the right used a capped pen to trace the line of road she had yet to travel.

Thala was perched atop the roof of the beast. Her legs swung back and forth through the closed door while she herself ate a cheeseburger, or at least the perceived image of one in High-Tide’s mind. Her eyes were turned down towards the atlas on the hood of the car. Her mouth opened as if she were about to speak, when from the older sister’s mind came the already answering thought.

“I know you’ve got the road atlas in your head sis. Or… I’ve totes got it in my head. However the hell it works ‘cause of the glasses. All the same man, I wanna do it like this. Feel the map under the fingers, yeh? So, we drive the rest of the day. We'll be in Ashland. Sleep. Next day, Portland. Crash for the night yo- and then straight shot on out through Peace Arch Crossing. From there the Ninety Nine to the One. The Trans-Canada Expressway yo.” The shark chewed thoughtfully at her burger while regarding that map. “Dude.” she just breathed the word out softly, It wasn’t so much in disbelief, the distance she was going to drive was a reality. It was more how daunting it, and everything else to come was.

Through Thala she had some conception of what was to come. What Recruiter 17 wanted her to be. The important question had yet to really be answered. What did she want? For the past month she’d wanted nothing short of bloody retribution. To viscerally feel her revenge and have it fill that gaping hole in her chest. Her head tipped back and up and she looked to the rising peak of Mt. Shasta just beyond the roofs of the town surrounding her. The Volcano earned an arch of the brow from the girl. Her thoughts however were interrupted as she ruminated.

“Minerva Knox-Trudeau! You are not going to have a Volcano Lair! First off, utterly trope-laden. Secondly, your name isn’t Ernst Stavro Blofeld! Third, you’re a shark! There is no ocean or large body of water for miles! Fourth and most importantly, Mr. Shasta is an active volcano and considered one of highest concern by the Geological Survey. It is well due for an eruption, and we are talking about the scale of it erupting every half a century or so! So absolutely not!”

“Okay, geeze…” the shark mumbled out in reply with a gentle roll of her eyes, and turned back to the task at hand of devouring her burger. From the corner of her eye however, she saw something that caused her heart to drop.

A beagle with a post hole digger hauling earth up and out in the front yard of the house across the way. He then sunk in what she knew was coming. The Foreclosure Sale sign was firmly put in place, and the earth packed back down at its base. It gnawed at the pit of her, a ball of righteous anger forming in her belly. The cause that her father, her family had been murdered over sang in her veins. Her teeth were showing, and her back was going a bit hunched. It would be so simple, she could just smash in the canine's gut and have it over with. Then what? Go murder everyone at the real estate office? The bank foreclosing? How many more murders lay before her?

Would Murder bring the change she wanted in the world? The change her dad had been fighting for? Through the cavalcade of thought, Thala simply watched her with those rosy hued eyes. Murder was a tool, a messy, and final tool. It was part of the carceral tool kit the Sheriff of Santa Cruz County had used. Her jaw tightened slowly at the corners. It belonged in her kit for use on those deserving of unspeakable violence. This was just some poor schmuck stuck working a shitty nine to five. Her burger was slowly finished. There were ways to slow this guy up without ever laying a hand on him.

Thala’s expression slowly melted into a smile from the neutral observation she’d been in. “Oh, I like that idea sis. You have an extra gauze roll in the duffle bag.” The shark polished off her milkshake, keeping an eye on the dog as he started to walk across the street. She popped the trunk and began rooting around in the duffle for the gauze, and thus armed, she started to cross the street while the dog meandered into Floyd’s. She had just a few minutes to get the deed done.

In a further little flash of rebellion, after stuffing the whole roll of gauze down into that gas tank, she keyed the winged helix right into the driver’s side door. Violence against property like this? This didn’t shatter any ethical lines she didn’t want to cross. This she could easily do. Mischief laid, she hustled back across the street and clambered into Beast. Maybe, just maybe, that act of hers would delay a few people from getting the business end of a bastard bank foreclosure. She dropped the beast into gear and steered out of the dusty parking lot of Floyd’s Freeze, driving off and heading back to the five. There was still plenty of daylight to burn, and there were still miles to turn before turning in for the night.