She crossed the open desert, one bleeding foot after the other. Through dark and bitter cold. A hundred billion stars burning overhead. Her hands and arms lacerated. A crying wind cutting her to the bone. But the pain was a fire burning in the dark, and what she had left behind would soon come catching up to her. So she went on, one bleeding foot after the other.
After many hours, she arrived at a dirt road. She followed it by the light of the moon until she reached a hill so steep she had to crane her neck to see the top of it. At the summit sat a small house, its silhouette barely visible against the night sky. She looked back the way she had come. Although she saw nothing, heard nothing, she knew they were out there, coming for her.
She went up. She saw the porch light dead, every window of the ramshackle house dark. Weeds surrounded a junkyard, filled with rusted car frames and rotted beams and shards of glass that snapped underfoot. And other signs: an old pickup in the driveway, locked, fresh tire tread and bootprints in the dirt.
She tried the rear door to the house. The door swung free. She stepped inside and let the latch click softly behind her.
The interior was painted blue in the moonlight, shadow-filled, quiet as a graveyard. She sat on the linoleum and pried her sneakers from her throbbing feet. Her socks were soaked with blood and stunk like death. She winced her way to her feet holding her shoes in one hand and led herself by the wall down the hallway, stepping carefully on the creaking floorboards.
She rounded the corner. A dim glow flickered at the end of the hallway. Through the low entryway she entered the living room. An old man in grease-stained overalls sprawled across a flowerprint couch that looked as if it had been left outside for years in the dust. His eyes were closed, his mouth open, completely still. For a moment, she thought him dead. Then his chest filled slowly with air and he let go of a long snore like the air being let out of a balloon.
He dozed in the blue glow of the television set. On the screen played a muted black and white horror film: a man with wild, desperate eyes running through dark woods, screaming soundlessly as he transformed frame by frame into a snarling werewolf.
She set her shoes next to the couch and went into the kitchen. She turned on the light and drank straight from the faucet, the water splashing over her face. When she came up for air she caught the ghost of her reflection in the window — her jumpsuit shredded from razorwire, a gash along her hairline and blood matted down the side of her face. Beneath her clothes, she knew it would be one long smear from her collarbone to her toes.
She found a can of baked beans in the cupboard and a can opener in the drawer. She opened the can and drank it where she stood, letting it pour down her chin, hardly chewing. Then she took another can and opened it and took it with a spoon back to the living room. She sat on the free end of the couch, spooning beans into her mouth and half-watching the movie. She faintly remembered seeing this one once, a lifetime ago, on a fuzzy VHS in her mother’s desert trailer a hundred miles from anywhere.
The old man snorted to life. He looked over at her on the other side of the couch, then turned back to the TV. The werewolf lunged through the trees after a screaming teenage girl. After a few moments, he looked at her again, blinking through bleary bloodshot eyes.
“Am I dreaming?” he asked.
She imagined the way she looked to him, half in the dark and bloodied.
“You should go back to sleep,” she said.
He stared at her for a long time, breathing through his open mouth, then turned his head back to the TV. They watched in silence for several minutes. A tall black man dressed in Wild West mortician’s clothes beckoned to the camera with long fingers. His image was superimposed over a montage of scenes of terrified teenagers being hunted and murdered.
The man reminded her of her father, killed weeks before she was born in a hail of gunfire. Growing up, she had only the one photo: a tall, thin black man from a place called Angola. In the picture he wore a long leather jacket and held a gloved fist above his head, a rifle aloft in his other hand. She lost the photo many years ago.
On the screen, the werewolf howled at the moon with red jaws, the screen awash in buckets of fake blood.
The movie cut out and the screen went black. The blackness became a BREAKING NEWS graphic. Her face appeared on the screen, text scrolling beneath her mugshot — her name, her crime, her escape. Extremely dangerous, it read. Call the authorities. Do not approach.
The old man’s eyeballs turned in his head in her direction. His head and body frozen in place. She sighed. He winced.
“Now you just stay right there,” she said getting up. Like a child, he did as he was told.
She crossed the kitchen linoleum in her squishing socks and in one motion pulled the rotary phone from the wall. It came free in chunks of drywall and dust and dangling red and blue wires. She set it on the countertop, then opened the fridge and surveyed its contents. There was nothing but swill beer and condiments and a plastic sack of candy bars.
She came back to the living room with the sack. The old man remained frozen on the couch, whiteknuckling the armrest.
“Do you have another phone?” she asked.
“No, ma’am.”
“A cell?”
“A what?”
She took his wallet from the mantle and pulled out the cash, an assortment of loose bills that totaled no more than fifty dollars. She returned the wallet to the mantle and picked up the keys.
“I left you the beer. Troopers will be around the next day. Maybe two days at the latest. All the same, you should ration the beans.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She walked down the hall and was out the door.
She drove through the night.
She drove hunched over the wheel, chewing candy bars one by one and letting the wrappers fall to the floor. Her breath smoked in the dark cab. Wind lashed the truck. It rained mile after mile. A wolf howled somewhere in the darkness. A werewolf. She passed no cars, came to no checkpoints. The terrain was empty and vast and made her feel like she was the last person alive on Earth. Her earliest and most cherished fantasy. She gunned the truck to eighty, ninety, one hundred miles per hour, pushing for the horizon. She would be free or she would burn in bright flames.
•••
Shane Joaquin Jimenez is a writer whose work has appeared in the Greensboro Review, Denver Quarterly, Hunger Mountain, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Millions, Film International, and elsewhere. This story is an excerpt from Bondage, a novel-in-progress. He lives in Portland, OR, with his wife and children.