American Elsewhere

CHAPTER FORTY




There is a certain darkness you can never imagine until you are actually in it. It is a darkness so deep and complete it not only makes you doubt if you have ever seen light, it also makes you doubt if the world is still truly there: If I stretch out my hands, you think, will I feel anything? If I walk in one direction for miles and miles and days and days, will there be only nothing, nothing forever and ever?

But Mona finds herself lost in a darkness even deeper than that. Her feet do not touch the ground; her lungs pull no air; her nerves report neither heat nor coolness. There is only the dark and the nothing.

Then forms begin to appear. Trees. Rocks. Stars. But it is as if she is seeing them through a dark filter—they are there in only the most muted, superficial sense.

She begins to realize she is still in the same place, still in the pine forest below the mesa, but she is also, like so many places in Wink, somewhere else at the same time.

She begins to see.

She is in a stone chamber, like a crypt. There is no light in the chamber, yet she can see. There are no corners: the chamber is round. The floor is flat and filthy, and in the center of the floor is a pile of bones.

Not just bones. Rabbit skulls.

The double vision slowly fades: she is now within this room only.

Mona swallows. This place, though so much of it escapes her senses, feels trapped, hermetic. Unlike much of Wink, it does not bleed into anything else, does not fade imperceptibly into a park or a backyard or someone’s upper room; it is even different from the mirror room at Coburn, which seemed to float in nothing, like a capsule lost below the sea; no, this is a jail cell at the very fringes of existence.

So what is jailed here?

Her eyes struggle to make sense of the space: is this chamber vastly huge, or tiny? When she looks in one direction it feels like a cathedral vault, yet in another it is like a kitchen cupboard.

Maybe it is big to me, she thinks, but tiny to whatever is trapped here.

But still the question remains—what is trapped here? The room appears empty, and there are no doors or windows, no hiding places of any kind. Is she alone? She does not think so: she does not feel alone. Whatever is here is watching her.

Helpless, Mona keeps slowly turning around, yet on each turn her eye wanders back to the pile of rabbit skulls. Finally she stops turning and walks to them.

She picks one up. Looks at it. Then, very quickly, everything begins to vibrate.

Without any warning, she’s suddenly in another part of the rounded chamber, looking in a different direction. It takes her a moment to reorient herself.

She looks in her hand. The rabbit skull is gone.

She returns to the pile and picks up another. For a moment there is nothing, and then everything begins to vibrate again like she’s stuck in a paint shaker, and before she can do more she’s staring into the stone wall of the chamber. Once more she has been transported to a different part of the room. Her fingers clutch nothing, for again the rabbit skull is gone.

In the inexplicable manner of dream logic, she begins to understand:

The skulls are not skulls. They look like skulls, but they aren’t, not really. They’re doors. Little tiny doors that, when activated, take you to this place. But when they’re activated here, they can’t bring you far at all, can they?

Maybe they bring you halfway, thinks Mona, and allow whatever is in here to venture out halfway as well, and meet you.

Then she sees it: something is moving over her shoulder, like a portion of the rounded stone wall is rippling liquid. She does not want to look, she does not, but she cannot help but see a form begin to emerge, tall and thin, and when she sees what appears to be a face (a face carved of wood?) then everything begins to…

Change.

She first sees a man, standing quite still and wearing a curious blue canvas suit that is covered in tiny wooden rabbit heads. On his face he wears a primitive wooden mask, suggesting the face of a rabbit, but its features are spare and simple, giving it a blank, furious look.

But this is only an image. Behind it, in a deeper way, is something else.

She does not want to look. But she cannot help it.

She sees

(a figure, tall and ropy)

(an arched back and bony shoulders)

(covered in hair)

(arms like needles, stretching for miles)

(how does it stand)

(on such thin legs)

(and its face)

(so, so long)

(and its eyes)

(so terribly)

(huge)

(don’t look)

(don’t)

Just as with Parson and Mrs. Benjamin, this vision threatens to overwhelm her. But Mona has been figuring out a few things since she’s been here in Wink. In Weringer’s bedroom she was able to avoid the deep places, the places on the other side. Why couldn’t she do the same here?

So she focuses, and breathes, and relaxes… and with a simple push, she picks up this horrible image and packages it away, pushing it in one direction and her own mind in another, until all she can see is the man in the filthy rabbit costume…

Yet as she does so, she understands that whatever this man is—whatever he really is—is much, much more powerful than Parson or Mrs. Benjamin. The man in the blue rabbit suit is not a simple vessel, like those used by so many “people” in Wink. Rather, whatever is in this jail cell with her just chooses to manifest as this odd sight, a filthy man in a filthy rabbit suit. She supposes it could manifest as whatever it wished: in this place, the difference between it and a god is too small to matter.

She breathes deeply, and focuses. “Who are you?” she asks.

The man stares at her. She cannot see any eyes through the holes in his mask.

“Am I meant to be here?” asks Mona. “Did I come here by accident?”

The man cocks his head, like a curious dog. Mona finds the sight repulsive. Then the man raises an arm and reaches out to her, but stops, fingers trembling. It is an oddly sentimental gesture, as if he wishes to touch her face and yet adores her too much to bring himself to do so.

Mona withdraws a little. “What do you want?” she asks.

The man slowly drops his arm. He cocks his head one way, then the other. Then he appears to come to some decision, and reaches up to take off his mask.

Mona wonders if she should turn away. The horrors that reside in this town seem to possess many secrets too large for her mind, and whatever lies behind that mask should surely be one of them. But as he removes the wooden mask, she sees something she never expected.

“Oh, my God,” she says, surprised.

At first she thinks it is her own face—because those are most certainly her eyes, deep and rounded and charcoal-brown, and her lips, so dark and thin—but it is a male face, with sharp, hard cheekbones, and many lines, as if this face has been exposed to brutal conditions day in and day out for decades. The man looks at her in a manner both wary and full of longing, as if he wishes for her to accept him, even come to love him, but cannot bring himself to believe she ever would.

He looks so much like me, thinks Mona. He could even be my brother.

“What is this?” she asks him.

The man slumps forward a little. He looks away as if her response has deeply disappointed him.

“What do you mean by this?” Mona asks him.

He shakes his head. He suddenly looks terribly distraught. He buries his face in his hands.

“Wait,” says Mona, “are you trying to say that—”

But then things begin to swim around her, and she hears someone saying her name.


“—ight? Miss Bright?”

It’s dark again. Mona realizes she has her eyes shut. She opens them, and sees the lights of Wink just below her. She is back in the forest: in one hand she holds a bloody, empty box, and in the other a rabbit skull. She hears someone crashing through the undergrowth. Then Gracie emerges from the trees at the edge of the clearing.

“What happened?” Mona asks.

Gracie says, “There you are. Are you all right?”

Mona inspects herself. “I think so.”

“Where were you? Were you here this whole time?”

The question is simple enough, but Mona is not sure how to answer.

“I’ve been looking for you for over half an hour!” says Gracie. “I walked by here calling your name, but I swear I didn’t see this place. I don’t remember it being here at all. So—” She freezes, eye drawn to the two cowboy boots poking out from underneath the brush. “Wh… what’s that? Is that—is that man… dead?”

“What?” says Mona absently. “Oh. Yeah.”

“Did you kill him?” asks Gracie.

“Yes.”

“Oh.” She stares at the body, not daring to ask more.

Mona’s still thinking about what Gracie just said—so this whole clearing just went missing when she picked up the skull? She turns it over in her fingers, wondering if it could still pose a threat. She thinks not: perhaps its batteries have been drained, so to speak. A one-shot ticket.

She replaces the little skull in the bloody box, kneels, and hides the box in the weeds. She is not sure what it did to her, but she does not want to carry it any farther. “They were bringing this here,” she says.

Gracie does not answer: she is backing away slowly, her attention fixed on Dee’s body.

“Gracie!” says Mona sharply.

Gracie jumps a little. “Wh-what?”

“They were bringing this box here,” says Mona. “They didn’t come here to attack us. Just to bring this. Why would they do that?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never heard of such a thing.”

“Has your”—Mona struggles as she wonders how to word this—“ friend heard of it?” She nods toward the canyon.

“He’s never mentioned it.”

Mona turns back to the little bloody box hiding in the weeds. “It took me someplace. When I opened it, it took me and… I think this whole clearing someplace. Somewhere not in Wink. I mean, I know a lot of places in Wink aren’t actually in Wink, whatever that means, but… somewhere even farther than that.”

“Why would they want to do that to you?”

Mona starts back up the hill to the mouth of the canyon. “I don’t think they wanted to do that to me,” she says. “Come on. Let’s go meet your boyfriend.”





CHCAPTER FORTY-ONE




Unlike nearly everyone who works for him at the Roadhouse, Bolan has a vehicle devoid of any overweening masculinity: his chosen chariot is not a neon-colored sports car, or a muscle-y, amped-up truck, but a bland, nondescript Honda Civic whose sole embellishment is satellite radio. Bolan chose to purchase this car the day he drove back to his home in his Camaro with over three-quarters of a million dollars in the trunk, hands jittering all the way as he tried to imagine how he would explain his cargo to any highway patrolman who just happened to pull him over due to a vague dislike for his ride.

No—Bolan does not plan to go out like that. He’d rather drive a nebbishy, emasculated car than get collared that way.

But the Civic has trouble getting to the more remote places here. Bolan never considered that, because he never intended to go into the mountains: he has never wished to go to Wink, never wanted to start down its many winding roads, so he did not choose a car that could handle this terrain. Yet here he is, struggling up an insane incline, wincing as he waits for the road to drop away, when he’ll have to start mashing on the brake.

Finally he comes to the highway crossroads. He has seen this destination only on a map: it is a frequent pickup spot for Zimmerman, and he often comes back with several pounds of incredibly pure heroin. It is a bit surreal to finally see it in real life. He can see the sign welcoming everyone to Wink just a few feet down, and beyond that the crystalline spiderweb of the town.

Bolan pulls off the road, throwing up tons of dust, and gets out.

The headlights turn the dust into a swirling khaki-colored mist. It’s almost impenetrable to the eye. Bolan remembers what the message on the machine said—you will have to look down—and dutifully looks down.

There is just gravel there, of course. But as the dust settles, he sees he’s parked on the edge of a small cliff. He never even noticed it. If he hadn’t stopped, he would have driven over the edge.

Nervous (for Bolan does not like heights), he walks to the edge of the cliff, and looks down. There’s a long ravine at the bottom, which, after the fog of dust recedes, fills with pink moonlight. Just a few yards below Bolan is a small rent in the cliff wall, and there is something uncomfortably organic about it, as if it is the cliff’s navel, or (Bolan’s mind does not really want to go there but what can you do) some kind of vaginal orifice.

That’s the place, of course. It has to be.

Bolan hasn’t worked as a legman in decades, but he was still smart enough to bring a flashlight. He takes it out and walks along the roadside, flashing the rocks and the trees, looking for a way down. He finds one path that is incredibly dangerous, almost a sheer drop down to the bottom of the ravine, but it’s less sheer than the rest of the cliff wall.

It takes him twenty minutes to climb down. I am going to get this creepy motherf*cker, he thinks, to cough up a significant fee for this act.

But of course Bolan will do no such thing.

He gets to the bottom of the ravine and puts his hands on his knees and puffs for a while. When he finally gains the strength to lift his head, he sees he is not alone.

There is someone standing in front of the hole in the cliff wall. The person is not facing him, but the moon: he stands directly underneath the pale pink orb with one arm up, fingers clawed as if desperate to grasp it.

Bolan can see that the person is wearing a pale blue suit and a white panama hat. He waits for the man to acknowledge him, but he never does: the man just stands there, frozen, reaching for the moon. Bolan gives up and begins to approach, though warily.

When he’s about twenty yards away he notices the man in the panama hat is a lot shorter than he remembered. But then, what can he remember about this man? He remembers the briefcase full of heroin, the appearances at the edges of the Roadhouse’s parking lot, but not much else. But whatever he remembers, he does not remember this.

Because the person in front of the cave is not a man, but a young girl of about sixteen. She has dirty-blond hair that hangs down from the back of the white panama hat in a crooked sheet—obviously, she does not know how to make long hair work with such a hat.

Bolan stops. He scratches his nose, feeling terribly awkward. Finally the girl drops her arm, stares at her hand for a while, and turns to face Bolan.

Her eyes are wide and mad, but the rest of her face is vacant of any expression at all. Finally she smiles dreamily. “You look surprised.”

“That’s because I am,” he says. “Where’s your boss?”

“Boss?”

“Yeah. The man who messaged me.”

“I messaged you,” she says.

Bolan frowns at her.

“Do you not recognize me?” she asks.

He looks at her for a while. Something flutters in her eyes, far at the back. He says, uncertainly, “No.”

She laughs a laugh that’s mostly clicks from somewhere in her throat. “That’s because I’ve changed. But it is still me, in here.”

There’s a sound from the cave entrance, an oddly wet sound like someone emptying a bucket of water. Bolan glances at the cave: it is a surprisingly dark hole in the cliff wall, and he can see no end, so it must continue back for several feet. Or more.

“Okay?” says Bolan.

“You’re not comforted.”

“No. The guy said he might die tonight. So I have to assume he did.”

“Oh, yes. That’s right. I forgot I told you that.” She smiles wider. “Well. I didn’t die. Let’s say I wanted to test what my adversaries knew. And I found they don’t know much. I feared they might know a way to kill me—after all, they are my elders, and usually know much more—but they didn’t. Perhaps they’ve been trapped here for so long they’ve forgotten how we fight.”

“Okay,” says Bolan, who is feeling more uncomfortable with every passing second.

She gazes at him solemnly for a long time. Bolan awkwardly stares at the ground and waits. He has never held such a long in-person conversation with his superior—who might or might not be a teenage girl, he isn’t sure. It’s like talking to someone from a mental ward, or a prison, like she’s been in isolation for so long she’s forgotten how to talk with normal people.

“The totem is on its way to the canyon, correct?” she asks.

“Yeah. I sent them up there with the box this evening.”

“And you have no reason to expect any issues?”

“No. Should I?”

She stares at him again, that wild, mad gaze of a cultist or a street preacher.

Bolan’s impatience eventually outweighs his fear. “So… why am I here, again?”

“You’re here because I wanted to show you something.” She gestures to the cave. “This way.” With stiff, awkward steps, she walks to the cave entrance, and strolls in without looking back.

“Shit,” says Bolan, and fumbles with the flashlight as he catches up.

The cave is quite spacious, tall enough to admit him without his having to duck. It is also curiously even, as if it was drilled or carved into the rock. But its sides gleam a little, as if moist, and when he reaches out to touch them the girl in the panama hat says, “I wouldn’t,” and Bolan does not argue.

“Where are we?” he asks.

“You have your headquarters,” says the girl. “I have mine. This is where we’ve been gathering.”

Bolan thinks—We? He begins looking backward, trying to see if he can spot any figures following them into the tunnel.

“Have you ever been an outcast, Mr. Bolan?” asks the girl.

“Uh, an outcast?”

“Yes.”

“Not really, I guess.”

“It is not a pleasant experience. We all wish to belong. We all have our families, our communities, our hierarchies. And we all wish to be thought well of in the eyes of those above us. But to be denied that—to have it withheld, and to be forgotten, when you are so deserving of attention—can you imagine anything worse?”

Bolan decides now is a great time to be diplomatic. “I can’t.” He is keeping the flashlight trained on the floor, watching the gleaming heels of the girl’s two-tone shoes as they pace over the tunnel floor. But at one point the walls recede from his vision, and he realizes they have just entered what must be an immense cavern.

Then the girl isn’t there anymore. It’s just him and his flashlight, standing at the entrance to this huge cavern. Bolan hears noises in the cavern: that wet, sloshing noise, and what he can only think of as a sloughing sound. Something in this chamber is moving, he realizes. Probably because he’s just walked in, which makes it—whatever it is—nervous.

A hand snaps out of the dark and snatches the wrist holding the flashlight. He yelps a little, and squirms to see it’s the girl in the panama hat.

“I would keep your flashlight trained on me,” she says softly, “and what I wish you to view, and nothing else.”

“Why?”

“Because there are things in the dark here, Mr. Bolan. Things I do not think you wish to see.”

The noises in the cave increase. His ears become hysterical half-wits, telling him he is hearing pits of snakes, octopuses in underground pools, alligators turning over in the churning mud. He stares into the wide, mad eyes of the girl, who is breathing hard, with flushed cheeks. Bolan is uncomfortably reminded of his high school girlfriend, whose cheeks pinkened that exact same way when she was horny, as if she were almost to the point of overheating and had to strip from fear of death.

“Do you know why I engaged your services?” the girl asks.

Bolan thinks of several answers, and knows all of them are wrong. “Not really.”

“I contacted you,” she says, “because I wished to stage a reunion.”

“All right?”

“And some people were very difficult about that. Some people did not wish to reunite with anyone. They claimed they were happy where they were. But no one,” she says slowly, with a touch of fear in her eyes, “is ever really happy where they are—are they?”

“I guess you’re onto something there.”

“No. No, they’re not.” She looks away into the darkness, as if she can see right into it. She thinks, then looks back at Bolan with a knowing gleam in her eyes. “Look,” she says. She forcefully turns his hand over—she’s as strong as a goddamn ox, somehow—and shines his light on something lying on the ground at the cave wall.

There is a glistening white deposit of some mineral there, nearly four feet tall and about six feet in diameter. It looks like the ceiling has been dripping down onto this spot for millennia, leaving traces of… whatever that is on the cave floor. The girl drags him over to it, and reaches out and touches the deposit, which crumbles apart like flour.

She holds her fingers up to Bolan’s face with the traces of powder still on their tips. “Does that look familiar?”

Bolan looks at it. He slowly begins to understand what the girl is suggesting. “Is that… no. No way.”

She smiles. “They’re making it now. Can you not hear them?” She cocks her head, and points to the ceiling. Bolan looks up, but can see nothing but darkness above them. Then there’s a wet sucking sound, and a soft moan, and a huge dollop of something white plummets out of the darkness to smack into the top of the white pile.

Bolan almost falls back, but the girl holds him up. “It takes a while for it to dry,” she says calmly. “And it took us a while to get the formula right. But with the resources I’ve gathered here, there really isn’t much I can’t make.”

He has never been more repulsed and terrified in his life. Did something up there really excrete or shit out a whole f*cking kilo of what this girl is suggesting is heroin?

She is clearly enjoying his confusion. “You look surprised.”

“Please take me out of here,” says Bolan. He cannot stop staring into the shadows, wondering what stands just beyond the penumbra of his flashlight, staring back at him.

“Are you afraid?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. Because I don’t think… I don’t think we’re alone in here.”

“You’ve never been alone. We’ve always been there at the edges of things, watching. You see us when we wish you to.”

“Please. Please get me out of here.”

“Not yet,” she says. “I have one more thing to show you.” She turns the flashlight to the left, where there’s something else down along the cave wall.

It’s a stack of metal blocks of varying sizes: some are the size of shoeboxes, others the size of nickels. The proportions remain the same, however, each time an absolutely perfect cube, save for the odd notches and scuffs in their edges.

Though the blocks appear rather unremarkable—just bland gray, and six square sides—there is something about them that pulls Bolan’s eye to them. He can’t stop looking at them—in fact, now that he knows that they’re here, he feels that his thoughts will be drawn back to them long after he leaves this place. There is something intensely heavy about them: they make his teeth hurt, like the cubes are slowly but inexorably pulling the fillings out of his skull.

He realizes that these are the blocks of metal he’s been sending Dee out to get for the past months. He’s never actually seen one in person. Now he knows what Dee is always bitching about: it’s as if merely seeing them has left an imprint on his bones.

“What are they?” he asks.

The girl is silent for a long time. He glances sideways at her and sees that tears are streaming down her face. This sight awakens some long-dormant paternal instinct in Bolan, and he briefly experiences the desire to give this crying girl a hug before remembering that the thing holding his hand is probably not a girl of any kind.

“Have you ever in your life, Mr. Bolan,” asks the girl, “looked on your parents’ remains?”

“No,” says Bolan, who never knew his father, and whose mother died in prison.

“Then I cannot describe it to you. It hurts to look at them. But it hurts even more to hold them.” She releases him, and walks to the stack of blocks. She reaches out to one, stoops, and picks it up.

Immediately her fingers begin smoking. The skin on her palm turns glossy black, like volcanic glass, then crumples and cracks to reveal brilliant red flesh.

“Jesus Christ!” cries Bolan.

The girl stares at her withering hand impassively. “Your kind can’t touch Her,” she says reverently. “She is too much for you. Only we can touch Her, in our real forms. But people tend to take notice of our real forms when we move out in the open.”

She looks at Bolan as if she’s just remembered he’s there. Then she walks to him, smoking, crinkling hand outstretched. He turns his head away, but does not dare step back, for what could be waiting in those shadows?

“Do you see what this does to me?” she says. “Do you see?”

“I see! I f*cking see!”

“What I hold in my hand now is more important than your drug, than your money, than the lives of your men. What I hold in my hand is more important than my own life, and the lives of everyone else who’s come to gather and work in this cavern with me. I would murder this entire town for what I hold in my hand. Do you understand me?”

“I got you!” Bolan casts an eye back over his shoulder, wondering if he should try running for it.

“Soon I will need you to find the last pieces. I believe I know where one is, one I’ve asked you about so many times—the largest piece yet. You will find it for me. You must find it for me.”

The black has spread to the back of the girl’s hand, where the skin is splitting like a shirt several sizes too small. Bolan can see tendons encased in pink tissue, then it all sloughs off and curls away as if the hand is molting.

“I will! Jesus Christ, I will!”

The girl nods. “Good,” she says, and—her one hand still sputtering like a dying torch—calmly walks to the stack and replaces the block on the top. She stands there, staring reverently at the block as one would at a gravestone, and nods and walks back to Bolan. “I will take you out now.”

She walks to the cavern entrance. Bolan turns to follow her, but as he does his flashlight beam happens to shoot out across the cavern.

And when it does, he sees something.

For one thing, the cave is enormous—bigger than a football field. But though the cavern is vast, almost all of it is occupied: there is something heaped in the center, and the heap is so huge it almost touches the walls on all sides.

As the image fades, he realizes it is not a heap: it is a series of stacks, stacks of blocks like the one he just saw, but there must be thousands—no, millions of them. They have been put together almost like a jigsaw, with tiny ones sandwiched between larger ones, and though they are all quite angular, as he considers the sight he realizes they make a shape much like a giant body lying on the cavern floor.

And as he stumbles down the tunnel, he realizes he saw something else.

There were things crawling across the stacks of blocks. Dark, shapeless things, dozens of them, hundreds of them, with many arms and legs (or tentacles?), headless, spineless creatures, like enormous jellyfish, all crawling across the sides and roof of the cave…

He is too stunned to think. Then a thought rises through all his numb terror: What the f*ck have I gotten myself into?

He is still in a stupor when the girl leads him out of the tunnel. She turns and begins speaking to him, but he is too horrified to hear. Then he realizes she has stopped speaking, and is staring at him curiously.

There is an odd sound coming from his pocket: his cell phone is playing its blues-riff ringtone.

“Your body is beeping,” says the girl.

“Oh,” says Bolan. “Shit. Sorry.” He answers it, and, in the manner of cell phone users everywhere, steps a few paces away to take the call. But the girl in the panama hat apparently has no knowledge of phone etiquette, for she follows him step for step, staring at him curiously.

Bolan listens to the call. He says “okay,” three times, with various inflections: there’s “Okay?” and “Okay…” and, finally, a soft, grim “Okay.”

He hangs up. He turns to the girl, wondering how to put this.

“Things at the canyon,” he says slowly, “have not gone well. That new girl was there. The girl in the red car? The one you had us investigating?”

She gives no sign of understanding: she just waits for more.

“And I guess she must be a f*cking Green Beret or something because, uh… it seems she killed one of my men, and severely wounded another.” Ordinarily Bolan would be furious about this—because what the f*ck was this girl doing there, and why weren’t they warned about this, and how did we not know she could outclass us that way, etc., etc.—but after what he saw in that cave, Bolan is going to try his goddamnedest to stay on the good side of the girl in the panama hat.

She looks away, thinking. She turns 180 degrees and stares in the exact opposite direction as she considers it.

She turns back around. “And the totem?”

“The guy who got killed was the one carrying it.”

“And your men did not recover it?”

“He made it sound like he would have gotten shot dead if he tried. This lady is… serious business, it seems.”

The girl in the panama hat looks away once more, and again turns 180 degrees as she thinks.

Bolan feels something drip down the side of his face, and realizes he is sweating. No one has made him sweat for over fifteen years, but here he is, being grilled by a teenage girl dressed like a f*cking zoot-suiter on vacation in the Caribbean.

Finally she turns back around. If this information is troubling to her, she does not show it. “You brought a car,” she says.

“Huh? Yeah. Yeah, I brought a car.”

She nods. “I am going to need a ride.”