There won't be any rest stop; the accident is too close, and the taste of ashes is too strong. "Could we maybe slow down a little?" I ask, doing my best to look sick but-not-that-sick, unsettled by the heat and the speed and the road, but not quite into the territory of serious illness. It's a difficult masquerade, and not one I have much familiarity with.
Maybe it helps that it's not entirely a lie; I really am feeling sick to my stomach, and the pain in my back is bad enough that it feels like my tattoo is trying to burrow all the way into my flesh. Chris nods, easing back on the gas. "Sure, Rose," he says. "Just let me know when you're feeling better, okay? Are you sure we don't need to stop?"
"Not yet," I say, and smile wanly. It's the smile that does it.
He's still looking at me when we come around the bend, moving slower than we were, but not slow enough, and the taste of ashes and lilies takes everything away even before Chris starts swearing, hauling hard on the steering wheel, tires finding no traction on asphalt slick with oil and rough with bits of broken glass and broken futures. He's shouting, and the air stinks like burning rubber, and someone's screaming, and I think it's me--
And he's lost control of the car, he doesn't know it yet, but the car does. She's trying to help, tires straining for purchase, engine screaming with the effort of survival. She's too young, the bond between them too fragile, and in the end, she's just a machine, barely aware enough to know that she's about to--
And the smell of wormwood is heavy over everything, the stink of it, like a corpse unembalmed and left to rot by the side of the road, but that's what he is, isn't it? Just a corpse that won't lie still, a corpse that makes more corpses, zombie dragster, bastard son of the silver screen. Bobby Cross is here, Bobby Cross is coming--
And I'm wearing a coat, and I realize too late what that means, what the onrushing wall of twisted steel that used to be cars means if we hit it while I have this coat on--
--and we slam, hard, into the segmented body of the single beast called "accident," and everything is blackness, and the smell of burning.
***
I've been on the ghostroads for eight years. Long enough to see my classmates marry, start families of their own, put the yearbooks on the shelf and forget the girl who starred on her very own page in her Junior Year, the one titled "In Memoriam." Long enough to see my boyfriend graduate. He saw me once, when I was young and careless, and it broke something deep inside of him, in the space where mourning lives.
Long enough to learn to slip between the twilight and the daylight like a bride slips between the sheets on her wedding night; long enough to learn what it means when I touch a trucker's hand and taste ashes, when I flag down a ride and smell lilies on the wind. Hitchers aren't death omens, but we're psychopomps, if we want to be. "It can make you crazy," says one of the older hitchers, a lanky man who goes by "Texas Bill," whose eyes contain a million miles of desert road. "All those lives, all those deaths--leave them. Find another ride, and keep your sanity."
Emma at the Last Dance (which is the Last Chance sometimes, they tell me, and those are the times where you need to be wary and beware) says something different. "By the time they hear me singing, it's too late," she says, and she sounds sadder than any living soul should sound--but she's not really living, is she? The rules are different for the bean sidhe, and I don't know quite how they apply to her. "You get an early warning. You get a chance. That's just this side of a miracle, Rose. You should treat it like one."
I listen to them both, but I've made up my mind, and not because of anything either of them said. No; what made up my mind was a white-haired old trucker who bought me a grilled cheese sandwich and showed me pictures of his sister, of her little house in Florida, the place he was going when he retired. Just four more cross-country runs, he said, and his skin smelled like lilies and ashes, and I knew, even if he didn't, that he was never going to see his sister's little house on the beach. And I didn't help him. I didn't even try. I told him I didn't feel good, ran for the bathroom, and fell back down to the ghostroads, where the dead are the dead, and the living don't look at us that way.
His truck crashed on I-5, blind curve, bad driving conditions, a perfect storm of bad luck and bad decisions. Word in the truck stops is that his body wasn't even recognizable when they pulled it from the cab. That doesn't bother me as much as it should--being dead for eight years has given me a very different outlook on death--but what came after is another story. One of the trainspotters was near the place where the crash happened, riding the rails from San Diego to Vancouver, and he came looking for me as soon as he figured out what rail line I was closest to. That's the trouble with trainspotters. They can see the future (sometimes, when they're looking in the right direction), but they're limited in more ways even than the hitchers.