ALL THE RAGE (writer: T.M. Frazier)(80)

Whispers begin to flow through the diner before the car has even skittered to a stop on the tarmac. An accident? Somebody call nine-one-one. What’s going on?

I drop the change onto the table, missing the guy’s large, oil-stained hand completely. Coins roll in ten different directions, and the guy glares at me, clearly unimpressed.

I’m not paying attention to him, though. I’m staring at what I think I just saw, what I definitely heard, waiting for another crack of lightning to show me I was imagining things.

“Hey, you okay?” One of the truckers asks me. He’s wearing one of those baseball caps, the peak so low I can barely see the whites of his eyes as they reflect my horrified expression.

My mouth is dry. It wasn’t his car. I just spoke to him.

“My boyfriend drives a Mustang,” I say slowly. An odd taste fills my mouth, and it’s a moment before I realise I’ve bitten the inside of my cheek hard enough to draw blood.

“Oh, hell,” the trucker says, putting a hand on my shoulder as a set of headlights roll through the rain on the highway, stopping in front of the wrecked car. I know that car. I’ve driven that car more times than I could count. Candy Apple red, with a black racing stripe. I’ve held it’s parts in my hands, their oily black lifeblood smeared over my skin, and watched as Leo put it back together over several years.

It’s not him.

We lived in a small town, and when it wasn’t football season, there was very little to do except sneak away to have sex, and having a car made that so much easier. Hence our rebuilding of the old Shelby Mustang that Leo’s father had somehow acquired but never gotten to fixing. That car was going to take us to our new place, after we finished school. It was going to take us to Vegas so we could get married, the weekend he turned eighteen. It was going to take our first baby home from the hospital in ten years when we were settled and ready to start a family. We might’ve been young, and stupid, but Leo Bentley and I already knew where life was taking us. Life was a candy apple red Shelby Mustang, and it was going places. Places that weren’t Gun Creek.

I snap out of my inertia as the headlights of the Sheriff’s car stopped in front of the red car up ahead. Tearing my apron off, I drop it on the ground, sprinting for the front doors.

“Cass?” A voice comes in from my right. Hands fall upon my arms, a face leaning down into mine that I know but can’t place, even though I see it every day.

“Cassie!” the face yells, and suddenly, two green eyes spring into focus.

“Leo,” I say to the face.

Those eyes scrunch up in confusion. “Cassie, what’s going on?”

I need for him to let go of me. I needed to get to the red car up on the highway to tell myself it isn’t Leo. That it’s anyone except Leo.

“The car!” I yell, shaking myself free of green eyes’ grip. “It’s a Mustang. Let go of me!”

Bobby Chalmers. That’s his name. The quarterback of Gun Creek High’s football team. The little kid who pulled a chunk of my hair out in kindergarten. He’s seventeen now, like me. His eyes go wide as he lets me go, and then I’m smacking my shoulder against the heavy double doors at the entrance to Dana’s, leaping off the front steps and almost breaking my neck as I land on icy asphalt. My teeth start chattering almost immediately. It’s below freezing tonight, and the rain is turning yesterday’s snow drifts into pale, grey sludge.

My Sketchers sink into the sleet, and I fall over a couple of times. I’m getting closer. The wind whips my hair around my face, matted blonde strands sticking to my lips and teeth as I keep running and falling. Running and falling and getting back up.

Almost there.

“Cassie!” A voice yells from the diner. I don’t even look back. I can’t. I have to get to the car and tell everyone it isn’t Leo inside. “Get the hell away from there!”

I’m almost at the car when flames start to spread inside.

“No!” I yell, the wind buffeting any noise that might have come out of my mouth, literally making me choke on my own words as cold air slams into my lungs. I cough, water streaming from my eyes, tiny icicles already forming on my eyelashes.

I’m thirty feet from the car when I see the blue football jersey being devoured by flames.

And I know, without a doubt, that the boy I’ve wanted to marry since I was twelve years old, is trapped, upside down, bleeding and unconscious, in a car that is on fire.

“Cassie!” I hear a voice to my left, barely audible over the wind. The voice sounds familiar. Damon King is the town sheriff. He’s also my mother’s new husband. He’s a nice guy. They’ve been married for a couple months, now. He’ll help, I think, my teeth chattering so hard I think they’ll smash. He’ll get Leo out.

He doesn’t. He runs down the embankment on the other side of the road and disappears.

What the hell?

“Leo!” I scream, my words lost on the wind. It’s cold and my throat hurts and I don’t know what to do. Instinct tells me to run away from the car, but love is stronger. Love is foolish, as it pulls me to the car like a moth to a flame – ha, a flame, a f*cking bonfire now, strangely comforting as it’s worth takes the edge off my frozen state. Something about the flames snaps me out of my dream-like fog. I look around and see nobody. Nobody wants to risk coming too close to the flames in case the car blows up, and I can’t say I blame them. But me? They’d have to drag me away from here, because I’ll burn sooner than leave Leo to perish.