Chapter 1 - The Drive to Nowhere
The midnight air bit sharply against the fresh cut on my cheek as I settled into the passenger seat of my son’s sedan, the damp washcloth pressed hard against my skin to stem the steady throb.
Beside me, my son—let’s call him Julian, though in the heat of that chaotic kitchen he was just a father driven to the edge of sanity—kept one hand clamped firmly on the steering wheel while the other hovered near the rear-facing car seat where his daughter slept in fitful, exhausted breaths.
“You shouldn’t have come with me, Mom,” he said, his voice flat, stripped of all warmth. His jaw was clenched so tight I could see the muscle ticking beneath his skin. “You’re bleeding. We should get you back to urgent care.”
“My face can wait,” I replied, staring out at the rain-slicked asphalt reflecting the amber streetlights. “That address on the appointment slip cannot. If your cousin managed to divert her records to a third location, God knows what else he’s forged.”
Julian didn’t argue. He knew I was right.
The address led us twenty minutes out of the residential suburb and deep into an industrial edge of town where the houses gave way to concrete warehouses, overgrown vacant lots, and fading strip malls. It was a bleak, desolate stretch where nobody paid attention to who came or went.
We turned down a narrow, unpaved alleyway flanked by rusted chain-link fences. The streetlights here were dead, plunging the alley into pitch blackness save for the sweeping amber beam of our headlights.
Halfway down the block sat a dilapidated two-story duplex with peeling gray paint and an overgrown front lawn choked with weeds. A single dim bulb flickered above the front porch, casting a jaundiced light over a rusted silver sedan parked haphazardly in the gravel driveway—the exact car Julian’s cousin had been driving over the past two weeks.
Julian killed the engine and dowsed the headlights.
The sudden silence inside the car was deafening, broken only by the soft, rhythmic hum of the air conditioner and the steady intake of our breathing.
“Stay in the car,” Julian whispered, his hand sliding down to unlatch the glove compartment, where he kept a heavy metal tire iron.
“I’m not staying behind, Julian,” I said, opening my door before he could protest. The damp night air rushed in, smelling of wet earth and exhaust. “We go together.”
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We moved with absolute silence, navigating the uneven gravel driveway. As we reached the front steps of the duplex, a muffled sound drifted from behind the rotting wooden door—the unmistakable, high-pitched scratching of a dog clawing at linoleum, followed by the low murmur of an angry voice.
Julian raised his fist and hammered twice against the hollow wood, shaking the entire frame.
