Blue Valley

Sandra, who was sat in the passenger seat for the journey, had said something half a mile ago and received no response. As they passed the sign that read ‘BLUE VALLEY NATIONAL PARK 5 MILES’, she tried again. She started with two sharp, blunt coughs and looked over to the driver, her husband, Dan.

“You listening to me?” She scoffed.

Dan reacted as though he had not realised she was in the car, jumping slightly and taking his eyes off the road to look at her with an almost suspicious glance. She was smaller, younger, and cuter than him; and that was how he liked his women. She was a natural blonde, and had a face and manner that he thought was like the summer: eternally bright, and always golden. To his friends, he told them she was trailer trash; but in reality, she was just a loudmouthed Arizonan who dressed for the beach in rain or shine.

“You say something, doll?” He smiled at her.

He made an effort to never smile with open lips, as to never show off the half-chipped tooth that sat like a shattered gravestone in his mouth. All his other teeth were greyed by years of smoking, or actively rotting away. He paid for Sandra to get dental work whenever she needed it, but never afforded himself the same luxury.

“I said,” she raised her voice rather suddenly, “these mountains really as blue as you say they are?”

Sandra rolled her eyes, and Dan didn’t notice. It wasn’t for lack of focus that he had missed her talking, but that the purr of the engine that spilled out from the front of his vintage sports car was so loud it would block the ripping of bullet fire.

“Sure are, doll.” He chuckled to himself. “Blue as diamonds, and then some.” He added.

He wasn’t lying, Blue Valley National Park had been opened in 1922, and was named for the stunning white-faced mountains that appeared to shimmer in a pale shade of blue when the light hit the surface of Roosevelt Pool, the large body of water that slept beneath them. The park was home to a twenty-mile path, and connected to the seldom defeated Yorgos Line, one of the longest single hiking trails in the country.

What Dan was lying about was his intentions in taking his wife down to the park. In the top drawer of his desk, nestled between a copy of a nudie magazine and a jury summons he pretended never arrived, was a new life insurance policy made out in the name of Sandra Webber. It was for a substantial payout, made payable in the event that she died to the bank account of Daniel Webber. He knew about the claim, and kept his wife blissfully unaware that it even existed.

She had come close to finding him out while cleaning his desk a few days prior to their trip; she had opened the aforementioned draw and swept a pile of now stickless sticky notes into it. It was then that she had seen the front cover of the nudie magazine and scoffed at the front image of Miss Winter, a model named Annabelle Broche, seductively eyeballing the camera while on her knees. She slammed the draw shut, muttering about her perverted husband and making plans to confront him about it when he got back from the baseball. He only knew what she had found as she mentioned it over dinner, saying that such disgusting things didn’t belong in a marital home; he had argued that a man needs what a man needs, and shut down all other conversation dead in its tracks.

In the inside pocket of his chocolate tone leather jacket, Dan was concealing a snub-nosed revolver, there was a switchblade in breast pocket he usually used to carry cigarettes, and there was a length of rope tucked into his back pocket that had been painfully digging into him for the whole journey. He was a walking arsenal of whodunnit weapons, most of them unusable if his aim of Sandra’s death looking like an accident was to come true.

He had contemplated just shooting her, but knew it would likely invalidate his claim unless he could frame the death as a murder by some burglar or spurned ex; he knew it would likely be the most fun of all the possibilities, but that it was the one he most likely could not get away with. The same went for the knife; though he had debated using it in such a way that resembled suicide, the whole situation around it seemed problematic no matter what way he turned it.

“There somewhere we can eat,” Sandra said rather suddenly, “when we get there, I mean.”

Her eyes began skimming the surroundings, they hadn’t passed that many buildings in the past two miles and she was wondering when they would next see life. Obviously there was an abundance of wildlife, but there hadn’t been a sign of people since they passed the diner coming off the highway.

“Well sure.” Dan said bluntly. “There’s a café down by the lake, but we’ll be parking about two miles from it.”

He had pawed over every detail; everything that could go wrong had been planned for. His arsenal was a contingency to his holocaust, and every step was noted and revised a hundred times so its sole target would be dead before noon. Obviously, he had destroyed the notes, their ashes dumped into the pit at the bottom of the barbeque, but every word of them was committed to memory the way a priest stains verses of the bible directly to his brain. His prayer, the lies he was going to spin as soon as he watched his wife fall from the walkway overlooking Roosevelt Pond; his church, wherever his web of deceit followed him.

“Two miles.” Sandra sulked. “But, I’m hungry now.”

Her shoulders fell in a slump; she was never one for stropping when she didn’t get her way, but right now she was hungry, and those painful pangs were rising from her stomach every time she breathed. She hadn’t had time to eat before they left that morning, and her suggestion of stopping at the diner had been turned down without a word when Dan pushed the pedal through the floor and sped directly past it.

“We’ll eat when we find a god damned place to eat.” Dan suddenly snapped.

When Dan got angry, his face seemed to instinctively form a disgusted frown, and his right eye would twitch wildly until he calmed down. It was like as soon as his heartrate increased, the sensitivity of every muscle in his face shot through the roof and he lost all control of every minute movement that made him look like an enraged dog. If he could, he probably would have begun barking and mauled her to death where she sat.

“Damn.” Sandra crossed her arms and retreated back into her seat. “Just wanted to know.”

She tried to keep silent for the rest of the journey up the mountain, he would occasionally say something to himself, and she wouldn’t dare even look at him in fear it may be enough to set him off again. He would note a new type of tree flanking the road, a new dead animal swept out into a layby, anything to keep the car full of a noise other than that knocking growl of the engine which, he knew, was slowly starting to drive him a little mad.

Three miles became two, and then the penultimate mile lead into the final one, and as the parking lot rounded into view a new, even more hideously intense, feeling joined the hunger pangs in Sandra’s stomach. She was nervous, a weird nervous like she had never known before, a nervous that shook behind her eyes and made her mouth go dry with the taste of bile. Every few seconds, she would flick a momentary glance to Dan and then return to whatever else she could concentrate on. The bulge in his breast pocket wasn’t the usual rectangle that jutted out to show the box of Lucky Silver brand cigarettes he always kept, it was thinner and longer than that; and she was sure that when he had leaned over to lower his window, she had seen the butt of a revolver in his pocket.

She had known he had a revolver, but she had never known him to carry it so carelessly in his pocket like that; but she had also never known him to not have a packet of Lucky Silver on him, especially since he was so many miles from home and within the first hour his cravings should have taken hold.

‘Maybe that’s all his snap was?’

She had been under the impression that she had only thought that little idea, but somehow it had spilled out of her lips in a moment of panic so great she forgot all barrier between the two parts. Maybe it wasn’t loud enough for him to hear? God, she prayed to him that he hadn’t heard her slip up.

He had heard. His eyebrows were, at that moment, furrowing madly and his hands were shaking so badly that the car began wanting to veer off the road.

Time stood still for Sandra; she looked down at her door and then back at Dan as his head craned around to shoot her a look that froze her deep down to the core. She could feel the breath running from her lungs, the skin on her arms tensing as every hair stood on end; she had to fight air back into her with a shaky, unsure inhale that choked in the back of her throat like she was swallowing concrete. She watched on, completely distressed as his lips peeled back from over his teeth, her ears stinging as he growled at her. She was sickened by the sound, especially by the breath whistling a little through his half-shattered tooth as it fell out to slap her face with a deeply upsetting warmth.

“What did you say?” He said, eyes still burning into Sandra. “What did you say, damn you?”

By the end, he was shouting so loud Sandra’s ears were beginning to ring, and she was being beaten a hundred times a second by globes of spit that shot out from his mouth and littered her face.

In a single moment, she became aware of something that Dan wasn’t yet to notice, and it turned her chances around in as quick a time as it took for her to brace in her seat. In his state of rage, he had let his grip on the wheel slack and the freedom awarded to the car sent it into the opposite lane. He regained focus quickly enough to avoid the oncoming car, but was taken aback when Sandra used the few seconds next to the grassy verge to fling her door open and roll out into its embrace.

Dan slammed on the breaks as he directed the car back into the correct lane, but he was no longer in control of the hurtling vehicle enough to route it away from the approaching pine tree. The front of the car wrapped around the trunk, almost completely looping around it in a jagged grip as her speed collapsed from sixty to zero in the space of seconds. The belt around Dan’s torso snapped tight as he went forward, holding him in place and then directly back into the faded leather seat.

Sandra had watched the crash and sighed out in genuine relief; nobody could have survived that crash. He rose out of the car with all the casual cool of a man stepping out of a limousine onto a red carpet. He blinked slowly in the bearing sunlight, but his face fell to confusion when he felt that his left eye was not blinking all the way. The eyelids had met a block, a two-inch, flat butted shard of glass that was now jutting out of his eyeball.

She was too scared to even move as he drew the revolver from the inside pocket and fired blindly in her direction for three shots. One shot whipped so close to her ear that her hair had been caught in the wind of its tail. Another had buried itself in the soft mud beside her right foot, the very earth below her shaking as it came to a halting stop.

Then, he stopped to plan his next move. He had only come with that cylinder of bullets and had none to reload, Sandra did not know this, but she wasn’t up to finding out. She had come a few centimetres from death, and knew that even in his current state he could still get lucky and hit her. They were at a stalemate; it was check and she was eyeing every space on the board that didn’t play right into his badly sliced hands.

She attempted to turn on her heels, and now she was aware of just how much her body was beginning to hurt. The pain had first appeared in her shoulder, but now her side was on fire and that heat, which she soon realised was blood, had just begun trickling down her hip and towards the knee of her right leg. That is where the third bullet had gone; just as she feared, he had got lucky and one of his potshots had landed. The bleeding was slow, not enough to make her feel faint but enough to begin seriously worrying her as Dan took his first few steps towards her.

He walked with a strong, unimpeded gate and was in the middle of the road within a few paces. His eye was locked on target, as was the barrel of the gun, and he didn’t even react when the car he had nearly struck came speeding back to where the near-miss had occurred. He seemed to not need eyes for a moment, he turned the gun away from Sandra and killed the driver of the oncoming car with a lethal shot to the head. The driver’s body slumped against the wheel, and the car passed by Sandra to tumble slowly down the steep verge behind her.

The gun trained back on her, Sandra was desperate for a way out. She suddenly took a breath and held it against the urge to scream, locking away that building pressure rising in her chest so she could ignore the agony that ached from so many points in her body. She was, against all better judgement, doing the one thing Dan wouldn’t have planned for: she was running directly for him.

He shot again; the breath she had held was stolen as she was hit again in the arm; but she didn’t even shed a tear. He fired for a final time, and missed all together.

Another engine coughed out of the parking lot and sheepishly came into view, its driver curious about the source of the noise. He was leaned forward slightly, and scanning the landscape before him with a ruthless efficiency; then he found the source. As he rolled past, Sandra had just used the flat of her hand against the blunt end of the glass and Dan was making a guttural belching noise. She pulled back and watched him fall to his knees, then plant down face first into the road. The glass lodged itself further in his brain, and she turned to beg the driver for help. He obliged, opened the passenger side door for her, and dove off without even a word being said.

She looked into the rear-view mirror at the crash, and at Dan’s lifeless body. In less than a minute, her life had been upended and all she had to show for it was destroyed sports car and a dead husband; but as she looked her eyes got drawn to those pale, chalky faces of the mountains. The light had hit Roosevelt Pool in just the right way, and suddenly they were lit up.

“Huh…” She sighed.

The Driver turned to her, looking over the two open wounds as they bled over the interior of his car.

“You okay?” He asked.

“Yeah… they really are as blue as diamonds.” She smiled. “And then some.”