Godspeed

TW: Substance Abuse, Violence, Mental Health, Some Language

____________________

Vermont, 1997.

The rain pelted against the narrow overhang of the motel, its steady rhythm broken only by the occasional clap of thunder in the distance. Chris stood under the faded light, the sharp sting of a cigarette on his lips, and a million thoughts racing through his mind. The parking lot before him was empty, the asphalt glistening with water, reflecting the dull neon of the motel sign. He had been standing there for what felt like hours, eyes darting around, unable to settle. His fingers were trembling from the nicotine and adrenaline still coursing through his veins. A deep feeling of dread shadowed him like a veil of darkness. Every drop of rain, every rustle of wind, and every flash of lightning seemed to carry a new threat. 

He glanced toward the motel room, the curtains drawn but not enough to hide the faint light flickering within. His heart ached at the thought of his Tatianna. She was inside doing God knows what, caught in the haze of her drugs and her desire for him. She was unpredictable, volatile. But also passionate and loved him dearly. And that was the only thing keeping him tethered to this nightmare. 

With a deep drag, he crushed the cigarette butt under his heel, the orange ember briefly flickering and sizzling before being swallowed by the puddle beneath him, accompanied by several others much like itself.

____________________

When Chris stepped back into the room, the stench of stale smoke and drugs hit him immediately. Tatianna sat on the bed, her back hunched, her face obscured by a mess of unkempt blonde hair. Her eyes were glazed, her hands shaking as she clutched a roach and a small vial of pills. The silence in the room was suffocating. 

"What's up, baby?" Chris asked, his voice tender despite the exhaustion pulling at him. 

She didn't respond, her fingers twitching with the items she gripped weakly. She was high, but not totally wasted. He could see it in the way she swayed back and forth like a broken metronome. There wasn't any thought behind her actions, but Chris knew that too well. He was four years sober and desperately wanted his fiancée to get clean, even though her addiction seemed to be worsening. But she was his Tatianna, and he couldn't bring himself to walk away. 

Chris ran a hand through his messy brown hair and sat down on the edge of the bed beside her. He stared at the floor, unable to meet her eyes. His eyes slowly drifted to the stolen money, neatly stacked and organized from largest to smallest denominations in one-thousand-dollar increments, laid out in grandiose fashion on the coffee table. A silver Colt revolver lay adjacent, its black stippled grip covered in white hockey tape. A scrap piece of paper sat separately from both; an array of arithmetic and scribbles and strikethroughs danced across the page. At the bottom, circled in bold strokes:

45,036.

The phone on the nightstand rang, its shrill tone slicing through the quiet. Tatianna's body tensed, her eyes flicking to the phone, then to the table, and back to Chris. Nobody moved.

"I'm not answering it," she muttered, the words coming out thick and heavy. She got up and began lurching towards the bathroom where a bottle sat near the sink. "Don't know what that bitch at the front desk wants anyways; we paid in advance."

Chris frowned, his stomach churning. It was just a phone call. But in this world, a phone call was never just a phone call.

"I don't know if they'd call this late," he whispered more to himself than to her. The phone went silent, drawing out even more sound from the room.

But Tatianna wasn't listening. She had started taking quick, calculated swigs from the bottle, her movements jerky and uncoordinated. She spilled some down her shirt front, swearing. She was slipping.

The phone rang again, and Chris couldn't stand the sound any longer. His temples pounded.

"Hello?"

The voice on the other end was distorted and low, like it had been through a thousand different filters.

"Christopher Spence."

His blood ran cold.

"Who the hell is this?" he demanded, his heart rate spiking. He tried to ignore the way his palms began to sweat, an unknown sense of terror creeping up his spine.

The voice didn't answer right away. There was a long pause, followed by a dry chuckle that made Chris's stomach bubble, as he stood breathless.

"I know who you are," the voice finally said. "I know everything about you."

Chris's breath caught. He could feel his heart beating faster, the thrum of panic in his veins. He glanced at Tatianna, who hadn't moved from the bathroom, glassy-eyed, playing with her stray bangs in the mirror. 

"Sorry, man," Chris said, trying to steady his voice. "You've got the wrong person."

The voice laughed again, and the sound was like stone being scraped across glass.

"You and I both know that's not true," the voice replied calmly. "Christopher James Spence…born December 3rd, 1970, to Hillary and Richard in Omaha, Nebraska. Played baseball before you got caught boosting cars at seventeen, shoplifting at eighteen, got kicked out after high school, and moved to New York City—"

Chris's hands began to shake. The caller continued to cite accurate life events tailored to him, as if they were reading it from a teleprompter. It seemed to go on forever.

"—You can run, Christopher, but you can't hide forever."

Click. 

Chris held the switch down with one finger, his other hand squeezing the phone against his head still. He could feel his heartbeat pulsating on the receiver, sweat dripping down his face. The caller knew everything about him, everything he had worked so hard to forget. His past was coming for him, and it wasn't the law—it was something much darker, he feared.

Tatianna's voice broke through the panic. "Who is it, Chris?" she asked, her tone distant and slurred. "What do they want?"

He tried to speak, but the words stuck in his throat. Chris's gaze darted between her and the phone. The caller had said too much. His mind was spiraling, his thoughts a blur of fear and confusion. 

"I—" he began but couldn't continue. 

Tatianna's face twisted with anger. "What the hell's going on?" she snapped, lumbering towards him, the liquor in grasp. "What did they say? Something wrong with the cash we put down?"

"They know everything," Chris breathed, his voice a whisper of horror. "They know about the robbery… they know about me, about everything."

Tatianna froze, her expression flickering between disbelief and rage. "You're talking…crazy. Somebody's fuckin' with you."

Even as she spoke, her eyes darted around the room, as though expecting someone to jump out at any given moment. Maybe it was the drugs.

"No baby, this ain't a joke," he said, wiping his brow with his dirty sleeve.

Tatianna began to pace, her hands trembling as she placed the bottle down and grabbed for a loose bag filled with different pills. She fumbled to open it and swallowed a few. 

"We need to leave. Right now. We're being watched. I can feel it," she said, throwing the bag down and racing to the windows, peeking through the blinds into the blackness of night. 

"No," Chris snapped, grabbing her arm. "We need to think. We can't keep—"

The phone rang again, and Tatianna flinched, freeing herself from Chris's grasp. 

Chris answered it this time without hesitation. 

"Hello?" He said, his voice wavering. 

"I told you, Christopher. I know everything. Your life. Your family. Your past. The robbery…"

Chris's throat tightened. "Wh-what do you want?"

Tatianna snatched the phone from him, her eyes burning with anger. 

"Listen here, asshole, you leave us alo—"

"Tatianna Claire Williamson," the caller interrupted. "Born July 14th, 1973, to Margaret and Frederick Williamson in Queens, New York. A real firecracker, huh? Even before the drugs…Lived there your whole life and met Mr. Spence during attendance at—"

The caller went on through her life story, including her parents' tragic deaths and a recent spree of drug abuse and petty crimes, leading to the most recent robbery in upstate New York with Chris, and finally them running from the law, hoping to escape the country. 

Tatianna's paranoia mirrored Chris's, and for the first time, she felt the weight of their situation settling in. Paralyzed with the realization that this was really happening, her mind began to race with ideas. Betrayal from Chris and not covering their paper trail and someone following them and not killing all of the eyewitnesses. 

What gave us away? Who can I trust? Can I trust myself? She thought feverishly.

"—You can run, Tatianna, but you can't hide forever."

Click.

Tatianna fell to her knees, tears falling from her eyes. She screamed an expletive and began slamming the phone handle into the cradle over and over again.

Chris grabbed the phone out of her hands, consoling her. 

"Baby, be quiet!" he said in a hushed tone. "Front office is gonna wonder what the hell's going on here."

She crawled toward the cluttered table and began shoveling the money into the same duffel bag the tellers were ordered to fill days prior. 

"We n-need to g-get out of h-here," she sobbed, choking on the lump in her throat. Unsecured wads of green cascaded over the edge into the bag in a sloppy manner, some spilling onto the floor. She frantically grabbed at the bills that missed the zipper's entrance.

"Enough!" yelled Chris. "We can't keep running, Tati. Cut it out!" 

He put his arms around her torso and lifted her from the ground, like a child. Her limbs began to violently shake in a sort of spasm. 

"Get off of me!" she screamed, struggling to escape his strength. 

An elbow caught Chris in the ribs, and he released her, grabbing at his midsection. In a rampage, she grabbed the liquor bottle and whipped it around without looking, catching Chris's face, shattering on impact, green glass spewing from the bottleneck she grasped, Chris falling like a rag doll, and meeting the carpet in a pool of alcohol and glass shards. 

Tatianna was standing above him, chest heaving, still gathering herself, the silence echoing in the room. As her temper softened, she began to realize the severity of the situation.

"Oh no, no, no," she whimpered, falling to her knees, picking his head up from the floor. "Christopher? Baby? Please wake up."

Chris lay motionless, a large welt forming on his head. Blood began to drip from somewhere on his scalp. She checked for his pulse, which she found almost immediately.

"I'm so sorry, baby," she wept, dabbing at his hair with her shirt bottom. "I didn't mean t-to hurt you. Please wake up."

The phone rang again, Tatianna jerking her head in unadulterated fear.

She reached for it, trembling, and answered.

"What do you want from us?"

The voice laughed again, seeming to feed off of her psychological strain. "I hope Christopher is alright. That's sure going to hurt tomorrow."

"I want to give you a choice," the caller continued. "Choice number one…you turn yourselves in to the authorities and forfeit the stolen cash. This will ensure that both of you survive until your clocks run out. However, you'll be incarcerated for quite a while and separated. But who knows, maybe when you're gray and old, and they let you see the light again, you two can reconnect."

Tatianna's back was against the wall, Chris's head in her lap. Her lips parted, but no sound came out. She traced over her name tattooed on his neck, below his left ear.

"Or choice number two…one of you must kill the other. I know, I know, pretty heavy stuff. I will ensure that you escape this whole… dilemma, I guess you could say, unscathed. You'll be notified of further instructions. The money will be all yours, all forty-five thousand and change, and your freedom will be intact. However, you'll be alone and have to live with the guilt of killing your lover."

She stopped tracing his name and turned to marble. Her hands stopped shaking, and her body was sweating, and her eyes were scanning the room, looking for any indication that she was being watched. Her skin began to itch, as if something was growing inside of her. 

"You have fifteen minutes to decide your fates. After that, I will alert the local authorities of your whereabouts, and you'll be at the hands of their jurisdiction. And let me tell you, I have a feeling they won't be so generous."

"You can't get away with this," she said weakly. "Who the hell are you?"

"On the contrary, you're the one that can't get away with this," the voice responded. 

"Unless you choose to do so. And as for who I am? I'm the judge and the defendant. The predator and the prey. The cameraman and the anchorwoman. A friend and a foe. Whichever you prefer me to be. You'd better wake Chris up, Tatianna. Fourteen minutes and counting. Godspeed."

Click.

The caller ends it, the dial tone reverberating through Tatianna's head like a bad dream. She drops the phone and sits broken, hyperventilating. Her mind was thoughtless and absent of reason. Time was even more a factor now, and she was ambivalent. Her eyes on her lover, cradled in her arms from her own hysterics. Her rock; the one who consoled her at her parents' funerals, the one who bailed her out of jail countless times, the one who slept at her side all of these years and stayed faithful. Her past and future. They shoot to the mess of currency partially packed into a bag. Her ticket out of this whole mess, a reset button, enough to start fresh and live comfortably. Another future. She vacillates relentlessly and begins to panic, moving Chris's head to the ground. She stands up and begins pacing.

No. No. NO! You're crazy, she thinks. Quit thinking so much, just, just…

Chris squirms and moans on the ground, glass fragments clicking together as his body awakens. 

"Wh-what the hell happened?" Chris mumbled, his eyes squinting. He grabs toward his head and winces. "Did I fall or somethin'?"

Tatianna's back is to him, and she stands unmoving. Chris looks at the broken whiskey bottle around him and pieces together his thoughts. 

"Y-You did this," he contextualized. "What the hell's wrong with you?"

She slowly turns to him, sniveling. A thick gob of snot drips from her nose, and she wipes it away with her sleeve, the silver barrel shining from the overhead light.

"Baby," he said calmly. "Put that thing down, you hear me? Don't do this."

She slowly raises the gun, gripping it with both hands, her arms shaking slightly. Tears cascade down her cheeks; she cries silently. 

"You're drunk and high, you damn monster! Put the gun down, you crazy sonofabitch!"

She closes her mouth and inhales deeply through her nose, blowing it out through her pursed lips. 

"I'm sorry," she whispered, pulling the trigger. "I love you."

____________________

Tatianna stands outside of the motel under the cracked overhang, rain pouring in thick sheets. The storm grows angrier, wind picking up loose trash and thrashing it violently into the darkness. She breathes in the cold night air, the darkness stretching endlessly, swallowing the horizon. 

A payphone across the parking lot began to flicker, illuminating the uneven surface of the pavement, potholes and cracks gleaming like rivers and lakes. The phone began to ring, the sound distant and muffled beneath the sound of rain pelting the ground. She hoists the duffel bag higher onto her shoulder and approaches the phone, leaving ripples in the puddles below.