Télen a természet visszavonul, megpihen, és erőt gyűjt egy új kezdethez. Ezt mi is megtehetjük, kis barátom.
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Csüt. 13 Júl. 2023 - 22:20
whatever you do, you're still my brother.
Nico sets on his way and Elias digs into his pocket, producing an engraved cigarette case, rusty, second-hand. Clicking away at the lighter, his face looms blue with an orange tint at the bottom, same as the sky behind him – time’s ticking and Nico seems to be on, like, a little weekend stroll. “Hurry the fuck up!” Elias shouts after his brother, fully expecting a middle finger or two in response. Heaving an impatient sigh, he heads towards that little setup by the road. Once there, he peers inside the cooler like a hobo fishing for junk to eat, then lowers himself into the folding chair and hunches like a sulking teenager, face glowing orange, baby-smooth. His sense of style – combat boots with some band’s illegible, thorn-like font cracking and peeling across his black t-shirt – comes with the side effect of looking ridiculous in most ordinary settings; on several occasions, he’s had to fight Isa to the death over his refusal to wear cone hats for Sofi’s birthdays. Anyway – nice view. Reminds him of his time hunting for rotting roadkill to plant inside Jasmine Montes’ locker on Valentine’s Day.
Without even turning his head, he knows the footsteps are his brother’s. He could have guessed the opening line, too: We should get the fuck out of here. Nico’s always had this agitation about him, he always seemed to be crouching on all fours like a sprinter, ready, set. Lowering his cigarette, Elias jabs out of mere brother-ness, “Scared of two inbred hicks?”, even though he knows Nico’s more afraid of hurting than being hurt. He’s always been dickless like that, saying “meth lab” like it’s such a bad thing. Elias really wouldn’t mind some of that redneck coke right now, to be honest. He wouldn’t normally, it’s not this anytime anywhere thing, he could never afford it and scraping up petty cash in junkie fashion sounds like a shitload of effort, but today’s shaping up to be sufficiently unbearable to justify a batch. The type cooked up on an RV stovetop, the type that hurls you head-first into traffic or gets you charging around town biting people, maybe eating someone just a little, ending up on the news, yeah. Maybe that’s where the solution lies. Maybe he could just join in on Nico’s cannibalistic bender tonight. Back home in the Walmart parking lot, his dealer would lie to his face sometimes, clearly just trying to get him hooked, “Ice is all I got today, homes.” He’d smoke it right there in the car, shit got him so feral he’d be eye-fucking the abuelas trudging in and out the 5XL-briefs-and-flight-socks store – in fact, his own grandmother spotted him once. She flounced across the parking lot, snatched her plastic flip-flop off her pearly overgrown toenails and smacked him square in the left eardrum, shit kept ringing all day. They always pretended to care in public. To them, his problems only became problems once they became loud. Everyone shrugged when he went mute following his first communion, one less screaming-crying kid in the house, at least. No one paid him much attention until Eduarda came to get him for Sunday mass and found him in bed, limbs sprawled along the mattress, eyes wide, a fly darting across his face. The silence, she was used to, but he seemed so still now, as if… As if… No. Nonononono. Elias? Why won’t y… Elias?! And then, just as tears started welling up in her eyes, he ran out of breath and his chest rose and she let go of him, speechless. He was just playing. Playing… dead. And from that day on, the problems only grew louder. And the louder they got, the harder everyone covered their ears, and the louder they sang, “LA-LA-LA-LA”.
Having listened to all of Nico’s concerns regarding the park, he flicks ash into dirt, gaze fixed on the horizon with a withering lack of emotion. “Remind me why we dragged our dicks across scorching fucking concrete if you were gonna bitch out at the first sign of ‘people’.” He’s always talked like this, with audible little “quotation marks” around certain words, words he didn’t believe in. And truly, they could have just headed for the fields in the first place, if they weren’t a pair of stupid twenty-somethings with a crippling inability to communicate even their most basic wants and needs, communicate how they feel about this and that, how they feel about Nico's condition, even. There was a time where he had zero control over himself in this… altered state, nor any kind of recollection of what he was like during that time. Well, Elias did, does, and to this day he continues cradling these wee little doubts about staying alone with the wolf in the middle of a fucking field with nowhere to run or hide. It’d be a lie to deny that he’s been treating Nico like a hellspawn: like he needs a sigil drawn around him, something to contain this superior being, maintain control at all costs – otherwise, he himself is left open and helpless to this predator, and frankly, the mere thought makes his guts churn. He smacks the armrest in a half-assed attempt at expressing frustration, pushes himself to his feet, grumbles “Can’t suck worse than the eclipse,” and heads to the fields. If he’s going to survive tonight, he better suck it up.
Deep down, way down, Lord, I try Try to follow your light but it's nighttime
Compared to his siblings, he was always a much more mellow child; their brother had lowkey anger-issues, and their sister’s seemingly undiminishable bulk of energy could never be matched by either of them. Elias might have been less talkative, so quiet sometimes that he’d seemingly disappear, he didn’t yell or break things, his lashes came out in a different, silently shimmering way. It’s easy to forget how loud life used to be before they got on their merry way, just the two of them. When they had a full house at home, back when they still had their father without his cells eating him alive, with Mamá and all their Tíos and Tías and primos, because they might not have enough space so everyone can have their own bed, but there’s surely another seat around the table. As they walk, he looks at his hand as if he’s just realized he had one. He’s looking for claws, he’s looking for fur, he’s looking for soft pads that let you sneak around soundlessly even in the bone-dry cutgrass. The nahual wouldn’t want to miss the chance to choke its cottontail of the evening. At first, he wondered why wolves don’t just tear them apart – then he decided choking is much more fitting. Prolonged pain. He’s used to being the quiet kid, the reliable kid, the nice kid. None of those kids wake up naked in a freaking cornfield and hope it’s just a piece of jackrabbit stuck between their canines. Elias probably wouldn’t have the same moral conflicts keeping him up at night, and Nico’s not sure if he’d even lift his head at his comment if it weren’t for his general irritability today. But he does. And it keeps bugging him, more and more, the further they walk. Maybe he left the last crumbs of his patience on the peeling backseat of his car. ”What we need is get the fuck away from people,” I shake my head, still somewhat sold on the gas station. Then he corrects himself, “I do.” For whatever reason, Elias has never been too keen on staying alone with him during these phases, even though ever since Kris, he’s been fine. He hates Kris’ guts, but he’s fine now, more in control, that’s why he risks going out now instead of being locked up. He just can’t deal with that agony anymore. He’s not too keen on getting in an argument about their plans, though, so he follows Elias’ lead. The place he’s set his eyes on doesn’t seem too promising from afar and even less so from close up. They really can’t afford to be choosey, and he’d be fine with spending the night here if there weren’t other people around. He doesn’t really need to look for clues like some Texmex-flavored Sherlock Holmes, he can smell them. He might have learned how to ignore Elias, but new people are always a problem. “I meant abandoned as ’abandoned’, not just abandoned by hope and God,” he turns towards his brother, his jaw flexing. There’s people here. True, he wanted to ask around for a place, but he meant people who might be tolerably unhelpful at worse. He can’t tell how many people are around, but he figures they probably don’t stay here because they want to be disturbed. He doesn’t have enough energy to argue with Elias, though, learned the hard way just how much more painful the process is when you’re already exhausted, so he just rolls his eyes and walks off, muttering culero under his breath. The RVs are parked on a lower plane, so he hops down the bevel, and the earth huffs up at him, stirring sand and lifeless dirt with his threadbare workboots at every step. He stops at the first one and stands for a few seconds, listening. A chorus of cicadas playing their never-ending musical number, a coyote shrieking in the distance, haunting like a crying baby, and some rodents running around the dry grass, gophers or voles. He hears static, from a radio or an old TV unit, and some rusty metal creaking. He can’t tell which one it’s coming from, though, so door-to-door it is. Get to be an Eagle Scout, afterall. ”Hello? Is anyone there?”, he calls out, loud enough so someone could hear it from the last one as well, through all the noise of dusk animals. Then again, he supposes, for most people this is quiet. “Hey, I’m just looking for directions, if you could help…?” No answer, so he steps over the invisible line of the RV park and walks where the parking road’s supposed to be; it’s all cracked up and some overtaken by grass and dirt. Despite the sun slowly sinking behind the horizon, he can clearly see a ton of footsteps in the middle, with different lines going towards some of the RVs. There’s a wider path towards a particular beige one. Seems to be in better condition than the ones in the front, and as he stops to listen again, there’s the telltale creaking and thumping of movement. He says the same thing once again, taking in the boarded-up windows. There’s one near the end that’s only covered from the inside with a cardboard plane behind the dusted-up window. He wonders if he saw that move, but then the faint thumping turns into banging along the length of the RV. He takes a step back from the door, which is good. One, he would have been smacked in the face with the aluminum door. Two, this way there’s ample space between him and the piss-and-booze scented upstanding citizen with a stained Kansas City Chiefs baseball cap for his AR15, currently pointed at Nico’s chest. His hands immediately rise up to stay in front of him, trying to look as unthreatening as he can. The guy looks him up and down, somewhat content at not finding a weapon. That just wouldn’t be right, now, would it. “’Fuck you want?” ”Hey, man, just… looking for directions. Kinda got lost.” It’s not like this is his first time seeing a semi up close, their neighbor back home even had a bazooka he stole from some WW2 veteran (but it was okay, since the guy was racist), and he had his fair share of police stops and gun-fanatics pulling their piece at him at the first wrong move – and when you’re an immigrant in Bumpkin County, every move is the wrong one. It’s not something you get used to, though, and yet, his voice doesn’t shake. He knows he should be shitting his pants, instead his chest is filled with the urge to grab the barrel, tear it from his hands and beat him to a pulp with it. He doesn’t have to think hard to realize this isn’t his urge. ”Heard it, ‘Ma? Fucker got lost! ”He fuckin’ is.” He heard the woman sneaking around the other side but didn’t risk moving. It’s not like there’s any doubt that she has a gun, too. Everyone does around here. “Fuck you lookin’ for?” ”Our car broke down on the side of the road. We were told there’s a gasstation nearby?” ”There was.” Nico waits for a moment or two before accepting this as the final answer. “Town’s five miles up the road.” Nico nods his head towards the building. “Is that yours?” ”You the fucking IRS or somethin’?” ”It’s just…” The guy moves closer, the barrel almost touching his chest, and he knows he has to get out of there, fast. “The open’s not safe at night. We’d like to stay ‘till it’s light out. If that’s… okay with y’all.” He feels wrong asking, there’s this voice telling him he shouldn’t be asking, he should be taking, because he could, he could take them out, if he wanted to, they’d never see it coming, he’s stronger, he’s faster, he owns this shithole if he wants to. But he does ask and does ignore the voice and puts on the most spooked, harmless face he could master. ”You fuck off now and you fuck off good.” The woman sidesteps to look at the guy; he seems to be in his late thirties, and she seems to be in her early fifties. He also realizes that there’s still creaking coming from the RV and the one next to it. Could be more people with guns, running a crack operation or could be children for all he knows. “Who the fuck cares if they stay there? We don’t need those mutts getting another taste of people,” she says to the guy. Nico can’t tell if he truly is his mother or wife or… whatever else. He seems annoyed at first, then clenches his jaw and points his chin. “Fine. You fucking stay there, you hear me? If I see you or your brother coming towards us one more time, there’ll be no warning shot. Comprende?” Nico inwardly cringes at his pronunciation but nods with a polite smile, muttering a ‘thanks, man’ and backing off. He turns around after a few feet, the hairs at his nape standing at attention as he exposes his back. He can feel them looking at him walk away, expecting some funny business. He’s almost out of the parking lot when he hears faintly, “If I see his face again, I’ll shoot him like they should’ve shot him at the border. Fucking beaner fuck.” The taste of iron floods his mouth as he bites his mouth, forcing his legs to go straight up. Can’t get angry. Not now. Not when… ”We should get the fuck out of here,” he says once he lays eyes on Elias who seemes to have made himself comfortable in the meantime. Lucky he doesn’t have enhanced hearing, or he might have taken insult. “There’s people there, in the RVs. Dunno how many, I saw two. Dude casually had a semi pointed at me the whole time. Real lovely people.” He lays a hand on his neck, rolling his head around, trying to get rid of the muscle spasm. It won’t go away. “Maybe it’s a methlab. Maybe it’s doomsday prep people. Point is, it’s not safe. If any of them come out when I’m…” Wolfing around. “I think we should go.”
So, Nico thinks their chances of randomly stumbling upon just the right place to contain him are higher than making it back in time to their usual spot, which at least they know to fucking work. For a hot second there, Elias actually considers raising his concerns, but even the simple act of uttering vowels physically pains him sometimes, and honestly, at the end of the day, “…Whatever.” So while Nico’s fetching his phone, he walks to the passenger door to snatch the XD from the glove box. It’s not like he needs an excuse: you don’t just go walking down a Missouri highway unarmed, and to address the elephant, yes, it does deter the skinwalker. Can’t kill it, as they found out from that second time Nico got loose and came back alive, leaking like a sieve, but alive. It was awesome, by the way. He props the dusty sole of one boot upon the passenger seat, rolls his pants up his ankle and tears open a velcro holster cap, and in case Nico’s wondering, “It’s for plan B. Kidnapping a decoy.” Leaving a hobnailed boot print on the seat, he tugs at his jacket, “Someone slower than me,” and it suddenly feelks like he’s dropping dead weight by slamming all that heavy leather on the seat. He tails Nico like his shadow, an inch taller but hunching so bad he actually seems smaller. Walking home from school, it used to be this shoulders-up, self-conscious little hunch – now it’s more of a head-down, shifty kind of hunch. Type you pass in your car and you’re glad you’re in your car. He usually doesn't react to well-meaning suggestions in that 10k steps kind of vein, the vein of “drink more water”, “go for a walk”, “get out in the sun”. 'Cause fuck water. Fuck walks. Fuck the Sun. And if he could fuck the Sun, he would, might solve his vitamin D deficiency that way, but walks? Gay. “We don’t need the fuckin’ gas station, anyway,” not if they’ve given up on coolant for now, not if there ain’t no fuckin’ gas station to speak of, apparently. And when there ain’t nothing to speak of, it’s best to act like you didn’t want or need it in the first place. “We just need a building.” And he juts his chin at what looks like a greyish cube on the horizon, wedged between cross-like telephone poles and nondescript water tanks.
Even from up close, greyish cube is the best way to describe it. It’s a single makeshift house, if one could even call it that, standing unfinished on this concrete wall of a base, hills of sand piling around it. It boasts a bizarre facade consisting of a door leading inside the base and another door hovering just above – if one were to step through it from inside, they’d simply fall. Perched on both ends of the flat roof are two arched windows like the tiny eyes of a crab, just topping it all off. Elias blinks up at it, expressing his amazement in a toneless, lifeless moan, “Wow...” Both him and the sky are ten shades darker than ten minutes ago as he turns to the five-to-six vehicles scattered around next door, a deserted RV park signed “The Sunrise Park” that nobody, and I mean nobody, asked for. They’ve been staying in similar places, except there were usually people there, an owner with dogs and roosters and all, someone to run background checks on visitors, no kiddie diddlers, please. Facing the highway is a single folding chair and a giant cooler box, as if someone had been sitting there, observing traffic recreationally. No other signs of intelligent life, but it’s not like there’s anywhere to go from here, meaning there must be someone inside one of those RVs. Someone to tell them if they've seen any movement around the Greyish Cube lately, for instance – so, “Fuck you waitin’ for, Small Talk?”
Deep down, way down, Lord, I try Try to follow your light but it's nighttime
He looks up at the insult but ultimately decides to shut the fuck up, an underrated, ancient art that is sorely underrepresented today and especially in his brother, if anyone asks his opinion. He wants to ask him – do you think I didn’t want to jam my knee into his jerky-fed stomach and see his face distort in pain? Or throw him one right into his potato nose and feel the cartilages mush into a pulp? He wouldn’t have minded having his knuckles torn up from bone and teeth as long as he got to say tell your buddies a wetback made you cry like a little girl. You get used to white people acting all superior race, doesn’t mean you like it – some people grow up and learn to choose their battles for the day, others start cursing their bloodlines. To each their own, he supposed, and usually didn’t care enough to play peacekeeper. He couldn’t remove himself from the situation without Elias this time, though; and he was starting to get paranoid. Ever since those pendejos chased them away like the Spanish fucking Inquisition, he had this sinking feeling surfacing now and then, where he was sure they were being watched and hunted. Even out here, the middle of nowhere, with a clear line of sight basically 360 degrees, he constantly had this urge to look behind his back. The last thing he needed was for Elias to draw even more attention to themselves for middle school taunts. “You’re the cargo crushing me to death,” he mumbled, perfectly aware of their closeness. Okay, so some middle school taunts are fine. When they don’t result in racially charged mass brawls, for example. He’s sure that their mother wouldn’t agree and probably beat the both of them with her slipper if they kept on like this. She, like many other Mexican moms before her, had a very unique idea of how to achieve peace and love, and it usually included various household objects not being used for their intended purpose. To say that Elias did not easily come off harmless would be an understatement. Mostly it wasn’t how he looked, and more the way he looked at you. So he looks at his expanded hand, then looks back up, and he really doesn’t mean to, but his eyebrow shoots up on its own. No, he wasn’t at all sure Elias would come back, not after what he said. And he kind of gets it – but he also knows that if the moon catches him alone, in a place that’s not secure, bad things could happen. Elias might not be strong enough to stop him, but at least he could… Fuck if he knew. Deter him from cars passing by? “I’m not sure getting coolant will solve our problems,” he shakes his head. “At this rate, even if I get the car running, by the time we reach the town and find somewhere safe…” No, that’s cutting it too close. “I’m better at smalltalk and we need to ask if there’s any less populated areas around. Something abandoned. Without sounding like we want to set up a methlab.” So he grabs his phone, his one, battery-dead possession from the seat he’s thrown it on, the money’s already in his back pocket, and turns the manual lock on the door. A futile attempt, really, since you can literally use those little toys with suction-bottoms to pull down the window, but it’s not like there’s anything to steal in there, anyway, it’s just habit. The same way he still waits for Elias and looks at him sometimes as they walk towards the hill, the same way he used to when they’d walk to school. The hill is a bit steeper than it looked from over there, but at least the burning in his lungs matches the burning in his bones. He expects to see the silhouette of the gas station somewhere – yet there’s nothing but even more road and dust. “You sure the sign said 1.5 miles?” They should be able to see it, at least in the distance, no? “Maybe it’s the next one. You could use your 10k steps.”
“That time of the month, indeed,” he grumbles with a resentful flash of the eyes. “Coulda used some of that attitude back in the repair shop, wetback.” ‘Cause that’s what that hick fucking called them, and yet Nico was so in control back there, so set on avoiding yet another “scene”. And to be fair, it makes perfect sense for him to want to lay low, a concept his brother can’t exactly seem to wrap his head around. To him, it’s not like they need Santa Claus, Missouri so bad, so why can’t they just take whatever they want and fuck off and rinse and repeat one town over? Go off-grid and nomadic while they’re at it, sounds way better than buying another cardboard “home” in the Midwest’s asshole only to Howdy the same old mouthbreathers day-in-day-out for the rest of your lives. Had enough of that in OK, thank you. And by “your”, he doesn’t mean Mamá and Sofi and Isa and Feli, he means himself and Nico, of course – he means the gifted ones. Yes, his brother’s got a gift, his brother’s indestructible, and all he ever fucking does is bitch about it. Talk about negativity. Elias spends the next minute or two doing fuck all, smoking in silence until Nico finally gives up, suggesting to simply voodoo the problem away like it’s that simple. A single semi-truck roars past, hauling a huge load of logs; Elias waits for it to pass, the gust sweeping wiry black hair and frizz out of his face. He’s always had this stillness about him, like you could just start hanging Christmas decorations on his ears and nose and collars and he wouldn’t even budge. He then offers in a heavy-lidded deadpan, “Best I can do is some cargo crushing us to death.” ‘Cause even he himself isn’t sure why, but his spells have never actually helped anyone – all they've ever managed to accomplish was grave misfortune. Now curses, he’s good at. Perhaps he could even give Nico the luxury of choice, thirty tons of timber (classic) or five-thousand gallons of sulfuric acid (headline-worthy)? Might be Nico prefers the latter, being a Christian and all. Them Quakers like the pain, they truly think suffering “purifies”, somehow. No need for Permanent Solutions like that, though: as they’ve noted earlier, there’s a gas station right past the incline. Walking up to his brother, Elias flicks his cigarette into the corn and sighs, “I’mma go voodoo up some coolant, then – but we’re gonna need this most sinister device of black magic called “money”.” And he flips his palm casually, waiting for a couple of Nico’s I’m-in-the-trades bucks to hit it. A couple awkward seconds elapse before he registers his brother’s hesitation and crosses his arms grudgingly, “Or you could come with, make sure I don’t murk nobody.” Sending him is no option because who knows, he might spend the money on crack or run away or start shit or something, and leaving him is no option, either, because… Because who knows.
Deep down, way down, Lord, I try Try to follow your light but it's nighttime
The Silverado’s original head gasket gave in around second term of Bush, and it wasn’t the first time he had to pay more money than the whole ordeal was worth only to get the car moving. It’s never a surprise when you’re used to fourth-handing shit. The only time he ever saw an engine compartment without duct tape in it was when these stupid-ass white kids from Indiana got lost near their part of Fuckall, Oklahoma, and their car started to signal they still didn’t have a new Pope yet. Dumbasses came all the way from St. Louis putting Diesel into a gas engine, and guess what? He’d bet they still managed to make it to their totally Instagrammable glamping in Tijuana. ‘Cause, you know, shit somehow works out for folks like these, but here he was, pretending like another roll of duct tape would magically heal the header tank. “No,” comes his grunt through squeezed teeth. He briefly wonders if losing his teeth in this form would also effect the other one. He does remember the movie, however; it’s simply feels good to finally say ’no’ to something. He’d gladly grasp at the hint of authority over any kind of situation right now. He has half a mind to throw the empty can away, fuck the turtles. Thing is, they’ll probably need it later. So he puts the lid back on, curses under his breath when the screw lines don’t match up immediately, and sets to find out whether you can have an engine made out of duct tape entirely. Too bad they’re running out of that, too. “Shouldn’t you be happy about that?”, he asks, tracing over a crack on the cylinder head. “Thought you liked the darkness.” He presses the word comically, widening his eyes at his brother for a moment. “And what do you expect me to do?” He throws his hands up in defeat. “Huh? Or are you just speaking for the sake of being negative? And what’s up with the jacket, anyway? It’s like eighty degrees out.” He can’t tell if the sun really is burning hotter by every passing minute or if it’s the monster waiting to rip out of his skin. He knows Elias is right, but Elias has this thing about him where you don’t ever feel good about agreeing with him. One thing’s for sure, though; this car would never make it up that hill with this busted engine. It takes about another minute or two of tinkering before he throws in the towel – the tape – and leans against the side of the car, eyeing the distance. “We came about… What. Fifteen miles? We could walk the rest,” he shrugs, knowing full well it’s no shrugging matter. “It’s like… Four hours. Four and a half, tops. Or you could voodoo up some actually useful shit for once.”
They’ve stopped to let the engine cool, Nico emptying the last bottle of water into the radiator. In the meantime, Elias disappeared inside a corn field, emerged ten minutes later, his fly going zzzip. Blaring from the radio is a scratchy assortment of classic rock – the thing never got the memo that everything was supposed to be going to shit right now. “Remember The Hills Have Eyes?” he raises his voice over the music, nodding to the beat, cheeks going hollow as he flick flick flicks his lighter. He ends up setting the end of that shitty roll on fire, shaking to extinguish. Water worked, sure, to some degree – not to ninety degrees, though. With every stop, the engine began giving in faster and faster, the coolant-to-water ratio slowly dwindling. There’s a hill coming up, or at least a hill by Missouri standards, and there ain’t no fucking way they’re climbing that thing with a bust engine, that’s for sure. This would have never happened if Nico had let him handle that sack of shit cracker back in the repair shop. “I don’t fix no wetbacks’ cars,” the nazi cunt mumbled from underneath a fucking Ford E, bold words from a guy that’s one kick away from being crushed by a three-ton van. Imagine not even bothering to set up your jack properly and still having the gall to openly spew that confeddy shit, right to his face, right to his face. Alarmed by his flaring nostrils, Nico soon ushered him out of the garage, huffing himself, “Whatever, we’ll just drive one town over.” Only the next proper shithole was seventy miles away, and when they got there, it turned out their auto shop was closed for the day. Another forty miles, it is. “Lights won’t last long like this,” his smoke merges with the steam, stare all deadpan at his poor brother still attempting to plug the leak. “Even if we get it to start, we won’t see shit.” No service and a battery so flat they can’t even charge their phones anymore. A while back, though, they saw a sign saying there was a gas station over the hill, and with the Sun about to set here in the asshole of Hicksville, a hike’s starting to sound kinda tempting. “We still got a few hours to lock you the fuck up,” he ponders, gaze measuring the setting Sun. “But only if we get this thing going, like, now.” He lowers his cigarette, exhaling a puff of smoke. “Otherwise, I see you when I see you.” ‘Cause there ain’t no way he’s about to stand around, waiting to be mauled by his own brother. Sure, there’s times where he wants to go, and go fast, but... Not like that, thank you.