Dottie and Bree: Episode 15
They didn't order breakfast but left four quarters on the table. Dottie draped Bree's wounded arm around her shoulder re-opening cuts and gashes that began to flow red rivers. They dripped slow dots off her bitten fingertips and onto Dottie's chest. She grabbed the silver metal napkin dispenser off the last booth by the door, snarled at the dangerous man in the corner with shaved head and twisted mouth and shuffled out the glass doors into the car while "Come Sail Away" tinkled on the jukebox in the corner.
"I gave you those quarters for Journey, not Styx." Bree mumbled absently.
They would never be old.
They would make it to Mexico.
Dottie hadn't slept in 41 hours. The lines and lights and reflectors off the road jumped and swirled and spun flashes in her eyes. She avoided directing her focus left or right to the phantoms, but she would force her green raisin eyeballs to the far corners of her sockets hoping a glimpse would prove them hallucinations. Her brain felt shrunken and pained. Her head thumped and pounded with the seconds that stretched and puffed like marshmallows in a campfire. Food. S'mores. Chunky Chocolate with raisins.
The trunk slammed in time with her brain now; she needed it to stop. Sleep was irrelevant; she needed to keep her eyes open to the endless emptied road ahead. "How far is it to Mexico? It seems like we've been driving for three days."
She saw forks ahead as the road diverged into two, then four, then 600 tines.
"Talk to me. We have to stay awake." Pleading and begging to Bree wasn't working. More drastic measures would have to be taken, and soon. It was coming for them.
Bree listlessly answered in babbles and incoherent warbles. Dottie swore she heard something about squirrels, Wisconsin or Imperial China, but she couldn't be sure and had to keep the double yellow lines in the glistening morning sunlight straight. They wavered like strands of spaghetti in inky squid sauce with sage and scrub brush and tumbleweed and twirled around her mind's fork, and the trunk was scratching now with 10,000 dying squirrels or purring with a million glitter kittens and she couldn't escape the grinding metal scraping sounds of death and pain and she suddenly knew how to stop it.
"Bree! BREE! We have to get in the trunk!" Slamming the car to an immediate stop in the center of the deserted highway, Dottie began to unbuckle Bree and stare into her distantly glazing eyes. "I know what to do now. We can finish this. I can finish this. We're making it to Mexico."
"No, not in the trunk. Don't open the trunk. Dottie. No trunk."
Dottie scrambled into the back seat and chewed the upholstery with her hands, ripping and obliterating the leather, throwing chunks of foam on the roadside, madly destroying the car. She fashioned a small hole into the trunk and pried it open with both hands, grunting and screaming as she made the portal big enough to slip through. She softly pulled Bree into the back seat and started stuffing her into the trunk.
"This is the only way. You have to trust me."
"Trust and faith; you're doing and excellent job." She kissed her gently on the forehead; her blood stained the metal and the remaining foam along the darkened hole.
Dottie was crying openly now as she wiggled in through the tiny opening.
They would make it to Mexico.
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