Jump

Gunshots exploded through the windows, glass shattering against the tiled floor. Charlie's eyes jolted open. Voices outside whispered orders, accompanied by the distinct heavy rustling of humans moving as quietly as they could in nature. Catching breaths he neither wanted or needed, he tumbled off the side of the bed, clinging his body tight against the mattress. In the darkness, peering at the mound of rumpled sheets and blankets, it was impossible to tell if the body laying still and breathless underneath them was still alive. 

A small coughing from the body signaled life, and Charlie sighed in relief. 

 On the nightstand, Charlie's phone vibrated and chimed, silencing the quiet chorus outside. He snatched it from the table, and scanned the bright glowing screen as quickly as his tired eyes would let him. 'Caroline,' it read.

-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-

    On the dashboard, a small plastic woman with a cellophane grass skirt swiveled her hips as the van rumbled down the highway. “How much was our agreement for?” Charlie asked. It was the fourth, maybe fifth time he'd spoken those exact words this morning. He wasn't keeping track. Caroline glared over with bags under her eyes, then looked back to the road. As Charlie opened his mouth again to speak, she reached a hand over, turning the volume on the car stereo from "loud" to "uncomfortable." In the backseat, Rocco was sleeping soundly, even as Van Halen screamed “JUMP!” so loud Charlie could feel it vibrate through him. 

Charlie leaned forward and turned the radio off. “Enough.”

Caroline was glaring again when he looked up. “I gave you at least a hundred thousand dollars explicitly to keep this from happening.” He shot her a glare of his own. “How do you explain this?”

“Do you have any idea how hard to it is to keep hunters from catching wind of your bullshit? And Seriously? That house you bought?! Why didn't you just paint 'Come kill me' on the outside?” She tightened her grip on the steering wheel until her knuckles turned white. “You don't even bother living under an alias or anything. Like, holy shit. You have to realize that there's only so much I can do. You should be glad I hauled ass from Alabama to come and get your sorry asses.” She paused for a moment. “I expect to be reimbursed for the gas, by the way.” 

Charlie tapped a beat on his armrest. “Are you finished?” 

“Not even close,” she snapped. “Just--yeah. Shit, I guess I am.” She exhaled a deep sigh.  “I can take you as far as Tennessee. You figure out where you're going after that.” She adjusted her rear view mirror to get a look at the backseat. “Is he dead?” 

.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-

Rocco opened his eyes. The world was shaking like a snow globe. He noticed Charlie gripping him by his shoulders. It was dark out still, or maybe again. He never was sure how long he'd slept for. Charlie whispered something that he didn't catch. “We need to leave immediately,” he repeated, with more force and volume. 

Rocco nodded that time. He sat up and caught only a brief glimpse of the dark room--the windows were in heaps on the floor. “Oh,” He said. “That kinda night.”

“Yeah,” Charlie snapped. “Grab your pants, follow me.”

Rocco nodded again. He moved clumsily through the house in a sleepy haze. Ahead of him, he could hear Charlie speaking as he walked. He noticed the small glow of the cell phone in Charlie's hand. Calmly, Charlie recited what sounded like their address. “Who's that?” Rocco whispered. Charlie said a 'thank you' to whoever was on the other line. 

“Cops,” Charlie said. “Should buy us a little time.” 

“What's going on?”

“As far as I know, there's a bunch of rednecks on our front lawn with guns and God knows what else.” 

“What, like hunters?” 

“Yeah."

“Wasn't Caroline s'posta-”

“Yeah.” Charlie kept moving, soft on his feet, not looking back as he passed through the dark rooms and halls of their newest home. He creaked the backdoor open, and paused, staring out at the street. It was dimly lit in small yellow bursts from lamp posts, but still mostly invisible.  Rocco lumbered carefully across the dining room, and stopped short of the door. 

“Put your pants on now,” Charlie said, meeting Rocco's eyes. “When I get to 'one,' we're gonna run. We'll climb that fence and keep running until I say stop, got it?”

Rocco nodded again, and checked his pants to be sure they were actually zipped up. 

"Three..."

“Two...”

“One.”

.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.

Rocco's eyes weren't ready to open just yet. He felt the kind of sore cramping only long sleeps in the backseats of cars could cause.

It was a feeling with which he'd become very familiar over the past fifty-odd years.  

“Wha' happened?” he mumbled.

Charlie answered. “Hunters, Roc. Remember?”

He nodded and licked the dry sides of his mouth. 

“Okay. Next thing then, and I don't want nobody to panic," Rocco told them, "but I think there's somethin' behind my seat.” He knew better than to turn around and check. In the front seat, he could see Charlie turn slowly to Caroline, his eyes wide. She didn't look back.

“That's Alex,” she simply said. 

There was silence in the car--or there would have been, if not for Lynyrd Skynyrd. 

“My girlfriend,” she continued. “Look, I didn't introduce you because you guys aren't exactly... good with people.”  

“I'm insulted,” Charlie mumbled.

Slowly, Rocco peered over his shoulder. Huddled against a number of guns and boxes was a small girl who looked no older than her mid-twenties. She stared straight at him with large, deep brown eyes framed by square lenses. 

“Hello,” she said. He looked away quickly, like he'd seen something he wasn't supposed to know about.

“You're Rocco, right?” she asked, re-positioning herself among the artillery. “We've met before. Kind of. I mean. Well, I was there, I guess. We were never introduced.” 

Rocco nodded, keeping his eyes averted.   

“I'm a friend of David's, kind of. Anyway, if I could offer a bit of advice?, If you're looking for a place that's fairly hunter-free, I'd say you should go with Alaska. Mostly just bigfoot hunters up there. No one really interested in vampires, anyway.” 

“Not much a fan of the cold,” Charlie replied. 

“Just a suggestion. I mean, between cold or death, it's up to you," Alex continued, unwarranted, "But yeah, Alaska. Think about it.”

“For now, they're gonna have to settle for whatever they can find in Tennessee,” Caroline said. 

Rocco had never been to Tennessee. For as much as he'd traveled over the years, he knew very little about most of the country. He had no mental image of it. Southern accents, he figured, maybe rocking chairs and farm dogs. Nothing else came to mind. 

Time passed slowly on the road. Alex filled it with long stories about monsters he'd never heard of, and things that David said about him. Rocco just nodded. He'd never met anyone who could talk that much without stopping, and he wondered if she ever would. 

There was a rest stop on the side of the road, near the Florida-Georgia border. Caroline stopped the car and threw the door open, Alex jumping out after her and jogging to catch up. Rocco sighed, and this time he could actually hear it. 

He took in their surroundings through the window. He thought about getting out to stretch his legs, but instead just let himself sink deeper into the beat up old plush seats of the van. Absentmindedly, he patted his pocket for cigarettes. Empty. Of course. 

“Charlie,” Rocco said, “this sucks.”

Charlie made a small noise of agreement in the front. “This isn't exactly what I anticipated when I made the arrangement," he admitted.  “Don't suppose you somehow got a smoke for me?”

Rocco shook his head. “Still gone,” he said. He thought about everything else he'd left behind that night, and felt a little gutted. “Will our stuff be ok?” 

Charlie shrugged. “We can hope. I have home insurance, at the least.” It was an empty comfort, even Rocco could tell. All the insurance money in the world wouldn’t bring back Charlie’s scrapbooks and photos. His voice made it clear that he realized that.

From what Rocco could see of his reflection in the rear view mirror, Charlie looked tired. He scratched his head. “We've been through worse,” he said, his eyes closing. “Much worse...many times.” 

He was right; he always was. In the past five months alone, there'd been more close calls than Rocco could count on both his hands. But they were alone now--more vulnerable. Charlie wouldn't admit it, but he knew that worried him. Charlie nestling into twenty-year-old-van seats was proof enough of that. 

Charlie smiled sleepily from the front seat. “Whatcha wanna eat when we get to Tennessee then?” He asked.

“Dunno. Ain't you the local?” Rocco replied. It was a stupid joke, but at least Charlie's smile loosened into a genuine one. “We'll need a real meal first, I guess.” He thought about it. “Barbeque, maybe... Wanna try that?”

“Sure, Roc,” he said.

Rocco weakly attempted to grin, even though Charlie couldn't see it. He patted his empty pocket again and looked out at the rest stop gas station. “I'll be right back,” he said to no one who could hear him.

.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.

Human habits, like breathing, die hard. You tie the idea of fear and exhaustion to gasping and fighting for deep lungfuls of air. It's a hard association to break, even when your body doesn't need it.

Rocco's asthma wasn't a quiet thing. 

“Stop.” Charlie tried to remind him to quiet down. It was a challenge enough for a big guy like him to try and walk quietly even before he made a spectacle of himself with the asthma attack. They were probably far enough away now, Charlie figured, but the hunters had cars, and they only had feet. 

“How'd they find us?” Rocco asked. 

“Dunno,” Charlie replied. Maybe the mysterious deaths on the news, the new massive house, the two men spotted around said new massive house fitting their descriptions, all that for starters.  Word traveled fast amongst humans, and even faster among hunters. He imagined there were probably things he could have done to prevent this from happening so soon. Still, it'd only been a month or two since they'd left Boston. 

“Wassername...Caroline. Don't think she sold us out, do ya?”

“No.” 

“Trust 'er?” Rocco managed through coughs, fighting his own body for air. Charlie rolled his eyes. No amount of reminders could stop him now. Rocco was hacking and spitting, and shambling to keep up with Charlie. 

“Trust is a strong word,” he said, choosing his words carefully. “She has a certain debt to me. It's a hunter thing. A sort of code of theirs.” Which, regardless, doesn't stop her from trying to make a profit off me, he thought. “Besides, it's not in her best interest to let the person paying for her to continue this 'hobby' of hers to die,” he added.

A look of dull understanding crossed Rocco's face. “Ok,” he said, swallowing hard. He drew more needless breaths, clutching his leather jacket tightly, still rumpled in his arms. Life or death, he still brings the damn thing, Charlie thought, purposely ignoring the wallet and phone stuffed in  his back pockets. 

“Where are we meeting her?” Rocco asked.

“As far from here as we can manage until she arrives,” Charlie said. “Be wise to stray from gas stations and bars...Anywhere public at all, really.” It wouldn't be hard. There wasn't much around them anyway. They'd made it to a back road, sparsely lit with old, harsh streetlights every couple hundred feet. As Charlie went further off the road, he murmured a short command to his companion to do the same.  Rocco had managed one more deep, deep cough and spat on the ground. 

Without breathing or heartbeats, it was silent, save for the sounds of animals and cars speeding by through the night. 

They walked. 

.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-..-.-.-.-.-.-.-..-.-.-.-.-

“You can buy those if you want, but there's no smoking in my car,” Caroline called over to him from the snack aisle, putting two, or maybe five tubes of Pringles chips into a bag. 

Rocco said nothing, but lifted another two fingers to the man behind the glass counter and pointed to the box of Marlboros. They weren't Luckies, but they'd work in a pinch. He pointed to the Virginia Slims, and the cashier added a pack to the pile. He picked up a lighter from the counter and grabbed a wad of crumpled bills from his pocket. After counting them, he put everything in a messy pile in the metal tray to be slid behind the protective glass. Five inches under Rocco's eye level, Caroline bustled up to the counter, Alex in tow. He hadn't seen the smaller girl over the aisles earlier. 

“Hey! Did you hear me? You're not gonna smoke that shit in the car. They might not be able to hurt you anymore, but in my line of work you have a short life span to begin with, I'm not gonna let some asshole's secondhand smoke cut it down to nothing.” 

Rocco collected his change and his bag of cigarettes. “Smoke 'em outside,” he muttered, pulling out his Malboros and tapping the box. He knocked one out and slid it between his lips. 

He squinted as he walked outside. Truth be told, he didn't mind having to relocate, but the sun of the south was nothing short of oppressive, even early in the morning. He never was keen on the idea that Charlie married himself to, which included driving as far south as he could from Boston, until pine trees were replaced with palm trees and the seasons became “hot,” and “slightly less so."  

He lit his cigarette and puffed, and he thought about Boston. It was probably thirty-four degrees back home this time of year. 

Caroline emerged through the rest stop's double doors. Alex, again, trailed behind her, this time with arms full of what looked like magazines and maps. 

“Smoke it and get back in the van,” Caroline snapped as she walked away without so much as looking him in the eye. He remembered what Charlie said earlier, something about her not being a people person. He understood now.

.-.-.-.-.--.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-

At night, it almost reminded him of home. Almost. Still too green, and nowhere near enough buildings to keep the cold in. The air felt heavier somehow. There was a nip in the air that night, though slight, but chilly enough that Charlie'd resorted to requesting the jacket off his back. That was something, at least.

They passed a gas station, houses, and probably the last phone booth in the state. They walked along the road, no longer worried so much about staying out of the yellow gleam of the streetlights. Charlie pressed some buttons on his cell phone, and it glowed, lighting up his face so Rocco could clearly see him in the dark. He didn't look too scared. Tired, even annoyed, but not nervous, not scared. He felt stupid for worrying.

“Hey Charlie?” Rocco slowed his pace to stay behind Charlie.

“Yeah, Roc?” Charlie replied.

His hands fidgeted inside his pockets, and his eyes found themselves resting on the gravel alongside the road. 

“Is it ever gonna go back to how it was, ya think?”  

He held a small bit of hope inside him that it would. The question felt heavy inside of him, and even heavier when he spoke it into the silence. 

Charlie swiped at his phone a couple more times and responded, “You want me to lie to ya?” 

Rocco shook his head before realizing Charlie couldn't see it. “Nah, Charlie,”

“We had a good run with the family, Roc.” He paused. Rocco felt the knot in his stomach grow. The worry felt more like a double knot now, or one of those fancy sailor knots. 

“Your trade, my club... Boston, all of it. We had a good run," Charlie continued, "But that ain't our lives no more, Roc. It can't be. It's over, and now we gotta find something new. D'ya remember how it was before ya found the family?”

Before the family, he had another family, and he never really had anything else to do with himself. He fought, he sold drugs, he fought more, and he avoided the cops so he could do it again another day. He remembered the years in the hospital, the only time he wasn't involved with some family or another, and knew it wouldn't be like that. Charlie meant something that he couldn't possibly understand, Rocco decided. 

“You know I don't, Charlie. I ain't never had anythin' else.”

“That's right,” Charlie recalled. “Well, we're gonna have to wander for a while, s'what I meant. We'll find somethin'. Somethin' new.  Might take a while is all. 'Til then, just think of this as extended vacation.”

Extended vacation had a nice sound to it, like living at Disney World or taking a road trip. But the thing about vacation is at the end of it, there's the comfort of knowing you can finally go home. For Rocco that meant seeing his dogs, kickin' around town for a couple hours, getting breakfast at his favorite place, and finally, back to Charlie's for a couple days before he went back to work at the warehouse. It wasn't a vacation if there was no home to return to. Charlie was trying to soften news that he hadn't even broken yet.

“We ain't never goin' home again. are we?” 

“No,” Charlie said finally.

They walked. Rocco's feet felt like enormous weights, impossible to move forward. His eyes stung. He could feel the mucus welling up in his nose and throat.

“Aw hell, Roc...Don't cry.”