Herring

Didn't Know You Spoke French...

~

Alright. Gone underground. Train's moving. Graffiti's done. The robbery's dissolved. You'd think that was the end of it.

You'd be wrong.

Here's where it gets — well. Here's where it gets.

A-and that's all you'll be getting for now sweetie, byeee

Wait you sick twisted deluded fuc—

I'm taking this one. She doesn't get to narrate what comes next. Not because she can't — she absolutely could, and she'd do it with the particular unhinged energy that I've come to deeply admire — but because what's about to happen is the kind of thing a person can't narrate while it's happening to them.

They're too busy surviving it. I mean she could always narrate it in past tense, but I want this one.

Third person. My rules. My voice. Go.

~

The train deposited Deia at Beacon Hill because she'd ridden it past her stop twice without noticing and eventually made herself get off before she ended up in the depot. She emerged from the station into air that had gone sharper, the rain having upgraded from a suggestion to the lord's command, and stood on the pavement outside with her bag and her ankle and her broken evening and tried to remember the geometry of how to get home from here.

Forty minutes on foot. Maybe thirty-five if she pushed it. The ankle said absolutely f*****g not, but the ankle was outvoted.

She started walking.

Here is what Deia did not know, could not have known, had absolutely no framework for knowing: she was about to walk directly into the second act of the same night she'd already been surviving. Hilarious no? Watch this.

The three cars from the Falk Street convoy — the ones that had burned through the intersection without lights, the ones the police had been chasing — had not stopped. They'd scattered. Two going north, one going south, taking different routes through the city with the specific route-knowledge of people who'd planned for exactly this possibility, which they had, because they were the kind of people who planned for exactly this possibility.

The southbound one — a black pickup truck, mud-smeared, moving at a speed that turned traffic lights into a suggestion — came through the intersection at the top of Beacon Hill just as Deia stepped off the curb at the bottom.

She heard it before she saw it. The engine first. Then the tires on the wet road, a sound like fabric tearing. Then the lights — high and bright, cutting through the rain sideways.

She stopped walking.

The truck stopped too.

Not gently. It braked hard, fishtailing slightly, the rear end swinging wide and catching the lamplight before the whole vehicle corrected and sat there in the middle of the road, engine running, fifteen feet from where Deia was standing on the pavement with her hands at her sides and the expression of someone who had genuinely, sincerely, done nothing wrong tonight except the graffiti and she was already regretting that.

The driver's window rolled down.

Deia looked at the driver.

The driver looked at Deia.

And here is the thing about Varietta — the actual thing, the thing that no description fully captures until you've been on the receiving end of it — she had a face that was completely at peace with whatever was happening. A specific, unnerving peace. The peace of someone who has decided that outcomes are interesting rather than frightening, which sounds like wisdom until you realise it means she would drive off a cliff with the same emotional register as ordering coffee.

Varietta: "You need a lift."

It was not a question.

Deia: "I don't know you."

Varietta: "You needed one about four blocks back when you got off that train. I've kinda been watching you limp."

Deia: "Why were you watching me limp?"

Varietta: "Seemed like the kind of limping that had a story."

Deia: "I don't —"

Somewhere behind them, two blocks north, the first siren wail re-entered the evening. Both women's heads turned toward it. Then, a second direction — east — another one. The police net had not stopped tightening. It had simply relocated.

They were looking for the truck.

The truck Varietta was currently sitting in, idling, in the middle of Beacon Hill, with the window down and rain coming in.

Deia looked at the truck.

Looked at the direction of the sirens.

Looked at the truck again.

Varietta: "I know somewhere they won't follow."

Deia: "You can't possibly know that."

Varietta: "I know a lot of things I shouldn't. Get in or don't. But decide fast because I'm leaving either way and you look like you've had a genuinely terrible evening and it seems unfair to leave you in the rain. Plus uh, they're probably coming for you too huh."

She said this pleasantly. The way someone says would you like sugar in your tea?

Deia: "This is the worst decision I've ever f*****g made."

Varietta: "Top five, maybe. Get in."

This probably wouldn't even make the top ten worst decisions she'll ever make. But at the moment, this was number zero.

Deia got in.

She does not know, to this day, with any confidence, why she got in. The ankle, maybe. The rain. The sirens from two directions. The way Varietta said I know somewhere they won't follow with the complete conviction of someone who has never in their life said anything they didn't mean. All of it, probably. All of it stacked on top of a day that had started with seventeen stolen minutes of sleep and cascaded from there with the structural integrity of a building that had been compromised at the foundation.

She got in.

The truck moved.

What followed was the kind of thing news helicopters exist for.

Channel 7 had a crew already on the Falk Street scene — a standard dispatch for what had looked like a police chase story — and when their helicopter pilot radioed in that the southbound vehicle had apparently picked someone up in Beacon Hill and was now heading toward the water at a speed that precluded any interpretation except deliberate, the producer made a decision in about two seconds.

Stay on it.

The footage would be used across four stations and two national networks before the night was over. It began, on the Channel 7 broadcast that went live at twelve-eighteen am, with an aerial shot of the truck taking a sharp left onto a waterfront road with four police vehicles in pursuit, the gap between them shrinking. The lights of the city were on the water to the left. The bridge was ahead.

Inside the truck, Deia had both hands on the dashboard and was engaging in the kind of prayer that requires no previous religious affiliation.

Deia: "Why are there four of them now—"

Varietta: "Six."

Deia: "What?"

Varietta checked the side mirror with the unhurried focus of someone parallel parking.

Varietta: "There are six. Two caught up while you were doing your thing with the dashboard."

Deia: "My thing with the — I'm holding on, I'm holding on because you're driving like you're trying to outrun the concept of roads —"

Varietta: "The bridge is clear."

Deia: "The bridge is barricaded, I can see the lights from here —"

Varietta: "The bridge is clear on the left side."

Deia: "That's the edge. That's the water side. That's not a lane, that's a railing —"

Varietta: "There's a gap."

Deia: "There is no gap in a bridge railing, that's the whole structural purpose of —"

Varietta: "Small gap. Construction gap. I measured it last week."

Deia stopped talking.

Stared at her.

Deia: "You measured it?"

Varietta: "I'm thorough."

Deia: "LAST WEEK —"

Varietta: "I had a feeling."

In the convenience store on Fifth, the television above the counter was running Channel 7 because Kezia had put it on for background noise and never changed the channel and had been half-watching it for the last twenty minutes the way you half-watch things that aren't quite interesting enough to actually look at but aren't quite boring enough to look away from.

Then the aerial footage came up.

Kezia leaned forward.

Squinted.

Put her face about eight inches from the screen.

Kezia: "...Holy shit."

The truck on the television had a figure in the passenger seat that was, from this altitude and in this rain and through this camera, not identifiable by any reasonable evidentiary standard.

Kezia had known Deia for two years.

She knew the way she held her shoulders when she was bracing for something. She knew the white-knuckle posture of someone who was convinced something bad was about to happen and had been proven completely right.

She knew.

Deia. What the f**k!

She grabbed her phone.

The bridge.

Twelve-twenty-two am. Rain at full swing. Six police vehicles behind them — two had peeled off at the on-ramp, too close, too fast, trying to get ahead — the barricade at the far end lit up like a small municipal Christmas, blue and red, three units across, not moving, because they were not required to move, because the bridge was a dead end, because this was over.

That was the calculation the officers at the barricade had made. Reasonable calculation. Professionally sound. Every piece of available information supported it.

Varietta looked at the barricade.

She looked at it the way a chess player looks at an endgame they mapped out four moves ago and are now arriving at with the satisfaction of having been correct.

She looked at the gap in the railing.

Construction gap. Temporary. Eight inches wider than standard. She'd been thorough.

Deia: "What the f**k are you doing?! We're gonna die!"

Varietta: "Didn't know you spoke French, oui."

Deia: "Have you lost your goddamn mind?"

Varietta: "Haven't been more sane my entire life."

Deia: "I don't even f*****g know you!"

Varietta: "A bit late for introductions no?"

Deia: "f**k YOU!"

Just as the truck was about to hit the gap, at a jawbreaking hundred-and-three miles an hour, Varietta didn't however account for the police vehicle suddenly catching up to her. Ramming into the rear of the pick-up with enough speed to alter its trajectory, they swerved, missing a clean crossing of the gap almost cinematic in occurrence.

From the Channel 7 helicopter, the aerial operator caught the exact moment of it — the truck's nose just missing the gap in the railing by a margin. Crashing into the railing before flying off the bridge, an immense chill filled Deia. A spray of sparks that caught the rain and looked briefly, from that altitude, like something a person might call beautiful if they were not currently in it.

The pickup took flight.

Missing the intended point by a good margin, they took flight with a takeoff so violent, flight was too beautiful a word to describe what happened.

It simply went. Up and out and over the water, the bridge lights behind it, the city behind that, the whole illuminated spread of Seattle reflected in the black water below in a smear of light that the truck descended toward with what could only be described, from any objective vantage point, as conviction.

Varietta, who had not survived this long by making incomplete plans, had already unbuckled.

She was already at the window.

She was already —

Deia turned and saw her preparing to leave the vehicle.

Mid-air.

Over the water.

In a truck that was no longer in contact with any road.

Varietta: "See ya."

Deia: "WHAT THE FU—"

Varietta soared.

The truck did not.

Gravity, which is brutish but thorough, kept its prior engagement with the Ford and delivered on it completely — the impact when it came was total, the kind that renders the word impact insufficient, the water receiving the truck with the same indifferent force it receives everything that falls into it, which is: all of it, eventually, one way or another.

The crash was f*****g horrible.

Varietta who had attempted to escape with that leap had her oh so luscious and long hair caught by a piece of disconnecting metal from the car, making her dive absolutely horrifying.

Deia, still strapped into the car, felt the impact of the icy cold waters as though it was a brick wall. The water didn't seep in. It erupted. A violent, freezing surge that punched through the shattered windshield and swallowed the truck in less time than it takes to draw a single breath.

Deia's lungs seized. Not from the cold—though the cold was absolute, a black icy bitterness that seeped into her marrow—but from the sheer wrongness of the plight. One moment she was upright, strapped into a passenger seat, watching Varietta's calm profile as the guardrail splintered and the truck went airborne. The next moment she was upside down. Underwater. The world converted to a churning grey-green murk, lit only by the dying flicker of the headlights as they shorted out against the deep.

The seatbelt. The f*****g seatbelt.

It was locked. Cinched tight across her chest and lap, a nylon fist holding her in place while the pickup—this steel coffin, this sinking tomb—began its slow, groaning descent toward the bottom of whatever body of water they had plunged into. The sound was enormous. A deep, metallic moan. The frame of the truck compressing. The windows—what remained of them—spiderwebbing further. The pressure building in her ears like a scream she couldn't release.

She thrashed. Not with strategy. With an animalistic desire to live. Her hands clawed at the belt release. Found it. Pressed. Nothing. Pressed again. The mechanism was jammed. Water had already fouled it. Or the impact had warped it. Or the universe, in its infinite and personal cruelty, had simply decided she would die here.

No. No no no no no—

She didn't think the words. She became them. A single pulsing negation that filled her skull and drowned out everything except the need to not be here, not like this, not yet, not f*****g yet.

Her fingers found the strap itself. Nylon. Unbreakable by human hands. She knew this. She knew this the way she knew her own name. And still she pulled. Yanked. Twisted. Her shoulders screaming. Her vision spotting at the edges. The water was so cold it had stopped feeling cold and had become something else—a numbness that was eating her from the outside in, taking her extremities one by one, working inward toward the vital things.

The buckle. Go back to the buckle. Jam something in it. Jam what. You have nothing. Your hands are nothing. You are nothing. You are going to die in this seat.

Her lungs were burning now. Not the abstract burn of exertion. The specific, brutal fire of carbon dioxide building in her blood, demanding release, demanding air, demanding she open her mouth and let the water in just to make the burning stop.

She didn't open her mouth.

Her right hand—numb, clumsy, barely responsive—found the buckle again. This time she didn't press. She slammed. The heel of her palm, driven by everything she had left, which was almost nothing. A desperate, formless strike.

The buckle gave.

The belt retracted with a wet shhhhick and she was free. Floating. Disoriented. Which way was up. Which way was out? The truck was tilted. The windshield was a gaping maw, water rushing in, no light beyond it. The driver's side window was gone too. Just a ragged hole where glass used to be. That was her exit. That had to be her exit.

She kicked. Her legs were lead. Her boots—she was still wearing her f*****g boots—dragged at her like anchors. She kicked harder. Pulled herself through the window frame. Something sharp—glass, metal, she didn't know—raked across her ribs. She felt it as a distant pressure, not pain. Pain required blood flow. She had none to spare.

And then she was out. Free of the truck. Suspended in the cold dark water with no reference, no direction, no sense of how far she had to go to reach air.

Up.

Go up.

Just. go. up…