Dividing Earth: A Novel of Dark Fantasy by Stoops Troy

Author:Stoops, Troy [Stoops, Troy]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub
Publisher: Red Shift Press
Published: 2013-02-23T18:30:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty: A Vase Shatters in Gibsonton

1

For Veronica, it was a time of endless roads, long nights, and filched identity.

She’d been staying at the Motel 6, sans Chris, and going to work from there, and Robert hadn’t called, hadn’t dropped a note, nothing. Nothing, that is, until he’d had her served at work. She’d signed, bid the messenger good day, then tossed the papers into the garbage beside her desk. After that, she’d stood up, taken a deep and cleansing breath, performed a check on the teller line, dropped several clips of hundred dollar bills into her purse—a dozen, maybe; maybe a few more than that—and had, not two minutes later, strode from the bank calmly, as if exiting the confessional.

The romance of a new life had long appealed to her. Driving to the office or on errands, she’d often imagined what it would be like to skip the designated exit. Where, and when, would she stop? What would it mean?

After taking the money she drove to the edge of town, paused at a stoplight. East, and she would hit Daytona; west, and Tampa wasn’t far. The light turned green, and she tensed a moment, then got in the westbound lane. She tapped the brakes once at cruising speed, five miles under the limit, and remained in the far right-hand lane, her hands clutching ten and two, her mind, for perhaps the first time ever, completely free.

That night, she decided on a town called Gibsonton, though she was somewhat sorry to be stopping, to be yielding to another exit, another town. Towns, she now thought, existed to keep you, to trap you. She felt hopeless: she’d been born too late. The ideals and dreams of earlier times were dead; price tags and million dollar yachts, tax exemptions and gated communities—these made up the new Eden. She’d long felt an overwhelming wanderlust, but had squelched it in order to live a socially acceptable life, but it had been unbearable, and it wasn’t Robert’s fault, or little Jenn’s, but her own. To vanish, she thought with a smile. Now that’s romantic. A new life, a new name, and new dreams.

For miles there were only trailer parks and fields in which cows grazed under the setting sun. Dusk now, the moon a white thumbprint following her. She saw boarded-up filling stations and abandoned cars, but no people, and she began to wonder if Gibsonton was a ghost town. Another mile brought a series of sparsely populated trailer parks, and a truck stop café sporting only one car out front, an old Pontiac Firebird, the phoenix dull on its hood.

Then she saw something. It was huge and round and partially concealed by a tree. Below it an old double wide trailer seemed to rear back, as if in fear. She slowed down, leaned over the steering wheel, shook her head, staring blankly. She’d been stopped nearly a minute before she realized what she was looking at. The construct was a mess, some of its seats had rusted through, and it leaned precariously over the street.

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