Following, Part 1

The headlights reflected off the yellow lines in front of him. They fired past like the stars when the Millennium Falcon blasts into light speed. He had the simultaneous contradicting feelings that he’d been driving much longer than he really had, and that he’d been driving almost no time at all. He’d started in the middle of the night, and it was still the middle of the night. That told him it had only been, at most, a few hours.

It was quiet. Some strips of I40 West were older than others, so occasionally he had the background noise of tires rolling over rough asphalt patches beneath him. But right now, on a newer stretch of highway, they only hummed. Like the white noise machine his mom used to turn on to help him sleep. He hadn’t used one in years, the silence of the night amplifying the high-pitched ringing that sporadically came to his ears. But the humming. It was making him tired.

Had he really not had the radio on this entire time? He hadn’t even noticed. He’d been too stuck inside his own head, listening to his thoughts. But he’d had enough of those by now.

He leaned down to find the power button on the radio. As he did, the dark sedan began its natural drift to the right, its wheels crossing over the white line and thump thump thumping against the divots on the edge of the road meant for just such an occasion. He shot to attention, the boost of adrenaline keeping the sleep from his eyes for another few minutes. He fiddled with the radio, unable to see its button labels in the dark. Finally, he switched it on with the big circle volume button. He spun it to the right to crank it up and drowned out the hum.

The radio was tuned to a news station, the newsman’s voice coming through energetic horns and drums of the show’s theme behind him. He let the man droll on with the story, not catching the first few words, only thankful he finally had some other sound to keep him company. Until he heard this.

“…last reported by Oklahoma Highway Patrol authorities as heading west on I40, although it’s possible the prison escapee has veered from that path since he was last seen in Okishawa at the lone gas station just outside of town only four hours ago…”

“Heading West on I40? Prison escapee?” he thought to himself. “Shit.” He opened the glove box looking for a road map but didn’t find one. He tried to mentally figure out how long it’d been since he’d gone through Okishawa himself. Okay, about four or five hours, he’d guessed. But he hadn’t noticed anything worth worrying about driving through there.

No cars as far as the eye could see ahead of or behind him. It was just him out here. This road was as straight as an arrow. He’d even be able to see if someone was twenty miles behind him, he figured. Only that didn’t help to quell the feeling building up inside him. The feeling that he was being followed.

“…considered armed and dangerous…” the voice on the radio continued, “…having killed a man and stolen his vehicle upon reaching town before taking off west. Authorities have described the car in question, still thought to be what the suspect is driving. They described it as a black, two-door Chevy Malibu. The escapee’s name is…”

And then, as if flicking on a light switch in a dark room, a neon sign appeared in front of him. He couldn’t read it at first, but as he drew closer, more lights came into view. The lights of some sort of structure. He clicked the radio off as he got closer to the sign. He could make out what he thought was the word VACANCY in curly red letters blinking in front of him, the word NO not illuminated directly proceeding it. He came to what looked like an old plantation-style home, four large, cream-colored beams extending from the front porch up to the roof of the two-story house. Attached to it, extending out to its right side like some sort of unnatural prosthetic limb was a long building in the shape of an L. It was only one story and looked like it’d been added on. Not recently, however, as the roof was bare of shingles in many places and the bluish-green paint had chipped off in a few spots revealing a rainbow series of red, yellow, and brown layers of paint beneath. Along the front of the ugly long building were a series of doors, all numbered except for two where a discoloration in the paint showed that a set of numbers had hung there but was now gone.

Above the blinking vacancy sign were the words WELCOME INN, shaded in the dark on the front side, all of the letters’ lights having presumably fizzled out. As he drove past the sign and into the gravel parking lot, he saw some of the back sign was at least working, although the only letters shining in a yellowish light were WE and INN.

A rusted brown, square body single-cab Ford pickup was the only other vehicle near the building, not in the parking lot but pulled up to the left side of the house. As he pulled in, he saw a black sign hanging on the front door reading OPEN and COME ON IN in bright orange letters. It looked as if there were still lights on inside.

He drove to the far right of the building, which would’ve been the very bottom of its capital L shape, and parked his car there in the dark at the edge of the gravel. And then, there was that feeling again. Someone was coming this way, although he looked back east and saw nothing. Now was as good a time as ever to find a place to stay for the night. No prison escapee on the run would stop and stay in a motel if he was hoping to stay ahead of the law, right? He figured that was common sense. He looked east down the highway. Still no one coming behind him. He’d be safe here.

He walked past the stretch of motel rooms, keeping his ears tuned for the sound of any approaching cars. When he was halfway to the front of the business he started to question whether this motel was even up and running at all. From the looks of it, busted glass and empty Lays chip bags in the parking lot, one of the motel doors without a number on it cracked open and creaking in the wind, it didn’t look like anyone had kept up with it in a long time.

But sure enough, the front door was unlocked. As he walked in a tiny bell rung above his head causing him to jump at the sound, looking at the bell over his shoulder like it’d just hurled an insult at him.

The open area he’d walked into was empty. Ten feet from the front door was a wide staircase going up to a second floor and a balcony that looked down upon him. The upstairs was too dark to see what was, or wasn’t, there. The hallway going past the staircase was dimly lit and seemed to lead into a kitchen, as he saw a fridge and small table with chairs poking around the doorway. To his left was an opening in the wall with a sitting room, holding a couch, a coffee table, a couple of bookcases, and a small fireplace as old and broken down as the rest of the home itself.

To his right, a few feet across the black and white checkered tile was the front desk of the motel. On the wall behind it was a series of cubby holes with keys inside them, tags attached to the keys with room numbers. Looks like there were vacancies here tonight. Lots of them.

The light above the front desk was the only one shining bright enough to light the room. It occasionally flickered, buzzing each time it shivered on and off. The desk was a scrambled mess of papers and post-its, pens and pencils, an ashtray full of smoked cigarette ends. No computer screen to check anyone in, but rather, a logbook with scribbles across its pages in all different colors of ink. It was open, lying next to an old cash register.

He cleared his throat to alert someone, anyone there, to his presence, but there was no response. He looked around, listened intently, and it did appear he was alone. He walked around to the back of the front desk and looked at the writing in the logbook. It told him no one had checked in since - what was it now, April? - at least the last two months, unless anyone checking in was being kept off the books.

If this is a running business, he told himself, then surely they’ll have something in the cash register. He took one last preemptive look around the space, then pulled the cash drawer out. He was right, there certainly was something in it. Not cash, no. But a revolver, a brown handle with black metal scratched and dulled above it.

To the right of the desk was a bedroom door half-open, looking into a dark room. He closed the drawer and looked in to see an empty, unmade bed, pillows and blankets laying on the floor. The room was partially lit from the motel’s sign outside shining in through the sheer white curtains on the large open window. He walked back around to the front of the desk. On the nightstand next to the bed lay another ashtray, this one with a half-smoked cigarette hanging over the side, a small stream of smoke still rising from it to the ceiling.

Then he noticed the bell on top of the front desk. Scribbled in black letters with an arrow pointing to the bell were the words RING ME and a smiley face. He tapped it and it rang out quietly. He hit it again, this time harder, and it sang. He waited a few seconds, then hit it three more times with full force.

“Alright, alright,” he heard a man’s voice call out from the kitchen area at the back of the house. The sound was followed by what sounded like a screen door’s spring stretching, then pulling the door shut until it slammed.

“I hear ya, I’m coming,” the man called from the back. “Just let me wash up.” A sink was turned on in the kitchen for a few seconds while someone hacked a snotty ball of mucus and spit it out before turning the water off. When the man finally came around the corner, he snorted loudly, scrunching up the front of his nose as if he was working on his next spitball. The man wore a light tan jumpsuit with black and brown stains across it from his whiskered chin down to the black boots on his feet.

“Howdy, how ya doin’ there, buddy?” the man said, wiping his right hand down the side of his jumpsuit and extending it out for a shake. “How can I help ya?”

“I need a room,” he responded, shaking hands, looking at the name tag on the man’s jumpsuit, the name Billy sewed in curly red letters against a white rectangle patch. “Billy, is it?”

“Huh?” The man looked confused, then stared down at his chest and smiled. “Oh, no, that,” he laughed. “Name’s Kevin. Got this at the Goodwill and never bothered fixin it, you know?”

“How much for a room, Kev?” he said, cutting to the chase.

Kevin moved to the back of the front desk, not noticing the cash drawer had been opened and shut without his knowledge. “Welp, we got plenty of ‘em.” He laughed again, like his business doing poorly was some sort of inside joke. “Can I get a name?”

“Thad.”

“Last name, Thad?” Kevin asked, scribbling in his logbook.

There was a pause. “What for?”

Kevin looked up. “I need your info if you’re booking a room.”

Thad hesitated. “Shelton.”

Kevin wrote it down. “Just one?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Just one room?”

Thad sarcastically looked to his left, then his right. “Uh, yeah. Just me, Kev.”

“Alright,” said Kevin, sticking his tongue out as he wrote. “Well seeing as we ain’t got but you here tonight, I can put you right next to the office if you’d like. Quicker to come in for coffee in the morning.”

“No,” said Thad. “Put me down at the end.”

Kevin gave him a strange look, “I promise I don’t make no noise here at night. And that bed in there’s already made. Room eleven at the end, sheets aren’t on the bed yet, and TV’s broken.”

“I’ll make the bed,” Thad said. “And I won’t watch TV. Don’t need coffee either. I’ll be in and out pretty quick tonight. I need to hit the road.”

Kevin shrugged and grabbed a set of keys with a diamond-shaped tag hanging from the keychain with the number 11 on it. “Alright then, if that’s what you want.”

“I just, well, I parked my car down that way and I don’t feel like moving it.”

“Hey listen, man, you got the pick of the lot tonight. You want the last room, you got it. What’s your license plate number?”

“Why?” Thad replied quickly.

Kevin almost spoke, then stopped to think a second. “Hell, I don’t know. There’s a spot in the logbook for it next to the guest’s name, so I always write it down.”

“For what?”

“Well I spose it’s so you can park in our lot and we know you’re a customer so we don’t tow your car.” Saying it like it made all the sense in the world.

Thad looked outside at the empty parking lot, his car parked out of sight. “You going to tow my car?”

Kevin thought for a second, then said, “No.” He moved on. “Alright, cash, check, or card? I might have change in here if you got cash.”

He started to pull on the cash drawer, but Thad spoke up, stopping him. “Uh, no, no change. No cash. Check.”

“Okay. Well, we got a dollar fifty charge you pay by check. Just cause I got to go cash it and bank’s about fifteen miles from here.”

“That’s alright. It’s just, you mind if I pay in the morning? My checkbook’s in my car and I don’t feel like walking down there and back right now. I’ll drop one off before I leave.”

“Oh yeah, sure, sure,” said Kevin. “Now how early you plan on getting out of here? I ought to be up, but most likely going to be in the garage out back.”

Thad looked towards the back of the house again, curious. “What’s in the garage out back?”

“Welp, as you can see, the motel portion of my business ain’t running so hot nowadays. Sure, we still get a few folks in here every now and then. But out back, that’s the moneymaker. I got a garage, work on cars, long haul trucks, that sort of thing. Small-time, cash transactions.”

“Just you out there, Kevin?” Thad asked.

“Oh yeah. Just me and the radio, man. Say, you had yours on when you was driving up here?”

Thad paused. “Yeah. Why?”

“Well, they said a man busted out the pen, west of here a couple hours. I thought about sitting out on the front porch seeing if anyone comes driving by, thought it might be him. I can usually hear a car going by, though. Yours is the first one I heard tonight.”

“How would you know it was him if you came by?”

“I figure I see a dark-colored car going by, car sort of like yours, then that’s him.”

Thad stepped right up to the front desk until his crotch was up against it. “Car like mine, huh? How do you know it’s not me?”

Kevin looked up from the logbook and his writing and stared at Thad. “I, uh…” he stammered. His hand went to the cash drawer and stayed there for a moment, but he kept his eyes on Thad. Then he burst out laughing. “You funny, man. Ain’t no escape convict shacking up at a motel for a night’s rest. Hell, that fella probably turned south soon as he hit Checotah.”

Thad smiled. “You’re probably right.” He shook his head. “I sort of had a weird feeling all night tonight. Like someone was following me. Decided maybe if I stopped for the night, whatever was coming, up behind me would pass me by.”

“Well you’re welcome here long as you need a place. I…”

As he began to speak, a pair of headlights turned into the parking lot, flashing through the front door blinds that were twisted shut so you couldn’t see out through them.

Kevin stepped up to them, bending one blind and peeking through. “I’ll be damned,” he said.

“What?” asked Thad.

“I couldn’t tell you the last time I had two guests stop here the same night. Car just like yours, too.”

“What kind of car, Kevin?”

Kevin squinted, then his mouth dropped open as he turned towards Thad, wide-eyed. “Black.” He gulped. “Chevy Malibu.”