Masked Read Free

of the
night. It was another dark highway; one more lonely road.
    The only thing I could get on the
radio was some middle-of-the-night soft rock station. For whatever reason, when
driving through the more isolated parts of the Rockies that one station always
came in the clearest. Usually the same loop of past hits repeated itself each
night. The reception was choppy and starting to fade.
    I recognized most of the songs,
at least parts, enough to sing along to, but had no idea of the song titles or
artists. A song about someone being all out of love and so lost without someone
else was playing by an artist who sounded like a woman, but for some reason who
I thought was really a man.
    The large green sign showed it
was ‘sixty-four miles to Missoula.’ I considered it for a moment, looked at the
clock and decided it was as good of a place to stop as any. Dawn was coming
soon and I knew I shouldn’t try to go any further. I’d been driving all night,
well at least since 12:30, when I finally was able to make my way out of Troy.
    Troy had been only the latest
stop on my endless self-inflicted wanderings through the Pacific Northwest. I
was glad the business there was over and Hannah was safe. It had been hard to finally
pin it on Ted and my head throbbed with the additional effort.
    After leaving Ted’s house, it took
a while to make it out of town. Since I’d been there for a week and a half, I was
strapped for funds and wasn’t going to get far on a twenty dollar bill and near
empty tank of gas. I needed more cash in order to be able to move on.
    Getting cash when I needed it
usually wasn’t a problem since I could teleport pretty much anywhere I wanted,
just a simple in, out and away. This time however, I ran into a few minor
glitches with the out and away part, probably due to stupidity under the
influence of exhaustion, but I guess it couldn’t be easy every time. All that
mattered was I had the cash I needed to move on.
    I was used to being up all night,
it was the schedule I knew, how I was forced to live. Night time was when I
preferred to travel and usually I fit sleep in during the day. Since most of
the time there wasn’t much I could do during the day, the schedule worked well
for me. The last couple of days had been long though, and sleep seemed like a
distant friend. The throbbing in my head was almost unbearable.
    I yawned aloud to the empty
vehicle as I pressed the palm of my right hand to my pounding temple. “Man, I
need to get some sleep.” Each pulse carried through my cranium as if someone
was beating it like a bass drum in a parade.
    I reached over and opened the
glove box to riffle through its contents, pulling out a few different
prescription bottles before finding the one I wanted.
    A few of the small pills fell
into my mouth as I poured them straight from the bottle. I chewed with a bit of
a grimace and swallowed down the bitter pieces. Without anything to chase the
bits of pill down, several pieces got caught in my dry throat.
    “Blah.”
    I twisted the lid back on the
container and tossed it into the open glove box. Fortunately, I was able to
work up enough saliva to get all of the pieces down.
    Next to me, on the passenger seat
was a plastic grocery bag. Unfortunately the bag didn’t contain anything to
drink. I did however have several bars of nourishment . The reason I say nourishment instead of food is because calling the bag’s contents food is an affront to
anyone with functional taste buds. I reached in to pull out a protein energy
bar. Choco-Explosion , it said on the wrapper.
    Who were they kidding? It was the
type of bar that was high in energy and protein, but equally low in taste and
appetizing texture. The choco in Choco-Explosion was a chemical tasting attempt
at chocolate without any of the things that made chocolate good.
    The bars served their purpose, a
lot of calories, a lot of energy and little money. I opened the wrapper and
devoured the bar in three bites. Again, I