Levitating Las Vegas(38)
Author: Jennifer Echols

Then her thoughts spun in different directions, ricocheting at random angles. But her attraction to him—that colored everything else in her mind. He constantly chided himself that his entire hallucination of mind reading was a symptom of MAD, some self-aggrandizing delusion. It was the wishful thinking of the teenage boy he’d been, jilted for a prom date with a girl who’d been too good for him, and wanting to prove she’d been wrong: Someday she’ll be sorry. Now his someday had arrived.

He knew full well that the two storylines progressed in parallel: his delusional adventure story about saving himself and Holly, and what was really happening. He had no way of knowing which was which, or what borders they shared. He could only assume that what he processed as reading her mind was actually information he gained by some other method, like talking to her, or reading her body language, or subconsciously capitalizing on four years of college psychology classes. He could only work with the information he had.

She dropped the fork and empty container back into the cooler, zipped it, and tossed it into the backseat. She wanted to thank him for a delicious homemade dinner, except as a general rule she did not thank her kidnappers. She was still kind of mad at him. Instead she said, “Your plan is to drive to Icarus, Colorado, and go to the drug factory that makes Mentafixol.”

Candy company, he almost corrected her. That would sound crazy, so he just nodded.

“You have the address?”

“I looked it up on the web. It’s on the main street of the town.” He’d broken out in a cold sweat at his computer when he saw that the address he’d pulled from the pharmacy clerk’s mind was a real place. But if the candy company actually made his medicine, he’d probably remembered the address from a pill bottle, back in the heady days when his pills were at his fingertips. And if the candy company didn’t make his medicine, he’d unknowingly remembered the address from some gift catalog in his mother’s apartment.

The upside was, he’d also seen on the web that the candy company was famous for its fudge. If in fact he’d imagined the entire connection between the candy company and Mentafixol, when they arrived, perhaps he could buy Holly some fudge to placate her—especially if she was crazy by then, too.

“I doubt we can walk up to a drug factory and ask for drugs, even with a prescription,” Holly reasoned. She’d been working through the scenario as she talked. Now an awful possibility occurred to her, and her heart thumped harder again. “You’re not thinking of holding up the drug factory?” She folded one leg and braced the toe of her glittering shoe against the glove compartment in case he dove for the gun.

“I’m thinking of casing the joint,” he admitted. “All I know for sure is that we need that drug, there’s none in Vegas, and I suspect there’s lots in Icarus. Beyond that, we’ll play it by ear.”

She decided to humor him. He seemed honestly intent on “saving” her, and she could at least return the favor by keeping him out of trouble. She kicked off her high heels and cranked down the window. She stretched her long legs in front her and put her bare feet out the window, wiggling her toes in the roaring wind. Her pink toenail polish twinkled in the streetlights over the interstate. “So, now that we’re finally being honest with each other . . .” she began.

He winced internally and tried not to show it on his face. He really hated deceiving her about how crazy he’d gone. He wished he were rescuing her for real.

“. . . what does it feel like to be off Mentafixol completely?” she asked. “In case our field trip to the drug factory doesn’t work, I want to know what I’m in for tomorrow afternoon.”

He didn’t want to scare her about what she was in for. He didn’t want to terrify her by revealing his current state of mind, sending her skittering into a convenience store the first time they stopped for gas, seeking the protection of the clerk and the panic button and the shotgun behind the counter. But he didn’t want to lie to her, either. He told her as much of the truth as he could. “I feel like something’s going to happen.”

As he spoke, a rock song she loved whispered through the radio. He dialed up the volume. Sure enough, as if he could really read minds, she relaxed into the seat and lost herself in the beat of the music. The song made the midnight drive through the desert more bearable. She was embarrassed that she’d asked him on a date and he’d responded by kidnapping her. She was humiliated that he’d probably been charming on the bus only so he could stay close to her and pull a gun on her, not because he’d been coming on to her. But to the background noise of this song, she could pretend that it was a normal crush gone bad, and that she wasn’t teetering on the edge of madness herself.

Elijah relaxed too, finally. His head filled with how much she loved this song, especially the cool part coming up. He liked the song himself. Tune after tune they both liked came on Vegas’s best alt-rock station. The weight of the last few days didn’t lift from his shoulders, exactly, but underneath that burden he was at least able to enjoy listening to Holly’s colorful mind.

The rest would wait until tomorrow.

10

Holly welcomed the dawn. Now that she could see in the first sunlight, she had something to occupy her mind besides the impending doom of herself and Elijah. As he sped the car along a winding mountain highway, she spied pinecones and rocks on the shoulder ahead of them and tried to lift them with her mind, just as she’d willed Elijah’s gun to come to her the night before.

Nothing happened, of course. The gun had slipped out of Elijah’s pants when they hit a bump in the road. Her telekinetic power was in her imagination. But as the Mentafixol continued to wear off, exercising her imagined mental muscle gave her skin a euphoric sparkling sensation, just like old times.

At the intersection with the even narrower highway that would finally take them up to Icarus, Elijah stopped at a gas station and bought her a soda—not diet but a real one with full sugar—and a candy bar, her favorite kind. She wondered how he’d known. For the final leg of the drive, she nibbled candy, sipped Coke, and braced her bare feet on the glove compartment to keep herself from sliding into him when he rounded sharp curves. As the tires spun pebbles into the air and over cliffs, she pretended she was moving them herself, and wished she could. It seemed pedestrian, but the sparkles and the sharp morning sunlight on her skin made it ecstasy.

Midmorning, the paved highway petered out into a dirt road and wound around the lip of a cliff and into a tunnel carved from the solid rock of the mountain. He slowed the car as darkness fell on them like a rock slide. He flipped the windshield wipers on before finding the headlights.