I went behind a tree and threw up. I was still bent over when I heard Bennacio call softly behind me.
“Kropp! Alfred! Come!”
Don’t look; don’t look, just keep your head up and your eyes on Bennacio, I told myself as I walked back to the car. He was already sitting in the passenger seat. He had taken the Big Mac apart and was eating the patty, holding it in the palm of his large hand, using a napkin as a plate, cutting the meat with the side of his plastic fork. Don’t look, don’t look, I told myself, but I had to look because I didn’t want to trip on any body parts on the way to the car. So I looked and saw Bennacio had kept both his promises.
18
I drove toward the interstate. Bennacio told me to turn into the McDonald’s parking lot. At first I thought he wanted to wash up, but I couldn’t see any blood on his clothes, not a speck anywhere. He had me cruise around the building once, then pull onto the road again and turn left into the parking lot of the gas station on the interstate side of the McDonald’s.
“There it is. Stop, Kropp.”
I pulled beside a car parked behind the station. Bennacio dabbed both corners of his mouth with a napkin and got out while I sat there and watched him through his open door. He pulled a set of keys from his pocket and pressed the remote button, unlocking the other car. I got out then and joined him.
“Hey,” I said. “This is a Ferrari Enzo.”
Bennacio didn’t answer. He was searching the car. He checked the center console, over the visors, under the seats and floor mats. He opened the glove box and pulled out a sleek black cell phone.
I said, “You know, it’s funny. Somebody once promised I would have one of these cars.” All of a sudden I felt like crying.
“Park the car, Kropp,” he said, with a little jerk of his head toward the Mercedes. “Over there.” He pointed to the far corner of the lot. I parked, walked back to the Ferrari, and when I got there, Bennacio was going through the trunk. He threw the keys to the Ferrari at me.
“What, we’re taking this?” I asked.
“Hurry, Kropp,” he said. “They know where we are now and where we’re going. There will be more.”
I slid into the driver’s seat of the Ferrari and said to Bennacio, “You knights sure like to travel in style.”
Bennacio said, “Drive, Kropp.”
I got back on the highway and the Ferrari sped up to seventy-five like it was cruising a neighborhood street. Bennacio told me to go faster. At ninety he told me to go faster again. At 110 I told him I wasn’t going any faster because if I drove any faster, my stomach would come out of my mouth. He didn’t say anything after that.
I wished I could put the top down. I had always wanted a convertible and to take it onto the open road like in a commercial and go a hundred miles an hour with the top down.
After an hour, the black cell phone rang. Bennacio flipped it open, listened for a second, then said, “It is too late. They are dead.” He snapped it closed and tossed it out the window.
He leaned back in his seat, closed his eyes, and said, “I must rest now. Wake me when you are tired and I will drive.”
“I don’t get it,” I said. I was pretty upset. There had been more blood flying around than in a horror movie. I had somehow found myself in an R-rated movie when all I wanted was PG-13. “There’s a whole lot I don’t get, Bennacio, like why we’re driving in a hot car to Nova Scotia; why people are trying to kill us; what the heck OIPEP is and how it fits into all this; how Mogart or anybody else could use a sword no matter how powerful to take over the whole world; and why any of this had to happen to me in the first place. But what I really don’t get is why you had to slaughter those guys like that.”
“They would have slaughtered us.”
“But how’s that make you any different from them?”
“They are servants of the enemy—”
“So?”
“—thralls of the Dragon. Would you have them live to pursue us to our end?”
“I just don’t get it, that’s all. Chopping off people’s heads and cutting out their guts . . .”
“You would not pity them if you knew them as I do.”
“I don’t know anybody who deserves something like that.”
“You are afraid. I understand.” His eyes were still closed. He spoke kindly to me, like a father would, or how I imagined a father would, since I never knew my father.
“You may pull off and find the nearest bus terminal if you wish, Kropp. I will give you the money for a ticket. I am well enough now to drive the rest of the way.”
I thought about it. I thought about it hard. His offer was tempting, but really, where would I go? I didn’t want to live with the Tuttles, and if I went back to Knoxville I wouldn’t have a choice. Then all of a sudden I thought about that little beach town in Florida where Mom used to take me every summer. Maybe I could go there and get a job and live on the beach until the world ended. There were a lot worse places you could wait for the end of the world.
And, really, what did I think I was doing—me, Alfred Kropp of all people—driving a hundred miles an hour in a Ferrari Enzo with a modern-day knight by my side? Who the heck did I think I was?
“It was because of what Mogart did to Mr. Samson, wasn’t it?” I asked finally. “The reason you mutilated those guys.”
“Samson was my captain, Kropp,” Bennacio said. “And there are some debts that cry to heaven to be repaid.”
19
We were about twenty-five miles north of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, when Bennacio told me to take the next exit. We had been on the road for over sixteen hours and maybe he noticed how much I was yawning and rubbing my eyes. We hadn’t stopped since Edinburg except to fill up on gas and use the john.
I started to turn into a Super 8 just off the exit, but Bennacio told me to keep driving. I drove west on Highway 501, which hugged the edge of Swatara State Park. Trees crowded both sides of the road and there were no streetlights; it felt as if we were driving through a tunnel. I thought maybe the idea was to park somewhere in the woods and sleep in the car. We passed a sign that said “Suedberg 2 mi.”
About a mile past the sign, Bennacio told me to turn onto a little dirt lane that wound up a hill, then through a dense group of trees. On the other side of the trees was a bridge that spanned a little creek, and after the bridge the road narrowed until it ended at a house set back in the woods. It reminded me of the houses from those old scary children’s stories, like the witch’s house in Hansel and Gretel.