Page 13 of A Future To Remember

Cash widened his eyes, like he’d never heard somebody swear before.

“Sorry,” I muttered, shifting under the blankets to try to find a comfortable position, which was right around the time I noticed that someone else was in the room.

A uniformed deputy stood against the back wall, looking warily at me. No. Not warily. Squinting at him, I could see he appeared genuinely afraid of me. And something about that had a sense of familiarity to it. As if I’d seen that exact expression a lot in my life.

“You were yelling, ‘I’m alive!’” Cash said, his eyes now pinched with worry. “You were repeating it again and again.”

I rubbed my forehead and mentally searched for the dream I’d been having, but it slipped away like smoke through my fingers. “Well, I am alive,” I reasoned.

Cash reached out and gently raised my right wrist, exposing the skin on the underside. Amid the red circular scars of wounds barely healed, there were fresh scratches. They were deep enough to break the skin and allow tiny droplets of blood to form.

I winced when he brought the fresh wounds to my attention.

“You were scratching the hell out of your arm,” he said.

I stared at the marks for a solid ten seconds, then shook my head. “I don’t…remember.”

Cash laid my arm back onto the bed. “It’s okay. Don’t try to push it. It’ll come when it comes.”

I pointed to the deputy. “You guys out on patrol together?”

Cash glanced over his shoulder. “That’s Deputy Joel Buchanon. He was on duty tonight.”

I nodded. “Joel. Good to meet you.”

Joel didn’t respond. Or do much of anything except continue to stare warily at me.

It was frankly annoying. “What’s his beef with me?” I whispered to Cash.

The sheriff glanced over his shoulder again. “He’s a little freaked out.” He didn’t elaborate further.

“Aaaaaaand?” I asked, impatiently.

Cash twirled his Stetson. “I told him what you’d said to me yesterday afternoon.”

I sighed. It was like everybody expected me to remember shit when I was in the goddamn hospital for amnesia. “What’d I say?”

“About the white truck with the red and blue stripes. Remember?”

I stared at Cash with hard eyes. If I heard one more person ask me if I remembered something, I’d lose it. “No.”

“You told me to tell my deputy not to chase the white truck with the stripes.”

Brightness blossomed in my mind’s eye as, finally, a memory came back to me. “Oh, yeah. That.” Looking pointedly at the deputy, I added, “Don’t chase the white truck with red and blue stripes. Just let it speed on by and catch up to it later.”

The deputy simply stared at me.

Cash twirled his Stetson. “See, the thing is, Maddy, tonight Joel was working highway patrol, and he clocked a white Chevy Silverado going ninety in a sixty-five. The driver was weaving erratically—probably drunk off his ass.”

“Oh! So, it already happened?”

Cash didn’t answer me directly. Instead, he said, “Protocol was for Joel to give chase. But he remembered what you’d told me, so he called it in to me to ask what he should do. I told him to follow at a safe distance, and me and my other deputy would join him as soon as we could.”

“And then all hell broke loose,” Joel said, finally speaking, but that wary expression had now turned haunted.

“What?”

Cash explained: “The pickup crossed an intersection where a semi was blowing through a stop sign. The two collided, and there’s not much left of either driver, the pickup, or the cab of the semi. They caught fire, and county fire had a helluva time putting it out.”