“I’m not calling 911. Jesus Christ, we’re not going to get killed by some Grandma. When was the last time you heard of a 70-year-old female serial killer?”

I sat there in silence, the full weight of how stupid this all seemed hitting home when Kyle spelled it out like that.

Kyle put the car into gear, but something was clearly off with it. Even I could tell and I didn’t know shit about cars. The whole vehicle seemed to react as if we ran over a boulder every few feet that it rolled.

“Shit, I think we have a flat tire,” Kyle exhaled with every word and Don emerged from his big rig.

Don shuffled up to the driver’s window with a huge dip of chaw bulging his jaw and started talking before Kyle even got the window all the way rolled down.

“Fucking-a, you got a flat tire. Unless you got a spare, we can either roll that thing up into my hauler, I got room, or, you can just ride with Darla to the ‘spital,” Don said, and that’s not a typo, that’s how he pronounced “hospital.”

“Do we have a spare tire?” I frantically asked Kyle.

“We did. I sold it,” Kyle dribbled back.

“Well y’all wanna hop in with Darla then?” Don asked.

I started gnashing my teeth before I even heard Kyle agree, but it didn’t matter. We had no real other choice. Kyle actually could maybe bleed to death if we didn’t get him some attention soon.

I followed Kyle out of the car and over to the passenger side door of Darla’s rig.

The truck gave out a heavy gasp and then the door swung out mechanically like the door of a school bus revealing Darla sitting there behind the wheel looking like Large Marge.

“Pretty nifty ain’t it?” Darla said.

Kyle agreed verbally, I just kind of gave a half nod when we stepped up into the rig.

“You two can hang out in the sleeper cab if you would rather stay together than try and share the front seat up here,” Darla announced.

The two of us piled into the darkness of Darla’s sleeper cab that reminded me a bit of the RV that my best friend’s family used when I would camp with them while growing up. The thing even had the musty, outdoorsy smell that I remembered.

Kyle and I found a seat on a futon-style cushy couch in the back of the thing, far from Darla who was whistling vaguely familiar old show tunes and captaining the rig out onto the road.

It seemed weird, but maybe that familiar smell had soothed my nerves. I felt a little bit at ease.