Rebel Girl by Ann Wuehler

In her kiss, I tasted the revolution. Her lips held flies, worms, and mold, but she smiled and licked my lips before taking my hand. I went with Rebel Girl, because I knew no other choices in the sandlands of everything around us. Gunning the engine of the baby blue Ford Comet, I went out into the night, beneath the heavy twinkle of the dead stars above our heads. I rode with a dead girl toward vengeance.

“Take the 95 exit. Let’s head for Winnemucca, then Reno,” Rebel Girl whispered, her breath stinking of that t-bone left to rot in a trashed apartment. She licked my ear with her slimy tongue and placed her tattered hand on my blue-jeaned thigh.

“I ain’t got enough gas to get to Nevada,” I said, letting her peek down my stained flannel shirt with the ragged hem. It was about the only shirt I had left. My wealth consisted of some quarters and a ketchup packet from Micky D’s. “You thinking what I’m thinking, honey?”

Rebel Girl threw back her hair, what remained of it, just clumps of brownish strings plastered together with mold and dirt. “You dug me up. I’m the queen now. We head to Nevada, we find Bruce and Mandy. I screamed for you, Edith. And you heard me.”

“We’ll get ’em both, Rebel. Of course I heard you.”

She and I howled like insane coyotes as I swung off the highway and pulled into the little gas station off the back end of Parma, Idaho. I drove up to a pump, wondering who could see my dead baby riding shotgun. There was nobody else there, late at night, and the clerk inside no doubt had his hands down his pants as he watched women doing bad, bad things on his cheap phone. God knows we’d all done that at jobs like this.

“Gun or knife?”

“Knife. I want the suffering.” Rebel Girl took out a coil of her own intestines, and wound it about her right arm like a strange, rotting bracelet. Her eyes turned to me, her bright, lovely eyes that held sparks of hell and wisps of Christmas.

I searched for the butcher knife. “You’re so beautiful, Edith. I love how full of revenge you are. I want to eat your nipples with a side of fries and a strawberry milkshake. I wanna wear your clothes.”

Her fingers skittered over my arm, the bones showing through the tatters of skin. For a moment, I knew an actual coldness. Where would tonight end? Would she vanish, leaving my heart forever broken? Would I be dragged with her toward whatever hell existed?

My own fingers found the big butcher knife, called Betsy. I kept her in the glove box, just in case. My Arminus handgun, loaded with .22 Long Rifle bullets, waited beneath the driver’s seat.

I loved Rebel Girl, I feared her. She had kept her promise.

She expected her Edith to keep hers.

“It won’t take long.” I met her lips, tasting the ash she had wanted to reduce the world to, so we could all start over, so we could all be cleansed and free and happy.

No more rules or laws or old white men telling us what to do, the fuckers. How she had gritted out cuss words for the old white guys. I would take her in my arms, she would calm. But her eyes searched me then to see if I truly believed in her version of the future or if I slogged in the mud and the shit with everyone else.

Onward I walked into the convenience store with the lone man scrolling through his phone, his brown eyes not wanting to lift or deal with some customer at eleven at night. I remembered my grandmother smoked Pall Mall’s, but my long-gone daddy chewed Copenhagen. The rows of tobacco stuff made memories fill my head, and spit filled my mouth until I swallowed. Candy bars and chips waited to be bought; the machines to dole out coffee, the cold section full of pop and beer and wine coolers.

All of it meaningless and overpriced, but it would soon get splashed with man blood.

Keeping ol’ Betsy behind my back, I let my face settle into something normal. I even tossed my hair, which hit my shoulders.

“Help you?” He had a nametag, which read Reed. He looked Basque or Mexican or Eastern European. Brown eyes, darkish skin, pimples, a long nose, and a scruffy beard shadow that did not add to his masculine appeal.

I had practiced my helpless gal routine with Rebel Girl’s help a year ago. Smile, act nice, pretend real hard, make up a story. Get out, don’t get caught.

“Yeah. I’m just traveling through. I think my tire’s a bit flat. Can you come out and look at it? I’m heading for Utah.”

“We got air out there. You getting gas?”

“Eventually,” I admitted. I smiled, but the guy seemed oblivious to my obvious charms. “Please have a look before I put any air in? I don’t wanna blow my tire or have a wreck or whatever.”

“I…shit. Okay. It has to be quick.”

The moment Reed stepped out from behind his counter, the till was calling my name. I brought Betsy out and up. She slid into Reed’s soft beer belly like a spoon going into Dairy Queen soft-serve. He grunted, and the hot sticky red flowed. I twisted ol’ Betsy viciously and often as he tried to fight me. He slipped and fell on his own muck. Betsy took two fingers, just like that. He screamed and screamed, but I did not relent. Rebel Girl left the car to watch me pump my knife into his body. I’m a big woman but I’m cute, as she had told me after those times when I got doubts or cried for days on end that no one loved me, no one at all.

I love you, Edith. I love you.

Reed knocked me off him and I flew into the rack of chips, smelling copper, drenched in gore. He screeched and yowled, a human pincushion now.

“Take the damn money. Fuck, oh fuck, take it! Let me call an ambulance. Please. Please? What is that thing? That thing—oh fuck it hurts, it hurts—” He tried to point at Rebel Girl, but I had sliced two of his fingers off.

“That’s my baby,” I announced, as I bent to cut his throat.

I kissed him as he died, with Rebel Girl sitting on his belly, grinning at us both, the skin of her face cracking and splitting. I tasted nothing but death on Reed’s slack mouth. Blood all over as Rebel Girl crawled through the puddles. Her corpse rested in the passenger seat, yet she played in pools of blood like a happy puppy.

I jimmied the till open with Betsy, bending the tip to do so, and scored oodles of cash, change, and even a few checks. What dimwits still wrote checks in these failing and few remaining days of the empire? I scooped out the cash and change, and put it in a plastic bag. My instincts told me I did not have long to linger. My nape itched. Get out of here, they’re coming, something in my gut said. Other people needed gas in Idaho late at night.

Finding a big woman covered with the blood of the dead attendant would not go so well for me, haha.

Rebel Girl had no sense of humor, but I sure did.

I took two large bottles of water and put them in a bag. My hands grabbed for jerky, granola bars, and apples, but I let them drop as lights splashed by on the highway. The driver did not turn into the gas station.

Get the car fueled up, get out of here, get back to revenge.

Rebel Girl floated back to the car as I switched the pumps on. I got the tank filled, though my hands were shaking. I filled a jerry can I kept in the Comet just in case, then got two more cans from the store, filled them too. Reed stared up at the ceiling, his second mouth grinning at me and drooling what looked like black cherry Jell-O down toward his collarbones.

I need to haul ass from this place of carnage and suffering and seek the objects of my fury and grief.

Bruce and Mandy would be hiding somewhere in the sandlands of Nevada.

They had decided Rebel Girl needed to go before she got us life in a federal pen. Being an actual rebel is not for crybaby wimps. Doing bad stuff to get to the good didn’t sit well with the pair of weaklings. Fucking murderous crybaby shitbirds.

The Comet lurched onto the asphalt and Rebel Girl laughed. I drove toward the 95 onramp, then turned us toward the Silver State. We sang as I guided the boat of a car through the night. We sang songs we made up about love and change and rebuilding it all. It takes courage, she had once told me. It takes courage to wanna burn the world down and form it brand new.

I stopped to top the tank off from one of the jerry cans somewhere past Jordan Valley, my head buzzing and tingling. My jeans and flannel shirt needed to be tossed. I stripped naked as Rebel Girl catcalled and told me I was her beautiful Edith, her warrior love, her Amazon sweetie. Sweatpants and a hoodie were all I had with me. Gray from the waist down, blue to the top of my head and I felt good. I felt good and strange and a little drunk on how much I loved Rebel Girl.

What if she wasn’t here at all?

Pulling the driver’s side door open, I saw her dead self slumped in the seat. Then there was the plastic sack of cash and change, and the two gallons of water. I saw ol’ Betsy on the passenger side floor, the tip ruined and bent and the blade itself gummy with Reed’s blood. I had killed a man, but we had killed before when Rebel had been alive. Or had we? My memory seemed full of holes within holes with more holes after that until those skeleton fingers touched my back.

I had to focus. I had to keep going.

“Where in Nevada?”

“Head to Route 50, we’ll find ’em,” Rebel Girl said as she settled into her seat. She turned to watch me with her bright, lovely eyes. “You gonna leave those clothes on the side of the road, babe?”

“Yeah. Why not? Let the revolution start,” I said as I slid behind the wheel. I took off toward Route 50, the loneliest highway and a good place to go to ground.

“You don’t love me anymore.”

My foot stomped on the brake. The Comet screeched, leaving some rubber on the road. I watched a shooting star streak across the heavens. My hand reached for hers and her fingers finally closed around mine, the awful skinny bones pressing into my flesh. In the far distance, headlights grew bigger and bigger in the rearview. We could not sit here long. I pulled us as far over as I could and cut the motor.

I took my Rebel Girl in my arms and rocked her, her face settling in the crook of my neck, finding that hollow in my shoulder that was her special spot. She stank, the rot of her high and ripe. I held her the same way as on the day she died, her head blown off by Bruce, who handed the old shotgun to Mandy, so if they got caught for this, she’d be blamed, too. It’s how cowards think, and God knows, God knows me so well, I was once a coward, and I will always be a follower. I followed Rebel Girl, and I will follow her now into the very sun if this dead woman demands it of me. I hesitated when Bruce raised the shotgun. How could anyone shoot someone so right about burning it all down? How?

But he did. He muttered about crazy and going too far and I got a job interview for a casino, me and Mandy is done with this shit. Blowing up a hospital is terrorist shit! Bang. Bang and my Rebel Girl gone! I buried her, I dug her up and here she is. Here she is.

We’re gonna blow up St. Luke’s there in Boise, blow it right to hell up and the people will rise up, they’ll rise up, free, oh free, Rebel Girl told us.

“Let’s get going.” She drew back, smiling a little, her teeth looking too long, but her gums had decomposed. “We kill those scum and we nuke St. Luke’s. I got plans, Edith. I got plans. Nuke the Luke!”

I drove and drove, my hand in hers. The car behind us zoomed past and disappeared around the corner, going at least a hundred. The morning sun hit my eyes, and I needed coffee or a place to rest. My hand stretched over the white seat, but Rebel Girl’s body did not slump there. Maybe I could only have her with me at night? Had I left her body along with my bloody clothes on the side of Highway 95 South?

Yes, I had left her body behind.

Nevada seemed strange and full of shadows as I coasted toward Winnemucca. I had some gas left and a lot of cash. I noted a Nevada State cop car coming from Winnemucca and that it slowed. It stopped and turned so that it was now behind me. Reaching for the gun beneath my seat, I heard Rebel Girl’s breath in my ear, felt her lips on my cheek. I was not alone. She was with me and we would see the revolution start.

The lights flashed.

I checked the chambers of my grandpa’s nine-round ancient revolver. Twenty-two Long Rifles, nine for each slot, greeted my exhausted eyes. There was no other traffic. No one would see this. I rolled down my window. My breath came easily. The sky had turned the soft blue of a July day destined to be boiling hot and cloud-free. I watched him get out, I watched him walk toward me, a big man with his hand already on his revolver.

My shot went into his shoulder, not his face. He drew his own gun and shot me on the side of the road. Rebel Girl took my hand.

We watched the ambulance show up, we watched them talk about me, that I might be ‘the one’ who had killed that guy in Idaho. I might be the one who killed that guy. Did she dump that dead girl on the side of the road? Maybe, can’t say yet.

They zipped my body into a black bag.

Rebel Girl tugged me back toward 95, leaving the lights and cars and people to deal with the business of living as we kept onward to take on Bruce and Mandy in the middle of the Silver State.

In my kiss, she tastes the revolution and my love at last. We drift toward the future and hide ourselves beneath the dead stars that still send out light to guide us on clear evenings.