Final Departure

Chapter Six

        "Please, Mister!" I really gotta go!" Johnny whined, fidgeting in his seat. "One minute more and I'll go in my pants!" Josh considered that idea for a moment.

        "You'd better not, it's a rental," he said. "Next exit, okay?"

Johnny stared ahead at the long, desolate stretch of highway.

        "Can you go any faster?"

        Within a few minutes, Josh pulled the car along side of a broken-down old gas station, directly to the door of the Men's room.  It was a good thing, too--wasting another second would have cost Johnny his clean pants.  Josh reached back to unlock the door and grabbed Johnny's arm.

        "No tricks." He said.

        "Of course not," Johnny agreed weakly. 

        After making sure the door was locked securely and using the toilet, Johnny gulped some water from the sink faucet and thought about the entire situation.  Something was very wrong here...he was certainly nowhere near his dad's office, and this strange man was being none too friendly.   They'd also been driving for quite some time... although it was hard to judge since he had been asleep, but it felt like at least an hour.  Johnny splashed some water on his face and stared at his own reflection.

Wait, he thought, his jaw dropping. Am I being kidnapped?  Is this what it's like?  He had heard the stories about the men in big vans who offer you candy, tales of bad guys who pretended to need help locating their lost puppies, and he knew better than to open the door for strangers...but, this was the sort of thing that happened to little kids, wasn't it? Kids who hung out with the wrong crowd or took shortcuts through alleyways at night...not a kid waiting for a train in Medford.

        The water dripped off Johnny's face and into the sink, and he suddenly felt very stupid for allowing himself to be tricked in such a  manner.  There was no accident at the plant.  His dad didn't need him.  He had been fooled...almost nine years old, and he had actually been fooled and kidnapped.

        He tried to remember everything he knew about kidnapping, but it wasn't much.   His mother had been watching an episode of Oprah that involved kidnapping, but he had only caught the tail end of a program.

        "If you get away from your kidnapper," the lady with the long red fingernails and a Ph.D was saying, "Be sure to call a lot of attention to yourself. Make a big commotion. Screaming is always good..."

        "So, the opposite of how we normally want children to behave?" Oprah had asked, her brow furrowing out of the confusion or perhaps frustration at not being able to understand what seemed to be a perfectly simple concept.

        "Exactly.  Be loud, break things. Whatever calls attention." 

        There was a loud knock on the bathroom door and Johnny startled.

        "Kid, did you fall in?" Josh Perkins called from outside. Not that he cared all that much, or even at all.

        Well, it's now or never. 

    Johnny took a deep breath and began screaming. He lifted the large metal wastebasket and threw its contents on the floor, banging it against the tile floor as loudly as he could.

"Kid?" Josh asked, sounding a little scared. Johnny raised the wastebasket above his head and smashed the large mirror with it. He was showered with little fragments of the mirror, and he let the wastebasket fall to the floor with a loud, metallic clunk.