Free Reckoning Road: A Get Jack Reacher Short Story by Scott Blade Page A

fate. Statistically, it was a zero chance probability. I should’ve known better. But my legs ached and my feet throbbed and my shoulders stung from sleeping on the dry ground under a tree. Miles back and the night before, I’d been tired and hadn’t found a motel, not on an abandoned western interstate in Texas. So I’d laid up under a tree off of the highway, down a hill, just wanting to rest my eyes for a couple of hours. I’d woken up this morning, and my shoulders hurt. Not a good way to start my day.
    Moments before I leaped out of the way to avoid being plowed over at over sixty-five miles an hour by the car, I saw inside the vehicle. I couldn’t see the driver, but my first instinct was that there were two occupants. Perhaps they scrambled for the wheel in some sort of struggle like two guys who had gotten into a spontaneous argument turned violent. A friendly conversation turned bad. Or maybe they fought because the passenger was an unwilling participant on their journey. Perhaps the driver was victim to a criminal hitchhiker. Whatever the reason, I didn’t like almost being hit by a car. And maybe I should’ve let it go. But I couldn’t. Not after it had almost run me down. Not after I had walked for hours. Not after the aches and pains I’d acquired from sleeping on the hard ground.
    So I watched as the car weaved from lane to lane and then dipped down over a hill and ramped up into the air at the apex. The wheels came up off of the ground a bit, and then the car swerved from shoulder to shoulder and the taillights faded away into the blackness. The car was soon lost to sight.
    I didn’t think it would make it too far. Not in the reckless state it was in. Surely, there was a considerable chance it’d crash into a tree. And that’s exactly what it did.
     
    Chapter 2
    THE CAR WAS A BLACK FORD FUSION.
    The vehicle year, I didn’t know. Whether it was an LS or an XL, I didn’t know. I didn’t know if it even came in an LS or XL. What I did know was that it had crashed into a thin tree about fifty yards off of the side of a broken section of Route 66. The headlights were on, bright halogen bulbs still lighting up the dead road beyond the tree. The engine coughed and sputtered. I walked for a good ten minutes and nearly a mile of highway before I reached it. More even.
    I had walked a total of four hours in the dark that night. It had been that long since the last sign of civilization. I’d spent the last twelve hours walking with little human interaction. But that provided something I liked—silence.
    In the cities, I had seen people walking with eyes half on their cell phone screens and half on the road ahead. I had seen the same in the small towns. The same in the midsized towns. The same on trains. The same at day, and the same at night. I had seen people driving the same way. Maybe a little less occupied with their phones, but only because the ones who were more occupied with their phones had probably lost their driving privileges. Or worse.
    Either way, most people lived their lives the same way they drove their cars or walked the streets of their cities or small towns or midsized towns—half-distracted and half-looking ahead. Most people were too busy to live. In too much of a rush to look. Or too busy looking to see.
    I knew what I was. I knew what I wanted. I was nineteen years old. I wasn’t a know-it-all. Not really. Not the way that older people usually think. In fact, when you thought about it, I was an old man. Half of the world’s population was under the age of fifteen. I was nineteen and, therefore, older than most. In the top fifty percent. An old man in those terms.
    A unique perspective. And one that most people wouldn’t agree with. Not necessarily. But those are the kind of thoughts you get on the road. Alone.
    I was never one for meditation. However, walking from place to place was what I imagined surfing would be to surfers. The sun beating down. The wind blowing. The trees.