After a while, a man drives up in a car outside. A crazy man--some ordinary nebbishy guy who has gone postal. He tears out of the car, lets a screaming ten-year old girl from the trunk, and--dragging her along--runs into the lay-by, where he tries to drag me out in a random kidnapping. I keep digging in my heels and pulling away from him as he yanks me by the wrist, as the kid screams. Pandemonium. The guy tries to grab another kid from the audience but I foil him, and he finally gives up his attempts and runs back out with the original girl to his car. I yell for everyone in the lay-by to go after him and stop him--don't let him go, hurry, get him! Everyone rushes out and surrounds the car and traps him. They drag him from the driver's seat, put him in the passenger side, and we're all standing around like crazy vigilantes when a cop car pulls in.
The bubbas in the police car are not inclined to believe a bunch of hippie kids are doing the right thing, and more interested in protecting the Innocent White Man in the car, so things start going awry. There's a tall young black guy in the crowd, and one of the cops pulls a gun on him--but all of a sudden our guy has the cop in a chokehold and is regretfully telling him he should've taken care of the real criminal. Then he shoots the cop. I'm sitting with a bunch of the other kids as the leaders try to figure out what to do now. I say calmly, "We're going to have to murder the other policeman, and the man, and hide the bodies. This will give us time to get away." I ask if anyone has a shovel, and then point out that there might be one in the trunk of the black-and-white.
We're putting our plan into action--digging, etc. There's a large school bus of some kind parked by the lay-by now, and somewhere we've picked up several bags of money. Several of us are crowded into the bus, watching the second cop. The black guy--who now resembles Vin Diesel--is really torn up over the murder he committed. He's one of those sweetheart grizzlies, tough on the outside but with a big mushy center. So he takes a pencil and shoves it through his own hand to torment himself. I'm pressed close to him--we're all bonding intensely--and feeling great angst and sadness on his behalf. He then gets into a confrontation with the cop, who is tied up by us, and very angry. The cop somehow manages to take one of Vin's thumbs and begin bending it back to an improbable degree, which he does until it cracks and then he just swings it around and around in its socket like the handle of an eggbeater. Vin just lets him, stoic to the max.
During all of this, cars keep driving past us on the road. It's a long, empty backroad at night, but now and then we'll see headlights and cheese it as we wait out the passing of a car--this, while we've got all these huge, obvious vehicles and a cop car pulled over to the side, and for some reason a lot of people pretending to sleep around them, on the ground.
We eventually disappear both cop and kidnapper, and begin cleaning up the site. So we've become this band of strangers, lost boys--a bunch of teenagers and few very young kids--and we all intend to disappear to the ends of the earth. A Greyhound bus pulls up and three or four of the kids get on, one hauling a few money bags; they are going to Kansas. I have pangs as I say goodbye, knowing I'll probably never see them again, but aware that we've been through this life-altering event together that none of us will ever forget. Other kids get in cars and take off. I'm part of the remaining kid crew, and instead of continuing on home (apparently mom never did come, though perhaps she drove by when I wasn't paying attention) I climb into the bus with the others, settling near Vin. He's still brooding and grimly suffering, and I tell him how great he is, how much his and everyone else's characters have grown during this experience. I've kinda got a crush on Vin.
Then we all drive off into the future together, on the lam with some stolen cash, leaving buried bodies behind us, heading toward destinations unknown.
In other news, the trend of people watching new Buffy eps, and posting about it in LJ, the day *before* they air--kind of irks me. I mean, WTF? Part of the joy that a new ep should stir up is the sense of togetherness that builds with collective anticipation, cumlminating in the ep itself, which airs at its appointed frickin time. The whole wildfeed furor every single week: teeth-grittingly irritating. The actual *watching* of eps a day early? Insane-making. First you have to try and blot out hints and reactions--which do influence viewing, even broadly. ("Squee!" ... "Grumble.") And then if you want to read people's posts, you have to scroll back a day after the ep airs.
I'll probably make myself wildly unpopular with this opinion. It's not that I'm envious--I don't want to watch the ep early. I want to watch it on Tuesday, at 8:00PM, as
First day of help conference today--the panels were soporific. There was no place to hook up my laptop. There was a semi-open bar afterwards. Enough said.
I still want snow.