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The fog was thick and deep on the winding, dirt road, and the long boughs from the pines that flanked it on either side seemed to be reaching out in an attempt to pluck the Pontiac Grand Prix from the macadam. And even those sinewy, mist-dampened branches could only be seen with the aid of the headlights, all else being swallowed up in the smothering fog and ebony, eternal spaces beyond the grasp of the halogen lamps.
The thick brume and headlights lent an eerie character to the dirt road and the trees and the underbrush as the objects moved into the embrace of the hazy light, then slowly disappeared behind them like a specter in a dream.
Though high on cocaine, Kate Mueller realized that instead of descending the deeply forested ridge to the state route that would take them back to Pittsburgh which lay down in the valley, they were headed up towards the crest of the ridge of foot hills. The more she looked out into the scene from The Outer Limits, the more apprehensive she got and the angrier she got; she was apprehensive because she felt as though she was in danger, and she was angry for letting herself get into this situation.
She looked over at the man driving. When she had met him earlier in the evening, she did not know him but was eager to. He was attractive and soft-spoken with masculine features, which she could see even before he took off his clothes: short, black hair, thin mustache, broad, dark eyes that shined like polished marble, great kisser and could perform oral sex like no one else she had ever met. So good, in fact, that she had amusingly considered to herself to pay him. It had been a long time since she herself had had an orgasm. It felt even better than she remembered. Sex was a commodity whose pleasurable feelings she'd all abandoned, giving them up for the money she'd need for her habit. Tonight had been a welcome exception.
But now, along a road she could not identify, she began to suspect that there was a greasy characteristic about the man—as dark and slick as his hair—which she didn't notice at first but now sensed.
The man—Brad, he called himself—was leaning up against the steering wheel, squinting out at the slowly-changing, phantasmal scene in front of them.
She could sense him looking at her from the corner of his eye, but neither had talked since he turned onto the road ten minutes ago. The silence seemed to add to her growing fear, so she decided to break it. "So this is your idea of a short cut, huh?" Her voice was a rough soprano and had a throaty quality that men found seductive. It was the cumulative affect of five hard years of whiskey and coke.
At first Brad did not answer her as was his custom since the beginning of their encounter, as if thinking of what his reply should be (something she now knew, but should have deduced earlier, to be a dead giveaway for someone who was deceiving her). Then, without taking his eyes off the road, he said sternly but with a voice as soft as a teddy bear, "I told you, Sweetie, I've taken this road before, don't worry so fucking much. Just keep looking for that dirt road that cuts off to the right. It should be coming up any time now. From there it's only fifteen minutes to town, faster if it weren't for this fucking fog."
Kate glowered at the way he had spoken to her, though in reality she was used to a lot worse from her tricks. He hadn't cursed once up until the time they'd had sex and he'd paid her—with both money and blow. But now it seemed like every sentence contained an obscenity. It felt evermore certain to her that his boyish personality and innocent charm were just a ploy, a snare to catch his game; he had gone small game hunting and caught himself a fox.
Suddenly, the inside of the car felt as cold as the night outside minus the oxygen. In its confines, she felt claustrophobic, and she found it hard to breathe. As best she could though, Kate struggled to hide the fear that was welling down in the pit of her stomach, and she nervously wiped the perspiration from her palms onto her taut jeans, then returned her eyes to the road as it jumped and jittered across her opiate-affected vision.
Were her fears of impending danger the affects of the nose candy or reality? She wasn't sure, but it didn't matter because no matter what the cause the feelings were real.
"Why are we going up?" she asked trying only to be inquisitive and non-threatening; dumb blond (though she had dark brown hair), hooker-type questions. "Isn't Pittsburgh down from here?" She twirled her hair and smiled at him dumbly, trying to convince him that she was as stupid as he probably hoped she was. She was on to him.
Again, after a long silence, "The fork in the road will take us down off the ridge, we just gotta get to it first. Besides, this is still faster than if we took the highway around the ridge. Don't worry, Cinderella. I'll get you back before you turn into a goddam pumpkin." He glowered at her, gave her a long stare as if determining her intentions with the current line of questions.
She gave him the best Suzanne Somers—Three's Company look she could muster, and apparently it worked. He returned his attention back to the road.
She looked at her faint reflection in the windshield made by the wan light given off by the instrument panel lights. It had a pale, almost moon-glow radiance, like that of a porcelain doll where shadows hadn't stolen her features. A thin film of perspiration replaced the layers of base and blush and eye shadow and lip stick, giving her skin a glass-like reflection in the phosphorescence. She could feel the dampness welling up from the uneasiness within her and wondered if
Brad had noticed it, too. She hoped not.
The coke or reality? Her thoughts were too muddy to decipher which. He had given her some good shit.
After another few minutes of silence, Brad began to thrum his fingers across the steering wheel nervously, and his eyes began to search the areas beyond the headlights, back and forth, back and forth, like a neurotic bird at a feeding perch above a kennel full of hungry cats. He was also slowing down.
As the car's speed ebbed Kate's heart rate picked up the slack, and she knew something was about to happen, though she didn't let on that she was even aware of the danger she was in. She recalled the story about Ted Bundy and how he used his charm and good looks to befriend young ladies, then take them into the woods and beat them and club them and rape them and slaughter them. She would have to play dumb and wait for the right moment to try and get away. Any hint of her not trusting him would just invite a more premature death than what she was already in store for.
Reality or coke? Reality was pulling into the lead.
"That road's probably coming up here any time now, wouldn't you think?" she asked to break the silence again and to just hear the sound of her own familiar voice. It was such a beautiful voice at one time. A crisp, melodic voice that, at nineteen, harbored hopes of making it big on Broadway in productions of Cats or Phantom of the Opera or West Side Story. A voice that only learned to cry from rejection after rejection. A voice that led her to Boston for less aspiring roles with no success, then to cocaine, alcohol and despair, then to prostitution, sliding into the smaller cities where she could get the cheaper highs and drunks. A voice that, at twenty four, now only wanted to survive.
"Yeah . . .anytime," Brad finally muttered almost incomprehensibly after yet another silence. He looked at her again, turning his head slowly, almost deliberately so. Now, he had glistening beads of perspiration that formed fat droplets on his forehead. He had a far-away look in his eyes, detached, so far-away that it was as though he almost wasn't even there. Like his soul had left his body, maybe to go ahead a prepare a place for her dead, disfigured body. A bloodthirsty alliance between body and spirit.
For a moment, Kate felt as though she had just witnessed what the Angel of Death looked like—cold, dark, so unforgiving.
It couldn't have been the high that was causing her to feel the terror she now felt for him. No, even with her senses dulled by the opiate, she could tell that something wasn't right.
For a while she couldn't distinguish between coke-head or intuition, but now she was certain that
Brad had malevolent plans for her. A woman's sixth sense could not be marred by any amount of blow.
Brad stopped the car, which made Kate's heart sink. She almost gasped. "Why are we stopping? Don't stop," she said with a concerned but not yet hysterical tone. She struggled to keep her wits about her and play along until the right moment to attempt an escape. It wasn't easy with axes and machetes floating by her eyes.
"I-I got a map in the trunk. I'm gonna get it out, see how close this fucking road should be to us. Could've sworn that we should've come up onto the sonofabitch by now."
He smiled. Funny how nice a smile the Devil had.
"Now don't worry. We're not lost. Everything's just fine." He got out, letting in a cool, humid rush of air, and after shutting the door, went around to the trunk.
She sensed that it wasn't a map that he was going into the trunk for. Probably a tire iron. She pictured herself dead and naked with entrails hanging from her eviscerated stomach and her curly brown hair sticky and clumped together from the blood and cerebral contents; the result of multiple blows from the sharp piece of steel that was going to bash in her skull.
Grand Prixs were equipped with trunk-release buttons to unlatch it without taking out the ignition key. In her initial fear she didn't realize that he had turned the car off and taken the keys with him. When she looked down and saw the ignition switch keyless, she knew it was time to go. She had no idea where she was at, but all she had to do was go down. The highway lay at the bottom of the ridge and hopefully not far, a town.
The trunk went up, and Brad was lost behind it.
Kate could feel the vibrations and quiet thuds as he rummaged through its contents. She more felt than heard as something heavy was quietly dragged across the floor of the trunk. She tried to shake off the faint remaining traces of head-spin that the cocaine had given her. Shaking uncontrollably, she grabbed the door handle.
The Grand Prix had dual sports mirrors and she looked out the passenger side to make sure he wasn't coming up to surprise her. With her heart threatening to explode through her rib cage she slowly disengaged the door but kept it closed and took a couple deep breaths to keep from hyperventilating. She let them out in a subdued whoosh.
Suddenly, though she hadn't heard anything, she heard Brad say, "Who's there?"
She turned completely around in her seat. He was still concealed by the up-turned trunk.
"Hello?" he said again. He had a thread of nervousness entwined in his speech. "Is anyone there?"
Though she hadn't heard anything beside her own pounding heart, Kate's intuition now told her that they indeed were not alone. She looked out the passenger-side window into the ghostly tentacles of fog as they choked off the deep woods that couldn't be seen even ten feet away. She looked into the sport mirror up the quickly disappearing road behind them. She saw no headlights of another car, and she doubted that many people took strolls down deserted roads at four in the morning, so she deduced that whatever it was he was hearing was probably a coke-inspired revenant or an animal, more afraid of him than he was of it.
She prayed that whatever noise he heard out there was benign. Had to be more benign than the noises she would soon make if she didn't leave while she still had the legs to run on.
It was time to make a break for it. The element of surprise was on her side, now.
But before she had time to take one more breath and open the door, it happened; something lunged out of the shadowed and mist-shrouded tree line at
Brad. Kate caught a glimpse of it through the sport mirror as she opened the car door. Its shadow seemed enormous and quick.
Brad barely had time to draw in a breath to scream before it was cut short to a sickening purl, and he collapsed backward onto the gravelly road on the driver's side of the car.
Now, something more frightening altogether had entered the picture.
When Kate climbed out of the car, she heard the wet, phlegmish growl of some animal from behind the car, ripping and tearing and snapping. There were whimpers and gurgling cries from
Brad as he was being drawn and quartered by the mouth and talons of the creature. In short order his muted cries ceased altogether.
As the pebbly ground under her feet settled when she turned to run, the thing popped its head up from behind the up-turned trunk and penetrated her with an inhuman glare. Though its intricacies were masked by fog and night, save faint pools of red from the rear lights of the car, its hideousness was well fathomed. It's body was radically immense and distorted by the graveyard-deep shadows as it loomed head-and-shoulders above the opened trunk. Its full-moon-shaped, pupil-less eyes almost bore a whole in her as though they were lasers. It seemed to be more of a glare of anger and hatred than of hunger. In the preternatural silence that followed, Kate could hear the faint drip, drip, drip of a liquid trickling from its shadow-hidden mouth onto the trunk lid. All else of it was shrouded by car and fog and night.
She let out a horrific scream and started running as fast as her legs could carry her down through the woods towards what she hoped was her salvation. It was down there somewhere. Question was, could she make it?
As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she had to make due with touch. Trees appeared out of no where, almost leaping out in front of her, but she paid them no mind, just scooted to one side or the other, occasionally getting stung in the face by a whip-like branch.
No longer did she have to worry about the dizzying, kaleidoscope-color, slow-motion-like affects of the coke. She was scared into sobriety. In fact, she was probably more straight than she had been since she'd started using drugs.
She could hear heavy breaths like a churning locomotive behind her, then the falling of trees as the thing felt it faster to go through them instead of around them. It let out only occasional quiet, high-pitched, dolphin-like squeals as it gained ground on her. Once she thought she heard it laugh, a quick, sadistic chirp.
Eyes having adjusted fully, now, she ran full tilt down the steep ridge, dodging the trees, left then right, then left again, getting smacked painfully across the face by low-hanging branches.
About two-hundred yards into her run she stumbled and fell onto another dirt road. Her momentum carried her forward when she hit level ground, and she fell headlong onto the macadam as she lost her balance. The blow as she met the hard earth knocked the wind from her, and she severely scrapped her hands as she slid across the gravel. She could feel tiny pieces of stone embedded under the skin of her hands as she got up and started running once more.
Sonofabitch! There actually was another road. Brad had told her the truth after all—at least that much, any way. Now she wondered if the whole grizzly scenario she had concocted in her mind was actually fact and not fiction. Even if were fact, she felt her odds better against a man high on coke and wielding a tire iron than with whatever the hell that thing was behind her.
With each strained swing of her arm, a bolt of pain radiated down each limb and intensified one-hundred fold in the palms of her hands.
Though never much of a runner, she surprised herself with the speed an impending death could force her legs to move. But despite her quickness, she felt as though she was running through soup, creating a drag that was slowing her down and tiring her too quickly.
Nothing ahead of her could be seen until she was ten feet in front of it. Just a dirt road that led down. Down to her salvation or down to Hell, depending on how forgiving God was for her wasted life and, more importantly, how close the phantasm was behind her.
Heavy snorts, like a giant dragon, filled the thick air just behind her. A putrid stench suddenly filled her lungs almost making her gag.
It was right behind her.
Suddenly, up ahead a filmy light passed fleetingly across the misty-laden road followed by the familiar rumble of a tractor-trailer. Somewhere ahead the road came out onto another highway. A fingernail's distance away from rescue.
But the beast was even closer.
Would she make it?
So close! Jesus, don't give up now!
She screamed again with all she had within her, hoping against hope that someone would hear her cries.
Her legs pounded, chest burned, hands ached, heart sank.
The last thing she remembered was hearing the bones in her back snap like a sun-baked twig when what felt like a wrecking ball covered with six-inch razors smashed through her spinal column.
At least death came quicker than if Brad had done it.
The police officer who had been given her case when she was found dead was waiting outside the morgue when the pathologist finished the autopsy.
"Anything obvious?" he asked the doctor.
He shrugged and sighed as he wiped his hands dry with a paper towel. "You said her boyfriend found her dead?"
"Yeah. Said she just ran away from the car as he was looking for something in the trunk when they were returning home from a night out early yesterday morning. He's already admitted to them using cocaine earlier in the evening."
"Well, we'll have to wait and see what toxicology tells us. Besides some abrasions on her hands, she seemed to be perfectly fine." He shook his head in pity. "Perfectly fine."
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