Reception

by Kenzie Jennings

  Oh, that’s right, the back entrance. I have to make it there, reach the car. I just have no idea where I am at the moment. Somehow, I’d taken a turn somewhere along the way in the grey, losing them only just, and now I’m half-jogging, half-stumbling around in patchy beds of brush and weeds, away from the parking lot. All of this going on, and I cannot believe my pumps have lasted the entire night. I could’ve danced well in these babies. It would’ve been nice, I guess.

  My head has gone numb and swimmy again, my mouth bone dry, and my limbs sore. I lean against what I presume to be a wall of some sort, take in a breath, exhale, and I can almost forget about all of what’s happening. The night air, while a little sticky and redolent with a smattering of honey-barbequed patrons, has a light breeze to it that cools the sweat and blood on my skin. The rough texture of the wall, the solidity of it beneath my fingers, reminds me where I am and where I need to be.

  But that’s not quite as important as the sudden, mocking chime of girlish laughter coming from somewhere in the dark, a sound mere steps from where I’m standing. The moon has gone dark, hidden behind a flock of clouds. If it hadn’t been for the moonlight, I’d be blindly using the wall as a guide, relying solely on my hearing and my sense of smell and touch. Thankfully, the dim light casts the occasional outlines and shadows, and when I turn around, I see them there, clustered together.

  The one who’d been laughing approaches me, and I keep the mallet behind my back, waiting to see just how close she intends to be. She giggles again, and then stifles it back with a pale hand. A flashlight clicks on in her other hand, casting her sunny freckled and blood-smeared face in light and shadow. It’s the redhead from the front desk. The others, a couple of panting, snickering teenaged boys with the sort of floppy hairstyle that’s deliberate, both in grubby resort uniforms, flank her sides. One of them, who keeps making an awful sucking noise with his lips and teeth, grips a crowbar. He’s just about to take a swing, ready to strike at me, when the redhead forcefully shoves him away, causing him to stumble back and fall to the ground.

  “She’s not yours, dipshit!” she snaps at him.

  The other one helps his seething friend back up on his feet, and the two of them exchange quick, whispered words back and forth between them, and when the redhead turns to deal with them both, I’ve turned and am already hightailing it as fast as I can run in these goddamned shoes, tripping along in the dark, my hand trailing the wall as I go. I mean, I could participate, maybe knock a few heads with my weapon of choice, but I’d really rather head back around and try to catch up with my sister.

  There’s a piercing screech directly behind me, and I can hear catcalls, cackles coming from far off. Undoubtedly, it’s the redhead leading the charge, ticked that she wasn’t able to chow down in full view of her boy scouts. At least, that’s what’s going through my overactive imagination as I run. If she catches me, I wonder if she’s into the raw bar sort of thing or if she enjoys the barbeque as much as her friendly family/employers here.

  The lights of the path leading to the road out of the back gate momentarily dazzle me as I trip along, but I manage to keep running, no matter. I know perfectly well that the dumbest thing a woman in my position can do is stop and turn to see who’s following close behind, but I’m tempted nonetheless. I can hear the pound of feet, many feet, behind me, and while I’m sure the image concocted in my feverish brain right now—that of the entire resort staff, a throng of them, joined by stray members of the Card family, after me—is a lot worse than the reality, there’s no way in all of hell, even if this is it, I’m about turn around and check. I’m not that kind of twit.

  I am, however, the other kind of ninny, the kind who doesn’t really watch where she’s going since she’s so focused on the possibility of an exit.

  So, naturally, when I make a turn, I slam right into the driver door of Shay’s precious SUV, the impact slamming me back, knocking me to the ground.

  “Ansley, get in!” Shay shouts from out the open driver window.

  My headache is blinding. I can see only spots of light, the blurry movement of colors shifting; everything else is cast in a watery sheen. The pain rakes its hot talons behind my eyes. I think it’s tears. I think I’m crying.

  Strong hands gently tug me up from underneath my arm, easing me back to my feet. I wipe at my eyes, and suddenly, it’s all there in the moonlight, racing towards the SUV, coming for me. The horde. All of them. I knew it, and I wish, for once, my imagination hadn’t been so close to reality. It rarely is. I always imagine the worst, like anyone else, I suppose, hoping for the best outcome. I’m pulled into the back, those strong hands now easing me in just as—

  They’re upon us. Hands claw for me, grasping only the air there, and—

  The passenger door slides shut behind me, nearly taking my leg. I can’t breathe. The ball of lead that had been rolling around inside of me is melting into my lungs and hardening there, weighing me down, causing me pain when I attempt to take in air. The last time I remember when I’d felt as if my ribcage was collapsing inward, when the fresh air couldn’t enter, I’d slid against my boss’ chest, grappling for his suit lapel as I gasped for breath, the firebombs going off behind my eyes. My head had struck the corner of my desk, and everything had just gone dark.

  This time, not like it’s any different. I feel that tightness, my throat constricting, and the last thing I see before I give myself over to the dark is Charlie’s face creasing over with concern. Those brown eyes. Those full lips of his.

  My last thought, I wonder how I really tasted.

  #

  The violent impact snaps me alert, ripping me out of the dark. My head whips back and forth like it’s on a stalk. Wrenching whiplash. My neck is on fire. We’ve hit something; the machinery that’s been on the move, keeping us relatively safe until now has gone dead. The only sound I hear is a high-pitched whine keening in my ears, masking the noise of everything else happening around me. Charlie is unbuckling his seatbelt from the front passenger seat, twisted around, saying something at me. Then he’s up from his seat and ducking back to check on the passenger next to me.

  It’s Bryceson. He’s crying loudly, and the pitch of his voice grows louder when everything comes into focus. The ringing sound is on repeat, warning lights and signals from the vehicle, reminding us of the obvious. I remove my seatbelt slowly, feeling for additional injuries, but aside from my burning arm, my stinging face, my throbbing neck, I’m all right.

  Shay is half-buried in the mess of the inflated airbag. She’s pulling at it, clawing to release herself from its enveloping cushion.

  “Everybody okay?” says Charlie. He’s directing it at all of us, even while his focus is on Bryceson. He checks the sobbing boy for injuries, wiping the kid’s teary face as he examines him. “Hey, guy. How we doing?” he says calmly to Bryceson while he looks him over. “Anything hurt? You all right there?”

  “I think I pooped a little.”

  Charlie chuckles softly. “Perfectly understandable.” He looks at me. “And you. You okay? You poop a little?” He winces when he takes a closer look. Your face. What happened?”

  “It’s nothing some antiseptic and a few shots of the Jim Beam variety couldn’t cure.” And yet it hurts just to say that. I unravel myself from the tangle of the seatbelt and scoot in towards my sister.

  Shay claws for the side seat control and suddenly slides back, nearly ramming it against me, pushing herself away from the airbag that’s starting to sag. She gasps, coughs, expels air. I lean in against the center console, twisting myself around to face her directly. She glances around at everything around us before her gaze settles on me. “You’re bleeding again,” she says, a croak in her voice. “Did you—Did you break your face?”

  It’s so hard to smile and even harder not to smile. The hot burn rips down the side of my face when I do. “How bad is it now? Does it look broken?”

  Shay winces back a grin. “It always does, Tee-tee. The scar’s gonna improve
things later.”

  “Best be shutting up now, Ta-ta.”

  “Hate to interrupt all the tee-tee and ta-ta going on right now,” says Charlie, “but if everyone’s all right, we’re gonna have to move. Right now. Get out there in the dark as quickly as we can and hide out somewhere out there until daylight.”

  Ignoring the spasms happening in my neck, I shift around from my leaning crouch, taking a look at the darkness outside. That pitch, it’s endless. It hides other things, a dark beyond the dark. It hits me, that resultant awareness a few minutes after an accident. I don’t even know what happened, never mind where we are. Shay switches off the car, cutting the shrill beep of the alarm as well, and it’s like all of the natural noise comes back on at once. I’m suddenly able to hear everything around us.

  Charlie slides open the side passenger door, hops outside, and then lifts Bryceson out of the SUV, hefting the kid up against him. He walks around to the front of the vehicle, carrying Bryceson as he does. Shay clicks open the driver door and eases herself out. Before I slide out of the passenger side, I catch a glimpse of Charlie standing in the single bright spotlight of the one working headlight. He and the kid are as bloodied and grimy as Shay and I are. The spiderweb crack of the windshield segments the sight out there in the line of the headlight’s beam. It looks as if we’d veered off-road and had slammed into something caught in the middle of clawing at the earth, its protrusions twisted and spiny. The skeleton of a fallen tree.

  Out here in the wide-open darkness of the countryside, so vulnerable as we are, I can’t see much; it’s hard to discern any shapes or shadows. The moon has decided to play a long game of hide-and-seek behind a chain of clouds.

  My legs are made of rubber, such wobbly, useless things, and I take a tumble. Shay staggers over to me with her hands out, reaching for me, and I grab them, allowing myself to be pulled back up, the two of us wavering.

  It takes me a minute to get my air back, to breathe, before I ask the million-dollar question: “What the hell happened?”

  Charlie has set Bryceson down and now has him by the hand as they make their way over. “Not like Shay could ease us out of the way. No one could’ve. I think it was some kind of spike strip or something like it. Someone set it up on the road,” says Charlie. “Normally those things are set up by the police, supposed to slow drivers down gradually, forcing them into a stop.”

  “That wasn’t ‘gradual,’” says Shay. “We’re off road, and we ran into a dead tree. We could’ve been killed. How was that meant to be ‘gradual’?”

  Charlie, still holding onto Bryceson’s hand, beckons us to follow them both back to the front of the SUV. “That’s not normal,” he says, pointing at it, urging us to see for ourselves. “But that was definitely intentional. Get us to veer completely off the road like that.”

  The tires have all been shredded, the front end a crumpled, chaotic crunch of metal and dead tree limbs. On quick glance, for an instance, it looks as if the SUV and the fallen tree had been trying to merge and form into an angry, bizarre mutation.

  It’s not the time for the how’s and why’s. It hasn’t been for a good while though. “We can’t stay out here,” I say. “Like Charlie said, we need to go. Right now.”

  Shay turns in a wide circle, looking all around us. “Where are we going though? Do you see any lights out there? Any houses, farms?”

  “Where’s the road from here? How far off-road are we?” I aim that at the whole group. I was unconscious, for shit’s sake; it’s not like I’d have any idea.

  Charlie turns in my direction. He looks as tense as the rest of us, clenched and breathing heavily. There’s something in his eyes. I can’t quite read it, but I’m going with my gut and keeping him at a few feet’s distance from me until I know what’s going on. “Why? We really shouldn’t go back, Ansley,” he says.

  “No shit. Did I say we should take it back?” I say, and then, remembering the age of the rest of our company, I add a, “Sorry, buddy. Just one of those times,” offering Bryceson as friendly a grin as I can offer under the circumstances.

  The kid just stares blankly at me in response. He’s miles away in his own mind, one grubby hand still entwined with Charlie’s, the other with a thumb in his mouth. Comfort where he can get it. What are we going to do with him?

  “What I meant was, if we can get back to the road, we can at least travel along, parallel to it, not on it. Doesn’t it lead to a gas station not too far from the resort?” I’m not about to add that I’m crazy, sure, but not stupid because there’s not really a worse time than now for self-abasement.

  “We’re not going in that direction, Ansley,” Shay mutters, and I barely catch it.

  “What do you mean we’re not going in that direction? That’s the way to that German town. Why wouldn’t we be going that way? There are people that way. There are miles and miles of straight-up nothing in the other fucking direction.”

  Shay gives me a hard look and nods towards Bryceson, as if my goddamned language seriously matters now. I can’t believe this. What the hell do they think we’re going to do out here? Set up camp under the stars? Toasting marshmallows over a fire? Sharing folksy legends about crazy cannibal families out in the country?

  I snort out a chuckle at the thought of it. The mad irony, noted.

  Charlie is all smooth and soft rather than blatantly wincing at my laughing like Shay’s doing right now. “They’re more likely to head towards town while they’re after us. It’s the logical choice, right?” he says. “I came over from the other direction. There are some houses out there. An RV park, too, if I recall. Can’t be more than a few miles at most.” He takes a quick glance at his watch. “Yeah,” he says, squinting at the thing. “It’s going on four thirty.” He looks over at me with a weak half-smile. “We might reach the park by dawn if we’re on the move now.”

  I suddenly feel my limbs go prickly. My back straightens, as if lifting by a cord. Something about that sounds familiar. “An RV park? As in trailers?” I turn to Shay who’s shaking her head at Charlie. It’s familiar to her as well.

  “They’ve got relatives there. Some cousins,” she says.

  And I remember now, the conversation between Rex and one of the beardos. “From what we heard, they serve the bad meat. Makes them sick.”

  Shay manages a lopsided grin. “I like the idea of all of them getting sick.”

  “It’s how those horror stories begin, Shay,” I say. “Redneck inbred family taking strangers in, cutting them up with chainsaws, and then prepping them for dinner. We’ve already experienced it with the rich members of the family. But they, at least, used fancy, clean utensils to prevent us from getting tetanus. We have sanitary choices here, you know.”

  “I guess you’re right. I mean, if we had to be eaten, it’s better for us to be treated with care, kind of like those cows in Japan that get massaged before they’re turned into steaks.”

  “Yeah, I’d definitely want five star treatment if I were serving…me. Or someone was serving me to somebody else. You know what I’m trying to say.”

  Shay nods, her grin widens. It’s best to make light, right? “I know what you’re trying to say.”

  “And now I really want a massage,” I say. The thought of it warms me, someone’s…anyone’s touch, as absurd as it seems.

  “Now I know what I don’t want,” says Shay. “I don’t want steak ever again. That’s it, everybody. I’m officially back to vegetarianism. Thanks, Nate, for ruining meat for me forever.”

  “Listen, we go in one direction or the other,” Charlie abruptly cuts in, returning us to the subject at hand. “We can’t just head into the hills. There’s nothing out there.”

  I’m not entirely convinced in such absolutes. Leon taught me that. Hell, therapy did, that there are more solutions out of the box, that varieties of grey exist in-between, that you can ask for something besides salt or pepper. There are always other options besides the ones in front of you.

  I turn, fac
ing him. “How can you be so sure there’s no one living out there in the hills? You’re not familiar with the area, are you? What, have you hiked around here? What do you know, Charlie?”

  Now it’s Shay’s turn to give Charlie a curious once-over, eyebrow raised. Charlie shakes his head; rakes his fingers through his hair, and, with his hands frozen there on his head, he lets out a long, exasperated puff of air, probably meant to be a sigh, at the two, little women staring at him with their flat, suspicious eyes. “I give up,” he finally says. “You two can decide what you’re gonna do from now on, but I’m gonna take Bryceson here, and we’re gonna head up the road in some direction that has possibility. I don’t care. We’re not staying out here by the car where we’re live bait.”

  “Police,” Bryceson says, startling us all. He’s staring at something, and Shay and I turn to see it, winking in the distance out there in the darkness, the blues and reds going around and around, weaving in and out of the crests and valleys.

  Shay lets out a whoop and is just about to make a move up the slope when she steps on something that crunches underneath her bare foot—a detail I’d somehow missed until now—and screams, her voice cutting the still night like a honed blade. I’m at her side in an instant, having her use my shoulder as leverage while she examines her foot. A sharp twig had impaled the sole of her foot. She gently tugs on it, urging it out slowly, carefully, sucking in her breath as she does. I have her sit beside me on the sandy heath and then rip off a strip of her bedraggled dress. It’s as if everything about the terrain, from its inhabitants right down to its natural growth, wants to keep us trapped here, in agony and afraid. I help her wrap her injured foot, staunching yet another wound. We’re just a mess. I want to laugh it off, but one side of my face is still on fire. It would hurt to laugh. Maybe once we’re in our comfy hospital beds, with round the clock care. Maybe then we could share a good, long laugh about surviving hell and everything with it.