by Riley Sager
Charlie stays silent. It’s better to do that than admit she feels the same way. There were points in this drive when she actually liked Josh, before suspicion and fear kicked in. She felt a kinship with him, probably because he’s as much of an outcast as she is. Lonely, too. She can tell that even now. Like recognizes like. In a weird, twisted way, Josh seems to understand her better than even Maddy sometimes did.
Or maybe it’s simply Maddy who makes her feel tied to Josh. There’s a reason Josh chose her to be one of his victims. Perhaps he was drawn to Maddy for the same reasons Charlie was. And it’s possible that’s another reason she got back into the car with him at the diner, even though it defied logic and reason.
She wants to know why.
Why Josh picked Maddy.
Why he approached her outside the bar.
Why he decided to kill her.
But instead of trying to articulate all that, Charlie lets the silence grow. It fills the car, uneasy, the two of them never taking their eyes off the road, which seems to have narrowed. On both sides, the forest presses in close. Bare branches arc overhead, connecting like elderly couples holding hands. Bits of snow still sit in the evergreens. Occasional clumps of it drop from the branches and hit the roof of the car with a muffled thump.
“So what now?” Charlie eventually says.
“We drive.”
“But not to Ohio.”
“No, Charlie. I’m afraid not.”
“What’s going to happen when the driving stops?”
“I think you already know the answer.”
Charlie’s fingers again curl around the knife in her pocket. This time, they stay that way. Gripping it tight. As ready as she’ll ever be.
“Maybe you should stop driving now,” she says.
Josh gives her a look. “You sure you want that?”
“No,” Charlie says. “But I’ve gone through a lot of things I didn’t want.”
“Like what happened to your parents.”
“Yes. And Maddy.”
Charlie finally senses it—the hardening of her heart she’s been waiting for. All it took was saying Maddy’s name out loud to the man who killed her. Yet it feels nothing like what she experienced in the movies in her mind. She’s angry, yes, but also sad. So exhaustingly sad.
“Yes,” Josh says. “And your—”
A deer suddenly leaps into the road, right in front of the car, the headlights making its eyes glow.
Josh pounds the brakes, and Charlie’s jerked forward a sliver of a second before the seat belt locks and yanks her back. Her head snaps against the back of the seat. Beside her, Josh cuts the wheel to the right, trying to avoid the deer. The animal springs across the road and into the woods, but the car keeps moving. Fishtailing at first, then rotating, the back of the Grand Am whipping in an arc across the road.
When the car stops, it’s still on the road but facing the wrong direction.
They sit there a moment, the car idling, the engine pinging, the headlights pointing in the direction from which they’d just come.
“Are you okay?” Josh says.
“I think so,” Charlie says before having two thoughts, right on top of each other.
The first is: If Josh plans on killing her, why does he care if she’s okay?
The second is: The driving has stopped.
Josh unhooks his seat belt. “We might have clipped that deer. I’m going to check the front of the car.”
He pauses, waiting for Charlie to say something. But she can’t say anything because that second thought she had repeats through her head like a siren.
We’ve stopped driving. We’ve stopped driving. We’ve stopped driving.
A third thought joins it.
I don’t know what’s going to happen next.
But Charlie does.
She’s known the moment they left the diner.
Josh is going to try to kill her and she’s going to try to kill him and only one of them is going to succeed.
With her hand in her coat pocket, her fingers in a death grip around the knife, Charlie watches as Josh gives up waiting for a response and gets out of the car. He crosses in front of it, his sweatshirt bright in the glow of the headlights. When he bends down to examine the front bumper, Charlie notices wisps of steam rising from the Grand Am’s hood. It takes her a second to realize the cause of it.
The engine.
It’s still running.
Ready to drive.
To end this, right now, all she needs to do is slip behind the wheel, shift into first gear, and stomp on the gas pedal.
Charlie moves quickly.
Snapping off the seat belt.
Sliding over the center console.
Grabbing the steering wheel for leverage.
She’s halfway behind the wheel when Josh catches sight of her. In a flash, he’s beside the car, flinging open the driver’s-side door before Charlie can hit the lock. As Josh pushes his way into the car, Charlie scrambles back into the passenger seat.
Josh gazes at her with regret in his eyes.
“Listen, Charlie,” he says, “I don’t want to hurt you, okay? But I can. Hurt you, that is. I’m quite capable of it. So we can do this two ways. You can be calm about it, which is my recommendation. Or you can try to fight it and I’ll be forced to get rough, which—I reiterate—I really, really don’t want to do.”
Shrinking against the passenger-side door, Charlie tries to put her hand back in her pocket.
“Keep those hands where I can see them,” Josh says. “Don’t make this hard on yourself.”
He plunges a hand into the front pocket of his jeans. He pulls something out and tosses it to Charlie. Unwilling to catch it, Charlie recoils and lets it drop to the floor with a rattle.
She looks down and sees it’s a pair of handcuffs.
“Pick them up and put them on,” Josh says.
Charlie shakes her head, and a tear flings from her eyes. A surprise. She didn’t know she’d started crying.
“You need to be smart now,” Josh says, his tone a warning. “Pick them up.”
“I—” Charlie’s voice cracks, cut short by fear and anger and sadness. “I don’t want to.”
“Please don’t make me get rough,” Josh says. “You don’t want that. I don’t want that. So I’m going to count to three. And when I’m done, those cuffs need to be around your wrists.”
He pauses.
Then he starts to count.
“One.”
Still shaking her head and still crying, Charlie reaches for the handcuffs at her feet.
“Two.”
She scrunches down, one hand scooping up the handcuffs, the other burrowing back into her coat pocket.
“Three.”
Charlie sits up, the cuffs cold in her left hand, the knife handle hot in her right.
She doesn’t move.
“Damn it, Charlie. Just use the fucking cuffs.”
Josh lunges over the center console, moving in an instant from driver’s side to passenger side.
Charlie pulls the knife from her coat.
She closes her eyes.
Then, with a scream so loud it shakes the car windows, she thrusts the knife forward and plunges it into Josh’s stomach.
She thought it would go in easier than it does. In the movies, knives slide in smoothly, like a blade through butter. The truth is that it takes force. Teeth-gritting, grunting force to push it through Josh’s sweatshirt, then his flesh, then deeper still, into places Charlie doesn’t want to think about. She stops only when she feels blood on her hands and hears Josh moan her name.
“Charlie.”
INT. GRAND AM—NIGHT
Charlie opens her eyes.
She turns her head.
Slowly.
> So slowly.
Her gaze inches to the left, stopping when the tree-shaped air freshener dangling from the rearview mirror hits the edge of her vision.
Charlie sucks in a breath, taking in the too-strong scent of pine.
“Whoa. You there, Charlie?” a voice next to her says.
Her head resumes turning. Fast now. A neck-snapping swivel that brings her face-to-face with Josh. He sits behind the wheel, looking both amused and expectant. Like he’s been waiting a long time for this moment, and now that it’s here, it pleases him.
“Is this real?” she says.
Josh studies the back of his hand, humoring her. “Looks pretty real to me. Were you, uh—”
“At the movies?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know.”
But she desperately hopes so. She wants to think she’s not capable of doing in real life what she’d just done in her imagination.
“How can you not know?” Josh says.
“It was—”
Scary.
So scary and detailed and confusing. Enough that Charlie feels dizzy. Gray clouds float in and out of her vision. Riding with them is a skull-filling headache. She feels like Dorothy waking at the end of The Wizard of Oz, suddenly in a sepia-tinted world that had minutes earlier been dazzling color.
“I don’t know what’s going on,” she says.
And she truly doesn’t. She has no idea if she’s in reality or a movie or a memory. Maybe it’s all three, which is a perfect description of movies themselves. They’re a combination of life and fantasy and illusion that becomes a kind of shared dream. Charlie imagines this moment being projected onto a big screen, watched by all those beautiful people out there in the dark.
At this point, nothing would surprise her anymore.
The car is still stopped in the middle of the road. Through the windshield, Charlie sees trees on both sides of the car, their bare limbs skeleton-gray against the sky.
“We don’t need to stop driving,” Josh says, a tinge of hope in his voice. “We can keep going.”
“All the way to Ohio?”
“If that’s what you want, yeah.”
“Or,” Charlie says, “we could go to a movie.”
The suggestion makes Josh chuckle. “I wouldn’t mind that. Not one bit.”
“So you’re not going to try to kill me?”
“I can’t,” Josh says. “You already killed me.”
Charlie looks down at her hands. One grips a pair of handcuffs. The other is smeared with blood. On the other side of the car, Josh chokes out her name.
“Charlie.”
INT. GRAND AM—NIGHT
Charlie’s eyes open on their own. A willful snap.
In front of her, sprawled sideways in the driver’s seat, is Josh. His head is propped against the window, which has become fogged by his pained grunts. When he spasms, his hair makes a jellyfish pattern in the glass.
The knife remains in his side, poking out like a meat thermometer. Josh stares at it, wild-eyed and sweaty, the fingers of his left hand reaching for it.
“Charlie,” he grunts. “Help me.”
She stays frozen, save for her eyelids, which she rapidly blinks, hoping that doing so will jolt her out of this nightmarish movie in her mind. Because that’s all it is.
A movie.
It has to be.
This can’t be real.
Even though it looks that way. Blood has started to seep into Josh’s sweatshirt. A wet bloom around the knife that’s darker than the fake blood used in movies. Almost black. Like it’s not really blood at all but some kind of primordial ooze.
Seeing it makes Charlie back against the passenger door. She fumbles for the handle, finds it, pulls. The door swings open, and the Grand Am’s dome light flicks on, casting a brutal glow over the inside of the car. No longer dark, the blood now looks Technicolor bright in the dome light’s glare.
Charlie resumes blinking. Faster now. Her eyelids working in a way that makes everything flicker like a projector not running at full speed. She slides out of the car backward, dropping through the door, landing on the road with a burst of pain in her lower back.
She crawls away from the car, scuttling backward like a crab. She doesn’t want to be here. She wants to be anywhere else. Any time else. She wants to wake and find herself in a whole other existence. One without Josh and that car and that blood.
When thinking about stabbing Josh, she didn’t know how she’d feel if she actually went through with it. Victorious, maybe. Or sated. Or proud.
Instead, she just feels scared.
But it’s a strange kind of fear.
She’s no longer scared about what might happen to her. She’s scared about what she’s done.
Charlie climbs to her feet.
She takes one last look at the Grand Am.
Then she begins to run.
INT. GRAND AM—NIGHT
He removes the knife from his gut in one quick yank. Better that than trying to pull it out little by little, which hurts more than helps. And there’s plenty of pain already. The moment air hits the stab wound, a fresh bolt of agony pulses through him and there’s nothing to do but yell.
When it’s over and the boiling pain lowers to a more manageable simmer, he takes a few deep breaths and checks the damage. The first thing he notices—because it’s impossible to miss—is the blood. The side where Charlie stabbed him is crimson from hip to armpit. He doesn’t know if it’s because his sweatshirt is extra absorbent or if he’s really lost that much blood. Either way, the sight of it makes him dizzy.
It takes some effort to lift the sweatshirt to see the actual knife wound. The blood-soaked fabric sticks to his skin like glue. He considers leaving it like that. A makeshift bandage. But he’s been stabbed before, and he knows that doing nothing will lead to more blood loss, then infection, then death.
Like it or not, this bitch needs to be stitched.
So he pulls up the sweatshirt the same way he pulled out the knife—in one swift motion. Riding out another blast of pain, he looks down and sees an inch-long slice on the left side of his abdomen.
It’s good that the knife was small.
It’s bad that it was long.
The wound it left behind is deep enough to make him worry that the knife could have hit a major organ or severed some nerves, although if that were the case, he thinks he’d be in more pain. Or dead. And since he’s alive and not paralyzed in agony, he assumes he got lucky.
He reaches under the driver’s seat, his left hand fumbling for the first-aid kit he keeps there in case of emergencies. Each movement prompts a fresh wave of pain that makes him curse everything about this night.
It was supposed to be easy. Now it’s just a shitshow. And he knows exactly who to blame.
Charlie.
He wasn’t lying when he said he liked talking to her. He can’t remember the last time he enjoyed being in someone’s company. People, generally speaking, suck. It’s why he does what he does. Most human beings can’t stop being selfish, greedy, piggish assholes. And it’s his job to make sure they pay for that.
But Charlie’s different. So weird and wounded and, as he now knows, secretly fierce. It made him lower his guard. He told her things he’d never told anyone else, ever. All it got him in return was a knife to the gut.
Beneath the seat, his fingers brush smooth plastic. The first-aid kit. Finally. He picks it up, drops it on the side of his stomach that doesn’t have a stab wound, and clicks it open. He rifles through it, finding a small bottle of rubbing alcohol, a gauze pad, some medical tape, a needle, and a tiny spool of thread. Everything he needs for a little amateur surgery.
Now comes the hard part. The thing he doesn’t want to do but knows he has to do if he’s going to catch up to Charlie. And he needs t
hat to happen.
He’s not done with her just yet.
Steeling himself with a ragged breath, he pours the alcohol onto the wound and screams through the pain. His hands tremble so much it takes four tries before he’s able to thread the needle. And when that’s done, he grunts, grits his teeth, and begins to stitch.
EXT. DINER PARKING LOT—NIGHT
The diner is dark by the time Charlie reaches it. So dark that she almost misses it in her mad sprint down the road. She’d been looking for its light, not its shape. The neon and pink and blue around the entrance. The gaudy brightness of its sign. The warm glow spilling through the wide windows. All of it is now gone, replaced by an unnerving blackness.
It’s closed.
There’s no one here.
But then she spots a lone car still in the parking lot. The powder-blue Cadillac she’d noticed when they first arrived. She hopes it means someone’s still there.
Charlie moves to the door, her legs heavy and her chest tight. She ran for at least half an hour. The longest she’s ever run in her life.
Despite the cold, her body is soaked with sweat. Charlie feels it underneath the coat. A damp stickiness that makes her shirt cling to her skin. She places a hand on her heart and realizes that she’s still holding the handcuffs. Her grip is so tight around them that she has to force her fingers loose.
Not knowing what else to do, she shoves the cuffs into the front pocket of her jeans. A good idea. They’ll serve as evidence. Proof that Josh had tried to use them on her and that she had killed him in self-defense.
The thought knocks the air out of her.
She just killed someone.
No, she didn’t see Josh die. She couldn’t bring herself to stick around for that. But she knows he’s dead. A fact that makes her look down at her blood-caked hands. She uses the coat to wipe them clean, knowing deep down that it’s pointless. It doesn’t matter that she killed a killer. Her hands will be forever stained.
Charlie tries the diner’s front door. Although the blinds have been lowered over the windows and the sign on the door has been turned to read closed, the handle still gives when she pushes on it.