Husk

by Hults, Matt

  Mallory straightened up a little further, wincing when another flash of pain pulsed through her chest. She struggled to remain focused, resisting the urge to simply close her eyes and allow the chaotic world to disappear from her perception.

  Beside her, in the driver’s seat, Tim busied himself with the vehicle’s controls. Though his facial features betrayed his inner fears, he appeared to be the calmest member of the group.

  “Where are we?” Mallory asked.

  His head jerked up at the sound of her voice, and his eyes locked on her as if viewing a reanimated corpse. “We just passed Hamel Road, onto Pioneer Trail. How do you feel?”

  “S-scared.”

  “Yeah, me, too.”

  Lightning throbbed across the sky, and the automobile rattled over a craterous section of asphalt, paralyzing Mallory until the jarring motion ceased.

  Even in her current condition, she recognized the futility of disputing how the Mercedes operated on its own. She still had no idea what was controlling the car, but she knew it had to be the same creature from the barn.

  “Where’s it taking us?” she groaned.

  “I’m not sure,” Tim replied. He shifted sideways in his seat so he could look beneath the steering column.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Trying to stop us,” he said. “Maybe there’s an anti-theft kill switch?”

  The vehicle dipped on its shocks in response to soaring across a wide depression in the road, then rose again when it crested the other side, barely keeping contact with the ground.

  “Hit the brakes,” Becky shouted for the twentieth time.

  “Don’t you think I already tried that?” Tim countered. “They’re no good.”

  “Then, pull the keys out.”

  “There aren’t any.”

  “What about yanking the fuses or something?” Lisa cried. “Will that work?”

  “Try the emergency brake,” Becky suggested.

  “Take it out of gear,” Adam demanded. “Put the fucker in park!”

  Tim bolted upright. “It’s locked up, all right, just like the brakes. I’ve tried everything and nothing works, so quit yelling at me!”

  The car took another wide but risky turn, the speedometer tipping just past eighty miles per hour. Mallory listened to the others fall silent while they balanced themselves against the centrifugal force, hearing a banshee wail arise from the agonized tires.

  She cringed with the ache in her chest, but managed a sigh when they safely completed what should have been a suicidal turn. When she looked up again, she saw lights twinkling through the trees ahead—other cars—and in seconds, they emerged from the back road and shot down an entrance ramp onto Highway 55.

  “Where are we going?” Lisa asked, once again igniting an explosion of questions from the back seat.

  Wailing pleas of who, what, where, when, and why assaulted Mallory’s ears in combination with the roaring engine, screaming tires, and blaring car horns of other motorists. But above the discord, from behind them, she detected the wavering scream of a siren, only then recalling the others mentioning something about a police car.

  “The police are behind us?” She turned to look over her shoulder and stiffened in pain.

  Tim glanced to the rearview mirror for a moment, then nodded. “There are three vehicles following us. There was a Blazer behind us earlier, but now it looks like they’ve let the cop pull ahead to clear traffic. I think the third car is your dad’s.”

  “My dad?” she repeated. Once again she tried for a look, twisting around far enough to make herself shout.

  Tim looked to her and began to ask if she was okay when a blinding flash exploded throughout the Mercedes’s interior. A white bolt of energy blasted away from them with the speed of a comet, soaring forward, straight into oncoming traffic. The next thing Mallory knew, Tim was battling with the steering wheel, trying to pull them out of a deafening skid. He cursed between clenched teeth with the world screaming in circles around them.

  * * *

  Jimmy “Dirty Dog” Gibbs had a spectacular view of the oncoming police chase from the lofty cab of his International 9900i-semi. It was awesome. He saw a sleek black Mercedes tearing like hell away from a State Patrol squad car, zipping past what little traffic blocked its way. The driver was a full-blown lunatic. He cut onto the shoulder to pass a minivan towing a trailer full of junk, then dodged between some dude on a Harley and an old red station wagon, forcing the guy on the Harley to nearly bail into the grass ditch separating the east and westbound lanes.

  “Hope you eat a tree, asshole!” Jimmy shouted out his window, simultaneously blasting the rig’s horn once the car neared.

  He followed the fugitive auto with his gaze when it raced past in the opposite direction, hoping to catch a glimpse of the driver. Instead, a fiery, white ripple of light sprung off the Mercedes’s hood, exploded across the median and rammed into his windshield.

  “Holy—”

  Jimmy braced for impact, crossing one arm over his face. But nothing happened. No crash, no shattered glass. When he looked, he discovered the windshield undamaged.

  “Jesus,” he breathed.

  Before he had a chance to digest what happened and formulate an explanation, the big truck roared with increased power. It bound forward, acquiring speed free of his command.

  The steering wheel slid through his hands like an enlivened serpent, angling the rig left, directing it into the shallow ditch divider.

  “Shee-it!”

  Jimmy heaved back and forth in his seat as the truck drove off the road and plunged into the weedy channel separating the lanes. Grass and dirt blasted upward where the front bumper bottomed out and gouged into the earth, spraying soil to each side like a boat bursting through a wave. But it didn’t stop there. The truck surged onto the opposite roadway just as violently, and no matter how hard he struggled to correct its course, the machine wouldn’t respond.

  Flashing lights whipped across the windshield glass. A siren whined.

  Jimmy looked ahead and saw the speeding police cruiser fall in line with the truck’s chrome hood ornament.

  “Aw, hell!”

  The officer slammed on his brakes, and his vehicle slanted to the right. Blue-white plumes of smoke screamed off the tires.

  But Jimmy knew it was already too late.

  The two vehicles came together and the patrol car disappeared in a cloud of destruction. Jimmy jolted with the collision, but his seatbelt held him in place. He gaped in surrealistic wonder at the sight of fractured pieces of colored plastic from the cruiser’s flasher coverings tumbling across the cab’s hood in slow motion.

  Despite the force of the crash, the semi didn’t slow.

  Its Herculean 600 horsepower Detroit Diesel engine roared onward, pushing through the cruiser’s wreckage, growling like a wild beast charging toward its next kill.

  * * *

  Rebecca couldn’t believe her eyes when she first saw the huge semi lunge into the wrong lane of traffic, but the explosion of sound when it collided with Sam’s squad car confirmed its deadly presence.

  A scream escalated in her throat. Before she could voice it, the police cruiser’s forward end vanished into the big rig, its rear tires lifting off the pavement. The patrol car spun into the ditch amid a cloud of debris.

  Transfixed on the accident, imagining poor Sam behind the wheel, Rebecca flinched in surprise when Paul slammed on the brakes and swerved toward the shoulder.

  Then she registered the grating noise of a second collision.

  Ahead of them, the truck had swerved to ram Frank Atkins’ Blazer. The big rig’s front bumper clipped the Chevy’s rear end as Frank tried to veer around it. The SUV leapt away from the crash like a cat with a broken tail, its rear bumper torn askew. Its wheels skipped off the asphalt, and the whole vehicle almost rolled before skidding onto the grassy divider.

  Now nothing stood between Paul’s sport utility and the massive truck except a scant portion of o
pen road that all but vanished in a second. Rebecca’s cry finally escaped her when Paul swung around the truck’s mangled front bumper, aware they were still too close to escape from danger. Less than halfway past the rig’s cab, the two vehicles scraped together with a squawk of colliding metal. The unmovable mechanical monster edged into them on the left, forcing the Expedition to rise up on its two right tires, off the highway’s shoulder.

  The SUV toppled and rolled into the ditch.

  The airbags activated.

  Rebecca screamed and the night spun around them, the sky once again afire with bolts of lightning.

  Then all went silent, vanishing into the darkness of unconsciousness.

  CHAPTER 50

  Tim didn’t even possess a driver’s license, let alone have the skill to manage a car in an out-of-control, high-speed slide. He had no idea how much brake pressure to apply, or which way he should turn the wheel in order to stop them from going into a spin. Adding to his predicament, the car had lost all power: no lights, no power steering, no anti-lock brakes. But against all odds, the Mercedes stayed on the road and slid to a halt about two hundred feet from where its unwavering route had first began to falter, its front end now facing the way they had come.

  At first, no one spoke. Everybody seemed too focused on the fact that they’d survived, or on the pileup of vehicles they’d left in their wake. Cars in the eastbound lane screeched to a stop adjacent the accident scene, their taillights burning red. Tim gaped at the sight, finding the semi truck they’d passed only a moment earlier now angled diagonally across the road.

  Thunder trembled in the air.

  The sound brought to Tim’s mind the image of multiple lightning bolts that had striped the sky just seconds ago. And that memory sparked the recollection of intense light that had flown from the Mercedes at the exact moment it lost control.

  It’s gone. The creature’s gone; that’s why we spun out. Just like it jumped into my jacket, it must have jumped out of the car.

  He began fumbling for the door locks, about to voice his suggestion that they all flee the vehicle while they had the chance, when he noticed Mallory. She’d doubled over in her seat, hunched like a limp rag doll. She clutched her chest, moaning. Enraptured with the prospect of escape, he hadn’t stopped to think of how the car’s careening movements must have affected her chest wound.

  “Mallory, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry! I didn’t know what else to do.”

  She issued a pathetic weeping noise that made Tim tremble with worry. He reached out to her, his hand hovering for a moment before touching down on her back. “I’m going to get you to safety,” he whispered. “I—”

  “Don’t touch her,” a demonic voice boomed from the car’s stereo speakers. Each word crackled and popped, laced by sharp electronic squeals and hissing static.

  With the crack of a whip, the shoulder belt shot out from behind him, arced across his chest, and locked into place. The strap drew taut and yanked him backward.

  Tim howled in pain.

  Ensnared, with both arms restrained, he had no other option but to watch while Mallory’s safety belt lunged around her, pulling her upright. From behind, he could hear Becky, Adam, and Lisa also being seized.

  The car came back to life.

  Once again running in submission to their invisible captor, the Mercedes made a quick U-turn and resumed their terrifying journey westward.

  * * *

  Flickering blasts of lightning mimicked the barrage of thoughts that flashed through Frank’s mind.

  Behind him, the rampaging eighteen-wheeler had come to a noisy standstill. The harsh keen of its air brakes still rang in his ears. But the damage had already been done. Seconds before, Frank and Melissa had swiveled in their seats and watched Paul Wiesses’ veering Ford vanish from sight behind the semi’s towering cab, its outcome still uncertain. The truck’s massive trailer continued to block their view. Worse yet, roughly thirty yards to the west, Officer Hale’s ravaged patrol car had settled into a deathlike repose halfway off the road. Its back end lay in the ditch while its crumpled front end pointed skyward—an optical illusion created by the monstrous amount of damage the vehicle had sustained. Indeed, from what Frank could tell so far, he and Melissa appeared to have been the most fortunate of the three. Though the Blazer had taken some damage and stalled out from their encounter, the two of them had come through the ordeal unharmed.

  He looked to the Mercedes.

  Removed from the inexplicable episode, it had skidded to a turbulent halt several hundred feet away and now faced them with darkened headlights.

  No one got out. Nobody ran.

  What was he to do? Should he stay and help—surely injuries had been dealt—or try to get to the teenagers trapped within the possessed auto?

  Melissa had already made up her mind; she prompted him to check on the patrol officer while she went to find Paul Wiess’s Ford.

  “There no time for that,” Frank said. “We have to get the kids before—”

  The Mercedes’s headlights blazed white, and the car swung around.

  “We can’t leave the others,” Melissa said, looking to the crash.

  Frank seized her arm when she went for her door. “We can’t let it get to Kane’s body,” he said, restarting the Blazer. “If it reaches the cemetery, there’s no telling what we’ll be up against. We have to follow them.”

  He didn’t wait for Melissa to protest and immediately gunned the engine.

  They lurched in place, then sank to the right. The whole vehicle shuddered with the roaring motor, but the Chevy refused to move.

  Melissa opened her door and checked left and right, her sights settling on something behind them. “It’s no use, Frank, your rear axle’s broken. We’re not going anywhere.”

  Frank let off the gas, watching the gleaming black Mercedes speed away, fading into the tempestuous night.

  * * *

  The nightmare ride continued.

  Tim closed his eyes and forced himself to block out the hysterical screams of the others, focusing all his concentration on how to escape their traveling mechanical prison.

  He exhaled a long slow breath, relaxing his muscles. In his mind, he saw his body narrow and pull inward, felt the excruciating grip of the Nylon strap around him loosen.

  Maintaining his calm control, Tim wedged his right hand between his hip and the seatbelt, striving to reach the lock release. He didn’t know if the stunt would work, but he had to try something, had to keep fighting. There was no telling where they were being taken, but he had the feeling once they got there the situation would only worsen.

  At the intersection of Highway 55 and County Road 19, the speeding Mercedes jarred Tim’s eyes open when it sideswiped an old pickup truck and cornered right to race northward.

  The car hadn’t traveled far before a curving line of bright red lights became visible farther ahead, on the street’s left-hand shoulder—a series of road flares glowing in the darkness, outlining the parameter of a stopped vehicle.

  And he saw a police car.

  Secured like a metal patient in a straightjacket, Tim had no way of sending a warning to the unknowing officer when the man stepped out into the middle of the road and began motioning them around the cordoned-off stretch of asphalt.

  The possessed car hurtled forward.

  Realizing the machine’s intent, the cop scrambled backward, drawing his weapon. Tim could already picture the first slug rupturing the windshield, and he joined in with the others, shouting at the top of his voice for the officer not to shoot.

  But the Mercedes moved too fast for the man.

  The cop abandoned his shooter’s stance and lunged to get clear of the car, only to find he’d backed up parallel to the disabled vehicle and had nowhere to go.

  Tim closed his eyes.

  The impact felt like a cannonball hit. The whole car jolted.

  The windshield imploded. The roof bucked.

  Shouts and cries that had originated
with the terror of being trapped within the haunted auto and subservient to its evil presence silenced in the crash.

  Tim opened his eyes to find that the safety glass of the windshield had turned white with destruction and now bowed inward toward them. Despite the devastation, it remained in its frame. Tim craned his head around to see what had become of the unfortunate officer, but all he saw were the terrified faces of Mallory’s friends.

  Clear of the patrol car, the Mercedes rushed on, making a sharp right onto a heavily wooded side road. It plowed through outstretched arms of plant life that overhung its boundaries.

  At the end of the drive an abandon church and cemetery emerged out of the murk.

  The Mercedes slowed to a stop before an iron fence half hidden by overgrown weeds. Scores of various shaped headstones glowed in the vehicle’s high beams.

  The car idled.

  “Everyone out except Mallory,” the dreaded voice demanded.

  The restraining belts lashed around Tim and the three teens behind him all clicked softly in their buckles and slipped away. The driver-side doors swung open.

  “What about Mallory?” Tim asked. “Why won’t you let her go, too?”

  He leaned over and checked Mallory’s ever-worsening condition, finding she’d slipped into unconsciousness and wouldn’t respond to his voice.

  “If you want Mallory to go free, then you’ll do as I say,” the speakers transmitted. “Otherwise, I’ll tear her apart, slowly, piece by tiny piece, making her suffer a hundred deaths before I finally allow her to die.”

  Tim didn’t question the validity of the monster’s threat, and the thought of what it might do to her made him choke. “W-what do you want from us?”