She bowed her head, wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, then reached under her shirt and pulled out the gun. Her skin reveled and recoiled as she touched it. Here was power. Here was weakness, too.
Here, also…was truth.
She cradled the gun in her lap, looked at Cody’s smooth forehead, and thought, hard.
For a long time.
* * *
“Wake up. We’re here.”
“Did we stop?”
“For a while, yes.”
“Are we there yet?”
“Not yet. Just a rest. We’ve got a little way to go. Just a little way.”
* * *
A sharp report shook the car. She woke and shivered, suddenly cold from the night air Cody had let in. She rubbed her eyes and looked over. He’d already buckled himself up and was once again playing with his Gameboy.
Somehow she found the strength to smile. “All set?”
A bare nod. “Yep. Kinda hungry, though. No snack machines here. Maybe at the next one.”
She looked away as she backed the car out. She hadn’t told Cody she’d spent their last few dollars on the Gameboy. Maybe enough quarters still rattled around in her purse to buy a bag of chips or cookies, so she could avoid the issue a little longer. Besides, maybe at the next stop she’d see someone she could borrow a few bucks from…
Beg. Beg a few bucks. Why lie?
She drove on. The night swirled around them. It had stopped raining. She glanced at the gas gauge. Though it had dropped deeper into the red band, it hadn’t hit bottom yet. Maybe, if she reached the next stop, she’d find help. Maybe.
The gun rubbed against her waist.
“We’re close, aren’t we?”
“I think so. Maybe. Hard to tell.”
“I hope so. I’m just so tired.”
“I know, and I’m sorry. So sorry. It’ll be better, soon.”
“Promise?”
A nod and a smile. “Promise.”
* * *
She blinked and sat up. Raindrops tapped the windshield, roof, and hood.
The car felt warm and close. Her head swimming with fatigue, she tried to brush off sleep, tried to focus.
They’d found another rest stop. Cody had left to…buy snacks? Use the bathroom again? Had he found change in her purse after all?
She squinted, looking at the building through the rain, lips unconsciously forming the words on its welcome sign. Then she yawned. She hadn’t dozed nearly as long as she could’ve.
Something had woken her. Raindrops?
Settling back into the driver’s seat, she frowned. No. Things felt wrong. Disjointed. Like a bad CD skipping in the middle of a song, getting hung up on the same phrase, over and over. Worse, the sensation felt familiar, but she wasn’t sure why.
Her gut twisted into knots. Of course it felt familiar; it was her life. It had always been like this, right? Ruined CD, ruined song…ruined life.
A sudden need to move consumed her. She reached under her seat, pulled her purse into her lap, and started rummaging through it. At first she found nothing but old lipstick tubes, crushed tampons, and a few brittle sticks of gum.
No money. Either she’d given it to Cody and he’d gone inside to buy something, or he’d just needed the bathroom again. Strange.
She couldn’t remember.
Her searching fingers tripped over a folded, glossy brochure. She dug it out and opened it. A ‘Welcome To’ brochure, the kind found at rest stops everywhere.
A tiny pinprick of alarm blossomed in her heart. She tried to swallow, but her throat clenched, tight and dry. Under a rising tide of panic, cold realization swirled. She couldn’t remember what state or county this was. How far had they come since their last stop?
She flattened the brochure on her thigh. It read “Welcome to Webb County.”
Her heart skipped a beat. She looked at the sign outside the car again.
Welcome to Webb County.
Back to the brochure. It looked worn. Soiled. Colors faded, like it had languished in her purse forever, yet…
Her desperate eyes read the sign once more, hoping for something different.
Welcome to Webb County.
“What the fuck?”
Something was wrong. She and Cody needed to get back on the road until she sorted this out…had she made another wrong turn?
She grabbed the door handle, but then stopped. Something nagged her. Opening the door felt wrong, out of place. How long had she been driving? Her stomach quivered.
She didn’t know.
Stupid. You’re tired. Need sleep, maybe even a drink. That’s all.
She shut off the ignition so she wouldn’t waste gas. Breathing deeply, spots clouding her vision, she exited the car.
* * *
“Cody?”
She stepped inside the rest stop, turned right into an empty lobby. Grit crunched underfoot. The place hadn’t been swept in ages. Pale fluorescent lights flickered above, throwing ghosts on the walls and floors. Something dripped. The information center in the far corner was deteriorated. The air tasted stale, like she was the first person to breathe it in years.
Her hand strayed to the gun, but she clenched her fist. “Cody? You’re creepin’ me out, chief. C’mon.”
Something shifted. She turned and faced two doors–bathrooms. Light glimmered around the door on her left, pulling her toward it. Each step dragged, her own breath roared in her ears, and her heart pounded.
Something waited behind that door.
“Cody?” Another step. Her hand trembled near the gun. “That you?”
Rustling. Sliding. She bit her tongue, tasting copper saltiness. Sweat chilled her forehead, and a scent like rotten leaves crept into her nostrils.
She reached beneath her ragged sweatshirt for the gun. Sweaty fingers closed around the grip, index finger curled on the trigger. She breathed frosty-white plumes. She pulled the gun from her waistband. Her nerveless fingers almost dropped it.
She felt more than heard it. Something sliding behind the door. She licked sour, cracked lips, and then…
…headlights splashed through the glass front doors, panned the far walls like a searchlight. Tires crunched asphalt and gravel, and an engine idled.
“Finally! Thank you, God!” She turned toward the light. “Cody! Quit screwing around! Someone’s here, we can–”
The bathroom door thumped. Hard, rattling in its frame, and she cried out. Growls rumbled behind that door, low and wet.
Another slam. She spun and pointed the gun at the door but couldn’t level it. The muzzle weighed a thousand pounds, and dizzying fear weakened her, turning her muscles into rubber.
Someone cried out, and then all fell quiet.
She looked back toward the headlights. The cry had come from there. Slowly, she backpedaled, lowering the gun. The rumbling behind the bathroom door quieted.
Squinting in the headlights’ glare, she saw something that ripped her breath away. Confusion tilted the floor and she wobbled, almost fell. She steadied herself with a palm against the glass door.
Outside, her rusted old Ford Escort idled. The car itself didn’t matter, though. Inside was something else.
Cody slept against the passenger side window. Behind the wheel sat…
The world spun away. Quiet hysteria roared behind her eyes.
Her, crying. Tears streaming down a broken face. Eyes gazing at Cody with desperate madness. Something metallic gleamed in her hand…
The gun.
“Please, God. No.”
The other Shelly raised the gun and planted the muzzle against Cody’s temple–tenderly. Like a kiss.
She struck the glass, the impact stinging her palm. “No! Dammit, no!” She wanted to run, her brain sent frenzied signals for her legs to move, something inside her screamed that she had to stop this, had to get out there and stop this, but her goddamn legs wouldn’t move, they wouldn’t…
A distant pop.
Cody’s head jer
ked.
Crimson whorls painted the window as he sagged down into his seat. She stared as the other Shelly swallowed the muzzle and pulled the trigger.
Another pop, this time louder. A wet, meaty thump.
She stumbled back away from the entrance, away from the car, away from what she’d just seen. It was a dream, a bad dream. A hallucination. She was tired, seeing things. Desperate, she fumbled with the gun’s cartridge chamber.
There should be six full chambers, because she’d never shot it, never shot it because that bastard Scott had seen reason–or at least hadn’t wanted his balls blown off–so he’d let them go, and she hadn’t fired a shot. She hadn’t done that horrible thing she just saw because she’d only dreamed it, and there should be six bullets, six bullets…
The cartridge cylinder clicked open. It spun lazily, then slowed, showing two empty bullet casings, side by side, in their chambers.
“N–no. I–I didn’t. I–I…”
The thing in the bathroom slammed against the door again, scratching and whining. She closed her eyes and saw blood. Matted hair. The small, red, wet hole in Cody’s temple.
The bathroom door thundered. Claws skittered on concrete. She opened her eyes and pointed the gun in that direction.
Her finger tightened on the trigger…but the growling stopped. The door fell silent and still.
She couldn’t take this. Too much, it was too much. So many images spun in her head. She couldn’t change it, couldn’t make it different or better, it was just like before, always like before.
Always.
She closed her eyes and jammed the muzzle deep into her mouth. Her teeth clicked against its metal.
And a warbling tune flowed from behind the bathroom door, stopping her. She strained to hear the odd yet familiar music.
Fanfare. Trumpets. Jingles and jangles. An old Gameboy.
She pulled the gun from her mouth, opening her eyes. “Cody?”
Silence. No growls or scratching, just silence.
Tears welled. She blinked, felt them overflow, cascading down her cheeks. “Please. I don’t want to do this anymore.” A sob twisted her chest, and she shuddered. “I’m so sorry.”
The door swung wide open, slowly. Backlit by a soft glow, an adolescent form approached her, its face cloaked in the shadows. It stopped a few feet away and stared at her with white, shining eyes that cast ghostly light across the soft contours of its face.
She sniffled. Wiped her eyes. A curious peace flooded her.
She reached out. Wordlessly, it took her hand. As they walked toward the exit, a stray thought stopped her.
She looked down. Saw the revolver gleaming in her hand.
Biting her lip, she tossed it away. It clattered on the cement, its echo thin and insignificant.
They left the rest stop, climbed inside the idling Escort. She put it into gear, pulled away and reentered the darkness ahead. They rode in silence until she whispered, “How much longer?”
“Not long,” it answered. “We’re almost there.”
She slipped a hand under her shirt and felt nothing but warm skin. “Promise?”
“Promise.”
She smiled.
Kevin Lucia is an Associate Fiction Editor for The Horror Channel and his podcast “Horror 101” is featured monthly on Tales to Terrify. His short fiction has appeared in several venues. He’s currently finishing his Creative Writing Masters Degree at Binghamton University, he teaches high school English and lives in Castle Creek, New York with his wife and children. He is the author of Hiram Grange & The Chosen One, Book Four of The Hiram Grange Chronicles and his first short story collection, Things Slip Through is forthcoming November 2013 from Crystal Lake Publishing. He’s currently working on his first novel. Visit him at: www.kevinlucia.com.
-Pillars of Light
by Michael A. Arnzen
I charge you in the presence of God,
who gives life to all things, and of Christ Jesus…
He who is the blessed and only Sovereign,
the King of kings and Lord of lords,
who alone possesses immortality
and dwells in unapproachable light,
whom no man has seen or can see.
–1 Timothy 6:13-16
Thunder rumbles so close, so deep, you can feel it reverberate and sing through the long rod that pierces your belly.
When it ceases, you hear the bloody foam of air bubbling out from just under your sternum, where that metal pole supports you. Your instincts are to press against the wound with your hands, but you merely flex your muscles and hold as still as possible. Your fists are bound behind your back and you have already learned that any sudden motion will fire lances of pain out of your backbone and around your ribcage, so you champ your teeth and let the blood flow while trying to focus on the fact that you are still, miraculously, alive.
You watch the roiling dark sky. Night filters into the fast-moving clouds the way oil seeps into cotton balls. You know you are close to the clouds, here in this ritually-arranged campground, high on some hilltop in the middle of nowhere, Colorado. The air is thin and clean and cold–it would be pure if not for the disgusting display of tissue and bone that you and your colleagues have become. You hold out hope for rescue, even though you don’t really believe it will ever come.
You hear muttering, but have tired of trying to understand what the bald man who brought you here–the madman who apparently did all of this to you–is saying to himself. You only know he is insane, nude and scarred everywhere, hunched over by the fire, chanting as the flame flicker paints his disfigurements with shiny pink color.
The rest of your crew–Judy and Ben–hang silent nearby, just as horrifically impaled as you are. Your bodies are arranged in a triangular formation around the campfire. You have not been able to make eye contact or to communicate with them. Both are motionless, like you. You assume both are dead; Judy D’Amata, the face of The Cyclone Cowgirl, definitely. She has slid down her spike enough so that she’s hanging backwards from it, and a split is visible from sternum to belly, and she leans there impossibly backwards from her own pelvis, like some broken toy. Benjamin–the soundman who always impressed you with his MacGyver-like ability to rig cable and electric cords in any location–is erect, still as a stone, blood glistening in an enormous puddle at his feet.
The mutterings of the madman by the fire are almost as soothing as a lullaby.
You have tired of the strain of peering around your nose to try to see all of this. The end of the rod has been pushed through the underside of your chin and now nuzzles against your upper palate, where the grit of metal and bone grinds in your head. Your skull is virtually locked by the weight of your body suspended on the hook of your upper jaw like this, craned back into a neck-breaking tilt. There is no avoiding the taste of the spike on your tongue–all copper and blood–and it’s hard to breathe through the steady but dissipating trickle. You try to imagine that these fatal wounds are somehow held in check by your weight and position on the spike. You try not to imagine the flavor of all the organs it lanced on its journey from somewhere in the taint of your groin all the way up to just below your sternum and out–ultimately lodging just inside your chin, as gravity holds you locked in place. The back of your neck feels ready to snap, but you are thankful for the strength of your skull bones, stopping your body from sliding further down the pike.
The torment is excruciating, but you dare not struggle. You have seen what sliding down the rod has done to Judy.
You close your eyes as the thunder claps again and the rain starts to dribble from the sky. The drops feel like BBs as they hit your eyelids, but the pelting distracts you from the rest of your predicament, and you long for more of the cool, cleansing rain to wash over your face.
The air shifts, and a cool mountain breeze washes over your body as you quietly imagine you are nothing more than a mast on a ship, the ocean mist billowing through the sails of your flesh. You sail….
An
d then a tug pulls at your jib and the pain is so enormous your eyes flare with light and when they recover you peer down your nose to see that the bald, naked madman is crouching down and pulling on something down by your waist. You cannot speak, but your animal grunt of agony does not register with him. He tugs again–more gently now–and you hear a familiar plastic click, followed by an electric whirr.
Could it really be your video cam, still hanging from its sling around your neck?
You peer around your nose and the madman’s bald head slowly crests the horizon of your vision. His entire scalp seems to bear burn marks, freaked down his temples in a web of crisscrossed mutilations. Even his eyebrows are gone, replaced only with scar tissue.
His eyes are shot with blood; the sclera is mottled ugly with red veins. And in the center, where you thought you’d see black pupils, are bright yellow-and-red disks, as boldly artificial as some cheap horror movie effect to make him look like a possessed demon or a lizard man.
You’d laugh if the contrast of plastic against vein wasn’t so surreal. He stares you down for a moment and then you recognize the contact lenses for what they are: red lightning bolts, jagging down the two circles of yellow.
He turns his head to one side, as though evaluating something on the side of your head when he finally speaks, uttering a grumble just above a whisper: “So you still live, do you? God’s will be done. We will bear witness to His power and His greatness…together.”
His badly painted eyes jitter, the lightning bolt emblems glimmering as he searches you sideways. It’s as though he’s trying to study you around the edges of the contact lenses. Then his breath is meaty and close to your nose. “Together we will see the way, the truth…and the light.”
Horror Library, Volume 5 Page 11