When Jared’s rig came trundling along, Betty had to return to her cruiser in order to try and move it over further, providing the tow truck enough clearance to situate itself in front of the mystery vehicle. Jared managed to make his way past the other two cars, although from the sound of it he took a few low-hanging branches with him. The bearded, bleary-eyed man slid out from behind his wheel and walked back to have a look at the derelict. He cast a glance Betty’s way, arching one bushy eyebrow. Jared wasn’t a day over thirty but he already looked like his old man, both in countenance and posture. He pulled the hook and chain down from the boom arm on the rear of his truck. Betty got out of her car to join him.
“Wanna see if you can jimmy it open and put ’er in neutral?” Jared asked without looking up. He knelt with a grunt and began slinging the tow chain around the derelict’s bumper. “Hope this bumper holds. Can’t reach that axle with all the goddamned thistles under here,” he muttered. “Pardon my French.”
But Betty only half-heard him as she headed back to her car to retrieve a slim jim, then started working on the driver’s door of the derelict. Couldn’t find the lock mechanism inside the door. She moved the slim jim back and forth and it seemed like there was nothing at all to catch onto. Was this thing even a car?
That seemed an odd thought, yet it stuck in the sheriff’s mind as she circled the vehicle.
“Can’t get any of these doors open,” she finally said with a sigh. Jared shrugged and turned on the winch attached to the boom. The derelict’s front end lifted out of the underbrush and its foremost tires settled on the truck bed’s rubber mats.
“We’ll see what happens,” Jared said, returning to his cab, and a second later he started to ease forward. Would the derelict’s rear wheels lock up and fight him? Betty waited for the screech of metal. Blessedly, none came. The derelict rolled after the truck without any complaint.
Jared braked and leaned out his window. “You want to come by tomorrow to process ’er? I’m dead on my feet right now.”
“That’s fine. Good night.” Betty watched as the two vehicles, moving in tandem like mating junebugs, crept down Creek Road and were eventually swallowed by the trees. Betty felt plenty bushed herself. Tomorrow she’d spend the morning poking through that car. Until then, dreamless sleep. At least that’s what she’d hoped for.
No, Betty awoke several times during the night, and each time her heart was pounding—each time, the misty fragments of some ungodly nightmare hung in her consciousness for a few nanoseconds before fading. She tried to grab onto those threads and remember what had so shaken her, but each time she found herself unable to remember a damn thing. Something about… junebugs? In space? Lord, no. That was more akin to the nightmares she’d had as a little girl. Young Betty had read too many issues of Sci-Fi Shriekers! and been prone to dreams about being an astronaut adrift in deep space: numb with soundless horror, no clear point of reference in the void, no sensation of forces acknowledging and acting upon her paralyzed body. Nothing, just the distant smattering of dim points representing dead stars. The doomed spacewoman may as well have not existed at all. That was the idea that had always haunted her upon awakening, the feeling that had caught in her chest and coiled up in there, promising her no sleep until dawn warmed her bones and made her real again.
With that rosy memory to keep her company, the sheriff gave up on sleep at four in the A.M. and sat in the kitchen with a pot of coffee. Around the time she was making the second pot, the sun bled through the forest that was her backyard and she went to shower. She’d grab breakfast on the way to the salvage yard. That second pot of coffee could wait until she got home—she was feeling jumpy enough without it. As Betty stood under the shower, she tried again to dredge up some remnant of her most recent nightmares. Nothing doing. She couldn’t help but think it had something to do with that car, though. Just another abandoned car, sure, at first glance; but nothing at all about it was typical. She had a feeling that researching the thing was going to take up most of her day.
Betty finished her McMuffin just as she pulled into Jared’s salvage yard. The derelict was parked in the gravel right in front of the office, itself a box on wheels. She tapped her horn and got out of the cruiser. It looked as if the driver’s door on the derelict was slightly ajar. She hoped Jared’s brother Abel hadn’t been rummaging through it for keepsakes. She wanted every bit of material evidence associated with this car laid out in front of her.
As she drew closer she saw that, indeed, Abel was seated behind the wheel of the vehicle. It didn’t look as if he’d noticed her presence. Staring straight ahead through the windshield, Jared’s younger brother was mouthing something and stroking the scruff on his chin. Betty pulled the long flashlight from her belt and prepared to rap on the glass. She froze in mid-swing as she saw all of him.
All of him. Rather, all that was left. Abel stared through her, continuing to make soundless shapes with his cracked lips. He stroked his beard and nodded as if agreeing with someone she couldn’t hear—or see—and beneath his ribs there was nearly nothing to speak of. The bottom of his ribcage was plainly visible, sticking out from beneath the tatters of his old corduroy jacket. Beneath that no stomach, no lap, no legs. A congealed, snotty mess hung from his open body cavity. They didn’t look like any organs Betty had ever seen, those quivering tubes of tissue which hung from Abel—Abel, whose back had to be fused to the car seat, otherwise how could he just be reclining there above the cushion? Dully, the sheriff noted that Abel was buckled in. Had he been trying to start the engine? Drive the thing into the back of the lot? As if in answer, the seatbelt tightened across Abel’s chest. That belt alone, though, wasn’t enough to hold him in place like that. No, he was struck fast to that seat. Betty was sure of it.
The mess of guts that unspooled from Abel’s insides and rested on the seat cushion pulsed, then collapsed. To Betty, still frozen in place, it looked like they were deflating. They were—he was—
It’s eating him.
“That just ain’t possible,” Betty breathed. There was no response from Abel. The entire surrounding area, in fact, was silent as the grave. Where was Jared? Those abominable hounds who patrolled the property? The clouds of gnats?
From the corner of her eye Betty saw the derelict’s trunk lift just a bit, then settle back into place. She was rooted to the spot where she stood. But she didn’t want to look in the trunk anyway. Not until she’d processed the horror in the front seat, a gibbering torso in the process of being absorbed into the upholstery.
There were a lot of thoughts racing through her mind. Some were about her radio, others about her gun. One particularly vivid impulse, which was looping through her brain with some urgency, involved Betty running screaming from the lot and never looking back.
Something else, too, less a thought than a feeling—that one they called déjà vu.
Something I dreamed. The nightmares.
She’d asked herself last night whether this thing was even a car. Now it looked to her like a Venus flytrap. Nothing seductive or alluring about it—fact of the matter was, the car was unremarkable from a distance—but something was at work underneath that hood and now she felt, rather than heard, the hum of it. Working on her. Trying to ply her from the fear that held her in place—protecting her from it, but already beginning to wane. It had worked Abel over real good. Had it gotten Jared first?
This time her question received an answer. A burst of static from the car’s stereo jolted her enough to awaken her limbs, and she was turning to run when the voice from the stereo made her stop cold once again.
“Betty. You can’t go.
“You found it, after all.
“You can’t just GO.”
Her hand found the butt of the revolver on her hip and she faced the car again. “J-Jared?”
“I’m not tired anymore,” said the radio. “We’re going on a trip. Not one you could take in any ordinary car. But you know this ain’t a car, don’t you?”
&n
bsp; It couldn’t have been so much as a minute since Betty had first come across Abel, and yet she felt like a petrified tree that had spent an eternity trembling before this thing. That was it, the terror from her nightmares—the feeling came flooding back to her, and it was just as crazy and just as undeniable as it had been in the realm of sleep. The terror was somehow knowing the agelessness of this living thing that had masqueraded as an early-nineties eggshell-hued sedan gathering rust on Creek Road. That something so old and intelligent had assumed this form… but what else should she have expected from a wolf in sheep’s clothing? Lights and whistles? It was a bland, innocuous imitation whose otherworldliness was only sensed through the scrutiny of someone who knew her cars.
And, perhaps, someone who wasn’t altogether unfamiliar with a certain sort of terror. This ancient thing was sister to the void from her childhood dreams. It was endless, and cold, and uncaring.
Jared must have sensed something in the derelict too. He must have broken in to get a better look—all along he would have thought the tug in his mind was only his own curiosity at work, not some infernal mechanism under that battered hood.
Sheriff Betty was feeling the car’s tug, and its invisible hooks probed deeper with every squawk of the radio. Jared’s voice was a flat monotone but she knew it was him nonetheless, not the thing parroting him.
“It’s not bad. It doesn’t hurt. Look at Abel. He ain’t feeling a thing. It doesn’t eat you, Betty, it just takes you in. And then we’ll all go for that big star-ride.
“Come on, Betty. Get in.”
“This can’t be right,” the sheriff moaned. “How—”
“It’s right as rain.” Static interrupted Jared for a moment, and he faded. Then he was back and clearer than before. “You see this ugly old clunker? And how she blends right in ’less you give ’er a good once-over? She blends because this old heap is all this world has to offer us. Under the shell, though, where I am—where we are—it’s all stars, Betty.”
The car pulled hard at her mind and she stumbled forward in spite of herself. She threw her left hand out and struck the hood. The sound of her palm against the eggshell was a sharp crack. The hood didn’t feel like metal at all. It was brittle and rough. It felt like the carapace of a crawdad. A shell.
There was a scraping sound beneath Betty’s hand and she jerked it away from the car. A radio antenna emerged from the place where her palm had rested. As she pulled away it craned forward in pursuit.
The horror of that sight was what gave Betty back full use of her limbs. Now she knew she could outrun the psychic tug of the thing beneath the shell. And that was all she needed to know in order for her to plant her feet and draw her revolver.
The car shivered.
Its paint job shimmered, and a ripple went through it like wind teasing linens on a clothesline. The ripple went from back to front and the headlights suddenly came on. The light was unlike any Betty had ever seen on God’s green Earth. Starlight, baby. That was Jared’s voice again but this time it wasn’t coming from the radio. He was in her head. The antenna wavered, danced like an Indian serpent.
Betty summoned the strength to speak loud and clear. “Wherever you’re going, friend, I can’t come. Don’t want to.” And get the HELL out of my mind.
“You’re just afraid.” The radio again. “It’s not really fear though, Betty. It’s wonder. It’s like what you’d feel if you ran smack into the good Lord walking down Main Street. Don’t lose out. GET IN.”
“Nothing doing.” Betty took aim at one of the glaring headlamps. “Let them go,” she said to that gleaming eye.
“Can’t undo what’s done,” said the radio.
“Not talking to you, Jared.”
The car shivered again and released a rumbling cough from under its hood. Was it about to rush her? Would it run her down or suck her in?
“It’s alive, Betty. Smart. It can make itself look like anything at all, and it came here and it chose us. How about that? All it wants is to take us home with it.”
“I’ll bet.”
“This isn’t a creature feature. It’s not gonna kill you.” Static crackled through Jared’s voice. He was sounding tired now. Betty focused again on her aim. She trained the barrel of her gun on the license plate. NV-GO, or maybe zero. Actually, she could see it a lot clearer from this distance. Damned farsightedness. She made herself a promise that she’d get the stupid bifocal prescription that afternoon.
Then she pulled the trigger, and the plate reading MI-GO warped as the bullet punched right through that center dash. The noise that came from the car in no way resembled the workings of a combustion engine. That was the sound of a pissed-off wasp and the wasp sounded like it was the size of a damn dog.
She fired again. The bullet struck the hood and cracks webbed out from the point of impact. Something pink and wet puffed out from the cracks. The car shook from side to side, then back and forth.
Betty took a sidestep and shot the front left wheel. More pink goo bloomed as the tire erupted.
“Stoooooooooooooop!” the radio blared. It wasn’t Jared anymore. It was a hundred buzzing wasps. Betty doubled over and clutched at her temples as the sound filled her skull. Staggering back, she glimpsed Abel’s torso slumping forward in the driver’s seat and then flopping from view.
The car reared back like a spider, front end rising and folding down towards her, its membranous paint job rippling and then flapping. Peeling away from the derelict body and beating the air, three great pairs of translucent wings stained pink with either pain or fear or rage. Betty realized she’d lost her gun but didn’t bother looking for it. Whatever was about to happen was about to happen.
The thing, which now only vaguely resembled a car, the thing whose pulsing undercarriage was ribbed flesh, lunged at her. Just before it would have taken her head off it tore upward and over her with a sound like a jet plane. Betty fell on her back and felt her head land hard on the revolver. Red light flooded her vision. When it cleared there was a dull ache, a ringing in her ears, and a clear sky overhead.
She rolled over and searched the horizon in every visible direction. It was gone, all right. She knew she’d only been out for a few seconds after smacking her head. It couldn’t have reached the cover of the clouds that quickly. It had taken some other route, something as alien as it was itself, and she imagined that now it was somewhere out in that void. That awful void.
Yet Jared—and she still believed it was his actual self speaking through the radio—hadn’t been shaken at all by the notion of surfing among the stars. She supposed it was all relative. Her idea of oblivion had, to him, seemed a boundless wonder. Maybe it was because she was content in her own skin. That made her flesh crawl a bit.
MI-GO. Her daddy would have seen that and pinned the whole thing on the Koreans. The thought made Betty laugh, and something about the unabashed cry of that laughter was liberating. Betty was able to lie prone in the gravel and regain her strength, to ponder, unafraid. Unafraid but hardly wonder-struck.
Regardless of that, she hoped that Jared would have a good trip, and that it would prove to be all he’d dreamed.
THE SWIMMING HOLE
Theric Jepson
I never wore shoes in July until 1987 when I was seven years old. No kid in our town did. I suppose if my family hadn’t moved to California, I would have stayed barefoot all summer every summer until the boys came calling. But instead I found myself in Sacramento with nothing but brimstone-hot asphalt to walk on. What I missed the most was not the air between my toes or the lack of constraint, but the calluses. Calluses so thick and hard that once I checked my foot to see what had been pressing into my heel the last block and found a bent-over thumbtack. Now that is true freedom. The freedom to walk anywhere you wish, just as God made you.
Funny how clear the memory of those calluses is to me even today. Most memories of my rural Oklahoma childhood have fled. I remember my granmammy—she kept glass chickens filled with either hard candy or B
rach Milk Maid Royals in every room. And even though I never cared for horehound, their location in the bathroom meant I didn’t have to ask permission. That memory that came flooding back when my husband brought home a bag of horehound candy last year from the farmer’s market. I still don’t like it, but it tasted like Oklahoma and that was worth something.
One thing I don’t remember is religion. Which is funny because my parents were about the most religious people I’ve ever met. I used to joke with them we must’ve moved to Sacramento for the name. First thing they did when we moved in was sign me up for a Baptist home school. This in addition to public school. On Sundays we were Methodist. Holidays we did Catholic. And anybody who knocked on the door teaching some version of Jesus was set right on the couch. Though the Mormons stopped coming after my mom tried to get one of them to take me to prom.
My parents passed away shortly after Ben and I were married. My father had a heart attack while driving on the 80. The car drifted into a truck carrying tomatoes. The spectacle became one of those stupid internet meme things. It still pops up. Ultimately, I had to quit the internet. My husband keeps an eye on my email (released to galleries only) and I stick with my old flip phone. But I never get online anymore. I barely touch the computer at all.
Ben and I have been blessed with two bright kids, ten and eight, a boy and a girl. Or, rather, our youngest manifests female. She’s hermaphroditic. The doctors urged us to give her a surgery as a baby, decide for her, but we couldn’t. She’ll just have to decide for herself someday. When she’s an adult. For now she’s happy being our little girl and we’re happy to have her.
When I received a certified letter from Boktussa, Oklahoma, I didn’t know what to expect, but certainly not that my granmammy had passed, leaving me her only heir. Her passing wasn’t the surprising part—I hadn’t seen her in 30 years and she had to be about a hundred—but that I was the only heir. My mother had a slew of brothers, six or seven, and I remember them having fertile wives. Nostalgia for my cousins has always been the prime temptation for getting back online in the age of facebooking and twittering and such. To learn that they were all… But how was it possible? My cousins would have kids by now—some of them I assumed would be grandparents! Clearly that detail was wrong, but for some reason Granmammy left me her property. Maybe the rest of the family had also moved away and I was the easiest for the small-town lawyer to find? Maybe Granmammy had had a falling out with her progeny? Or maybe she was trying to heal whatever mysterious rift had sent my parents west in the first place.
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