Lost Highways: Dark Fictions From the Road

by Rio Youers

  The girl’s photo flashed up again: a high-school portrait, taken against a light blue background. She wore a gray sweatshirt two sizes too large, with tape over the holes in the sleeves. Jill remembered doing that as a youngster, when her mother had no money for new shirts or skirts; the other kids always laughed at her, especially when she tried using a marker to color the tape to match the clothes.

  The newscaster said, “Sarah Zupan, twenty-four years old.”

  Through cold lips, Jill asked the waitress if she could box up the breakfast. She made it to the parking lot before her stomach hit the eject button, so hard she doubled over and dumped her Styrofoam carton of pancakes right in her own mess. The carton opened on the way down, soaking eight bucks’ worth of perfectly good food in bile.

  Leaning against her car, wiping her mouth, Jill cast a furtive glance at the diner. The waitress wasn’t watching, and that was good: she didn’t need a witness to this misery.

  Jill unlocked her car and climbed in, thinking: Just this once, thank God I’m alone.

  The shadow in the front passenger seat said: “I’m sorry.”

  Jill screamed through a raw throat.

  Sarah raised her hands, palms out. “It’s okay,” she said. “You’re kind. You were the first person to stop.”

  There was no Jill the Filmgoer this time, no sense that she was a prisoner in her own body. Her fingers clawed for the door-handle, and when the door slammed open she fell onto the pavement, scrambling away from the car as fast as she could.

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” Sarah called after her. “Actually, I need your help.”

  Jill stopped and spun around. “Sarah Zupan?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re . . . ”

  Sarah smiled. “Dead?”

  “I mean, you don’t look dead.”

  Sarah leaned forward and drummed a short beat on the dashboard. “I’m real, okay? Maybe not alive, but real.”

  Jill stood on quaking knees. Nausea roiled her belly again, and she bent over. Maybe I’ve had a psychotic break, she thought. I’ve finally snapped. Gone off the deep end. Totally bonkers.

  “It’s okay,” Sarah said. “Deep breaths. So, you saw the news?”

  Swallowing down bile, Jill straightened up and nodded.

  “That’s good. So I don’t have to explain a whole lot.” Sarah patted the driver’s seat. “I know who killed me. He’s still driving the highway once, twice a week. I can’t do anything about it, but maybe you can.”

  Jill took a step toward the car, wiping her mouth. “Sure, anything. Give me his name. I’ll call the police.”

  Sarah patted the seat harder. “If only it was that simple, Jill. You call the police, then what? ‘Hey, Mister Detective, that dead girl told me who killed her.’” She laughed softly. Autumn leaves rustling the pavement. “I bet they just hang up on you. How many crank calls you think they get a week?”

  “A lot?”

  “A lot is right. And the guy who did me in, I bet he was careful. He called himself ‘Tom,’ but I doubt that was his real name.”

  “But you know what he looks like.”

  “That’s right. And that’s where you come in. We’re going to find him.”

  Jill braced herself against the door. “And then what? Get evidence? I’m not a cop.”

  Sarah’s face was a black hole, her eyes twin pinpricks of white light. “I don’t know. We’ll figure that out when we find him. Not a great plan, but it’s the best I got, okay? Besides, what else you have going on?”

  Jill rubbed her ring finger, with its lighter band of skin. “I have a lot going on.”

  “Like what?”

  She shrugged. “My dog.”

  Sarah slid across the seats, slipping from the car smooth as smoke, so fast that Jill retreated a startled step. “This guy did me with a knife,” Sarah said, poking at her neck. “He takes I-84 every Thursday night. Stops at that big truck stop a couple miles from here, you know the one, even got the showers and stuff for truckers?”

  “I know it,” Jill said. “Their gas station sells wine in boxes. Pretty good wine, actually.” You should go home, she thought, and curl up with the dog until this whole rotten night fades from memory.

  But you can’t, said Jill the Filmgoer, sitting in her theater. Because whatever this is, it’s bigger than you. This is your role, like it or not.

  “Okay, I’ll help you find him.” The words sounded weird and stupid, and yet she already felt a little stronger, more sure of herself. “But no guarantees beyond that. I’m not . . . Wonder Woman or anything.”

  “Oh, that’s a start.” Sarah returned to the car, curling on the passenger seat like a street cat. “A real start.”

  ***

  The detective, James Peabody, was a big man with sloping shoulders and scruff on his chin thick enough to likely violate some police department regulation. Later, somebody told Jill that he had moved to Idaho after a bad experience with some missing kids in Cleveland. He had the hard, bright eyes of a crusader—the sort of man who will beat you with a phone book because he believes you’re guilty.

  In the windowless “interview room” that stank of piss, Peabody took a seat across from her and opened a manila folder on the table. He flicked the photos from the folder like playing cards, a full deck of evidence photos: a soiled blanket, a gaping neck wound with a white ruler beside it, a bit of silver jewelry spotted with blood.

  “How long were you married?” Peabody asked, consulting a piece of paper.

  “Five years,” Jill said, trying to ignore her stomach rumbling.

  “Why’d you get divorced?”

  “He beat me.”

  “Sorry to hear that. You have my sympathies.”

  Somehow Jill doubted that; she thought the man was trying to build a rapport with her, like they did on the cop shows. “Why does that matter?”

  “Just want to know your mental state,” Peabody said. “People go through a major life event, like a divorce, it creates triggers. It isn’t their fault. We’re just wired in some pretty weird ways.”

  “I’m not strange,” Jill said. “I know what I saw.”

  “The dead girl, as you said.” Peabody pursed his lips.

  “That’s right. I can’t explain it. All I can do is tell the truth.”

  “She made you do this?” Peabody tapped one of the photos between them, but Jill refused to look at the gore, the split bone, what was left of the eye. Instead she focused on her clenched fists, the nails clotted with dried blood.

  ***

  For once, Jill drove the speed limit. The truck stop was busy at this strange hour, the dinosaur rumble of trucks echoing off concrete. She parked in a space close to the brightly lit restaurant that served as the stop’s central hub. “What now?” Jill asked.

  “You find the guy,” Sarah said, leaning back in her seat. “I’ll wait here. Let me know when you see him.”

  “You’re not coming with me?”

  “I try to go inside, I’ll disappear. That’s how this ghost thing works, okay?”

  “I don’t even know what this guy’s supposed to look like.”

  “We saw him before. Big truck, red cap, scar.”

  Jill white-knuckled the wheel. “Really?”

  “That’s why I wanted to honk. Just to taunt him a little.”

  “But he could have noticed.”

  Sarah shrugged. “What’s he going to do? I’m already dead. He gutted me like a chicken.”

  “Hey, I’m still alive.” Jill leaned close. “And yes, my life is in the toilet right now, I’m broke, my dog’s had these weird orange poos lately, this car has too many miles on it, but it’s my life, okay? It’s the only one I’ve got.”

  “Great speech.” Sarah shrank in her seat, and for a horrible moment Jill could imagine her cowering at home, hands raised to block whatever lamp or pan some horrible relative threw at her. “Can you please go inside and see if he’s there?”

  “Remember what
I asked before? What do we do when I find him?”

  “I still don’t know. Kill him?”

  Jill swallowed hard. “I’m not going to do that. Could you do that?”

  Sarah looked away. “I don’t know.”

  Jill opened her door, the car’s warm air leaking away like blood from a wound. “At least I can go in and see,” she said, and stepped into the night, leaving the ghost alone.

  Yes—but if you see him coming, you run, Jill the Filmgoer offered. Trotting across the parking lot, Jill found herself feeling good for the first time in ages. Her stomach had settled, and the last of her alcohol buzz fended off the first stirrings of the inevitable hangover. So what if this whole situation was insane? It was an adventure, a thrill cleaner than anything she could find in a bottle.

  She spied the white pickup at the gas pumps adjoining the restaurant, and the man in the red cap paying for fuel with a credit card. He was surprisingly small, dressed in a dirty white t-shirt and a pair of faded jeans. Strong-looking, his muscles like cord wrapped around bone.

  Something was wrong with his pump’s credit-card reader. The man—Jill dubbed him the Killer—cursed loudly enough to hear across fifty feet of parking lot and smacked the device with his palm before heading inside the gas station that adjoined the restaurant.

  Take a peek inside his truck, Jill the Filmgoer advised. It’s the safest way to confirm. No muss, no fuss.

  Jill pulled out her phone, a flip model that had come free with her cellular plan. The camera was ancient but (she hoped) useable in low light.

  I had a gold necklace with a little dolphin, said Sarah, sitting next to Jill the Filmgoer. How had the ghost gotten in her head? Probably another supernatural power, like disappearing from cars moving at a high rate of speed. Serial killers take trophies. And when they do, sometimes they keep them close.

  Jill crept forward: forty feet, thirty, ten. A hatchback at the adjoining pumps blocked anyone inside the station from a full view of the truck. The hatchback’s driver sat behind the wheel, headphones on, head down as she stared into the glowing light of a phone.

  Reaching the passenger door of the pickup, Jill paused to wipe her hands on her jeans. Her heart thundered in her throat. She took a deep breath, gripped the handle, and pulled.

  The Killer had left it unlocked. Jill glanced at the front windows of the station. Behind the counter, the clerk struggled to keep his eyes open as he flipped through a magazine. If the Killer was using the bathroom, or shopping for snacks, that would buy her two or three minutes.

  The inside of the pickup was smeared with dirt. A pair of fuzzy dice dangled from the rearview mirror, and a jumbo-size fast-food cup jutted from the central drink holder like a rocket on its launchpad. There was a light blue blanket in the passenger seat, which she lifted by the edge. A spray of black stains on the underside, tacky to the touch.

  Could be old ketchup, Jill the Filmgoer suggested. Could be anything.

  Yeah, right.

  She snapped a few photos of the stains, with no flash, before setting the blanket back down. Peeked through the windshield at the station: all clear. Do the glove-box next.

  The glove-box, unlocked, unhinged its jaw to reveal a rat’s nest of papers: registration, old Chinese restaurant menus, a few crumpled parking tickets, receipts. She poked at the mess with her finger, and something metal tinkled. Shoving the papers aside revealed a clear plastic bag stuffed with jewelry: a gold necklace with a small dolphin, a few bracelets of chunky stones, a pair of pearl earrings.

  It’s really him! Jill the Filmgoer shrieked.

  Told you, Sarah said.

  Jill snapped a few photos from different angles, hoping the faint light was good enough, before pushing the bag aside to see if anything more lay beneath. Her fingers touched bumpy plastic, cold metal: a knife, curved like a raptor’s talon, sharp enough to zip your throat wide open.

  I barely felt it when it cut me, Sarah said. Even when he went deep.

  Jill’s reflection distorted in the steel as she balanced it on her finger. Too late, she realized she was leaving fingerprints on the handle. Shit!

  Before she could return the knife to its home, a heavy hand slammed on her shoulder.

  ***

  When Detective Peabody slipped the next photograph from his file, Jill’s heart spasmed for a few beats.

  The man in the photo was unmistakably the Killer: same red baseball cap, same scar carving up a rounded, surprisingly pleasant face. He had a big smile for the camera, and an arm draped across the thin shoulders of the woman beside him on a picnic bench.

  Jill took deep breaths until her heart found its normal rhythm, then tapped on the woman in the photo. “That’s Sarah,” she said. “This guy, he killed her.”

  Peabody’s left eyebrow twitched. “Who?”

  “Sarah,” Jill said, tapping harder. “She was murdered. It’s been all over the news. I didn’t know that she knew the guy.”

  Peabody lost his poker face, his brow scrunching in confusion. “Who? What murder?”

  ***

  Jill Cafferty, who cried whenever she saw dead birds in the road, who hid in the basement whenever her husband began to make that hissing sound that indicated he was in one of his violent moods, would have never recognized the creature of pure instinct who spun and buried the knife in the man’s soft throat. The curved blade punched through the thin skin over the jugular, and blood jetted in a hot spray that coated her face, hands, arms. It splashed in her eyes, stinging, blinding, and she pulled out the knife and slammed it home again, through softness, and again, glancing off bone, and again, into something tough that snagged the steel.

  She blinked, and her vision returned, blurry but clear enough to see the Killer flailing across the concrete between the pumps, his neck and face jetting red like a clogged fountain. Gushing, he fell to his knees, and then onto his face.

  Jill stumbled out of the truck, almost slipping on the blood. People were running from the gas station, drawn by the Killer’s messy demise. The hatchback’s driver had her phone raised, filming Jill as she bent over and vomited for the second time that night.

  Sarah was nowhere in sight.

  ***

  Holding the photo of the Killer and Sarah, Peabody asked: “Who is this couple?” His voice was loud, ringing off the walls, burrowing into Jill’s head. “Who do you think this woman is?”

  “Sarah,” Jill said, and her vision wavered, like it did when the Killer’s blood splashed her face.

  “There is no Sarah,” Peabody said. “This is a photo of you and your ex-husband.”

  “No.” Jill shook her head.

  “I understand if you killed him,” Peabody said. “Guy who beat on you like he did? I read the reports. If I were in your shoes, I’d have taken a knife to him, too.”

  She shook her head so hard, something in her neck popped. “No.”

  After a long pause, Peabody began slipping photos back into his folder. “If that’s how you’re going to play it,” he said, voice thick with disappointment, “I guess we’re going to need to get the shrink in here.”

  “I know what I saw,” Jill said, quieter than she intended. That couldn’t have been her ex-husband. Maybe a man who looked a lot like him, and who drove the same kind of truck, but not him.

  “We’ll see,” Peabody said, and left the room. His body had blocked the one-way mirror along the far wall, and now she could see Sarah staring at her in the glass, sitting in her seat, her shirt crusted with dried blood, smiling despite the tears streaming down her face.

  REQUITAL

  RICHARD THOMAS

  Open your eyes, Graysen.

  The shack is filling with a heat that rises up from the desert, a weight on my chest slowly spreading to my limbs, as a flicker of this journey unfurls in black and white photos, one horrible image after another. My breath is shallow, hard to summon up from the depths, and then I’m sitting upright on the cot, the thin blankets green and itchy, coughing up blood into my
open hands. Sand sifts in through the open frame, the actual wooden door painted red, splintered into sections, and scattered over the front yard. Emaciated, and nude, I squint, looking out the opening into the pale sunlight, unwilling to turn toward the corners of the empty hut, the shadows filled with memories.

  And the girl.

  Always the girl.

  She smiles in the darkness, blonde hair pulled back into pigtails, red ribbons holding the braids tight. Today it’s a light blue dress, ringed with daisies at the waist and collar, her black patent leather shoes buckled, shimmering somehow, the dainty little socks as white as bone. Her hands are behind her back, a grin holding her face intact, and I know what she’s hiding. I don’t want to see it again, but soon enough she’ll show me. Yesterday it was a mad dash into the desert where I collapsed in the blazing sun, dust filling my mouth, my skin turned to parchment.

  Today?

  The car.

  I close my eyes, and I’m flying down the highway, the wind in my hair, the windows open, the beat-up Nova purring across the desolate landscape, the girl and house no longer in the rear-view mirror. Jeans and a white t-shirt, scuffed boots, my hands grip the wheel as I push the accelerator down, lunging forward. The blacktop spirals forward like a slick of oil, and I chase it—anything to be out of that room, away from her. I click the radio on. Static, up and down the dial, as flashes of faded billboards and dying cactus fill my periphery vision.

  I look in the side mirror, and there’s nothing back there, a smile as blood fills the cracks between my teeth, my gut clenching suddenly in knots. Under my fingernails, there is so much dirt and grime; I can never seem to get it out. Eyes to the horizon, I cough again, a mist of red spraying the windshield, wiping my mouth as I sneer.

  Dammit.

  I never smoked a cigarette in my life.

  Eyes to the side mirror, the rear-view mirror, and the world framed in the windshield shimmers like I’m underwater.

  It feels good to be moving.

  For a moment, I can almost forget why I’m here.

  This particular black and white photo comes in several different versions—the grandmother in Alsip growing old and feeble, finally made obsolete; the neighbor hurt on the job, unable to work, abandoned by insurance and company alike; the sister and her addiction, garnering no sympathy, an inability to empathize. But closing my eyes won’t help.