A sudden wall of wind again buffeted his automobile, carrying in its wake another concerted torrent of rainfall.
In Walter’s twenty-five years living in that unremarkable southern-Vermont town of Sutherland, he could only recall a handful of rainstorms this severe. It was exciting. As he continued down the hill, he was eager to see how high the river would be running when he crossed the bridge at the bottom. He willed the rain to come down even harder, maybe wash out some of the roads he took to work, and a power line or two.
“Are you for-fucking-real, man?” exclaimed Walter as his attention was again stolen by the light bouncing off of his rearview mirror. The driver behind him was now only three car lengths back, and the gap was still shrinking.
His eyes jumped back and forth from the road ahead to the reflection of the car behind—its narrow, round headlights fit the profile of a Jeep, he observed uncaringly.
He said aloud when the headlights were less than a single car length behind, “Pass me if you want, you stupid fuck. It’s your funeral.”
Walter maintained his speed and held stubbornly to the center of the lane.
He couldn’t believe it when he saw it, and his eyes became glued to the mirror as it happened: The car behind him didn’t slow, and, stunningly, didn’t attempt to enter the oncoming lane to pass. Walter was forced to believe it, however, when he heard the smashing of metal and glass, and felt his body yanked back into his seat.
Everything that followed happened just as fast as every crash victim says it does: really fast.
The rear of his car was knocked out of line with the front, and in an instant Walter was angled in a direction that would lead him off the right side of the road . . . and there was the bridge and the river, straight ahead.
In a state of shock, Walter cut the wheel to the left, but the combination of the wet leaves and the momentum of the heavy Jeep barreling into his rear negated all traction.
His head flung around like a ragdoll’s and his seatbelt bit into his chest as his van plowed into a muddy stream of runoff water paralleling the road. A blinding wave of water and wet earth was thrown up onto his windshield. Somehow this wasn’t enough to stop the joined automobiles, or even slow them significantly. Walter had enough sense to throw a foot onto his brake pedal as the two cars together rampaged all the way off the road, yet this was as ineffective as his previous maneuver, and with his whole front-half layered with mud, he saw nothing more than shapeless black forms flying past as his van bounded wildly into the dark.
A half-formed image of the two cars plunging into the cold, raging river somewhere ahead entered Walter’s mind just before his head was ripped forward with a tremendous noise, dislodging all thought from his brain. At the same instant, an explosion of intense pressure slammed into his body, and then was gone in the next instant, replaced by a wave of delocalized burning all through his upper-torso and midsection.
His reeling head lolled from side to side before he could coordinate the muscles to bring it upright. His neck felt like an old, overused rubber band. His ears rang from the sound of the impact. The first thing Walter became aware of, beyond the pain, was that he was no longer moving. Whatever his van hit had stopped it completely.
Blinking through the stillness and the darkness, his ears still ringing shrilly, Walter saw that the windshield had partly disconnected from his van, and through an opening he could see the frontend bent around a large pine tree. The hood was gone and the engine was shooting up steam where water was falling freely onto its hot metal casings.
Walter groaned as he raised a hand to touch his neck. All the joints connecting his arm to the rest of him protested. He was happy to at least confirm that his head hadn’t been ripped half off.
The ringing in his ears was not fading. If anything, it was getting louder as his senses began to clear. Dazed as he was, pained as he was, this still lifted a red flag.
That’s when it dawned on Walter that the loud noise that was filling his head was not originating from inside his head. The constant, high pitch whining was coming from behind him. Deep unease swelled around his heart as he realized what the sound was.
Walter unlatched his buckle and gingerly turned his body and head to look behind him.
One of the Jeep’s round headlights was still lit and now shone brightly through the hole where his rear window had once been, wedged up against the backside of his van, a backside that now resembled one half of a partially compressed accordion. The Jeep’s driver, nevertheless, seemed bent on turning his green van into a fully compressed accordion: The piercing whining sound was a mixture of the Jeep’s engine, revved completely, and the Jeep’s wheels, spinning aggressively—but uselessly—in the mud. The direction and intention of the wheels was obvious, for in the dull refraction of the one headlight Walter could see a spray of muddy water shooting out behind the Jeep, into the dark.
He whispered the words that described his immediate reaction, “Oh my god. Does this guy wanna fucking kill me or something?” Fear spilled over his consciousness, joining the pain in a terrible party of ill-sensations. Had he bought from the wrong dealer recently? Had he, in one of his belligerent stupors, pissed off the wrong cokehead or meth-addict?
For the first time in a long time, Walter felt scared for his life.
From the direction of the Jeep’s engine there came a tremendous bang, a clattering of metal, and then silence, but for the plunking of rain dripping off of the trees overhead. The engine had blown.
Walter tensed. Now was some big hick going to step out of the Jeep and beat him to death with a tire iron? Walter was six feet tall and athletic—or, he’d been athletic way back in high school, a solid player on their middling hockey team—but in his reeling state he felt as defenseless as a young boy.
A change of wind brought the smell of burnt rubber and burnt machinery to Walter’s nose. He didn’t notice. He remained fixated on his ears and his eyes, poised to receive any sign of movement from the Jeep behind.
None came.
A crazy, eventless minute passed.
The deafening inaction did not align with Walter’s assumption that he was being hunted by a homicidal maniac. He was forced to conceive a less disturbing alternative. Maybe he had been hit by some poor idiot who, simply, had been driving too fast downhill and had lost control of his vehicle? Maybe, in the collision, the idiot driver had been knocked unconscious with, by stupid chance, a foot pinned to the gas?
The rare mortal fear within Walter abated. There were explanations that weren’t as grim as his first. He opened his door and turned his body and lowered a foot to the wet, pine-needle laden earth. The effort it took to bring his body upright was immense, fighting through the dissidence of his aching joints.
From the outside, the scene of the wreck was ugly. Walter had made out well to be standing, he knew. He staggered towards the Jeep, which, externally, was in better shape than his van, aside from the smoke sifting up from around its bent hood.
Once he was beyond the direct glare of the one headlight, Walter began to distinguish the outline of someone in the driver’s seat, hunched over the steering wheel. The person was not moving. Walter crept closer, to within reach of the Jeep. He extended a hand and tapped on the glass of the driver-side window. It was hard to be sure, looking through rain-splattered glass into a perfectly dark car, but the person did not appear to move.
Walter stood there for a moment, apprehensive. Obviously the man—or woman—was not out to kill him after all, right?
The ongoing rain worked its way down through the tall pine trees above, channeling into larger droplets that bombarded the roof of the Jeep and the head and shoulders of Walter.
“What the hell am I doing?” Walter finally said to the night, and he stepped closer to the Jeep and pulled open the door.
A man was folded over the steering wheel, his limp arms dangling past his knees, apelike. He had not been wearing a seatbelt. There wasn’t enough light to say anything more of the darkened
shapes . . . or to see the folded scrap of paper flutter from the opened door and get whisked away with a gust of wind . . .
Walter reached into his pocket and pulled out his cell phone, a bulky old thing that had an LED light fixed to the back of it. He pointed it into the Jeep and tapped the button.
“Dude, are you . . .” before Walter could finish the question, his mind was overcome by the first sign that something was horribly wrong. At the man’s feet there was a large, muddy slab of rock pinning the gas pedal to the floor.
His expression twisting, Walter brought the light up to the man’s head. His face was turned away from him, the side of it was propped at an uncomfortable angle an inch above the horn, but something bright red was accumulating and dripping off of the base of the steering wheel . . .
Forgetting everything he had learned in the Boy Scouts regarding first-aid when handling potential spinal injuries, Walter took the mystery man by the shoulder and pivoted him off the wheel and back into his seat.
Again he shined the light at the man’s head. A noise Walter had never produced in his life now escaped his limp, open mouth: a short, breathless exhale of terror. Nerves along his back flared as though cold steel had just grabbed at his spine.
He had been braced for some amount of gore, but nothing like this:
The man’s cheeks had been sliced all the way through into neat ribbons of flesh, like the gills on a fish. His nose had been carved down to the bone. His left eye had been gouged; either cut out entirely, or mashed into a bloody, unrecognizable paste. The last thing Walter saw was the large wooden handle of a hunting knife sticking out of the man’s chest—surely a mortal wound—and then he regained enough sense to fling himself around and lunge into the dark forest, in the general direction of the road, desperate to escape this sudden nightmare.
Walter’s mind was electric. He had taken a couple blind strides before he even thought to hold the LED light out in front of him to see where he was going.
His legs felt like jelly, and there was this strange sense that he was running on a slow treadmill, and that if he didn’t move fast enough, he would get dragged back to it . . .
Crashing out of the woods, Walter scarcely had room to line up the jump over the stream of water that bordered the road. The horror brought the adrenaline, making his heart go wild, overwriting the pain of the crash.
He flipped open his phone, momentarily losing his light source. No service—of course. He began jogging down the wet road, hobbling numbly, his light bouncing in front of him through the driving rain.
Who could do that to someone? A vague, horrific scenario took shape all by itself in Walter’s head, that of some psychotic killer mutilating his victim, throwing him into a Jeep, and then jamming the accelerator with a rock, sending him flying into the night to his doom. The scenario was spotty and would buckle under closer scrutiny, sure, but at that moment Walter was not in any state of mind to scrutinize.
The river was loud. It was high and it was wide, too, and Walter thought he could actually see the frothy waterline rising up the bank. He hesitated for an instant, envisioning the bridge being ripped up and toppled over by the water raging underneath. But then he remembered that there was, in all likelihood, a psycho-killer in the area, and Walter’s head swung backwards automatically, towards the rainy and gloomy night behind him. He saw only darkness except for the faint glimmer of the Jeep’s one headlight through the distant trees.
He hastened onto the bridge.
It was an old cement bridge, built sometime in the sixties. It arched up at the middle. Walter unthinkingly slowed when he reached its shallow apex. He couldn’t help himself from shining his light over the edge as he moved. He and his friends used to jump into the river from up here. It had always seemed like a pretty long fall, even the last time they’d done it as full-grown men, five or so years back. Now, the water seemed so high and so close that he could almost lean over and skim the rippling brown water with a fingertip.
The timing was impeccable. A second sooner or later and Walter would never have seen it: A large, familiarly-shaped object, floating near the surface of the water, shot out from under the bridge and raced away with the raging current.
At first sight his mind insisted that it had to be a large log, but then Walter saw the legs, and then the arms. He threw himself against the edge of the bridge and extended his light out over the water. This second look showed the floating object to have a head and a face. Two half-open eyes glinted in reflection of the flashlight up on the bridge, and then the body was carried off into the night.
Walter’s initial reaction had him thinking that the nearby psycho-killer was in fact a serial killer on a killing spree. Before succumbing to raw panic—somehow—he managed enough levelheadedness to raise a quick alternative: Even that wild night, a spade can remain a spade, and maybe some innocent victim had simply gotten too curious and too close to the fast rising river, and the wet, slippery rocks.
At any rate, Walter was not sure this person had been dead, floating on his back as he’d been. He picked up his pace, wiping rain off the screen of his phone, reconfirming his lack of service.
He started up the hill on the other side of the valley.
Walter felt terrible in every sense of the word. He was shocked, disturbed, and mystified by what he had seen and experienced in the past fifteen minutes, and the pain from the crash was now reasserting its presence throughout his body.
On the other hand, and more so than he had in many years, he felt alive.
Chapter 3 – Fire on the Hill
“Still not getting through?”
Nigel, pacing near the window with a phone in one hand, looked around for the voice, “Oh. No, nothing yet, Maddie.”
Nigel turned away, back towards the window. Why was she here? But, really, why were any of them here besides Henry and himself? Over the past year, none of them had made any effort to remain close with Walter.
But, of course Nigel knew why they all were here. He looked over his shoulder, through the small crowd of people pretending to be calm and comfortable when they were anything but, to his girlfriend, Jamie Astley. She was seated stoically on an armchair across the living room. She was a very strong-minded, persuasive woman, he acknowledged with a faint smile.
Nigel Kensington was a software programmer and system manager for a regional landscaping company, and he looked the part: lanky body, neat haircut, and large, rectangular reading glasses. That night, he also looked the part of one waiting for a call from the hospital regarding a family member undergoing a dangerous procedure. He had to keep alternating which hand held the phone because his palms were sweating so much.
Excluding Jamie, Nigel could sense that his growing hope was shared by the hushed, fidgety collection of people loitering about his living room: that Walter would simply not show up.
Predictably, that was exactly when Nigel heard his front door pull open from the adjacent hallway. Nigel frowned as he set down the phone and started for the hallway—typically, no one but strangers and delivery truck drivers used the front door.
“Nigel?” a breathless voice called.
“Walter?”
Nigel rounded through the doorway and into the hallway.
In spite of—or maybe because of—the tension that had been twisting his gut all night, Nigel laughed when he looked at Walter, half-drowned in rain as he was.
“Walter, you need to get that shit-bucket repaired. You can’t just have your car break down whenever there’s some rain or—”
“Wasn’t that,” Walter breathed between labored inhales. “I was hit by some murder victim. Near the bridge.”
“You were what by what?” Nigel frowned comically. “That didn’t make any sense.”
“No, it didn’t. I think the guy was . . . fatally mutilated and then thrown into an out-of-control Jeep to die . . . I need to use your phone.”
“. . . What?”
“I need to call the police.”
Nigel threw up what he intended to be a calming hand, “Just . . . say that one more time. In a way that makes sense. Please.”
“I can’t. I also saw someone floating down the river. Dead . . . or dying.”
Nigel’s face and hand dropped. He began to shake his head. Suddenly it made sense, and he was not happy. “You think it’s funny to show up to your intervention like this?”
“I’m not fucking tripping.” Walter started down the hallway, each footstep leaving behind a puddle on the glossy hardwood floor. “I’m deadly serious.” He was heading towards the kitchen and the nearest known telephone. He didn’t notice the utterly silent crowd of slack-jawed people standing in the clean, elegantly-furnished living room as he passed.
“You really were in an accident?” Nigel, momentarily stunned, called after him.
“Yeah.”
“Are you okay?”
“No.”
In the bright, high-ceilinged kitchen, Walter grabbed the phone and pressed 9-1-1.
Nigel stood by in silent bewilderment as Walter talked to the emergency operator. He explained the gruesome and unbelievable situation just as poorly as he had for Nigel.
Walter hung up.
“They’re on their way.”
“What the hell is going on, Walter?” Henry Potter had been the only one among the bewildered crowd in the living room brave enough to move while Walter had been on the phone.
Walter sighed deeply, “I really don’t know. All I know is I was rammed off the road by some dead guy who had half of his face cut off.”
“. . . What . . . why are you so sure he didn’t get his face busted open in the accident?”
Nigel nodded his endorsement of this levelheaded question. At that moment he was struggling to generate levelheaded thinking of his own.
“If you had seen it you’d understand.” The color left Walter’s face. “Just be glad you didn’t see it.”
“. . . Well, the police will sort all that out, I guess,” said Nigel, plainly unconvinced.
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