“They’re not going to stop,” Kris shouted to be heard over the drumming and screaming. “You have to drive through them.”
JD whipped the steering wheel to the left, then the right. The pounding got louder. JD eased up on the brake and the car jerked forward, and Kris felt relief run through her body. Then JD’s window exploded.
Pebbles of safety glass showered his hair and face and bounced off Kris’s neck, unleashing the roar of the furious crowd. Hands slapped into JD’s face, grabbing his hair, his shirt, his arms. Kris screamed, and JD thrashed and bellowed, but that exposed his tongue and fingers forced their way inside his mouth, hooked his left cheek, grabbed his tongue by the root. JD clung to the wheel as hundreds of hands pulled him out through the window by his lips. Hands pried his fingers off the steering wheel, breaking them with hollow pops, and JD screamed as his left cheek stretched like bubblegum, and then fissures appeared, filled with red, widened, and his cheek came loose from his face and white gobbets of fat and red blood flowed down his hairy chin and the front of his shirt in a bib.
Kris stretched her left leg over the center console, past JD’s thrashing legs. She found the accelerator, stepped on it, and the car jerked forward five feet before it caught on something and the engine revved, threatening to stall. The hands still had JD, and they dragged him backward through the window by his mouth and hair, leaving only his enormous belly and legs in the car. Kris grabbed onto his belt and jammed her foot down on the accelerator.
The air behind Kris’s head exploded and pebbles of safety glass blew all over the back of her neck and tumbled inside her tracksuit as hands grabbed her by the hair and hauled her backward. She clung to JD’s belt with one hand, held onto the steering wheel with the other, and hands tore at her ears, grabbed her neck, and she thought her elbows were going to shatter, she thought her fingers were going to pop.
Kris threw all her weight onto her left toes as her body slid backward out of the car, and the car lurched forward, hung for a second, then screamed forward again, the front bumper making hollow thunks as it threw people aside. The hands in her hair pulled her head back until she heard the vertebrae at the base of her skull pop, and then there was a searing pain in her scalp and the sound of her hair ripping out by the roots echoed inside her skull, and it was so painful she went blind for a full three seconds. JD slipped from her hand, then she gave a tremendous yank and he was back inside the car most of the way, and Kris was covered up to her shoulder in his hot blood and they were rolling forward.
“Guk!” JD choked, and Kris looked.
The white bone of his throat was totally exposed, and she watched a knob of cartilage work itself up, then down, as he tried to speak. His beard had only a few hairs left now and his left cheek was completely gone, showing a sideways grin. His dislocated jaw jutted out to form a grotesque, one-sided underbite. His left eye was a hole leaking white jelly. His scalp hung in a flap against the side of his face, exposing half a dome of raw bone.
Kris pressed her foot down on the accelerator harder, terrified to stop, people bouncing off the front bumper, spinning to the side. She checked fast over her shoulder as they cleared the last of the crowd and she saw them still running after her car, making calls, sending texts, filming her license plate as she raced toward the highway.
ROB ANTHONY: Not many people know how committed Terry is to helping the people who’ve helped him, and he views his Saturday night performance at Hellstock 2019 as a tribute to everyone who helped Koffin on its journey. To that end, he’s invited Tuck Merryweather, the bass player from Dürt Würk, his very first band, and Bill Thompson, Dürt Würk’s original drummer, to join him onstage.
ANN BOX: Unfortunately, there’s a sad story there.
ROB ANTHONY: Jefferson Davis, also a member of Dürt Würk, was a troubled individual and Terry has reached out to his family. And Kris Pulaski is…well…Terry hopes that she’ll have the good sense to turn herself in to the authorities. His number one concern is the safety of his fans.
—106.7 KROQ, “The Big Box”
September 6, 2019
ris stood on the accelerator, all her weight hanging from her wrists, fingers clamped around the steering wheel, trying not to rest on JD. Her butt was on his thigh, right foot trapped on the passenger side, straddling the center console. She roared forward, merging onto the highway.
JD’s blood beaded along the top of the doorframe and the wind flicked fat drops away. She yanked the wheel left to merge, trying to put as much distance between herself and the rest stop as possible, and a car laid on its horn, but no one hit her and she mashed the gas pedal all the way to the floor because she wanted to stay ahead of any cars, and their horns faded away behind her.
Wind roared through the shattered windows, making the blood tacky beneath her hands, gluing them to the wheel. Blood drooled down the back of her neck from her torn scalp, and the rest stop was a half mile behind, three-quarters of a mile, one mile, three miles, but she still didn’t feel safe.
A big green sign announced the exit for Battery Road and she put her weight on JD’s leg and eased up on the accelerator as she curved off the exit, the g-force trying to flip the car. All her weight went into her heel as she switched her foot to the brake, rolled slow through the stop sign at Battery, and took a right leading away from the highway.
JD’s body slumped to the left as she made the turn, and didn’t sit back up, and she knew he was gone. It took three miles to find what she needed, two miles beyond where she thought she’d go insane if she didn’t get away from his corpse. But if there was one thing she was learning it was that she could endure anything, even the unendurable.
She found an abandoned hotel, unbranded, no glass, its exterior walls built and rooms framed before the developers ran out of cash, or maybe discovered toxic waste on the site, or embezzled all their funds and split. It sat at the end of a crumbling road blocked by a single, sagging chain. Kris drove up into the weeds, around the chain, and parked behind the hotel.
She didn’t let herself look at JD until she was out of the car. Then she forced herself to take it all in. His exposed teeth and bones were blood-slimed. His broken fingers jutted off in different directions. His face was flayed and hairless. His remaining eye stared at the rearview mirror.
Kris popped the trunk and found three hot Budweiser tallboys in an empty cooler and poured them all over her head, scrubbing her face, knowing it was better to smell like a drunk than be covered in gore. The warm beer burned her scalp where chunks of her hair had been torn out.
She checked herself in the passenger side mirror: bedraggled, wet, skin stained red, eyes insane. Then came the hard part. She rolled JD’s uncooperative corpse to one side and pulled out his wallet. It contained $25. She picked up his Manowar bandana from the floor, and tied it gently over her bloody scalp. It pressed down on her raw skull like iron.
“I’m sorry,” Kris said to JD’s body.
She made herself memorize his swollen tongue, his missing cheek, the wet eye socket. Another person, crushed beneath Black Iron Mountain. She wished she could light the car on fire and give him the Viking funeral he deserved, but she didn’t have any matches. Kris turned and walked away.
A three-mile hike got her back to the highway overpass. Only two cars passed her on Battery Road. She was too tired to run, and there was a long list of things that had to be done before she could stop walking. Just thinking about that list exhausted her.
At the Citgo on the other side of the underpass she bought a bottle of water with JD’s money.
“Bathrooms are for customers only,” the grizzled guy behind the register said. “Five dollar minimum.”
Kris added a pair of scissors and a “Just Visiting” Roswell T-shirt and that earned her the key and left her with $9.
In the bathroom, she scrubbed off the remaining gore with the water and then cropped her hair close. She wrappe
d the pieces in paper towel and buried them at the bottom of the garbage can, not because the gas station seemed like the kind of place that would care if she left a pile of hair in the sink, but because she didn’t want Black Iron Mountain to track her here and learn she had cut her hair and changed her appearance.
Then she pressed the lead foil down as flat as she could and tied JD’s Manowar bandana back around her head. There was no choice but to think like him now. She had no one to watch her back, no one to keep her safe. She was on her own.
Cleaned up, an ad for New Mexico’s UFO industry across her chest, Kris waited in the parking lot and finally intercepted a guy in a Crosby, Stills & Nash reunion hoodie. He had a red goatee and a receding hairline.
“I got in a fight with my husband,” Kris said. “He threw me out of the car up the road. Can I get a ride?”
“Your head is bleeding,” he said.
Kris wiped the blood away.
“He drinks.”
“I can’t get involved,” the guy said.
Kris saw the clerk giving her the stink eye from inside. It was only a matter of time before he called the cops, and then the Hundred Handed Eye would find her. She needed to get walking.
“Hey,” a voice said from behind Kris. “I heard what you said about your husband.”
Kris turned around. A young girl on the curvy side with long black hair stood behind her, smacking gum.
“I’m okay,” Kris told her.
“Said the woman with the bleeding scalp.” The girl blew an enormous bubble and popped it. “Where’re you going?”
“I said I’m fine.” Kris started to walk away.
The girl stepped in front of her and stuck out her hand.
“Melanie Gutiérrez. I’m heading to Las Vegas.” She gestured to a dirty white Subaru with West Virginia plates. “Don’t worry. I just got a new transmission.”
Kris stopped. You reached out your hand and the world provided. Holy coincidence, Viking magic, Troglodyte—whatever you called it, she’d be a fool to refuse.
“I’m Deidre,” she said, shaking hands.
“We have to watch out for each other on the road,” Melanie said. “The guys aren’t going to do it, right?”
“Right,” Kris said.
DAVE KING: The crowd was crazy. They looked like they were trying to kill Pulaski and the hairy guy.
CARRIE MOSTE: I understand you were scared, but, Dave, I’ve got the police report right here, and they saw something different.
DAVE KING: You can see it on my phone.
CARRIE MOSTE: And definitely, in this video you took, there is definitely a crowd around Kris Pulaski, but where you see angry people trying to attack her, I see scared people trying to detain her until the police can arrive.
DAVE KING: No one called the police.
CARRIE MOSTE: They have recordings, Dave.
DAVE KING: I had another video, you could see them surround their car and—
CARRIE MOSTE: —try to stop them from fleeing the scene—
DAVE KING: —they tore the hairy guy apart.
CARRIE MOSTE: On this other video? Can I see it?
DAVE KING: It’s deleted off the cloud. I can’t find it.
CARRIE MOSTE: I appreciate you coming in to speak with us. Listeners, we’ll be bringing you live updates as we get them.
—102.7 KJYO, “The Night Stalker”
September 6, 2019
like your tracksuit,” Melanie said, as they pulled out of the gas station and back onto the highway. “It’s very hiphop.”
“Okay,” Kris said.
She looked at every car they passed, considered every driver and passenger, trying to see them before they saw her. Had they been at the rest stop? Were they from Well in the Woods? Were they looking for her?
“You want to get on the floor?” Melanie asked.
“What?” Kris asked.
“The way you’re looking at all the other cars. I thought maybe you were scared your husband might see you. So if you want to get on the floor, I won’t think it’s weird or anything.”
Kris considered Melanie for the first time. She was just a kid, open-faced, big eyes with lots of eyeliner and mascara, snaggle teeth. Melanie took her eyes off the road and shot Kris a smile that said, “I’m no danger to anyone.”
Shit, Kris thought. She’d gotten in the car and with a complete stranger. She would never survive on the road like this. She flashed on the girl with black lipstick back at the rest stop, not much older than this kid.
Shit, Melanie thought. She took a quick look at the painfully skinny, middle-aged woman in the passenger seat. Thrift store clothes, no makeup, banged up from a fight, intense looking, and Melanie knew from Pappy’s that intense people always meant trouble, especially women. She’d only picked her up because of the Manowar bandana. She and Sheila Bartell used to sing “Kings of Metal” when they drove home from volleyball.
Both of them thought at the same time: this is a mistake.
Kris went back to studying the road, trying to figure out her next move. She heard the wet gurgle JD made as his cheek came off, the sound of ripping meat she’d never be able to get out of her head. She gagged.
“Do you need to throw up?” Melanie asked.
Kris couldn’t trust herself to talk, so she shook her head, fast and hard.
Melanie had a bad feeling about this. Like a really, really bad feeling about this. She never should have let a stranger in the car. She needed to keep this woman talking, and ditch her at the next rest stop.
“Why’re you going to Vegas?” she asked.
Kris didn’t answer.
“I’m going because…” Melanie smiled and dropped her voice into a Monster Truck Announcer Voice because humor was the best way to disarm someone dangerous. “Hellstock 2019! The ultimate desert smackdown! Three days! Three stages! Fifty bands! And Saturday night, the final show for Koffin…Koffin…Koffin.”
She risked a look at Kris, who wasn’t smiling.
“My sister lives there,” Kris said.
“Cool,” Melanie said. “Were you guys moving out there with her?”
“No,” Kris said. “He was just giving me a ride.”
The sound of her hair being torn out at the roots echoed through her head. The white bone in JD’s throat moved up and down. His remaining eye stared at Kris, blinked, and the two halves of his torn eyelid crumpled down and wouldn’t come back up. Who was going to tell his mother?
“Your husband?” Melanie asked.
Kris realized no one was going to tell JD’s mom. The woman was going to hear about it on the news, and they’d have pictures of what happened, and they’d say Kris’s name, and this woman, who’d never hurt anyone, would be destroyed. A short, unhappy sound escaped Kris’s throat.
“You okay?” Melanie asked. “You need a tissue?”
“What?” Kris asked.
Melanie tried to put things back on track.
“Your husband was giving you a ride out there?” she asked. “I’m just being interested. I’ve been driving for eighteen hours straight. I’m a little stir crazy.”
“Yes,” Kris said. “We were heading out there and then we got in a fight.”
“Cool,” Melanie said, thinking, This woman is getting out at the next exit. She made her voice carefree. “I’m going out there to start over. See the show, and then turn over a new page, you know? I’ve got a guy there, just a friend, but he knows I’m coming. He’s waiting for me.”
“Yeah,” Kris said, slumping down in her seat, drowning in misery as she thought about JD’s mom, about JD’s agonizing last minutes of life, about how he came back for her. Another death, laid at Terry’s feet.
“Stand Strong” by Koffin blasted out the speakers, way too loud. Kris shot upright like she’d been shock
ed.
“Sorry!” Melanie said, turning it down. “I wasn’t used to having people in the car.”
“Can we have silence?” Kris asked.
Melanie picked up her phone, where it was plugged into the car, and paused her playlist.
“Sure,” she said.
There was silence except for the sound of tires on the highway.
Then Melanie said, “Look, I don’t know much about husband and wife stuff, but I got a feeling you’re pretty shaken up by what happened between you two, so I’m not going to bother you for a little while. If you want to talk, you can, but I’m not. If you want water, or some snacks, there’s a cooler right behind your seat there. There’s a first-aid kit under your seat, and if you need to call your sister you can use my phone. I’ve got it on airplane mode so my ex doesn’t bother me because frankly I wasted enough of my life on him and I don’t want to hear from him ever again, okay?”
Kris’s brain was consumed by images of hands reaching through the shattered window for her and she didn’t answer. But her scalp ached, and after a mile she leaned forward and reached under her seat and pulled out the first-aid kit. It was a white box with a red cross on top, and Melanie had clearly stocked it herself because it was insanely organized. Kris grimaced as she pulled the Manowar bandana away from her scabs. Melanie shot a quick look over, and sucked air between her teeth when she saw the raw, seeping patches.
“Use the Medihoney,” she said.
Kris unscrewed the cap and applied it to her scalp using the visor mirror. It numbed the burning, throbbing spots on her skull down to a dull ache. They drove on in silence, Kris’s head filled with the sounds of ripping skin, JD screaming, “I can’t! They’re people!” All this blackness crowded inside her skull. She squeezed her eyes shut, but in the darkness she saw his panicked, bearded face, the hands banging on the car windows.
“Can we have some music?” Kris demanded, then softened. “Please.”
We Sold Our Souls Page 18