by Jeremy Bates
Noah suspected Steve and Jenny had the best chance of sticking it out together. Even so, this was no guarantee either. They both had another two or three years of med school ahead of them, then equally long and brutal residencies. How much quality time could they possibly spend together? Then again, maybe their workloads would an advantage. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, right?
The joint did the rounds and returned to Noah, almost finished. He took a drag, then ground the roach out under his shoe just as another blast of wind swooped through the trees, whipping everyone’s hair and clothes into a frenzy. Noah turned his face out of the worst of it and found himself looking at Mandy’s breasts. Her nipples poked against the thin Spandex of her costume.
Abruptly Jenny called to them from the far side of the bridge: “People! There’re some rad baby shoes under the bridge, if you’re interested!”
Noah could just make out Jenny and Steve’s silhouettes.
“We’re shaking!” Jeff called back.
“For real!”
“Blow me!” Austin said.
Jeff slapped him on the back of the head. “Don’t be so crass.”
Austin frowned. “What’s your damage?”
“You barely know her. None of us do. Show a bit more class.”
“Why do you care?”
“It’s called respect, dickweed.” Jeff turned to the others. “So, what do you guys think? Wanna take a look under the bridge for these shoes?”
“It’s pitch black,” Cherry said.
“You’ll be fine,” Jeff told her. “You won’t even have to crouch.”
She glared at him.
Austin said, “Respect, huh?”
“Hey,” Jeff said to Cherry, “where’s your costume?”
Cherry was wearing an everyday fluorescent green blouse, denim miniskirt, and pink leg warmers.
Austin scowled. “She wouldn’t do it.”
“Do what?” Jeff asked.
“She didn’t bring a costume, so on the ride down here—”
“He told me to take off my clothes and wear my underwear around,” Cherry finished.
“Right,” Austin said. “A lingerie model.”
“Hey, that’s not a bad idea,” Jeff said, looking at Cherry with X-ray eyes.
Mandy harrumphed and Jeff pulled his eyes away and said, “Well, whatever, Mighty Mouse, if you’re too scared to come, stay here. No skin off my back. Noah, Mandy, Austin, let’s roll.” Without waiting for a response, he turned and ducked-walked into the darkness beneath the bridge.
While waiting at the BMW for the others to return from the riverbed, Steve and Jenny were playing a tongue-in-cheek game which involved one-upping the experiences they’d had thus far at med school.
“Pathology is snooze-worthy,” Steve said. He was leaning against the hood of the car, his arms folded across his chest to ward off the chill, studying the trees and thinking about those cutthroats Jeff had mentioned. Although he knew Jeff was only trying to scare them, he couldn’t help being on edge, his eyes trying to pick out anything moving in the dark that shouldn’t be moving.
“You used that last time,” Jenny said.
“Fine…don’t ask others about their grades.”
“I know! I hate gunners,” she said. “Okay. Umm…you’ll at some point walk down the street still wearing your stethoscope and people will look at you like you’re crazy.”
“Or like you’re a pompous asshole.” He thought for a moment. “You’ll learn that for almost any set of symptoms the answer could be diabetes, pregnancy, SLE, or thyroid problems.”
Jenny nodded. “Good one. Okay. At least once a week a professor will think fifty minutes is long enough to get through one hundred slides.”
“And fail.”
“Miserably.”
Just then movement in the vegetation caused Steve to start. He pushed himself off the car, wired. A moment later Jeff appeared, tall and lean, clawing through the shrubbery lining the bank.
Steve relaxed.
“Thanks for the wild goose chase, you two!” Jeff called, crossing the road toward them.
Noah and Austin and the girls appeared behind him, one after the other, single file.
“You didn’t see the shoes?” Steve said.
“We checked everywhere, mate,” Austin said, tossing his empty beer bottle over his shoulder into the trees. Glass shattered. “But I did smell something foul down there.”
“Something dead,” Mandy said.
“A chipmunk,” Cherry said.
Steve looked from Jeff to Austin to the others. “Are you guys having me on?”
“You don’t know when to give up, do you?” Jeff said. “But I gotta say, I appreciate the effort.”
Steve chuffed to himself, shaking his head. Then he started away from the car.
“What are you doing?” Jenny asked him.
“Getting the shoes to convert the unbelievers.”
Steve made his way down the bank, keeping to the path they’d already forged through the chokecherries and bracken fern. At the bottom he stopped in the center of the riverbed and faced the vacuous blackness that had gathered beneath the bridge. It seemed somehow blacker than it had earlier, threatening even.
It’s all in your head, Steve. Now get on with it.
He lit a match off his thumb, picked out his and Jenny’s original footprints among all the others, and followed them beneath the bridge to the baby shoes—or where the baby shoes had been.
Because now they were gone.
Frowning, he turned in a circle, searching the sand—and heard a noise behind him. He jerked around and squinted into the darkness. Nothing there. He wondered if it had been the wind. Only right then there was no wind. The night was tomb-still. Besides, since when did wind sound like chattering teeth?
Chattering teeth…or a baby’s rattle?
This thought raised the hackles on the back of his neck.
“Hello?” he said, though he didn’t wait for a reply. He scurried out from beneath the bridge and up the bank, irrationally convinced a rotting baby corpse was going to latch onto his legs and drag him back down to the riverbed, where the sand and the silt and the clay would swallow him whole just as it had swallowed the baby shoes.
This didn’t happen, of course, and when he was on the road again, the night sky above him, he chided himself for spooking so easily.
Everybody was back inside the two vehicles. Headlights pierced the omnipresent fog, turning it iridescent so that it seemed to glow with a radiance of its own. Jeff honked the BMW’s horn impatiently.
“Yeah, yeah,” Steve mumbled, swallowing the lump in his throat. “I’m coming.”
CHAPTER 3
“You know that part in scary movies when somebody does something really stupid and everyone hates them for it? This is it.”
Jeepers Creepers (2001)
As soon as Steve climbed into the front passenger seat, the cool leather crackling beneath his weight, Jeff said, “Well?”
Steve looked at him. “Well what?”
“Show me the shoes.”
“Did you take them?”
“Take them?” Jeff said. He was chewing a shoot of beard grass, which dangled from his mouth like a long, limp cigarette.
“Are you really going to play dumb?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“The baby shoes,” Steve said patiently. “You took them.”
“They weren’t there?” Jenny said.
Steve shook his head. “They took them.”
“Whatever you say, li’l buddy.” Jeff tossed the beard grass in the foot well, swallowed a belt of vodka from the bottle in his hand, then tucked the bottle neatly into his jacket’s inner pocket. He turned the key in the ignition slot. The engine vroomed to life. Hot air roared from the vents. “Need You Tonight” by INXS blasted from the speakers.
“I like these guys!” Mandy said. “They’re from the UK or Scotland, I think.”
&nbs
p; Jeff snorted laughter.
“Australia,” Steve told her, deciding not to point out that the UK included Scotland. He turned down the volume. “Anyway, I’m serious. Let me see them.”
Jeff seemed pleasantly exasperated. “There were no fucking baby shoes, bro,” he said. “Mandy—tell him.”
“We didn’t see them,” she said.
Steve shook his head; he didn’t care. He knew they were having him on. In fact, now that he thought about it, he wouldn’t be surprised if one of them had leaned over the side of the bridge and made that noise he’d heard.
He was about to mention this when a black car thundered past them so fast it left a wake of air that rattled the BMW.
“Fucking hell!” Jeff said, the curse drowned out by Mandy and Jenny’s exclamations of surprise.
“Asshole!” Mandy said.
“That was a hearse,” Steve said, noting the vehicle’s distinctive quarter panels.
“Bloody kids!” Jeff said.
“It was a hearse!” Steve repeated.
In the distance the red taillights flashed, angry red eyes in the eddying fog.
“Look, it’s stopping,” Mandy said.
The brake lights disappeared, replaced by the sweep of the headlights as the vehicle turned to face them. Two small, bright orbs glowed malevolently.
“Are they coming back?” Jenny said, a tremble in her voice.
“Maybe we should turn around?” Mandy said.
The hearse high beamed them.
“Oh the little pricks!” Jeff said, grinning. “They’ve got balls!” He flashed his high beams back.
“What are you doing?” Mandy demanded. “Jeff? Answer me!”
Jeff buzzed down his window, stuck his fist out, and effed them off with his middle finger. It was a pointless gesture, considering there was no way they could see his finger through the mist.
The hearse’s engine revved, building into a chainsaw-like screech. Then the vehicle shot toward them.
Jeff released the parking brake, shoved the transmission into first, popped the clutch, and goosed the gas. The tires squealed as the car lurched forward.
“Jeff!” Mandy wailed. “Don’t you dare!”
“Stop!” Jenny cried. “Please! I want to get out!”
Jeff smashed through the gears, reaching third and sixty miles an hour in a few seconds.
The g-forces flattened Steve to his seat. He fumbled for his seatbelt, tugged it across his chest, buckled it. He wanted to tell Jeff to stop, but the girls were already shouting at him to do exactly that, and he wasn’t listening.
As soon as they shot past the end of the bridge the canopy knitted together and blotted out the sky once more, creating the sensation that they were bulleting down the bore of a pistol.
Jeff stared intensely ahead at the road, his mouth twisted into a bitter grimace, his hands gripping the steering wheel in the ten and two positions tight enough to squeeze the blood from his knuckles.
He was a man who’d just gone all in on the pot of a lifetime, and right then Steve knew that he wasn’t going to yield the road.
Steve was suddenly furious. He couldn’t believe Jeff was risking a potentially fatal head-on collision, risking all of their futures, to prove he wasn’t a chicken.
Mandy and Jenny gave up yelling and buckled their belts. A fear-soaked silence followed, magnifying the purr of the engine and the hum of the tires.
Only a handful of seconds had passed since Jeff gunned the gas, but it felt like much longer. Steve’s fear had warped his perception of time, slowed it down, and for a crazy moment some mordant part of his brain contemplated jumping out of the speeding vehicle. But it was traveling too fast. He would break his back or neck—and likely get run over by the oncoming hearse. Besides, he was frozen stiff. All he could move were his eyeballs, which he strained to the left so he could read the speedometer. The needle wavered just below seventy miles per hour.
He looked back at the road. The hearse was sixty yards away, the headlights bleeding together to form a blinding wall of shimmering white.
Fifty yards.
We’re going to die, Steve thought.
Forty.
He braced his hands against the dash.
Thirty.
“Jeff!” Mandy shrieked.
Twenty.
“Jeff!”
Jeff swerved to the left. The hearse screamed past. Jeff yanked the wheel to the right but overcompensated. The car knifed across the dotted line toward the opposite shoulder. He yanked the wheel left again. Right, left, right, left, trying to regain control of the now fishtailing vehicle.
They careened off the road and plowed through a small tree, shattering bark and branches. They hit something that launched the BMW into an airborne somersault. For a moment Steve floated in zero gravity, and he was thinking this was it, this was how he was going to die, and there was nothing he could do to prevent it—
The car struck the ground nose first. The impact accordioned the engine block and slammed Steve with the force of a sledgehammer to the chest. The seatbelt strap bit into his flesh and held him suspended above the dash, which was no longer in front of him but below him. The handstanding vehicle crunched forward onto the roof, where it rocked back and forth before coming to rest in the still, silent forest.
Noah had been seconds away from getting out of the Jeep and going to talk to Jeff about the assholes in the hearse when the BMW’s rear tires squealed and literally burned rubber. Through wafts of smoke, he watched the car shoot away down the road.
“He’s playing chicken!” Austin exclaimed from beside him.
Noah didn’t know what to do, but he knew he couldn’t sit there doing nothing. He shoved the Jeep into gear and accelerated.
“He’s not going to give!” Austin said. “Jeff’s not going to give. The motherfucker’s going to get them all killed.”
“The hearse will give,” Noah said automatically.
“Don’t get too close,” Cherry said from the backseat in a borderline terrified voice. “Stay to the shoulder. Do you hear me? Stay to the shoulder.”
“I’m straddling the goddamn shoulder!” Noah said. In fact, he could hear loose gravel spraying the Jeep’s undercarriage.
Then, ahead, Jeff arced sharply to the left. For a moment it appeared as though the hearse had plowed straight through the BMW, but Noah knew that had to be a trick of the fog and the glare of the headlights. He eased fully onto the shoulder and slowed.
Two seconds later the hearse thundered past, hogging the center of the road, bovine horn moaning. Noah tried to glimpse the driver, but the hearse’s headlights had blinded him. No one turned to watch the morbid vehicle depart. No one said anything. They were all staring in horror at the slewing BMW ahead of them. In the next instant it bucketed off the left side of the road into the mix of evergreen and deciduous trees.
Cherry sobbed and screamed in the same breath.
Austin shouted: “Go!”
Noah was already accelerating again.
When Steve realized he wasn’t dead, and when his shock subsided, he heard moaning from behind him. “Jen?” he said. “Mandy?” He tried to crane his neck around to check on them, and that’s when he saw Jeff in the darkened cabin, crawling through a hole in the windshield. Then he realized Jeff wasn’t crawling; his lower body was ragdoll limp.
Steve couldn’t see the upper half of his friend, the half that had been launched through the windshield, because the glass had gone gummy and opaque with cracks.
“Fuck Jeff,” Steve mumbled. “You stupid fucking fuck…”
“Steve?” Mandy said shrilly. “What’s wrong? What happened to Jeff? Is he dead? Is he dead?”
Steve unclasped his seatbelt and collapsed onto the car’s ceiling. He twisted himself around so he could see Mandy and Jenny. They were both layered in shadows, hanging upside down like bats. Mandy was sobbing into her hands. Jenny was either unconscious or dead.
In the distance came the unmistakable
drone of an approaching vehicle. The hearse coming back for them?
Steve maneuvered his body in the awkward space so he could grasp the door handle. He tugged it. The door was stuck.
Tires screeched to a halt.
Steve drove his heels into the window. The glass spider webbed. He kicked it again, harder, and again, harder still, until his feet stamped through it. He rolled onto his hands and knees and scrambled through the shattered window. He heard branches snapping, vegetation crackling, and he was suddenly filled with an exquisite terror, sure the driver of the hearse was going to be something with a hole for a face and leathery wings and—
Austin shouted Jeff’s name; Noah, Steve’s.
“Here!” Steve managed, standing and swooning into the upturned car. Austin and Noah and Cherry burst through the thicket. They came to an abrupt standstill.
“Oh no,” Austin said, those two words barely audible but powerful enough to halt a marching band. “No, no, no…”
Steve pushed himself away from the car on splintered pegs for legs and faced the wreckage. In the frosty light he could see it clearly enough. Jeff’s head and shoulders protruded from the windshield like a half-eaten meal. He lay on his back. Given that the vehicle rested upside-down on top of him, his nose kissed the hood.
Noah brushed past Steve, dropped to his knees, and pried open the back door. He climbed in and spoke calmly to Mandy while attempting to extract her.
Steve wobbled around the front of the car—the BMW’s distinctive headlights and kidney-shaped grille were an unrecognizable mash of metal—and all but collapsed next to Jenny’s door. Blood smeared the window. He gripped the handle and pulled, expecting the door to be stuck. It swung open with ease. He felt one of Jenny’s dangling wrists for a pulse, but his hands were shaking too badly to perform this action correctly. He unbuckled her seatbelt, lowered her body into his arms, then dragged her out onto the leaf litter. The fog billowed around her, caressed her. He noticed her chest moving up and down and said a silent prayer of thanks.