Highways to Hell

by Smith, Bryan

  The city street appeared deserted, which wasn’t surprising at this hour. The bars had closed an hour earlier, disgorging the usual array of DUI candidates. By now, the drunks were all either home, in jail, or splattered in a mess of managed metal on the highway.

  The buildings to his left and right were all dark. No cars passed through the crossing street. Kent wondered why the traffic lights here didn’t flash that intermittent yellowpulse the way they did in other cities in the empty hours.

  He sighed.

  And thought, because I’m in Bumfuck, Nowhere, the asshole of the universe.

  Kent had been stricken with a terminal case of wanderlust in the waning days of his joyless marriage to Amy. One day, a bright, cloudless day in late August, he’d been washing the Camry in the driveway of their well-tended suburban home. He remembered twisting a sponge thick with soap and grit over a mop bucket, watching the stream of dirty water splash into the bucket. He remembered looking up and taking note of the way the sun glinted off the windshield of the Camry, making it sparkle in a way that caused his heart to ache with inchoate desire he couldn’t quite articulate.

  He dropped the sponge in the bucket, sprayed the soap off the car with hose, and drove away from his home.

  Away from Amy.

  He hadn’t seen her since.

  The notion of returning to Amy to be forgiveness for his flight occasionally flitted through his mind, but he knew he would never submit himself to that humiliation.

  Anyway, what could he tell her about why he’d left?

  He remained unsure of the actual reasons himself.

  His gaze went back to the traffic light.

  Still red.

  And it had been red an awfully long time.

  Why on earth would this light not change?

  He sighed.

  And thought, so just go through it.

  Hell, there was no one around.

  No pedestrians.

  No patrol cars.

  Nothing.

  Still, he hesitated. He checked his rearview mirror, saw nothing there, and again scanned the road ahead of him.

  He was utterly fucking alone in the dead of this cold night in this strange city.

  He longed for home.

  Tears stung his eyes.

  Home?

  What a fucking joke. He didn’t have one anymore.

  Kent blew out a breath. “Jesus Christ…I’m having a nervous breakdown.”

  Get yourself back to the hotel, he thought.

  It just wouldn’t do to suffer the long-delayed total mental meltdown he knew was coming while stuck at a malfunctioning traffic light. He was alone for the moment, yes, but that was subject to change as long as he remained here.

  His foot began to ease off the brake pedal.

  And that was when he saw her—long, skinny legs encased in ripped fishnets at the edge of his field of vision. His eyes tracked her as she crossed the intersection, taking note of her unsteady gait on those ridiculously high red stiletto heels. She glanced his way as she passed the car, and he shuddered at the sight of eyes so hollow they hinted at a soul emptier and more damaged than his own. Dark eyes that were a startling contrast to flesh so sickly pale Kent knew she was a drug addict. Her expression revealed nothing, a slack, flat mask of numb indifference.

  She reached the other side of the street, stumbled once as a heel skidded over the curb, and looked both ways before continuing across the crossing street. She reached the other side and continued down the sidewalk.

  Kent looked up.

  The light was green.

  He tapped the accelerator and the Camry rolled through the intersection. But his foot slid back to the brake pedal, and he exerted enough pressure to keep the car inching along behind the girl.

  He kept expecting her to look back and notice him, but she just continued down the sidewalk, her head down, her long, permed blonde hair hanging in her face. She wore a microshirt that clung to her skinny ass like shrink wrap. A battered leather jacket covered the sheer, flesh-exposing top he’d glimpsed when she passed him.

  Kent became aware of moisture at the corners of his mouth.

  This was all very alarming.

  What am I doing? he wondered.

  He supposed she was a strung-out prostitute. He thought about the wad of cash in his wallet, which had dipped below two-hundred dollars. It was all he had left, and he couldn’t afford to blow any of it on a hooker.

  She looked weak, used-up, just another of society’s wasted cast-offs.

  How hard could it be to pull her into the car and subdue her?

  Then…

  Kent was repulsed by the sick turn of his thoughts. There was a lot wrong with him, obviously; he was depressed, borderline suicidal, and he was a day or two away from facing some pretty hard choices, decisions that would either pull him out his this self-destructive spiral or speed him down the path toward absolute ruin. Pretty hardcore stuff. But he wasn’t a bad man. He’d never entertained—even for the briefest moment—thoughts as evil and perverse as these.

  He’d hit the road in search of…something. He didn’t know what, but something. Something new. Something revelatory. Something inspiring. Something beautiful. Some nugget of perfect truth he could seize hold of and use as a way of replenishing the missing parts of his soul.

  The object of his search, whatever it really was, remained elusive, but he knew one thing: he hadn’t begun this strange journey to embark on a career as a serial killer.

  He decided he should drive on past the pitiful whore.

  But his foot didn’t come off the brake pedal.

  His grip tightened around the steering wheel.

  His breath wheezed in and out through clenched teeth.

  The girl’s gait remained unsteady as she continued down the sidewalk, but she walked in a more-or-less straight line. Kent felt pity for her. He knew the kind of concentration it required to walk like that when you were that high, an intensity of focus that blotted out everything else. He saw that she was on a collision course with a glass-enclosed bus stop, and it was fascinating to watch, like seeing a slow-motion replay of a car crash. She just kept stumbling along until her forehead smacked the glass.

  She wobbled on her heels. One foot came off the ground, and her arms pinwheeled in a desperate effort to regain balance.

  To no avail.

  She pitched backward, landing hard on her ass and crying out.

  Kent pulled the Camry to the curb and got out. He went to the girl and knelt beside her, his nervous hands fluttering around her, wanting to touch, to calm, to…touch.

  He sucked moisture from the corners of his mouth again. “Miss, are you okay? Can I help you?”

  Her eyes screwed shut, but they fluttered open now.

  Kent’s hands settled around her waist, and he was momentarily unable to breath. She felt insubstantial, ephemeral, light as a pillow. He was aware of his car behind him of how very close it was.

  He could have her inside it in an instant.

  He could have her.

  His gaze slid away from her face, traced the length of her long legs, lingering on the patches of pale flesh exposed by rips in the fishnets. He could feel his soul growing cold, his essence, his identity as a decent man, disappearing down a very dark hole, like blood swirling down a shower drain.

  And he knew he was going to do it.

  Sentence himself to an eternity in hell.

  Despite the clamor of admonishing voices in his head—the nattering voices of ingrained lessons about right and wrong, good and bad—he was going to do it. He would deal with the damage to his conscience later.

  Anyway, maybe this really was the object of this strange journey.

  A long-sought opportunity to release the darkness within him.

  His grip tightened about the girl’s waist.

  He gasped as she seized handfuls of his shirt, twisting the shirt with strength such a wasted wretch couldn’t possibly possess. She pulled him close, a
nd her eyes glittered like black diamonds, unclouded by drugs and full of need.

  Full of hunger.

  Her formerly slack features bloomed with life and color, her mouth stretching thin in a wide, ghastly grin, exposing rows of jagged teeth. He saw something yellow and worm-like fluttering at the back of her mouth. She pulled him closer, wrapping her stockinged legs tight around him on the sidewalk.

  Kent struggled, but it was no use; her legs trapped him as efficiently as a block of wood in a vise. His heart thudded and he felt the sharp bite of acid reflux at the back of his throat. He’d only been this frightened one other time in his life, when he was a little boy and the older boys across the street did the awful things to him, the things his memory had shielded him from until now.

  Kent chocked out a phlegm sob.

  He was facing probably death at the hands of some inexplicable creature that was merely masquerading as a human woman, but that didn’t matter; he truly didn’t care that he was facing death. Because he suddenly knew what was wrong with him, knew where all the pain came from, irreparable damage no doctor could ever expunge.

  The girl-thing pulled him closer.

  Her face distended, became an elastic mask that mocked her former prettiness. Her mouth was a wide oval, and the yellow thing inside it grew larger, pulsing like an aroused cock. Then it surged forward, pushed through his own open mouth, and the creature began to feed, drawing sustenance from his suffering.

  His mind played a fast-forward catalogue of all the painful events from his life, thirty years worth of regrets and heartbreak. The early heart attack death of his father, the suicide of his alcoholic sister, the loss of his one true love (not Amy), his unfulfilled dreams, getting married to Amy because she was pregnant, the subsequent miscarriage, and the nightmares he never remembered upon awakening, surreal dream-world distortions of what the older boys did to him in that basement.

  All of it.

  Every disappointment.

  Every fractured hope.

  Each of them like a little death.

  Ending with his conflicted thoughts on the sidewalk a few moments ago.

  Then he felt the yellow thing—the probe, the feeder tube—retract, and he sucked in air, the automatic, involuntary act of a still-living organism. The creature’s legs loosened around him by slow degrees, and he saw her face reorganize itself, a strange, pliable putty that again formed a startling facsimile of an attractive woman’s face.

  It was smiling.

  A glowing visage that radiated satiation.

  Which was the opposite of the way Kent felt. He was a husk, a hollowed-out shell of his former self. He barely had enough energy to breathe. The girl-thing gave him a shove, and he tumbled away from her.

  He was on his back on the sidewalk.

  Staring up at the stars in the sky.

  The infinite expanse of space spoke to him, whispering of an ascent to a celestial abyss, a place where there was no hurt, just eternal nothingness, pure, perfect absence of all things composing the human condition.

  His vision blurred.

  The twinkling points of light above him became white blotches, sloppy smears on a faded canvas.

  He dimly perceived a sound of stiletto heels clicking down the sidewalk, moving way from him.

  Then the world was gone.

  Amy Hogan put aside the Maeve Binchy novel she’d been reading when she heard the front door creak open. Her pulse quickened, and a paralyzing rush of fear pinned her to the living room recliner.

  The closest phone was in the kitchen. She knew she could get to it and punch in 9-1-1 before the intruder had a chance to get to her. She glanced that way, swallowed hard, and remained where she was.

  She heard footsteps in the foyer.

  Followed by the sound of the door being pushed gently shut.

  Then a rattle of keys.

  No, she thought.

  It can’t be him.

  In the early days following Kent’s unexplained departure, she’d been surrounded by friends seeking to comfort her, people who told her she’d be all right eventually, that the passage of time would heal her emotional wounds. What she’d been unable to tell them—the thing she wouldn’t voice to even her closest girlfriends—was the sad truth of the situation; that she wasn’t heartbroken over her husband’s abandonment of her.

  What she mostly felt was relief.

  And she’d felt gratitude when her friends thought she should feel only anger. None of them knew the real truth of her marriage to Kent, that it had been a loveless sham from the beginning, a case of two broken people brought together by circumstance.

  The footsteps grew louder.

  Then Kent stepped through the archway into the living room.

  Amy’s heart sank.

  Go away, she thought.

  Go away and never come back.

  She sigh. “You’re back.”

  Kent shrugged. “Yeah.”

  He sounded tired.

  He looked worse, emaciated, like a heroin chic model from the early 90’s, only in Kent’s case there was no accompanying hint of decadent glamour. He wore ill-fitting clothes, a billowy t-shirt and baggy jeans that accentuated his gaunt appearance, made him look like a stickman.

  Amy felt a twinge of sympathy. “Kent…what the fuck?”

  She couldn’t think of anything else to say—the situation was beyond inexplicable. Her husband had been gone nearly two months, and now he’d returned looking like an Auschwitz survivor. She knew he’d withdrawn a couple grand from the bank the day of his disappearance, which wasn’t a fortune, but it meant there was no good reason he should be looking this bad.

  So “What the fuck?” was pretty much the prefect summation of her feelings.

  Kent opened his mouth to say something, but the words died on the tip of his tongue.

  His lower lip trembled.

  And then he was crying, his misty eyes yielding fat tears that rolled quickly down his cheeks, a waterfall of inarticulate emotion.

  Amy sighed again.

  She got to her feet and went to him, pulling him into a half-hearted embrace. She patted his back and made cooing noises. “There, there, baby, it’s okay. You just get it all out, cry until you’re dry, then we’ll talk about it, okay?”

  She lifted her head off his shoulder and smiled at him.

  Then he was smiling, too.

  Amy stepped back.

  He seized her wrists, halting her sudden backward motion.

  And his smile kept expanding, growing exponentially more obscene by the moment.

  She opened her mouth to scream.

  He smothered the scream with his own mouth.

  Then she felt something warm enter her, something thick, slimy, and pulsating, and she was pretty sure it was that awful yellow thing she’d glimpsed at the back of his throat.

  But then she wasn’t thinking about that anymore.

  She was a kid again, watching her daddy hit her mommy.

  She was a teenage virgin, an innocent being assaulted by a predator the police were never able to apprehend.

  And she was an unhappy mother-to-be who felt only shameful relief when she miscarried.

  And more, so much more.

  A parade of misery.

  The, worst of all, she was left alive on the living room floor.

  With something new growing inside of her.

  The old Chevelle was parked in a corner of the convenience store’s parking lot, its front end pointed toward the street. An Escalade with fake bullet hole stickers on the driver’s side door rolled to a slow stop at the nearby intersection. Heather Campbell tracked the Escalade’s snail-like progress through squinted eyes, an ugly scowl painted on otherwise lovely—albeit haggard—features.

  “Why do people do that?”

  Josh Browning, slumped down in the shotgun seat, blinked at her through eyes bleary from smoking too much weed. “Huh?” He sat up straighter, and his head swiveled slowly to the right. He squinted at the Escalade
, which was now sliding through the intersection on its way, no doubt, to some appropriately white trash destination. Then his head wobbled back in her direction. “Why do people drive Escalades? All sorts of reasons, I guess. It’s an individual thing. It all depends on what you want out of a car and—”

  Heather heaved an exasperated sigh. “Why do people put fake bullet hole decals on their fucking cars, man? Would it kill you to stop blazing up for a just a few minutes and pay some goddamn attention to what I’m saying?”

  Josh glanced at the crumpled joint hanging pinched loosely between his thumb and forefinger. He shrugged and stubbed the lit end out in the Chevelle’s overflowing ashtray. “Sorry. I guess people do that because they think it makes them look badass.”

  Heather’s scowl deepened. “It makes them look like fucking idiots.”

  “Yeah.”

  “If you were a real criminal, like of the violent, dangerous variety, why would you tool around in a shot-up ride?” Josh opened his mouth to reply, but Heather was too worked up and steamrolled right over whatever he’d been about to say. “You wouldn’t. Not at all, man. You’d want to lie low and be fucking inconspicuous. Shit!”

  She stomped the Chevelle’s floorboard with the heel of a boot.

  Josh’s expression became worried. “Hey...calm down, all right?”

  Heather heaved another big sigh. “I just hate stupid people.”

  “I know. Stupid people suck.”

  Heather was nodding. “They should all die.”

  “Yep. Totally agree.” Josh sounded more than a little nervous when he cleared his throat. “So...are we gonna do this thing or not?”

  Heather glanced at the loaded .38 clutched tightly in her white-knuckled right hand and felt her chest grow tight. “I can’t believe I’m doing this again. I swore I wouldn’t.”

  Josh shrugged, smiling weakly. “Hey, I’m against it, remember? You want to call it off, that’s cool by me.”

  Heather was shaking her head before she finished. “No. We need money. Now.” She opened the door on her side and swung one long leg out of the car. She glanced at Josh. “Get behind the wheel and start the engine. I’m gonna make this fast, so be ready to go.”