She hears something cutting into her scrambled thoughts. The police. They’re finally here. She thinks that she must’ve been here, trapped in this damn car for hours.
“Heather,” the voice says. “Heather.”
She doesn’t remember the officers knowing her name…
“Heather!”
She tries to open her eyes but grows confused because she’s sure they’re already open.
“Heather?”
Her eyes fluttered open.
“Oh, thank God!” she heard someone exclaim.
A sudden pressure squeezed her chest, and she realized that she was being embraced. Not by the police, but by Ian.
He unbuckled her seatbelt, and she dropped into his arms.
Throwing aside the lingering sensation of events long past, she wrapped her arms around him and held him with all her might, tears running down her face. “What…happened?” She brought her hand to her head, where the pain was. She saw for herself what had happened, and she was sixteen all over again.
“We hit something,” Ian said.
Heather’s mind worked to untangle the two accidents, sorting out the past from the present…her dead boyfriend from her living fiancé.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“I think so.” Other than a headache, she seemed fine.
“Come on.” Ian helped her out of the Taurus, which was now upside-down on the side of the road.
Heather stumbled against Ian, letting herself be guided through the heavy snow, when she suddenly stopped moving, her body shooting upright and rigid. “Where’s Ashley?”
“She’s okay. She’s with Marcus. They went to see what we hit.”
She left me here?
she thought. But then she heard her sister’s voice cutting through the storm.
“Heather!”
She couldn’t see Ashley until she was just a few feet in front of her and throwing her arms around her neck.
“Are you okay?” Ashley cried.
“Yeah. Are you?”
“We’re all fine. Not even a scratch, can you believe it?”
They separated.
“How long was I out?” Heather asked, figuring the soreness would come greeting them in the morning.
“Five minutes,” Ian’s voice informed her, but he was concentrating on Marcus. “What was it?”
“A moose.”
“A
moose
?”
Marcus nodded.
“I hit a freakin’
moose
?” He looked back at the overturned rental. “It’s dead?”
“Dying.”
The veterinarian stirred inside, and Heather put a hand on his shoulder. There was nothing to be done about it now. He swore.
“It’s a miracle we’re alive,” Marcus said, his own gaze fixed on the Ford.
Heather nodded, but they were still standing on a snow-covered road in the middle of a blizzard with nothing but mountains surrounding them. She crossed her arms over her chest, suddenly thankful for the striped sweater beneath her coat and no longer minding the stench of the perfume it had been marinated in. Even with the added layer of warmth, though—in these temperatures, in this wind—it wouldn’t be long before…
“What now?” Ashley asked, her own arms crossed, eyes darting back and forth through the falling snow.
The wind was howling through the trees around them. Snow melted and froze against their clothes.
“We have to get off the road.” Ian started walking to the car, his breath leaving a trail of clouds in his wake. “Another car could come down here and wipe us all out. We should go into the woods, try to find some kind of shelter until morning.”
Heather shuddered, her previous concern of being stranded in the Adirondacks now a horrible reality—only worse because of the blizzard. Her face was already numb, and her words were beginning to slur through lips capable of only moving in slow motion. “Should we check the car?”
They all stood still and looked at her, thinking of the trunk and what none of them wanted to believe might be inside.
“For things we’ll need,” she explained. “Flashlight, first aid kit, a lighter…”
“She’s right,” Ian said, and in fact, that was why he’d started toward the car in the first place. As he crouched down in the snow and wiggled his way back behind the steering wheel, Ashley appeared across from him, crawling in through the passenger side and working the glove compartment.
Heather watched them, or imagined that she was watching them. She could hear more clearly than she could see. Out here in the mountains at night…it was only the dim luminance of the snow on the ground and in the trees that added any sort of light to their surroundings. She shuddered again, thinking of how dark it would be in the woods, beneath the forest’s canopy where snow may not have been able to make it to the ground. It wouldn’t be like in the movies where there was always some mysterious light by which the characters were able to see in order to move the story along. No, she was quite certain that, unless the clouds broke and the moon was allowed to shine, they wouldn’t be getting very far at all.
But then a
click
introduced a beam of light within the car.
“Thank God,” Marcus said beside her. She jumped, not realizing he’d been there.
Ashley pointed the flashlight into the glove compartment and sifted through papers, looking for anything else they might need.
“Take all of it,” Ian told her. “We’ll need it to start a fire.”
So Ashley began shoving the owner’s manual and other documents into her coat pockets. When they were filled, she moved to the pouch of her new Bills sweatshirt, her hands glowing red and shaking in the cold as she stuffed herself with anything that would burn.
Ian turned and lay on his back, shimmying beneath the driver’s seat so that he could reach up and search the pouch attached to its back. He pulled out a large book and held it out the back window. “Take this,” he said to either Heather or Marcus.
Marcus stepped forward and grabbed it from him. “An atlas.”
“We’ll save that,” Ian said, blowing warm breath into his cupped hands. “At least the pages we can use.”
Marcus nodded, rolled it up, and stuck it into his back pocket.
Heather’s eyes were still hostage to the flashlight’s beam that was swinging back and forth in the front passenger seat of the car. As she stared, the wind continued to whistle through the nearby trees, their branches clapping hands and high-fiving each other.
The flashlight paused, something catching Ashley’s interest. Heather stepped forward to see what it was. “What is it?”
The flashlight was still pointing into the glove compartment when Ashley’s free hand passed through its beam and grasped something that sat glimmering under the light.
“A ring,” she muttered. She held it up and brought it close to the flashlight’s lens, examining it with peculiar interest.
“Nothing else back here,” Ian was saying, “unless we want to rip out some of the seats and use them, too.”
“Could we funnel some of the gas out, use it to start the fire?” Marcus wondered.
Ian nodded, still lying on his back. “We won’t go far from the car. Maybe a passing truck’ll see the fire through the woods.”
Heather didn’t think anyone else would be coming down this road, but she held her peace, taking another step closer to Ashley instead.
Wads of paper stuffed into her sweatshirt and coat pockets, Ashley stood beside the car, transfixed by the ring she was still staring at.
“Ashley.”
She looked up to her sister.
“What is it?”
Ashley shook her head. “I don’t know, but it—”
Ian climbed back over the front seat and asked Ashley to go to the back of the car. He was going to pop the trunk.
“Sure,” she responded, not so sure at all. But it wasn’t until she managed to pry her eyes off the object in her hand that she slipped it into her jeans and began making her way to the rear of the car.
Heather, Marcus, and Ashley stood facing the dented and upside-down trunk, the flashlight’s circle painting a large, red dot in the night.
When Ian pulled on the trunk release, all three of them stepped back, startled by the sound, but Ashley was able to hold the light steady as the trunk swung open.
A spare tire, tire iron, and jack fell out into the snow. The tire landed on its side, bounced, and rolled past them. They all turned and watched it disappear into the storm.
No dead body.
Ian walked up beside them and joined in staring at the empty trunk space. Even though they were relieved that the body of the missing man hadn’t spilled out into the snow along with the fleeing tire, the absence of a corpse debunked the only theory they had going.
Ian’s voice broke the silence. “You all have your phones?”
They checked their pockets, nodding.
“Let’s find out where we are if we can.” He took the battery out of one pocket, the phone from the other, and went about reuniting them with trembling hands.
Heather’s map application was still open, and she started to speak when—
“What?” Ian stepped closer and looked down over her shoulder at the glowing display screen.
“That can’t be right,” she whispered.
“What?” Marcus moved in for a look of his own.
“The map, it says we’re…”
“We
were
going north,” Ian whispered.
Heather lifted her eyes to their surroundings, squinting into the wind and pelting snow. Bending trees. Forest. Mountains.
“Okay, let’s—”
Marcus’ cell phone laid down a beat before Ian could finish.
“Text message,” he announced, but his thumb hesitated over the touch screen. Finally, he tapped it and read the message. “‘I’m coming for you, Blackman. Are you ready for me?’” Marcus swallowed the frigid air, not caring how badly it burned. His eyes found Ian’s.
Heather’s phone sounded. She looked down and gasped, then dropped to her knees.
Ashley went down beside her, putting an arm around her. “What? What does it say?”
But Heather couldn’t answer through her crying. She shot to her feet, threw the phone into the snow, and started stomping on it.
“Heather.” Ian reached a hand out to her. “Heather…”
“It’s the phones,” she said, stomping away in a blind rage. “It’s the
phones
!”
“Heather…” Ian wrapped his arms around her, trying to get her to relax. He started to whisper in her ear. “It’s okay. Everything’s gonna be okay.”
Then the phone in Marcus’ hand chimed again. He read the next message. “‘Almost there…’”
They fell silent again, their eyes moving back and forth through the darkness, feeling the cold travel straight through them.
“Do you see that?” Ashley pointed down the road, the way they’d come.
A faint glow seemed to materialize in the distance, a lighthouse shining weakly through the fog. It was getting closer.
A distant growl rumbled through the blizzard like far away thunder. It was growing louder and louder, the light shining brighter, and soon it was a roar.
Heather waited in anticipation, either for some creature to snatch her away from this world or for some Good Samaritan to save her. But in light of her most recent text message, she seemed to know that whatever was coming would be anything but salvation.
Ian held his arms out and forced everyone back off the road. They peered intensely through the snow, daring to hope.
And just like that, with a deafening growl from some mechanical beast, a black blur screamed past them, falling snow redirecting and curling after the shadow and its two red eyes as it disappeared into some other realm. A second later, the only evidence of the apparition’s existence was the two wide, treaded paths stretching north and south through the snow.
“That had to be doing seventy!” Marcus shouted above the wind.
“That’s not possible,” Ashley stated.
But there were the tire tracks, perfectly imprinted in the snow, streaking past where they stood.
Heather could barely feel Ian take her hand it was so numb, but as they stood there staring after the speeding car, her freezing hands became the least of her worries.
Red eyes blinked open in the storm.
“What the hell…” Ian took a step toward the glowing lights.
The two pinpricks of red brightened, white lights immediately following and growing wider.
“It’s backing up,” Marcus whispered, pulling on Ashley and leading her a few steps further from the road.
The radio in the overturned Taurus suddenly sprang to life, broadcasting, “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer.” The invisible wilderness around them echoed the satirical lyrics with a sort of perverse mocking.
“This isn’t good,” Ashley whispered.
The snow falling over the road separated, as if some vortex had opened a clear path for the reversing car. Suddenly, the wide wheels locked, and the vehicle, flat black, came sliding through the snow like a sled from hell.
It came to a stop directly across from them, its engine growling, its headlights staring off into the collapsing vortex.
“What is that?” Heather breathed.
“A Camaro,” Ian said. “A 1971 Z-28…”
A door swung open, and a tall figure stepped out. He stood there, on the other side of the short muscle car, and stared over the hood at them.
Ashley couldn’t help pointing the flashlight in his direction.
Beneath a large, wide-brimmed hat, mirrored glasses reflected the flashlight’s gaze, making his face an indiscernible bright spot in the storm.
“Hello?” Marcus called. His phone sounded. He didn’t check it.
The man didn’t reply, just stood there staring at them.
Ian squinted through the snowflakes. “We hit a moose back a ways…”
No response.
The lyrics to the song rebounded through the cold silence with alien strangeness.
The tension was thicker than the snow on the ground, and Heather pulled at Ian’s hand, trying to urge him away from this dark figure.
Finally unable to keep himself from looking, Marcus checked his cell phone. With a shaking hand, he held it out so that everyone else could see it, too.
I AM HERE. WE ARE HERE. GIVE IT TO US.
“Run,” Ian whispered, pushing Heather toward the trees. “Run!”