I stared as his window went up in a smooth slide. I stepped forward with my palms raised, shouting. The loud engine got louder as he pumped the pedal and began to slide back, stopped, and then went forward again. His lights came on and a plume of black smoke belched into the night. The rig came at me, horn blasting as I stood in front of him. But he did not slow as he swerved lazily around me and rolled onto the interstate entrance ramp.
I screamed after him, trying to run, but I couldn’t run and he was moving up through the gears now, rolling away until the orange lights across the rear doors winked and faded into the night.
I stared off into the dark distance where the truck had just been. No other cars passed. I turned in a circle. I was alone.
‘Sonofabitch!’
I went numb. Motionless. The earth continued to rotate.
I was about to turn away and walk back to Rick’s car when faint red spots glowed on the far horizon.
Brake lights.
He was at least a mile up the road now, but the fucker was braking. I blinked, waiting for them to fade out again, but they didn’t. I took two hesitant steps, then three, and I never took my eyes off the brake lights as I began to move faster, ignoring the pain now, in fact feeling no pain at all, knowing any minute they would vanish.
I never looked back to see if she was coming after me and, eventually, I found the strength to run.
42
The headwind and exertion watered my vision, making the stars on the horizon oscillate. My feet slapped tarmac in a disturbing rhythm. Far beyond the reach of the rest stop lights, a hundred yards ahead where the red glow was thinnest, something low and moving fast crossed the road, blurring from the desert to the yellow lines and then back into the desert before I could classify it. It was too low and fast to be a person but larger than any animal I could think of. I kept running, my pace flagging, until I was limping in a desperate shuffle.
The truck was idling. I could see
and
hear it now. The engine seemed to vibrate through the road as I approached. The brake lights glowed red, faint but growing brighter as I neared, and my destination seemed another mirage, a vision that receded cruelly every time I closed another hundred feet, the black highway a giant treadmill intent on dragging me back.
Slowly, finally, the entire back of the truck came into clear view. My eyes adjusted and the road became a fixed position below the tall gray doors. I waved my arms and slowed as I reached the back, veering left, coming up the trailer’s long dirty flank. I was out of breath, standing just behind the door of the cab, when I stopped.
Why hadn’t he opened the door? He must have seen me by now. Surely his conscience had dictated that he call the highway patrol, stop, wait for help to arrive.
Unless . . .
For the first time I glanced back the way I had come. The rest area was now only a faint glow above the few trees alongside the road. There were no other cars coming at us. Even way out here in the middle of nowhere, someone had to come along soon . . . eventually . . . but where had she gone? Why hadn’t she followed?
I turned back to the cab. The driver’s door was now open.
Wide open. Inviting.
I hadn’t heard it open. No voice had called out to me.
And then I
knew
.
Annette had been in the cab all along. In the sleeping compartment behind the front seats. She had watched and waited at the rest area, waiting for the right prospect to come along. We were out of gas, and she was guided by the need to escape at all costs, in any shell that would have her. The trucker had left his rig to use the bathroom and she had crawled inside. She’d heard me screaming for help and she had stayed silent, hidden in the back. And as soon as he had driven off . . .
I was trapped again. Stranded. There was no escape in any direction. I simply would not survive out here.
Before I had made the decision, my feet were shuffling forward, wide of the door. I walked out onto the center lane, pulled even with the open door.
The trucker was not in his seat. The front of the cab was empty. The seat was as high as my head, and behind it the cabin, an extended box behind the seats, large enough to conceal a narrow bed, a small table for eating, a cabinet above with a television and God knows what else bolted to the ceiling. The engine drilled the night.
I stepped closer. Raised myself on the balls of my feet.
I spotted a CB radio mounted low on the dash, to the right of the steering wheel. I could see the holstered hand mic attached to the spiral cord.
And next to that, a cellphone mounted to a plastic cradle. The lid was open, the keypad glowing blue. It would be so simple. Reach in and dial three digits. 9-1-1 . . .
But I could reach neither the CB nor the phone from the ground. I would have to climb in, lean over the seat.
I moved closer. I looked back and higher, between the seat backs. A breeze swirled through the cab, returning the aromas of sweat, enchilada sauce, and some kind of disinfectant. It smelled of death.
The dark porthole between the seats - the window leading back into the bunk - was a rectangle framed in splitting red vinyl, short but wide enough to crawl through.
A black mouth.
She was in there. I could feel her in the darkness.
I saw myself back away one last time, check the view to the road in both directions. I heard myself count to three, saw myself dance forward and scale the rig. Saw my feet mount the running board, the chrome step, my hand finding the steel bar behind the door, and then I was in the cab, my momentum almost pitching me over the driver’s seat as I grabbed for the phone and a scream erupted—
I saw it all - and my feet never moved.
I had never stared into such darkness. I might as well have been looking into a mile-deep coffin. To enter would be suicide. I took one step back.
If he’s not already dead, she’ll kill him and then me. She took out her own brother as if he were a weed in her garden. If the thing inside was ever Stacey, it is no longer. They don’t have names for what she’s become.
Stop her. You have to stop her.
I went quickly, my feet sure, climbing, my hand on the wheel. I reached for the phone. I fumbled it from the cradle. My foot slipped and I caught myself, leaning over the seat. The wind was hot on my neck, hot as breath, but I focused on the phone. My thumb found the 9 and for a moment there was no response, not a sound behind me. Maybe they had already abandoned the rig. She could be chasing him into the desert . . .
I pressed the first 1.
A thick arm shot through the hole and waved, the fingers clinching above the driver’s seat, grasping. He made no sound and his arm was grub-white.
I staggered back on my heels and for a moment was suspended, nearly vertical as I balanced, arms waving, the phone slipping from my hand.
‘Help,’ his tired voice whispered blindly. ‘Oh, Jesus, help me—’
His words were cut off and his arm retreated and then he screamed.
I fell down, tumbling, just gripping the door handle before I reset my feet and landed on the road. I staggered back, my blood freezing in revulsion as the black hole filled with grunts and the hard knocking of a body slamming against a wall. I backed away, never taking my eyes off that open door, and caught my heel. I landed on my ass and my right elbow struck the tarmac, the force of my fear hitting me like a wall, making everything up to my neck tingle.
Someone screamed, and, while it sounded distinctly feminine, I knew it wasn’t her. The metal side of the cab was shaking, flexing, and then there were no more screams, only a monotonous thudding, rhythmic and direct, the sound of a kid passing a basketball to himself off a gymnasium door. The pounding slowed, halted for nearly half a minute, then finished with a final sickening blow.
Everything was still.
I pushed off the ground and tried to stand.
She swirled out of the darkness, descending cat-like from the swinging door and dropped to the ground, coming for me with blood-soaked hands. There were more spatters of blood on her face and forehead, in her hair. Her shirt was torn open and one of her shoes - some kind of hiker-sneaker thing I didn’t know she had been wearing - was missing. She was calmly striding after me without a word. She wasn’t even breathing hard.
She stopped three feet away, looming above me. A knife wound some seven to ten inches long gaped white and fatty yellow along her thigh, the blood running down, soaking her socks. Her left eye was swollen shut. A globule of curdled blood and saliva hung from her chin and her teeth were red.
‘I fixed it,’ she said. ‘We’re going to Colorado. Everything will be better when we get back to the lake house.’
For a moment, in my obvious defeat, I thought of going. In the midst of her insanity I glimpsed her logic, the simple clarity of her vision. We would go to the lake house and spend the summer together, in privacy, and I would have another few weeks, perhaps even months, with Stacey. The illusion would be made real. To stay would be suicide, here in the desert, alone. To surrender all will would mean another few hours of warmth, and a lifetime of comfort in the seclusion of my lost mind, all for the low price of my cheaply bargained soul.
But I also knew she would never leave me alone. Wherever we ended up, she would never leave me in peace. It didn’t even matter if she was Stacey, if Stacey had taken control of her long ago, or if Annette had been obsessed with human masks before she ever laid eyes on Ghost. She was possessed by tragedy and she would invite more; because she had suffered she would thrive on the suffering of others. If it didn’t end here, she would possess me forever.
‘No,’ I said.
‘Get in the truck,’ she said, walking toward me.
‘No.’ I got to my feet.
‘Get in the truck now, James.’
‘You can’t save Aaron,’ I said. She stopped, her eyes full of fury. ‘Aaron’s dead. Just like Stacey. They’re all dead.’
For a moment the fury was replaced by a broken sadness. ‘You don’t know what you’re saying,’ she said. ‘You’re lost—’
‘I don’t love you. I don’t even care about you, Annette, whoever you are. You’re rotten all the way through and you bore me.’
I turned on the yellow lines and started back for the rest stop.
‘James?’ she said. ‘James!’
I kept walking.
‘I’m pregnant, James. That’s why we have to go. We can see it through. At the lake house.’
I shivered. I kept walking. Up ahead, more than a mile up the highway, headlights crested a hill.
‘I’m going to have it,’ she said. ‘It’s what we always wanted, isn’t it?’
For every step I took, the car moved a hundred feet closer.
‘I wanted it to be a surprise,’ she said, her voice closer than it had been a moment ago. She was following me, as Aaron had. ‘This is our chance to make it right. Don’t you want it back? Don’t you want everything you threw away?’
The car disappeared in a dip, then rose again, the crossbar of lights on top of the roof now visible. It would be the highway patrol. I could almost see his hat, the rounded brim and dented top, like a Mountie’s. The image tapped a new reservoir of energy in me and I began to trot.
‘You can’t escape, James,’ she said. Now she was out of breath, running, hurrying. ‘I’ll never let you go!’
The cruiser’s lights whirled and flashed to life, lighting the road and the desert in every direction. A spotlight trapped us. He slowed and then, as if realizing the urgency of the situation, hammered the throttle. I put my hands up and turned around as the blue cruiser with its white stripe skidded around me.
The trucker fell screaming from the cab, collapsing on the road behind her, seeming to fold over some kind of metal stock. He was half naked and streaked with blood. She stared at me, pleading as the trucker rolled and got to his knees, his shotgun cocking and then leveling until both barrels were aimed at us.