Edward Lorn

CRAWL

“If you’re going through hell, keep going.”

~ Winston Churchill

“The gentle maid, whose hapless tale

These melancholy pages speak;

Say, gracious lady, shall she fail

To draw the tear adown thy cheek?”

~“Sonnet to the Right Honourable Lady Mary Coke”

~Horace Walpole

1.

He loved her. She had no doubt. But he’d also betrayed her. And now they were on a road trip from Alabama to Georgia so she could spend some time with her mother in Warner Robins. Mom would comfort her and lead her in the right direction. After Colton returned home, he would make-do by himself; he’d feed the dog and write his books and watch his Doctor Who. And she, Juliet, would find out whether or not she still loved him. And if she didn’t? Perhaps she’d ditch her Judas and find herself. Or whatever it was that divorced thirtysomethings did.

Colton had been quiet since they’d left Mobile, and now he stared straight ahead, the red lights of the dashboard painting his stone face crimson. She thought, not for the first time, that he looked like Stonehenge. Or a Stonehenge. She wasn’t sure which the proper use was. Maybe Colton looked like a damn henge made of stone. His eyes had become baggier since his infidelity had been discovered. He also slumped more. Frumpy was the word that came to Juliet’s mind. His entire skin looked looser. Her big strong man had become a rotting pumpkin.

She imagined stress could do that to a person. But that’s what he got for slipping his dipstick into another Buick’s engine. There was nothing wrong with her. As far as she was concerned she had been more than active enough in the bedroom. Colton didn’t necessarily have a ferocious sexual appetite, and that was part of what confused her so. When they’d first met they’d been like any other couple, fornicating like pubescent rabbits. Even after they married a year and a half later, sex was something done more than once a day and never out of routine. They made love. They fucked. They tasted each other. Were each other. Nine years later, coitus had become a weekend practice. Friday or Saturday night, sometimes Sunday morning, they’d give porn stars a run for their money. Fun sex. Freaky-deaky bang-a-rang kind of bumpity-bump. Sometimes the cuffs came out. Other times, flavored gels were on the menu. But Juliet was always the instigator, the coach, directing Colton’s QB into the pocket. Never did it occur to her that maybe Colton didn’t want her, that he hungered for new scratch. Had he asked, she would have done anything to make him happy. But no, he’d cheated. And with the dog sitter of all people.

Colton tapped the dash’s display. “We’re running low on gas.”

“Then pull over.” Her statement came out sterner than she’d meant. She almost apologized, but thought better of it. Best to make him believe he was skating on thin ice with white-hot flatirons strapped to his feet. Colton had to think she was never coming back from her mother’s. That was the only way this was going to work.

“Right,” was all he said, drifting onto the first Opelika exit ramp.

The radio said it was quarter past one in the morning. Because of this, the only gas station open wasn’t truly open at all. It did, however, allow you to pay at the pump. Colton pulled the Subaru into the first row of tanks by the road, killed the engine, and hopped out. Juliet tracked him in the mirror all the way around the back of the car and to the rear fender on her side. He walked with a slow gait, his head down and his shoulders rolled in, concaving his chest. He looked so depressed she wanted to spit. She kept repeating her mantra, That’s what you get, Colton. That’s what you get. What you get—

He knocked on the window, jarring her out of her thoughts.

“Gimme the card out of my wallet. It’s in the center thingie.”

She popped the latch on the console’s lid and dug around inside until she came across his leather billfold. She yanked the American Express out of its sleeve and inserted it through the crack in her window. Colton grumbled a thank you, and swiped the Am Ex through the pump’s reader. He jammed the card into his pants pocket, lifted the nozzle from the base, and rammed it into the side of the car. The car morphed into Vicky the perky-titted dog sitter, and Colton became the gas pump. His nozzle filled her.

“Stop it.” Juliet’s trembling voice filled the tight confines of the hatchback. “You’re not helping anyone by constantly reminding yourself why you’re on this little jaunt across the Alabama/Georgia line. Just… stop it.”

I wonder if Vicky ever told Colton to “stop it?”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” she moaned.

Juliet had bought The Dog (thought of it like that, too—as The Dog) at a PetSmart in Spanish Fort. She had wanted the Heinz 57 because she’d grown tired of going to bed by herself on the evenings when Colton worked late. It still boggled her mind. All those extra hours and not one slip up. Colton truly had been at work. His paychecks verified his time away from the house, and Juliet had no reason to broach the possibility of him playing around. The Dog hassled and hindered more than it offered companionship, and tore the house to shreds every time she left it alone for longer than two shakes of its fluffy little tail.

When Colton had brought up the idea of Juliet accompanying him on his trips out of town instead of staying home with The Dog, she’d jumped at the chance. Boarding The Dog proved troublesome. The Dog had anxiety issues, and covered the back seat in vomit, urine, and feces during simple trips to the corner store. Trips to the kennel, which was over ten miles away, were most definitely not going to happen without the need of professional interior car care. Colton refused to buy The Dog Zoloft or Valium, so Juliet hired a dog sitter for those times when they’d be gone for extended periods.

It was only supposed to be the one time, after which they’d give The Dog to a proper shelter and be done with the whole mess. But Colton changed his mind when they got back, insisting that it would be cruel, that a shelter would no doubt put The Dog to sleep within a week’s time and then he and Juliet would both have some poor animal’s blood on their hands. At least that’s what Colton had told her. Truth was, he didn’t want to lose Vicky.

And to think, if Colton had simply offered Juliet the chance to go with him on work trips in the first place, she’d never have asked for the dog and Colton wouldn’t have been caught with his cock in the cookie jar.

The Dog had been boarded for the trip to her mother’s. The Subaru still smelled of canine evacuations.

Macklemore came over the radio, singing “Same Love.” She reached down and spun the volume higher. The song took her away from that gas station, away from that state, that world. She floated behind her eyes, riding waves of bass drums and trumpets, legato lyrics and melodic piano. Juliet melted into her seat, and was numb. Not happy, simply fluid, for the first time in weeks. Months. Ever. She’d felt so much so long ago that everything else since then seemed dumbed down and unreal. She was crying. She didn’t care. Needed the release. Her heart felt heavy, liquid, pumping in time with the music.

Their wedding day flickered across the screen of her mind. Her twirling in a pink dress, looking princess-like and carefree. Colton in his purple tux (she’d fought hard for that one) spun his bride across the dance floor to the tune of “Forever and Ever, Amen.” Their family and friends would say later that she seemed to float, that she was an angel, that she’d never looked so radiant and brilliant; her eyes had been full up with fireworks, perpetually exploding. Colton had been so handsome, a manicured five o’clock shadow darkening his chiseled face. The flat slope of his Stonehenge nose had been transformed; that one, subtle ugliness she had once cringed over was now a quality unique to him. Juliet’s mother had a horrible wine-colored birthmark that stretched from left cheek to collarbone, and Juliet used to wonder how Mom had ever snagged Dad. Now she knew. It was time. It was love. Both things combined created a bubble, a funhouse mirror effect, but instead of warping beauty, it hid blights, highlighted the good, elevated the positive. His schnoz disappeared for a while. Now it was back, and she hated Colton for allowing its return.

Colton slid into the car again, started the engine, and pulled out of the BP station. When they were back on the interstate, she glanced over at him, at his slab of a nose, and shivered. How cold she had become—Frosty the Snow Bitch tooling across eastern Alabama in a silver Subaru hatchback, accompanied by Stonehenge himself. Itself. Whatever.

Frosty the snow bitch? No, she wouldn’t do that. There was no need to call herself names. Colton had screwed the pooch (well, the pooch sitter, anyway) and spoiled everything. Damn him. How had she ever loved—?

Do not finish that thought, young lady. You’re angry. You finish that sentence and all this, all nine years of it, is over. Shut up and stare at your nail polish or something.

“Are you going to talk to me?” Colton asked.

Juliet was so shocked by his sudden question that it took her several seconds to respond.

“What do you want to talk about?”

“This. You and me. Why you’re leaving.”

“Oh,” she said shortly, “you mean you cheating on me. Gotcha.”

His hands tightened on the steering wheel, blanching the knuckles.

Juliet laughed mirthlessly. “You have no right to get angry here.”

She returned to the view scrolling past her window. The silhouettes of trees whizzed by, highlighted only by the backsplash of a red warning light atop a tower somewhere in the distance. Juliet tried to assure herself that she didn’t feel like throwing open her door and spilling out onto the tarmac simply to get away from the current topic of conversation.

“I’m not angry,” Colton said. “I’m frustrated. You said we’d work this out. That you wanted to work this out.”

“I do want to work this out,” she said, without looking at him. “It’s just too new. I need time. That’s why I’m visiting my mother. But, of course, I’ve already told you all this multiple times. Perhaps if my name were Vicky you’d give enough of a shit to actually listen to me.”

“She didn’t matter to me.”

“Right. You were just screwing her.”

“That’s low.”

She reared on him. “I’m low? Are you kidding me? You’ve got some nerve. Seriously.”

He flinched under her words.

“How are we going to rise above this if you can’t let it go?” he asked.

“We don’t have to rise above it. I have to forgive you. Right now, you’re not making that very easy. You messed up, Colt. Not me. If I do forgive you, it will be on my terms.”

A silence weighing roughly the same as a sumo wrestler settled upon them. Juliet glared at her husband’s crimson-splashed face. He still seemed to be angry, which infuriated her even more. Did he really think this was her problem? That she’d done something wrong by not accepting his apology and jumping back in the sack with him minutes after he’d been caught? What the hell was wrong with him?

Colton shattered the fragile quiet with, “Do you even love me anymore?”

She slapped him. It was an awkward thing. She’d been going for his left cheek. Instead, her right hand whapped down atop his lips, as if she were a mother popping a child on the mouth because they’d cursed. Colton barely flinched, though. His gaze traveled ever so slowly from the road to her, and she had a brief moment’s thought that he was about to direct them into those red-rimmed trees.

“I guess I deserved that.”

And with that, he focused on the road once more. His fists relaxed, and blood returned to his knuckles. A soft hand lighted upon Juliet’s left thigh, squeezing through her jeans. She didn’t allow it to linger, shooing it away with the back of one hand.

“What I meant was, I still love you,” he said, “and I hope one day you can forgive me enough to remember that we used to share something special.”

“Something special…” She let the sentence die in her throat. It would have become forced laughter had she not swallowed it forthwith.

They settled back into the oppressive silence. Not talking was becoming old hat with them. Juliet had to keep telling herself that silence was conducive to healing. Although she couldn’t recall a single time in her life when one of her wounds had mended or festered based on the volume level of her surroundings.

“I miss before The Dog.”

“What?” She’d heard him fine, but didn’t understand the meaning. What was before the dog? Shouldn’t it have been, before Vicky?

“No, that’s not right.” He blinked and a tear rappelled down his cheek, landing in the corner of his square lips. “I mean, I miss what that time represented. I miss that time when you needed me. I think The Dog killed that need in you.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Before The Dog, you needed me… well, you needed something, anyway. Once you had that mutt to comfort you those nights I was away, you didn’t need me anymore.”

“Colt, that’s bull—”

“Is it? You were filling a hole.” His anger came rushing back. “Replacing me with a fucking dog!”

He slapped the steering wheel.

She jumped.

He was sobbing now.

“You didn’t need me. What was I supposed to do? She was there. There, goddammit. There!”

Juliet steeled herself against the new Colton, this Colton filled with undue rage. She would not let him make this about her failures, because she was not the one who’d failed.

“You fucked her because you wanted her. It had nothing to do with me.”

“Exactly.” He loosed a sigh that sounded full of relief. “It had nothing to do with you.”

She twisted in her seat, trying to find a position of power that didn’t exist inside a hatchback. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I didn’t sleep with her because I don’t love you. I didn’t sleep with her because you weren’t there for me, or because I was upset with you for not putting out enough, or whatever other excuse your brain has dug up. I fucked her because she was there, Julie. Vicky was available. I’m not proud of it, but there it is. I slept with Vicky because I was bored and you weren’t around.”

“And where exactly was I, Colt?”

“Most nights? With your dog.”

Rivers of ice ran down her back. Was he actually getting to her? Could he have possibly found the one argument that made his infidelity acceptable? She didn’t even like that fucking animal. Did he honestly believe she’d been too enamored with The Dog to give Colton the attention he deserved? Then again, she wasn’t sure Colton actually deserved her constant attention. He paid the bills, but she wasn’t some pre-suffragette kitchen-bound homemaker who knelt at the command of her mister. She was a free woman who returned what she received. Love for affection. Anger for rage. Silence for betrayal. That was the base of it, wasn’t it? It all came down to a betrayal, a breaking of vows. A promise destroyed under the weight of two people entwined on a couch, writhing against one another, moaning and groaning, and singing each other’s names.

All Juliet had wanted was to surprise Colton with a quiet dinner at home. She’d made the excuse that she had some errands to run, that she would be a few hours out about town, and he’d said that was fine because he needed to run to the office for something. Colton called Vicky to watch The Dog. Juliet had left the dog sitter and her husband alone, thinking Colton was going to leave as well.

His car being in the driveway when she returned caused Juliet’s stomach to roil. She tried to will the bad feeling away, assuring herself that he’d simply beaten her home. But she hadn’t been gone that long. He couldn’t have made it to the office and back in the time she’d been gone. Which left one possibility: he’d never left. Her subconscious suggesting subterfuge, Juliet parked across the street, knowing deep down something was amiss. She shuffled over the asphalt, feet never really leaving the street. Stumbled onto the grass and up the porch steps, her keys tinkling together, far too heavy in her extended hand. The knob swallowed her offering, turned, and the door floated inward. Sounds flooded over her, nasty words and expulsions of orgasmic glee. She slammed the door, silencing the cadence of the lovers on the couch. Juliet braced herself against the door frame of the entrance to the living room, lifting her head to see the naked bitch scrabbling for her clothes, and Colton, sweating and panting, trying to cover his massive erection. The thing bobbed under its own weight below a tuft of curly brown hair, looking intent on impaling someone. Or ripping them in two. Juliet saw it, dismembered and twitching, on the floor of the kitchen beside a bloody butcher’s knife. And that’s what made her move. Out through the front door, down the steps, across the grass, into the street, and behind the wheel. She screamed the entire way. Because she was scared. Because she was terrified of the violence she wanted to see done to her husband. To her beloved Colton. Tires squealed as she rocketed away. Sobs wracked her while she fled. The sky opened up and sent torrents down to wash it all away. To wash her away.

And to think, poor Colton felt neglected.

Now, Juliet gripped the sides of her seat, fighting back the building rage that threatened to bubble forth from her.

In a voice not much more than a whisper, she said, “Don’t… just don’t. Keep on and you will end up losing me, Colton… if you haven’t lost me already. If you try to make this about me again, I will get out at the next stop, walk to the nearest bus station, and take a Greyhound the rest of the way to my mother’s. So I suggest you stop talking, unless the subject is the weather or some inane sports trivia you seem to be so fond of. Are we understood?”

He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to. His face said he understood perfectly. Gone was the dejected, rejected hubby’s countenance. Now, Juliet looked upon a scolded child, one that knew what he’d done and figured he’d better accept his punishment before Mommy went and fetched the belt.

Their old friend Silence returned, and they crossed into Georgia smothered by his presence.

2.

Juliet first noticed the ’50s model Mercury coupe with the JXSAVES license plate fifty miles south of Columbus on I-75. Colton was coasting at a steady eighty-five miles per hour, weaving in and out of slower traffic, and cursing now and then at the latest errant douchebag he considered unfit for America’s highways and byways. They were making damn good time, and Juliet wasn’t sure if it was Colton’s normal impatience or his desire to be rid of her because of their last conversation.

The Mercury, black as pitch but streaked with reflections from their Subaru’s headlights, maintained the same speed as Colton, two car lengths ahead of them.

Colton slapped the steering wheel. “Speed up or slow down, man, make up your mind.”

“If he’s upsetting you that bad, why not just pass him in the slow lane?” Juliet asked, studying her recent manicure and pretending as if she was not interested in this dick-measuring contest by automobile.

“It’s the principle of the matter. He needs to get the hell out of my way.”

“We need to see about getting you some anger management classes when I get back.”

In the ensuing quiet, such an awkward thing it was, Juliet looked over at her husband. He would glance her way then back to the road, a glimmer of boyish hope in his eye and a smile crinkling the corners of his rectangle of a mouth. She hadn’t a clue why such an affect should be gracing his face.

“What?” she asked.

“You said, when you get back.”

“Don’t read too much into it, Colt. I’m just carrying on friendly conversation.”

“But you didn’t say if. You said when. That counts for something. It means you can still see us together.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Just drive.”

Colton turned on his blinker and drifted over into the slow lane. The Mercury did the same. Juliet sat up straighter in her seat and peered through the windshield at the teardrop-shaped coupe. The Subaru’s headlights bounced off tinted windows, making Juliet squint. Though the Mercury’s brake lights never came on, they were gaining on the dark car. She could now see the bumper sticker that had been placed an inch to the right of the vanity plate.

I DO NOT

The entire thing, plate and all, read: JXSAVES… I DO NOT

A chill molested her guts. Colton cursed under his breath and swerved into the fast lane once more. He gunned the V6 under the hood. They shot forward, leaving the Merc in their rearview.

“Did you catch his plate?” Juliet asked.

“Yep. I saw that sticker, too. Typical Bible Belt bullshit is all. He’ll be in our dust in no time.”

And Colton was right. Juliet watched as the Merc’s headlights dwindled, going from blazing orbs to subtle balls of medium-tone light, then down to pinpricks—like cat’s eyes seen in the darkness under a porch. The ice in her stomach subsided and her mind drifted away from JXSAVES… I DO NOT

Five minutes elapsed before Juliet glanced over at the speedometer. The Subaru was pushing a hundred.

She said, “You might want to calm it down before we get pulled over.”

“I’m keeping up with the flow of traffic.”

She surveyed the dark, empty highway rushing by outside her window.

“Colt, you are the flow of traffic.”

“Stop worrying so much. Everyone goes this fast out here. This isn’t my first radio.”

“Rodeo.”

“Huh?”

“Never mind. Just slow down. Please.”

Colton loosed an exaggerated sigh and the car rocked forward as he decelerated.

“Better?”

She read the speed on the dash: seventy-five. “Fine.”

“You remember,” Colton said, “how I used to drive out here every weekend to pick you up. Phenix City to Warner Robins, every Friday like clockwork, and I never once complained.”

“How chivalrous of you.”

“I’d just graduated, and I was going to be some big shot architect. You were still living with your mother, and working part-time at Target.”

“Don’t remind me.”

“For six months, I never once let you down. I even came that time I had strep. You were mad because you insisted I was going to get you sick. You wouldn’t kiss me. I’d come all that way, and you wouldn’t even hug me.”

“Do you blame me?” She decided to settle into the memories. It was a welcome reprieve from the dark times behind them.

“Naw,” he chuckled, “I don’t blame you one bit. I remember what you wore that night, too. A yellow turtleneck and a pair of acid wash jeans. I didn’t think they even made acid wash anything anymore. But there you were, a closet full of eighties relics. I’m surprised you didn’t have your bangs swooshed up, and held in place with a gallon of Aqua Net.”

“I was going to, but you were sick. You wouldn’t have been able to handle my full-on epicosity.”

“Epicosity? Is that a word?”

“It is now. Phone Merriam-Webster and tell ’em I have a last minute addition.”

“We went to see a movie that night. You remember what it was?”

“Do you?”

“Yep. Dawn of the Dead, the first remake in, like, forever, that didn’t suck monkey balls.”

Juliet allowed a smile to grace her lips. “You didn’t want to go because you loved the original so much. Kept on saying they were only going to ruin Romero’s classic. I told you no one could ever ruin the original because it would always be what it was. It’s frozen in time, golden… untouchable.”

Colton laughed. “I really didn’t want to see that movie.”

“But you went anyway. Sick and all. Even when I wouldn’t kiss you, you went.”

“I did it because I loved you.” His tone grew somber. “And I still love you, Julie. I would go to the end of the earth for you.”

His words brought back the anger. It had never really left, not really. It had only hid in the shadows cast by fond recollections.

“Just don’t sleep with anyone on the way there.”

“Julie, please, I’m trying here.”

“Then maybe you should stop trying.” And, just like that, they were back on track. “I know you’re hearkening back to the early days of The Colt and Julie Show, but I don’t need that right now. I need space. I need you to not be around me for a while. Because the more I think about the good times, the more I think about that skank scampering across the carpet, trying to find her damn clothes.”

“Can I do anything? I’m feeling kinda helpless here.”

“No, Colt, you did enough.”

Her mother’s house, only thirty miles away now, had never seemed so close yet so far away.

Juliet prayed for the first time since she was a fragile girl of ten in Sunday school.

God, shut him up before I throw myself from a speeding car.

The Mercury’s bumper flashed in her mind.

JXSAVES… I DO NOT

She could only imagine how many Americans had requested JCSAVES, or some variation of such, since the invention of the vanity plate. Had the Mercury’s driver decided on JX, using the X in place of a C? Juliet wondered if the X in JXSAVES stood for the Greek-to-English translation of Christ, like when someone used Xmas instead of Christmas. The common misconception was that the X was meant to take Jesus out of the holiday. She wondered where she’d come across that information. Perhaps that long ago day in Bible school, listening to the bright lady with the neon-pink hair (whose name evaded her at the moment) tell horror stories concerning the stoning of whores, and Christ’s crucifixion and subsequent zombie-like rise from the grave three days later. Sweet baby Hey-Zeus, church had been a scary place for a ten-year-old.

3.

The second time they ran across the Mercury with the JXSAVES plate was at a Waffle House in Columbus. Neither Colton nor she was hungry, but he needed coffee, and she had to pee.

The Merc had been parked at the back of the restaurant, beside the dumpster’s enclosure. White exhaust puffed from the tail pipe, and the headlights highlighted the steel doors that hid the trash area. As the Subaru’s lights washed over the driver’s side of the Merc, Juliet could see that even the side windows had been tinted. Given the creepy message made when the vanity plate and the bumper sticker were combined—

(JXSAVES… I DO NOT)

—Juliet doubted that a benevolent individual owned that relic of a bygone age. A time when a cup of java and a gallon of gas would have run you about the same price, and twenty bucks bought enough groceries for a fortnight. She kept expecting the Merc’s door to pop open and Satan to step forth into the parking lot—the asphalt smoldering under his cloven hooves. All those thoughts of Sunday school had her imagination running in religious circles. Her mind needed better company. She averted her eyes and focused on the empty booths inside the Waffle House as Colton pulled into a spot directly in front of the entrance.

Both hopped out. He held the door open for her then followed. Garth Brooks’s “Friends in Low Places” played over the speakers while the cook at the grill sang a high-pitched backup. The heavy-bosomed lady twirled a spatula like a drumstick as she crooned. She nodded at Juliet and winked at Colton.

“Down, boy,” Juliet chided.

“As if,” Colton said, before grabbing a stool at the bar, looking not unlike a cowboy saddling up to a saloon in preparation for a night of drunken abandon. He dropped a quick “Hello” on the cook as Juliet made for the restrooms.

As she passed the men’s room, the door swung open and a man stepped into her. His momentum pushed her into the opposite wall. Her arms came up in a defensive reaction.

“So sorry, child.” It was as he said this that she realized he was dressed like a priest. No… Not a priest, exactly. His slacks and shirt were a deep crimson, but the requisite white clerical collar was unmistakable.

She scanned his face; his coal-colored eyes couldn’t actually be black… could they? No. Just a deep (hell-deep?) brown. Had to be. His silver hair came to a widow’s peak that could surely have pierced stone. Ruby cheeks offset a bloodless face, making him look like a corpse all made up and ready for his wake. His thin, purple lips arched perpetually downward, and, when he smiled at her, stretched into a flat line you could balance a level on.

“Jesus saves…” she heard herself mutter.

He smiled, “…and I do not.”

She pointed down the short hallway. “I’m… I have to piss.” As unladylike as her statement was, it burst from her nonetheless.

“Do wash your hands afterward, young lady. Cleanliness is next to godliness. I suggest running the water before using the commode, though, as the water takes a while to warm up. Have a good night.”

A silly need to ask him what his ominous “I do not” meant caught in her throat and she coughed.

Forget that shit, she thought as she retreated down the cramped hallway to the ladies’ room.

She rushed into the first of two stalls, shoved the door in, spun, and slammed it closed. She yanked the chrome lever into the clasp and backed up until the back of her jean-clad legs bumped into the lip of the toilet. Her heart, a wild animal in her chest, scrabbled at her ribs. It was hard to breathe. A cloying antiseptic odor hung in the air. She filled her lungs to the point of bursting with that smell. She tasted cigarettes, and was not surprised to see a fine, gray haze clinging to the ceiling above the cubicles.

In the stall beside her, someone coughed.

A raspy female voice, sounding an awful lot like Kathleen Turner with throat cancer, said, “I’ll be done in a minute.”

“No rush,” Juliet managed.

She undid her button-down fly and sat on the cold porcelain. She made water like a busted fire hydrant.

“They don’t let us have a smoke break,” Deathbed Kathleen Turner said.

This isn’t happening, Juliet thought. I am not having a conversation with some unseen soul while I’m emptying my bladder.

Obviously DKT hadn’t gotten that memo, for she continued with, “Takin’ a crap’s the only time I get to have a butt.”

“That’s… unfortunate,” said Juliet, and instantly regretted it.

“Don’t worry, though. I wash up real good ’fore goin’ back to work. Say, where you headin’? No one comes in here—” DKT paused and made a sucking sound Juliet assumed was her taking another puff off her cancer stick, “—at this time ah night unless they’s travelin’.”

Do not answer. Ignore her.

Juliet heeded her inner voice’s advice. Instead of playing twenty questions with DKT, Juliet wiped, flushed, and stood up.

“You okay in there?”

Quietly, Juliet undid the chrome latch.

“Eh, didja have a stroke or somethin’?”

As she pulled the door inward, the hinge squeaked. She cussed it, her lips moving but not adding sound to the expletive.

“Fine, then. I’s just makin’ conversation. Sheesh…”

A half-smoked cigarette cartwheeled over DKT’s stall door and landed in the sink. Juliet wanted to wash her hands, badly—

(Cleanliness is next to godliness)

—but she didn’t want to spend another minute in this carnival sideshow, with attractions like red priests and Kathleen Turner impersonators.

When she stepped back into the hall, she caught a glimpse of Colton as he disappeared into the men’s room. She quick-stepped in that direction, hugging the wall, and backed into the restroom after him.

When she faced him, Colton already had his fly down and his pelvis thrust into the urinal.

He craned his neck to look at her. “Whoa, what’s wrong with you?”

“Weird, weird, weirdy-type people.” Her heart continued to race. She couldn’t remember if it had calmed in between the red priest and Deathbed Kathleen Turner, but she didn’t think so.

Now, standing in the men’s room of a Waffle House and watching her hubby piss into a wall, she began to laugh. Whether her sudden joviality was a nervous outburst, the realization that a chatty restaurant employee on an illegitimate smoke break was nothing to be worried about, or the insanity of the situation truly setting in, she didn’t know.

“You’re the only weirdo I’m seeing right now. Get out of here before some stranger comes walking in. We guys are infamous for whipping out our hoses before we get to the fire.”

“Nope. Nu-huh. I’m bound to stumble upon Laurel and Hardy running away from the Wolfman out there.”

“What’s gotten into you?” He shook off, flushed, and went to the sink—

(Cleanliness is next to godliness)

—to wash his hands.

Juliet felt faint. The way her pulse was throbbing in her temples, her blood pressure had to be through the roof.

You’ve gone crazy. Deathbed Kathleen Turner was nothing to worry about, and neither was that priest. You’re acting foolish. This situation with Colton’s infidelity has you mistrusting people and jumping at shadows.

“Oh,” Colton said, meeting her eyes in the mirror, “did you see that dude in the priest getup? Is that what freaked you out? I think he’s the one driving the Mercury I passed earlier.”

They had passed the Merc with the vanity plate, hadn’t they? Juliet fought to remember whether or not the car had overtaken them again. The interstate had been empty, though, and she would have recalled the return of the red priest, if he was the Merc’s driver after all.

JXSAVES… I DO NOT

Colton finished washing his hands and faced her. “You look like shit. You feel all right?”

“Are you done? Can we leave?”

“Lemme tell the lady to put my coffee in a to-go cup, and, sure, we can go.”

“Hurry up.”

“She had to put on a new pot. It might be a—”

“Just hurry. Please.”

Juliet spun on her heel and exited the men’s room. As she passed the booths and then the bar/grill area, she noticed the small-framed, greasy-looking woman who had joined the big-breasted cook behind the counter. The new lady flashed Juliet a yellow smile and waggled nicotine-stained fingers at her as Juliet pushed through the exit. As the door swung shut, she thought she heard DKT call her a bitch.

The Mercury was nowhere to be found. And neither was the red priest. She sighed in relief as she popped open her door and slid back into the passenger seat of the Subaru.

Five minutes passed before Colton, blowing into the suck-hole of his coffee cup, rejoined her in the car.

“Ready?” He shot her a smile through the steam rising from the Styrofoam mug.

“Very funny. Drive. Now.”

“I be honking, Miss Daisy.”

“Shut up. That’s racist.”

“Really?” Colton started the engine. “I had no idea. I’ll have to write my congressman to have that film stricken from public record.”

She ignored him. He might have thought she’d momentarily misplaced the memory of his indiscretions, but they were still in the forefront of her mind, only now they were accompanied by a red priest piloting a black Mercury.

JXSAVES…

And I do not.

4.

The accident occurred on Highway 96, just outside of Fort Valley, Georgia, at two-fifty-three in the morning, between mile marker eight and a cross bearing the name of a girl who’d been killed by a drunk driver. A layer of thick fog covered the road, and a light drizzle made windshield wipers a necessary evil. The rubber smeared the mist instead of removing it, but to go without the wipers was to be blind, eaten up by an all-consuming gray scale maw. Colton left them squeaking.

Juliet had her hand up, in the middle of a diatribe about something she would not remember later, when she saw the pinpricks of the headlights coming from the opposite direction. A grass median separated the eastbound lane from the westbound, and it was that fact that caused Juliet to pause. This stretch of Highway 96 was bolt straight for a good ten miles, curving only once, somewhere in the middle, and they’d already passed that. The pinpricks expanded quickly, as if someone were throwing two flashlight-tipped spears directly at her. Colton raised his arm, presumably to point at the oddity, and his lips set to work, forming words that he never had the chance to birth.

The bodiless lights broke eye contact and seemed to look to their left. The fog acted as if it were a curtain slowly being pulled away to reveal the surprise waiting onstage. That’s when Juliet first saw the truck careening toward them, sideways, and the wide-eyed teenager clinging to the railing on the bed. The boy was redheaded and covered in freckles. She saw all this in terribly high definition because the Subaru was colliding with the truck’s passenger side rear panel and the teen was flying out of the bed, toward the windshield. The teen’s face connected with the upper right corner of the windshield as Juliet’s seatbelt caught, slinging her forward.

The rest was a blur. When they finally came to a rest, Juliet noticed someone had painted a red bunny in the upper corner of her vision. She glanced up, and saw that the painting was dripping. The red bunny was hurt. It was all hurt. Nothing but hurt. She hurt. Her chest was on fire. No, not just her chest. A column of flame had been set down upon her—across her abdomen, between her breasts, up across her right collarbone. Even though her agony was a powerful drug, willing her to run away from the world, that red bunny seemed a more pressing issue. The painter had been important. Hadn’t he? A ginger teen with freckles as big as manhole covers flickered across her eyes, and Juliet was able to match his face with the shape of the bunny. Because it wasn’t a bunny. My God, it’s not a fucking bunny.

“Colton?” she rasped, as she pulled the seat belt away from her abraded chest. “Colt?”

Her neck worked on a rusty ball bearing, swiveling and creaking with solid effort. She could smell antifreeze and gasoline now. Neither odor bothered her; she simply noted them.

Colton’s face rested in a pillow made of airbag. She watched her hand move of its own accord, pushing down the material, trying to find her husband’s face. Colton groaned as she unmasked him.

“Wha-happen?” He coughed, sending up a white cloud of what looked like flour.

“We hit someone.” She said it just like that. Not, that they’d hit something, but someone. The ginger’s face had painted that red bunny in her periphery, she was sure of it.

Airbag. Why hadn’t the airbag saved her from her seat belt or, at the very least, the vision of the ginger flying toward her? Her eyes focused on the key slot on the dash beside the radio. Three words hovered above the slot: Airbag On/Off. The nail of her index finger slid into the opening, and she picked at it absently. The slot had been lined up with Off. But why? Why would Colton turn off the passenger side airbag?

“Turn that thing off,” a younger version of Juliet had said once upon a time. “Have you seen what those things do to people’s faces? They peel them. Airbags peel people’s faces like oranges.”

Colton had laughed. Why had he thought her face being scalped was an amusing concept?

“Sure thing,” he’d said, not entirely done laughing. “Because you’d rather be dead than disfigured. Good job, honey. Way to be shallow.”

But he’d done as she’d asked. That meant something, hadn’t it?

Right now it meant fuck all, because she was alive, not disfigured in the least, and there was a bloody bunny lurking in the corner of her vision. All these things were far more important than Colton’s acquiescence to her shallow pleas.

Colton came fully awake. At first, his face was placid, seemingly drunk, as it rose from the airbag. Then he was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. And screaming his head off.

Why was he screaming?

His strained voice finally formed words. “My legs!”

She pushed the airbag away to reveal the messy amalgamation of plastic and flesh and steel and bone underneath. Was that the engine resting between Colt’s legs?

Oh, Juliet thought, that’s not pretty. Fat lot of good that airbag did.

She should have been more concerned. Somewhere in the depths of her mind, she knew this, but was still punch-drunk from the accident. Not really all there, was she? No. Not at all. For some reason, that bunny still bothered her. Sure, Colton screamed. He wailed and wailed, but that bunny was louder. Where had the artist gotten off to?

Juliet shoved her door open, not surprised in the least when it gave no resistance. After all, the majority of the damage had been on Colton’s side. It was he who’d been trapped, not her. She spilled out into grass, her hands and jeans becoming instantly dew-damp. Crawled two feet forward before pushing herself up. Shuffled out into the road. Spun languidly, assessing the scene.

The truck with the smashed in rear panel lay right-side-up in the culvert just beyond the breakdown lane. A vaguely human shape was hunched over behind the steering wheel.

The Subaru sat at an angle in the median. The front of the car was nonexistent, looking like a cab-over big rig.

No, she thought, that’s not right. It looks like an accordion that’s been put away for the night. Collapsed. It looks collapsed.

Like the red bunny before it, something new sat in the corner of her eye. This time, to her left. She turned, numb all over.

The ginger was approaching, head down, shuffling like—

Dawn of the Dead. Colt hadn’t wanted to see it. He had strep. I wouldn’t kiss him.

—a drunk after last call.

“Hey,” she said, without much tone to her voice at all. “You… you all right?”

The ginger stumbled forward, went sprawling, and pushed himself back to his feet. As he rose so did his head, and Juliet was allowed to look upon his face. Or what was left of it.

The entire left side of his face had been crushed in; it looked as if he’d been punched with a flatiron. Juliet recalled the red bunny. Didn’t the ginger’s squashed face resemble that strange ruddy hare in the backward way a stamp will look before being dipped in ink? She thought so.

The ginger reached for her, and she saw that two of the fingers on his right hand had been torn off—the pinkie and ring finger. She shuddered and was sick on the pavement. Wiping her gorge from her mouth, she glanced back up at the shuffling dead man. But he wasn’t dead. Dead men don’t bleed. And this poor boy was still bleeding. Fat drops of crimson spilled out of the mangled nubs where his fingers used to be and splashed down onto the street.

The teenager glowed. Brilliant light enveloped him. Juliet tried to step right, to get a better look at the source of the illumination behind him, but stumbled and went to her knees. She relaxed back on her haunches, watching in stunned disbelief as the Mercury pulled to a stop behind the boy with the shattered face. The red priest stepped out into the fog, and the moisture in the air seemed to part before him, giving him free passage to the teenager.

“Help,” Juliet asked quite calmly. “Help us.”

“Jesus saves,” the red priest said. “I do not.”

And Juliet had one thought before she passed out. A rational thought. A thought so unlike the ones she’d had up until then that it seemed ludicrous. That thought was: Why is he smiling?

5.

The first thing she felt upon waking was a piercing cold. Her arms were above her head, and her shoulders ached, as if she’d been sleeping in that position for some time. But she was upright, not stretched out on her bed, at home. A chilly wind blew against her exposed midriff and she shuddered under its touch. She looked down, finding that she still had on her blue blouse, but that it had pulled up because of her posture. She tried to reach for the fabric, to pull it back down, but realized she couldn’t feel her hands. Glancing up, she screamed.

Everything came rushing back in a tidal wave of reality. The accident. The engine in Colton’s lap. That poor teenager with a face like a kicked-in watermelon. The Mercury—

JXSAVES… I DO NOT

—and the red priest. Her asking for help. Him smiling.

After all that tragedy, someone had chained her to a post. Her hands had fallen asleep because they weren’t receiving circulation from the wrists. The cuffs were cutting off the supply of blood. They weren’t really cuffs, though, not really. More like shackles. The kind of things they used to use on witches before they burned them at the stake.

She smelled smoke.

Ten feet in front of her, a hunched figure worshipped at a campfire, his hands clasped together over the body of the teenager with the pushed-in kisser. He’s praying for him to make it, Juliet thought. She was well aware of how crazy that sounded.

A thick wood surrounded her, seemed to press in from all sides. To her left, a road. The boughs of the trees came together over the damp red clay, creating a corridor. At the end of that tunnel was a light so beautiful and welcoming that Juliet thought she would cry. If she weren’t already crying, that was. Deep sobs racked her body, and it was the weakness of her knees that told her she was standing. Her feet burned, though. They burned so badly it felt as if she stood over an open flame.

A witch set to burn over a bonfire repeated in her mind, and she glanced down. Her knees were bent and in her line of sight. She couldn’t see her feet. She tried to move them to the right, then the left, but they wouldn’t do as she told them. Finally, her knees parted, and she stared down between bare, milky thighs. She’d lost her pants, but that fact barely registered. At first the nails in her feet didn’t compute as such. The pain ebbed the more she gawked at the aluminum heads, ten in all, gazing back at her. She knew how many nail heads there were because she counted. Somehow, knowing how many had been driven into her feet helped ease her agony. The respite from the burning in her feet only lasted half a minute or so, before she remembered her aching shoulders and the shackles holding her arms above her head.

So many things to focus on, so little time.

“Why…” she blubbered, but her voice was barely audible, even to herself. The second time, she shrieked, “WHY?”

“Shhhh…” the red priest hissed. “I’m sssspeaking with the Lord about our fallen brother.”

“LET ME DOWN!” She sounded like a weak horror movie cliché, one of those useless bitches that tumble and fall on thin air with the killer right behind them. She hated the sound of that weakness. Hated herself for making it.

“You’ll be allowed to leave,” the red priest said. “Shortly.”

Juliet jerked her limp arms forward, expecting resistance but getting none, and began to tilt out over the ground below. Everything seemed to happen so slowly that she had time to think about the nails, those ten horrible nail heads and what they would do to her precious, fragile feet. She continued to drop, a scream vibrating her throat and painfully thrumming in her head. Then the nails caught. They tore, and she felt her feet coming apart, splitting, cleaving in two. The pain was transcendent. The pain was God. A fiery, torturous agony crippled every muscle in her body, and she slapped down, cheek first, onto the grassy clearing where she’d been trussed up like a biblical whore awaiting the first thrown stone. She lay there for some time, twitching and rolling feebly from side to side, bawling. Through her tears, she could see her hands out in front of her, the shackles still clasped around her wrists, the chain stretching out into the grass, a wooden peg impaling one link. Needing to take her mind off her cloven feet, she craned her neck and gazed up at the post. An empty notch, which had been drilled into the wood a foot below the top, stared down at her like some mocking cyclops. Two feet above the ground were the nails. Ten heads glistening with gore in the firelight, clumps of pink and purple flesh still clinging to the wood.

Is that a toe?

Juliet’s anguished cry exploded from her chest.

Without thought, she pushed herself to her knees then attempted to climb to her feet. Something spread beneath her, like toes with no webbing stretching too wide. A wave of white hot needles pressed into her calves, pierced her thigh muscles, and threw her screaming to the grass.

She flipped onto her back, howling her maladies to the canopy of gnarled tree branches overhead. She screeched, wailed, hollered, erupted, to anyone who’d listen. But, deep down, Juliet knew that the red priest was her only audience.

“That was foolish.” His voice was somber, so low that Juliet could barely hear him over her own echoing shrieks.

“FUCK YOU!”

“So unladylike. I’ll let this weakness go, but I doubt He will.”

Juliet didn’t care who He was, but could hear the inflection the priest put on the title, capitalized with emphasis. Her mind even highlighted the word and threw curses laced with middle fingers at it. If it were God the red priest spoke of, then God be damned. It’s not like God had helped her out. He’d let her pull that peg from the post and tear her feet all to shit. In regards to the titular He, God could take a flying fuck on a rolling doughnut in a field full of dandelions fertilized by baby tears for all the fucks given by her.

“I guess I’ll leave you two alone. Oh, and I suggest you crawl.”

Even over her pain-filled mumbling, Juliet heard the red priest’s soles squelching along as he left by way of the road domed by branches.

Now, it was only her. Well, her and a young man’s corpse. But he was dead, and dead men carry no conversations.

And, as the pain took over, and Juliet melted into the grass surrounding her, Colton flitted into her mind. That engine in his lap looked awfully dangerous. He might want to do something about that. She wondered if they’d ever hold another conversation.

6.

A shy young man in his last year of college, with dreams of building skyscrapers, and a young lady with a mind for teaching, converse in front of a fire at a rather banal Christmas party thrown by a mutual friend. This friend, William Beaumont, has recently moved to Mobile to attend college at Faulkner. Juliet has eyes for this young, wannabe doctor. Has eyes for his future success as well as his rumored prowess in the bedroom. Her bestie, Natalie, has been to the promised land before—twice—and was saved. So, why is it that she’s talking to this geekish boy with dirty blond hair, chubby cheeks, and a granite slab for a nose? He’s interesting. Too captivating for her to pull away from. What is this magic, she thinks, twinkling in his cinnamon eyes? What kind of dark sorcery has he cast upon her?

Across the room and through the crowd, a bright woman is approaching. This woman looks like Julie sounds like her, too. The doppelganger is happy. Maybe happier than Juliet-by-the-Fire. This twin, this reflection of her, moves through the party, ignoring the geek by the fireplace. Juliet-by-the-Fire glances back to the architect-in-training and sees that he’s no longer interested in her. He wants the Bright Julie. Because the Bright Julie doesn’t hold grudges. She looks past symptoms and delves to the heart of what-ails-ya. And the problem is her—Juliet-by-the-fire. Bright Julie can’t have the geek. He’s the property of Juliet-by-the-fire. And she’s his. But he’s already getting up. And the fire at her back is too hot. It’s burning her. Burning… burned… burnt…

7.

Juliet woke with a snap, screaming and smoking. Her feet forgotten for the moment, she rolled back and forth, trying to put out the flames. Lying on her smoldering back, she dealt with the last embers by smothering them beneath her. Other than a sensitive spot or two, she surmised she’d missed the worst of it by waking in time. Somehow, she’d gotten too close to the fire. Or she’d been pushed.

Colton always told her how soundly she slept. How she didn’t toss and turn and roll around like the women his buddies had married. She didn’t snore either, which Colton marked down as another blessing bestowed by the relationship gods. This didn’t mean, of course, that she was incapable of movement while asleep, only that Colton had never experienced it.

Colton…

No, she couldn’t think of him right now. She had to get moving. Find a way—

(I suggest you crawl)

—out of this mess.

Biting her lip until it bled, she managed to roll over onto her knees. Her remaining toes grazed the ground, sending bolts of electricity up her hips and into her back. Moving on her knees wasn’t going to work. The action caused hamstrings to seize because she had to try and hold her feet out of the grass and clay. She dropped to her belly and army-crawled, using her forearms to progress, holding her damaged feet up by her butt. She had to round the entirety of the campfire before the domed trail came back into view. That brilliant white light still shone at the end, like a beacon meant to keep her from running ashore. The start of the tunnel was, at her best guess, thirty to forty feet away. The space between looked forever long, but the stretch of road beyond seemed longer by an eternity. How far was she from help? Would anyone be at the light when she got there? Where was she? What was the light? And, furthermore, was she headed toward more danger?

That last thought stalled her engines, and she lay there, prone on the cold clay, breathing slowly, contemplating whether or not she really wanted to go near that light. It looked like salvation, but that could all be a less-than-subtle ruse. Hadn’t the red priest wanted her to leave the safety (maybe) of the campfire? Hadn’t he wanted her to (suggested she) crawl? What other way could she go?

She glanced back over her shoulder, saw the post with the bloody, fleshy nails; the smoking campfire giving up its heat to the heavens; dark shadows, cast by the flames, flickering through the tree line, looking lithe and alive. But it was what she didn’t see that bothered her. What she didn’t see caused her heart to jam down on the accelerator, ramping its speed up until it seemed the speedometer would go full circle back to zero.

Where the holy fuck is the boy?

The teenager with the squashed-in face was tardy from class, that little shit. Maybe he got a slip home. Perhaps he had to see a nurse. After all, his face wasn’t going to put itself back together.

Reality crashed against the rocks of Juliet’s mind, and she focused even harder on those lithe shadows dancing at the tree line. Her eyes drifted down, down to the scrub, where the clearing met the woods, and the boy’s crooked sneaker as it was pulled into the bush.

There was something in the trees. And it was chewing.

No. That’s not it at all. What you’re hearing is the snap, crackle, pop of the campfire. It does sound a lot like chewing, doesn’t it? Ha! It sure does. Just like someone sloppily tearing meat from bone and gnaw-gnaw-gnawing away with their jaws jacking. How rude! To think their mothers didn’t teach them to chew with their mouths closed. Someone should say something to them…

Snap.

Crackle.

Pop.

Growl.

Now, campfires don’t growl, do they? They roar, they blaze, sometimes, they even fart, but they most certainly do not growl. Not like a hungry wolf. But it didn’t really sound like a wolf, did it? No. It sounded like a… like a… Like something you’ve never heard before. It sounds hungry, that growl does. Like, maybe, the teenager won’t satiate it. Like, perhaps, it’ll still be hungry even after it’s picked its teeth clean on that boy’s bones. Then what? Then it’s coming after you, Juliet. And—

(I suggest you crawl)

—you better dip out with your prow out. Make like a virgin on prom night, and split. Because its coming, Julie. And it’s still hungry.

Juliet shot both arms out, sank her fingers, knuckle-deep, into the soft clay, and dragged herself toward the tunnel made of branches. Toward that beautiful light. Toward salvation. Toward not being fucking eaten.

She pulled, ripping a clot of red earth from the ground. It crumbled away at the sides, but what was left in her palm turned into a compressed putty of sorts. She tossed it over her shoulder then grabbed for another. If the thing in the woods moved slower than a crippled snail, Juliet might get away. But at this rate, a determined sloth could have caught her.

Snap, crackle, pop went—

(the monster)

—the fire, and Juliet threw another arm out, intent on escaping. Not wanting to know whether or not what she heard was truly the blaze or something else.

But that sneaker… You saw that boy’s sneaker being pulled into the bush. You saw it disappear. You saw it… devoured.

8.

Her every movement was excruciating. Her remaining toes would dip down to touch the clay and snaps of heat lightning would shoot from her shattered feet up through her hips and into her back. She’d writhe until the wave subsided then start anew. The shackles around her wrist were cumbersome but didn’t affect her progress.

The thing in the woods seemed preoccupied with its meal. It might not even know Juliet was crawling away. Could it see her beyond the fire? She hoped not.

Right hand. Fistful of clay. Pull.

Left. Dig. Tug.

Even when her feet didn’t scrape the ground, a steady inferno sizzled her soles, as if she were walking on coals. The pain was like nothing else she’d ever experienced. She kept trying to tell herself that her body was built for pain, had been constructed to birth a child, that this pain was nothing.

Imagine trying to push something the size of a watermelon out of something the size of a lemon. Now get a move on, wimp!

This inner-cheerleader’s voice reminded Juliet of Colton, but not entirely. There was a bit of her in there, too. A stronger, bassier version of Juliet Harryhousen, formerly Juliet Langenthrope, daughter of Bethany and Martin Langenthrope, Christian missionaries. Martin had died in Zimbabwe after eating spoiled yams. The can had been swollen—a sure sign of botulism. But they’d been in the bush for three days without food, after being abandoned by their guides because of militia activities. Martin hadn’t been able to take it any longer. By the time Bethany found Martin, the can lay empty between his legs. “I knew he was dead then,” Bethany had told Juliet. “It was nine hours later they found us, but his stomach was already beginning to swell. Stupid man. Stupid, selfish, stupid man…” Bethany had collapsed into sobs at that point, and twenty-year-old Juliet could only sit next to her and rub her back.

Daddy didn’t make it. But you will. You’ll crawl to the end of that tunnel made of trees, and you’ll reach that light. Then, you’ll find help. In fact, do you hear that? Do you hear what I hear?

Juliet propped herself up on her elbows and went completely silent. Far off, she could hear the ebbing growl of an engine.

The light ahead could very well be a streetlight, Juliet thought. A streetlight that’s just out of sight, shining down on the exit/entrance to this road. It seems so bright because it’s so dark in here, under this canopy of trees.

Her mind made a hard U-turn, veering away from the motor sounds coming from beyond the light at the end of the tunnel.

What time is it?

She recalled the time on the Subaru’s display, just before the accident—2:53 in the morning. Though she had no idea how long she had been unconscious, she assumed it had been some time, more than an hour at least. And how long had she been crawling? Half an hour? An hour?

More like an eternity.

Truth was she’d only been yanking herself across this clearing for a little more than ten minutes. She hadn’t even reached the corridor of trees. That fact lurked in the back of her mind, but she pushed it further down, labeling it a fallacy.

Ten minutes? Surely, you jest.

Only ten, my dear Julie. And stop calling me Shirley.

She barked laughter, a throaty sound full of spit. She regretted losing even that much saliva; a thirst was growing in her that she tried her best to ignore.

It’s all that blood you’re losing. Better focus on that car engine, and forget about a Dasani break.

What Juliet had first assumed was the sound of a car moving away couldn’t have been that at all. She still heard it; the low, steady hum of a car engine. It dissipated every few seconds then grew loud once again. She found this sound familiar, but couldn’t put her finger on it. She closed her eyes and pictured the Subaru. She saw Colton, smiling behind the wheel, he waved at her. Juliet waved back. Vicky the dog sitter pulled her head out of Colton’s lap and into view, wiping at the corners of her lips. The home-wrecker waved. Juliet responded with a middle finger as the Subaru clicked and hummed. Idling.

Idling!

The car at the end of the road was sitting there, running. That was what she heard, the rise and fall of engine sounds as the motor idled. Maybe if she screamed, and screamed loud enough…

“Help me…” she croaked. Her dry throat clicked painfully. Juliet sucked on her tongue, whishing it around, collecting as much spit as she could muster, and then swallowed.

“HELP ME!”

Much better. She repeated those two words a total of six times before her throat would have no more of it. Her voice retreated like a scared animal. No matter how hard she tried, the most she could produce was a mouse-like squeak. Could someone break their voice? She thought she had.

Her only choice—

(I suggest you crawl)

—was to carry on dragging her ass across the ground.

Her fingernails, caked with clay and throbbing, refused to dig anymore. Juliet pressed up on her elbows and army-crawled some more. Her legs seemed to have gained weight, especially from the knees down, and holding her feet up became an impossible chore. Her lower legs flopped down, striking the clay with such ferocity that her entire body convulsed. Juliet spat and shrieked, like a cat with its tail in a mousetrap, flopping from side to side. Her hands made to reach for her legs, but she willed against them. She wouldn’t even allow herself to look upon her ripped and crippled feet, didn’t want to know the extent of the damage. Though her mind conjured a rather nasty image, she refused to give credence to her thoughts by verifying the atrocity below.

When the pain became bearable again, Juliet used her elbows like climbing hooks. She laid her cheek against the cold clay, jabbed her elbows into the ground, and shoved up and forward. The resulting froggish leap landed her over a foot farther along than she had been. She judged this to be true because her left breast now rested in one of the last holes she’d dug with her tired hands.

When her subconscious registered the fact that she could no longer hear the thing in the woods gnaw-gnaw-gnawing on the teenager, her conscious mind told Mr. Subconscious to go fuck himself. She didn’t want to think about that right now. Being devoured by some corpse-ravaging monstrosity was last on her to-do list, which she treated like Colton’s Honey-Do Sheet—meaning, if it ever crossed her mind at all, it’d be a cold day in Hades.

Now if she could ignore the sensation of her feet being continuously dipped in concentrated acid she might make it out of this nightmare.

She creaked out another lackluster “Help me,” to whoever would listen, before elbow-launching forward again. This time she cracked her chin against the soft-packed ground and bit her tongue. The taste of pennies rolled around inside her mouth. She’d crushed her boobs, too, which was only slightly less agonizing than the lacerated tongue.

She hauled herself onto her elbows again. Not wanting to risk breaking a rib or cracking her sternum, she eased up, pushed forward, and rolled onto her forearms.

There, that’s better.

Her right elbow tore open as she moved from the clearing to the road. The fresh wound leaked thick blood onto the clay and spread, like ink on glass. Whimpering, Juliet rolled to her side and fingered the wound. It wasn’t more than an inch long and not too deep, but it bled as if she’d hit an artery. Superficial wounds always bleed the worst, she recalled reading in one magazine or another.

Juliet rested. Whether or not her weakness and lack of motivation stemmed from blood loss, she couldn’t have said, and didn’t really care, either. The world had become a blurred spectacle of muddy white light. It pulsed and thrummed. And behind it all, the wax and wane of someone’s car engine, set to idle, mocking her, driving her hazy mind mad with frustration.

“Come down here and get me or go the fuck away, you lousy shit,” Juliet croaked. She flopped over onto her back and laid her head back on the cool earth. She tried to find the stars through the boughs above, or maybe the first hint of approaching dawn seeping through the branches. Neither greeted her. The space between the entwined branches was dark; an unceasing, uncaring blackness. A void. Her hopes died there.

“Fuuuuuuuuuuck!” she wailed, drumming the balls of her fists at her sides. “I can’t die like this!”

Her head lolled to the side as she wept, wallowing in her own weakness. Blissfully aware that she no longer felt her split feet and sure that cold death now circulated through her veins instead of warm, life-sustaining blood, Juliet closed her eyes and prayed for the end.

“Just don’t lemme suffer, okay?” she asked God in a small, pitiful voice. “Lemme fall asleep and not wake up. Let it be like that”—her voice hitched with emotion—“okay, God? Okay? Please?”

The idling engine revved. Juliet heard the transmission shift with a clunk, and then tires crunching gravel.

They (who?) were coming. Juliet realized this in the middle of an inhalation of air. She choked on that breath as she rolled over and pushed up on her hands. A black shape blocked the lower half of the ball of light pouring in from the end of the tunnel of trees. No headlights. Not that they were needed, what with the grand illumination behind the wide-bodied car. The vehicle rolled along slowly, as if it still only idled, and a spike of fear drove into the space between Juliet’s breasts.

“It’s him,” she said, with the utmost certainty, not really seeing him but quite clearly picturing the red priest grinning over the Merc’s steering wheel.

The evil son of a bitch is coming back to see if I’m still alive. How nice of him. I wish I had a .357 Magnum and a shovel with which to properly thank him for being so attentive.

Another voice, this one sounding a lot like the husband she’d lost track of, entered her thoughts. Julie? Julie, babe? You think you might wanna hide? Maybe he’s coming back to finish what he started, and you shouldn’t be around to find out how he plans on doing that.

Hide? Hide where?

The scrub.

But there’s something bad in there.

You don’t know if it’s real. You know the red priest is real. Really real.

But the sneaker—

Fuck the sneaker, Julie. Get your ass into the scrub!

Before another bit of argumentative chatter could vomit forth, she felt herself rolling to the side, her feet slapping about like wet flippers. There was only a soft glow of pain this time, just enough to let her know it was there, and she had a fleeting thought that, if she made it out of this ordeal alive, she’d have a closet full of shoes she’d never get to wear again.

Juliet came to rest in a pile of leaves at the edge of the tree line. She hauled herself with tired hands through two bushes and into the woods she’d previously been too terrified to enter. She hid behind thick shrubbery, head propped on her uninjured elbow.

She had no idea if the red priest had seen her escape into the trees. Minutes passed like hours. Juliet found that, at some point, she’d started counting, and was now up to three-hundred-fifty. She stopped her tallying of the seconds and held her breath, listening for the telltale crunch and hum of trundling tires. She reached out, drew a thicket of tightly woven twigs apart, and witnessed the Mercury’s languid passing. The car couldn’t have been going any more than two or three miles per hour. She let out a blast of pent-up oxygen.

The red priest hadn’t seen her. Or at least Juliet assumed as much. If he had, she’d already be dead. Of that she was sure.

Juliet lay prostrate, her chest rising and falling with shallow breaths.

A few feet to her right, the dead teenager with the half-crushed-in face glanced around the trunk of a tree, waved, and disappeared again. Like a child playing peekaboo.

9.

Juliet pressed her hands down at her sides and edged back, dragging her legs out in front of her. She backed into a tree and sat trembling against its rough bark. She buried her feet in leaves so she wouldn’t have to see them.

Any number of things could have peeked around that tree trunk and scared Juliet less than the cold terror she felt now. There was no mistaking the dead ginger for a hallucination. He was there. This was true. But something about him didn’t seem right. His head lolled to one side, and even though his arm was extended and flopping around in a “Hello there!” fashion, his wrist was limp. Actually, everything about him looked limp. Even zombies had a bit of stability to them, didn’t they?

Actually, Julie, babe, zomb-zombs don’t exist. Dawn of the Dead is a piece of fiction, not a documentary.

“Then what’s that?” she asked. Her own words startled her, and she flattened against the tree, glancing left to right to find the source of the voice.

The dead teenager leaned out from the trunk a little more and waggled his head at her.

Then, he spoke.

“Boogedy boo!”

Juliet gasped, then frowned. “The fuck?”

She said this because the dead teen hadn’t truly spoken. Its purple lips hadn’t moved. The crooked jaw didn’t even flex. He hung there, jutting from the trunk, as animated as a sack of laundry. And that’s when she saw the filthy fingernails. Dirty fingers wrapped around the wrist supported the teen’s floppy hand. Soot-blackened digits were also dug in around the back of the neck. Someone was using the boy’s corpse like a puppet. Someone with hands. Someone human.

Now a new problem came to light. Who was she more scared of? The red priest or the unseen puppeteer? The devilish clergymen who’d kidnapped and nailed her to a post out in the woods or the sick Twinkie who had turned a dead teenager into a Muppet? This Sunday, Sunday, SUNDAY! at the Tree Dome: Evil Fuck versus Morbid Comedian! GETCHER TIGGIDS!

“Boogedy boo!” the macabre ventriloquist repeated. The dead teen was made to waggle his head at her again.

Juliet shuddered in disgust rather than terror. Her brain made the illogical conclusion that, because this asshole had a sense of humor, albeit a twisted one, he didn’t mean her any real harm. Sure, his actions disturbed her, but he wasn’t actively trying to kill her, as she assumed the red priest intended.

Had the chewing she’d heard really been fire sounds? Perhaps…

The teenager leaned out farther and slipped from the puppeteer’s grasp. The torso crashed onto the bed of leaves covering the forest floor. Juliet had just enough time to wonder what had happened to the poor boy’s legs before the thing with the dirty hands revealed itself.

It might have hands, Julie, babe, but that thing ain’t human. From my best guess, it never was human. Because those aren’t hands, Julie, babe, those are gloves. It’s wearing flesh like fashion accessories. And your brain isn’t making connections anymore, is it? Nope. You’ve lost it. You think this is actually Colton talking to you, Julie, babe, but Colt’s trapped under a million pounds of steel somewhere at the edge of the world. And you’re stuck here with a real life monster. A monster they don’t warn you about in storybooks. A monster made of other people. Made of Hell. Yes, Hell-with-a-capital-H. Because it has horns. Goat horns. And isn’t that red skin peeking through the flesh it wears? Yes, I think it is. Shiny, red flesh. And yellow eyes. Such piercing yellow eyes…

10.

Tired hands be damned, Juliet scrabbled out through the bushes, kicking detritus behind her with her mangled feet, ignoring the pain, needing to be gone from the demon in the woods. She exploded back onto the road, shrieking and spitting, trying to beat the devil.

She landed hard on her left shoulder. Adrenaline numbed the blow but she felt the thud of the connection in her core. Her skeleton vibrated. She pedaled on useless feet, making a mess of herself. What little blood she had left in her body was leaking out through whatever dam she’d broken loose down there. Because of this, she couldn’t find traction in the mud created by the clay and blood. She felt as if she were trying to stand up on a Slip ‘N Slide.

“You’re still alive?” called a voice. She was only vaguely aware that the red priest was rushing from his car toward her.

“HELP ME!” Something rational told her that she was asking help from the very individual who’d put her in this predicament but she didn’t care. She only wanted to be gone from that hellish puppeteer. She didn’t care if the red priest strung her up for sale in a fish market. At least she wouldn’t be torn asunder by whatever devil lurked among the trees.

Hands rolled her over. Scooped her up under the arm pits. Dragged her away from the scrub and toward the fire.

Juliet caught sight of her feet for the first time. A vague memory came to mind. The movie was Total Recall. Arnold Schwarzenegger watched as the mutant taxi driver took off his false arm to reveal a weird two-fingered appendage. Juliet’s legs looked like bloodier versions of those alien hands. For a split second, the devil in the woods was gone from her mind. For the briefest of instances, she considered how she felt about never being able to walk again.

Then a voice came from the bushes, soft and amused, and Juliet screamed so she wouldn’t have to listen to it.

“Boogedy… boogedy-boo!”

11.

She tried to mark the demon’s location, but failed. Those lithe shadows were back, dancing through the bushes and trees, flitting across the scrub and soaring into the entwined branches overhead.

“You’re stronger ’n I give you credit for, child,” the red priest grunted, as he dragged her away from the road and into the clearing with the campfire. The Mercury sat idling off to the left, white exhaust exhaling from its tail pipe. “Did it eat the boy?”

Only half, Juliet answered, but it took the red priest repeating his question for her to understand that she hadn’t spoken the words.

She swallowed what little spit she had. “Only… only his legs.”

“Ah,” the red priest sighed. “He must not be that hungry today. You’re lucky.”

“He?” was the only word she could form.

“Silas, child. Silas. Surely you saw him. I can see it in your eyes.”

Stop calling me Shirley, Juliet mused, and barked forced laughter.

I’m going mad.

The thought of madness was comforting—a welcome reprieve from red priests and devils with vacation homes deep in the Georgia woods. Hell, she might be in Hell. What a helluva concept Hell was. She’d been taught to expect a place of fire and brimstone, not a forest in the southern US of A. What a funny thing, putting Hell in the middle of the Bible Belt. Or, maybe Hell was like a flabby tummy hanging over the edge. Perhaps God had the Dunlop disease. His belly done lopped over…

That brought to mind an entire metric fuck-ton of asinine questions, all welcome distractions to the insanity of her predicament. Was it the Bible’s belt, or God’s? If the devil was a redneck who lived in the woods, was God a rapper living in Bankhead? Made sense, didn’t it? That God was a celebrity and Satan a backwoods hermit. No one paid attention until someone gave either a reality show. Then you found yourself watching Duck Dynasty and the Kardashians, Honey Boo Boo and World’s Dumbest Criminals: Holy Shit Edition.

Juliet found she was laughing. No, not really laughing. Guffawing. Great bursts of strained laughter vomited from her. She laughed so hard her stomach muscles seized. Even her feet seemed comical. Those feet flashing her lopsided peace signs. Silly feet. You so cray-cray!

“You broke this one, Silas!” the red priest shouted.

Silas? Funny thing to call the Devil.

The demon responded, “Boogedy-boo!”

“You can’t help the pets you fall in love with, eh, child?” The red priest asked. “You feed them, nurture them, give them toys to play with, and they take over your very existence.”

Juliet felt the heat of the campfire on her left arm. The memory of waking up with her back ablaze surfaced and suddenly nothing was as funny as it had been. All the levity she had running through her pissed out into a puddle of caustic fluid. She wallowed in it. Was steeled by it. Her hand slapped around at her side, the fire scorching her knuckles. Her aching fingers found a length of wood. She wrapped her clay-caked digits around the piece of firewood, the mud acting as an insulator of sorts, and swung it upward, nailing the red priest, she only hoped, between his beady black eyes.

He harrumphed, as if she’d asked him to clean up his room, and released her. She fell to the ground unimpeded, and her head bounced off the grass covering the floor of the clearing. Embers drifted down onto her blue blouse from the torch she held, leaving burns here and there. No pain came of the hot ash touching her skin once it had burned through the fabric of her shirt. Adrenaline again, she assumed.

She rolled and pressed up onto her knees. Her feet splayed out behind her; they were screaming, but so was she. She was louder.

The red priest, clutching his forehead with both hands, lay prostrate beside the fire. He moaned and groaned in pain. She dropped to her hands and knees—

(I suggest you crawl)

—and slunk up next to him. She thumped the piece of wood on the ground, knocking charred bits of wood from the sides, like flicking ash off a cigarette, and leaving only a vicious point of red hot stake.

Juliet giggled.

The red priest yanked his hands from his face and gazed up in horror as she lurched forward on her knees, the glowing stake clasped in two hands, held high above her head.

“Don’t!” he cried. “Don’t! He only—”

Juliet drove the smoking stake into the red priest’s guts. The point stabbed into the ground beneath the man, sending an aftershock through Juliet’s hands and arms. His flesh sizzled and crackled around the wood impaling his abdomen. She smelled cooked meats.

Juliet attempted to yank the post free, to ram it into him again, but her scorched hands refused to work.

All the while, the red priest howled. He looked like a vampire, staked and dying, smoke coming off him, as if sunlight had found him in his coffin.

“You stupid… stupid child…” the red priest spat. “He only… Silas only…”

On her hands and knees, Juliet craned her head to meet the man’s eyes. She grinned weakly. “Shut up and die.”

“Agh,” he grunted, as agony painted his face. He sat up as far as the stake in his stomach would allow and loosed a wail to the heavens before collapsing back onto the ground.

Juliet surveyed her work with sick pride. She’d done it. She’d killed the man who’d almost killed her. She’d won.

Only he wasn’t quite dead. Not yet.

“He only…” The red priest gurgled. “He only eats the dead. But He… He plays with the living.”

Our father, who art staked to the ground, fell silent. Juliet looked upon him, locked in stunned stupidity.

“Boogedy… boogedy… boo…”

Author’s Note

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons—living or dead—business establishments, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights.

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