Allison broke through the edge of the woods and stumbled into tall grass. She let out a sigh of relief at the sight of the road a few feet in front of her. It was a narrow, two-lane highway that circled around the majority of Arthur’s Creek, only cutting through the southernmost tip of town.
The county had built it decades before, when the mining economy was exponentially more profitable than it had been in the past few years. It was designed to keep the majority of the coal trucks off the main roads in town and to route them around. Arthur’s Creek would be cleaner and the drivers would have to deal with less traffic.
Except the economy had collapsed and now the town had a long highway to maintain with little budget to do it.
Sammy came up behind her and stopped. Her tight shirt clung to her. Allison glanced at her quickly, then had to look away. Women like Sammy made her feel like a cow.
Allison kept herself in good shape by walking the trails around town every day. Her condition was great, her body toned, but she didn’t have the Playboy body that Sammy had.
Genetics were a blessing to some and a curse to others.
Drew walked behind both of them, his eyes always scanning the woods. He stopped in the grass and looked both ways down the highway.
“Do you recognize that car?” He nodded at a beige sedan parked on the shoulder about fifty feet away.
“It belongs to Missy Matthews.”
Sammy asked, “How do you know everyone’s car from sight? Is the town really that small?”
“Yeah, it’s small, but I see everyone in their cars because of my job at the gas station.” Allison considered the car. “I have no idea why it would be parked out here though. She works and lives on the other end of town.”
Sammy lifted the bottom of her shirt and wiped at the sweat on her brow. Allison saw Drew glance at her exposed skin from the corner of his eye before looking away. She didn’t blame him.
The hike through the woods hadn’t been bad at first, but the rising sun had pushed the temperature significantly higher over the last hour or so. They were all sweating profusely, particularly Drew. Water coursed down his face and neck like he had a leaky spigot on the top of his head.
They’d walked single file most of the way on his orders. He wanted Allison in the lead because she knew the area. He took the rear so he could keep everything in front of him.
Allison thought he didn’t want either of them behind him because they didn’t know what had caused a few people to go nuts. He didn’t want to let anyone get the drop on him.
“Let’s take a look.” Drew started toward the car. “Maybe there’s a bottle of water in the back. I’m so dehydrated that I might crumple into a pile of dust soon.”
Sammy stepped beside him. “Do you think Ash and Nami are all right?”
“I’m sure of it. Ash is tough as nails, even though he acts like a goofball all the time.” Drew tucked his pistol into the holster on his hip as the approached the sedan. “He’s a great guy, one of my best friends, but I have to ask––what do you see in him? You know that you can’t fix him, right? There’s no cure for what he has.”
Allison was a few feet away, walking to Sammy’s left, opposite of Drew. She craned her neck in their direction a bit so that she could hear her response.
During their walk, she’d asked them several times to explain what was so special about Asher Benson, but neither would say anything. Allison had gathered that he was a target of some kind of assassination attempt. She’d gleaned that the man was valuable to the government.
But why, she couldn’t even begin to guess. He was an absolute mess of a man. Beer was practically seeping out of his pores when they’d pulled into the police station, and it was still dawn.
“He has a good heart. I can’t stand seeing someone so good in such obvious pain. I know that I can’t fix him, but I think that I can help.” Sammy lowered her voice and looked at her feet. “And I feel like I can relate to him. To his loneliness.”
Drew just shook his head.
Allison noticed that he did that a lot. He cracked jokes every now and then, but he seemed to be a lot more serious and professional than Asher.
They neared the rear end of the car when Drew stopped and jutted his arm out in front Sammy. The palm of his hand rested perfectly on her breast.
“Hey!” Sammy pushed at his arm. “What are you—?”
“Something isn’t right.” Drew lowered his hand, oblivious to the liberty he’d just taken. He pulled his pistol out again. “Stay behind the car.”
“What is it?” Allison asked.
“Bad news.”
Drew kept his focus on the inside of the car. He tapped his nose with his free hand. “You smell that?”
Allison sniffed and then wrinkled her nose. She caught a whiff of something that was similar to rotten meat, but much more intense.
Drew aimed at the back windshield and sidestepped to his right, working his way around to the side of the car. They couldn’t see anything but the backs of the seats. “Is anyone in the car? If you are, we won’t hurt you.”
There was no movement from inside.
Sammy took a few tentative steps after Drew. Allison followed both of them, her breathing heavy. She’d already seen three dead bodies today and didn’t know if she could handle being around another one.
When they’d left the police station and walked down the path, they’d come across the bodies Asher had described. One was Jimmy Walsh, the boy who delivered the newspapers in Allison’s neck of the woods. She didn’t have a subscription, but she still gave the kid a tip for Christmas every year.
The other man was Frank Dole. He’d owned a pizza franchise on Main Street that tended to be a bit skimpy on the toppings, but made up for it with Frank’s special tomato sauce that he made himself. Knowing that she would never walk in there and see Frank behind the counter again made Allison want to bawl.
She’d stared down at his body for nearly a minute before Drew had finally guided her away. Bones jutted from his legs. One of his eyes was a ruin of blood and goop and other unspeakable things.
He’d died like a dog in the dirt at the hands of a paperboy.
Nothing made sense today.
Drew continued sidestepping until he was even with the front door. “Jesus Christ.”
“What is it?” Sammy asked. She was still a few feet away from him.
“Don’t look inside the car.” Drew spun around, scanning the trees and high grass on the other side of the road. “Allison, which way should we go?”
Allison didn’t answer. She caught up with Sammy, who stood ramrod straight, a trembling hand covering her mouth.
Sitting upright in both of the front seats were decapitated bodies. The heads rested in their laps, staring up at the space where they used to be attached. So much blood had soaked through the hair that Allison couldn’t even tell if they’d been blonde or brunette.
The eye sockets were hollowed out.
Both of the mouths were stretched into yawns.
The tongues were missing.
Sammy started to scream as she looked in at them.
Drew slapped a hand over her mouth, muffling her cries. “Quiet!” he hissed in her ear. “The people who did this might still be nearby.”
Hearing that snapped Allison out of the fog she’d been in. She jerked her head around in wild arcs as she searched the woods for any sign of the monsters who could have done this. The heads were so disfigured, so much of their flesh and features removed, that she couldn’t be certain if one of the dead bodies belonged to Missy Matthews.
“Which way?” Drew asked her again. “We’re too exposed out here.”
Allison tried to reply, but her mouth had gone completely dry. She worked hard to swallow. Her tongue stuck to the top of her mouth, the backs of her teeth. She pointed down the road behind the car. “That way,” she finally squeaked out.
“Let’s move.” Drew nudged Sammy forward and finally took his hand away from her mouth. “Keep it together.”
“Who could do something like that?” Sammy asked.
“Crazy people.” Drew shot a glance behind them, before picking up his pace. “Ash and I stumbled on a few headless bodies in the desert outside of Baghdad one time.”
“You’ve seen something like this before?” Allison.
“When someone goes to extremes like that, it’s to send a message. Usually that message says that we need to get the hell out of their backyard. We’re going to comply right now.” Drew lightly took Sammy by the elbow and guided her back to the tall grass. “We’re going to walk just inside the edge of the woods. That will conceal us at least a little bit if someone comes by.”
Sammy let him lead her without a protest. She walked on stiff legs, her knees not seeming to bend the way they should.
“Good idea.” Allison followed them. She said a small prayer of thanks that she had Drew there with her.
Of all the days for something so insane to happen, she’d been fortunate to at least have someone with experience in dealing with madness. Had she been alone, Allison didn’t know if she would have been able to keep going after seeing the bodies behind the station.
They crossed through the high grass and walked along the tree line.
Briars and thin vines fought them as they pushed on, scratching at Sammy and Allison’s legs. The foliage was thick, but they all preferred the relative safety of the trees to walking along the side of the road, completely exposed to anyone who came by.
Allison had just started to feel a little better, the taste of bile no longer stinging the back of her throat, when she heard a truck approaching from ahead of them.
“Down!” Drew dropped to his knees, crouching behind a thicket of dead branches and vines.
Sammy followed suit, her movements still suffering from drunken sluggishness. Her eyes had a wild, shocked look in them. Allison knelt beside her and patted her leg. They stayed put, no one moving, and listened as the engine drew near.
A large, modified truck appeared down the road. It had been lifted at least a foot. Custom exhaust pipes jutted from the bed and ran up the back of the cab. They curved at the ends, belching black smoke several inches above the roof.
The exhaust rumbled like that of a semi-truck trying to get up a long, steep hill.
Two men stood in the bed, hanging on to the roof of the cab. They each had rifles slung over their shoulders. One had long hair that flapped behind him from the wind shear of the truck. He had a thick beard and wore a shirt adorned with several skulls that had the sleeves ripped off.
Everything about him screamed biker.
Allison knew the other man well.
He was the doctor she saw at the clinic in town if she was feeling more depressed than usual and needed something a little stronger than a bottle of Jack. He stood half a foot shorter than the biker and had tiny, circular glasses dangling on the edge of his nose. The slacks and dress shirt he wore to the office were present, as always. He’d lost a war with male-pattern baldness years ago.
The two men were as much an odd coupling as Ash and Nami had been in the police station. Their backgrounds and lifestyles were so utterly different that they might as well have been from different planets.
Allison knew Dr. Franklin to be a kind, generous man. He’d consoled her over the loss of her husband and had often given her steep discounts on her visits. Even flat out comping her twice when he knew she couldn’t afford her appointments.
Seeing him on the back of the truck with the scraggly biker drove home just how upside down the world had become. The dead bodies, firefights, and decapitations had been so shocking that she was still having trouble processing them. But watching her doctor riding on the back of a jacked-up truck defied comprehension.
Dr. Franklin looked to his left and watched the trees as they zipped by. The short strands of hair on each side of his head blew every which way.
The biker watched the other side of the road.
A blinding reflection on the windshield kept Allison from seeing who sat behind the wheel.
She didn’t recognize the truck.
As the vehicle pulled even with them, Allison caught a glimpse of blood covering the doctor’s forearms.
He held a hacksaw in his right hand, letting it rest on the roof of the truck.
Several tongues were attached to his belt.
Just as the truck passed them, his gaze locked onto a spot in the woods behind Allison and the others. He pounded on the roof with his free hand. “Hold up! We got something.”
The massive truck rolled to a stop a few dozen yards later, and the men climbed out of the bed.
“Someone came out of the woods right here,” Dr. Franklin said. He pointed at the tall grass, where they had stamped down a path as they made their way to the highway. His eyes searched the area behind the truck, inspecting the weeds. “There! They went back in there.”
The biker strutted toward the doctor. “Let’s follow it and see where it goes.”
Allison turned back to Drew, her heart hammering away. “What are we going to do?”
Drew tensed, watching as the men walked closer to their hiding place. “We’re going to run.”