1
“Oh my God! Oh my God!” Tammy shouted while Bronwyn took a blanket and covered her. They had made it back to the fire without getting attacked. Josh stood on the other side, crouching over Ziggy’s body.
Tammy’s teeth were chattering so loudly that it was like some old typewriter noise, and she shivered as if she were freezing.
Josh stared at Bronwyn, who stared back at him. All three of them had tears streaming down their faces.
After several minutes, Josh said, “It’s scared of fire.”
Bronwyn, one arm still slung across Tammy’s back, reached into her breast pocket and pulled out her Merits. She slid a cigarette between her lips, dropped the pack back in her pocket, withdrew her Bic lighter, flicked it, lit the cigarette, took the first puff and said, “What is that thing?”
“It’s the Unspeakable Mystery,” Tammy whimpered. “We let it out. We stole it. We’re all gonna die! And not just die, we’re all gonna get torn up just like Griff. Torn to itty-bitty pieces.”
She hadn’t actually seen Ziggy’s body yet. Josh had laid a blanket over it, barely aware that he could function at all. Tammy looked around the campfire. “Where’s Ziggy?”
Bronwyn raised her eyebrows to Josh, who went to the cooler and brought out a can of Pearl Beer. He tossed it to Bronwyn. She missed it, but picked it up off the ground and dusted it off with her hand. She popped the top and passed it to Tammy. “Take a sip. Come on. Take a sip,” she said.
Too eagerly, Tammy grabbed the beer and chugged it down. When she was done, she dropped the can by her feet. “It got Ziggy, too.”
Josh nodded.
“What’s the plan?” Bronwyn asked.
“I don’t know.”
“We’ve got to make a plan. We’ve got Scratch coming at us.”
Tammy started giggling. She covered her mouth, but couldn’t contain it.
“What’s funny?” Bronwyn asked.
“It’s not happening,” Tammy said. “Don’t you see? There’s no way in hell this can happen. It’s all a trick. Some kind of trick. Griff must be in on it.”
Bronwyn petted the top of Tammy’s head like she was a puppy. Bronwyn leaned into her, touching her scalp to Tammy’s cheek. “We’ll get through this. Don’t worry. Somehow.”
Tammy guffawed, pulling away from Bron. “There’s no way this is real. It can’t be. There’s no such thing as that . . . thing.”
Josh went around the fire and sat next to Bronwyn. “What if each of us grabs a log from the fire. We walk over to the car. If we set the car on fire. Maybe . . .”
Bronwyn said, “Maybe. Maybe not. Don’t you have flares in the Pimpmobile?”
2
Josh brought his flashlight into the trunk of the car, and shone it around the clothes and luggage. He pulled some of the suitcases out, and the bags of clothes.
Then he reached down and drew something out.
Bronwyn and Tammy huddled together, each with a burning stick in her hand.
Josh held up a small cylindrical object. “One flare, coming up.”
3
Back at the campfire, Josh had to wrangle with the flame a bit to get it to work. When he snapped it, it shot out into the air.
A brilliant, ragged orange-yellow streak of light. He set it down on the ground.
They all looked at it.
“No one’s going to help us,” Tammy said. “No one.”
Bronwyn glanced at her watch. “It’s almost midnight. Maybe six hours ’til daylight.”
“What good’s daylight,” Tammy said. “We’ll be dead by then.”
“We could start walking along the road.”
“Someone will see that flare,” Josh said.
“No one is going to see that flare unless they’re looking for us. That monster is going to come back,” Tammy said. “It’s going to cut us all up. It . . . it . . . it.” She hiccupped this last part.
“We should go to the road. We should start walking,” Bronwyn said. “We can keep lighting sticks, one after another and then drop them when they burn out. We have the flashlight.”
“What if we walk the wrong way?” Josh asked.
“I’m not sure there is a wrong way.”
“What if it’s there, out there on the road?”
“I think it’s gone,” Bronwyn said. “Let’s assume that it’s the Flesh-Scraper. Let’s assume it got enough flesh. Let’s assume that’s all it wanted.”
Josh wanted to go to her and hold her—she looked haunted now. She looked as if she’d gone from being a young woman of twenty to being fifty. She looked as if she had enormous sorrow at the center of her being, and he wanted to make it better for her somehow.
Looking between Bronwyn and Tammy, he wasn’t sure what the hell he could do. He wanted to cry out to his father and mother to come get him. He wanted to find someone to protect him, but when he looked at the two of them, some other instinct came out within him. He wasn’t sure what to call it, other than something more than the will to survive. It was something that seemed to wrestle deep inside his mind, something that made him want to protect his two friends, although he wasn’t sure that was possible. But another part of him just wanted to be safe himself, to get away from this place, to somehow wake up from this nightmare.
Tammy leaned forward and tapped Bronwyn to pass her another beer. “Please, I need it,” she said. Bronwyn opened two, passed one to her, and began drinking one of the cans herself. Tammy chugged this one also, and let her blanket slip. Josh was so stunned by the night’s events that he barely noticed Tammy’s nakedness beneath the blanket.
Tammy wiped at the blood on her face as if it were water. “That thing talked. I heard it.”
Josh nodded. “I did, too.”
“This fries my brain,” Bronwyn said, sipping the beer. “Am I the only one who feels as if everything I ever heard of in life was a lie?”
“Maybe this is what happens before you die,” Tammy said. “I been bad in my life. Real bad. Maybe that’s the devil. Maybe that thing is the devil. It sounded just like Griff. Poor Griff.”
“It’s the ritual,” Josh said. “When Griff pushed me over and I fell on it, it got some of my blood and some of my skin. That’s what the sign said. You turn it on that way. And now it’s skinning them.”
They all said nothing for several minutes, each one looking out into the darkness beyond the flickering fire.
“Where’d it get Ziggy?” Tammy asked.
Finally, Bronwyn broke the silence. “He’s over there.” She pointed to the blanket at the edge of where the firelight stretched, opposite them.
“We never knew his real name,” Josh said. “Just Ziggy.”
“James Wallace,” Bronwyn said. “I heard it on the first day of one of our classes. That’s his name.”
“James Wallace,” Josh said. “Rest in peace.”
Tammy closed her eyes and began saying the Lord’s Prayer aloud.
“Stop it,” Bronwyn said.
Tammy opened her eyes and turned to her. “You got something better? I think we need to call on a higher power.”
“If God gave a rat’s ass about us,” Bronwyn said, “He’d never have created that thing in the first place.”
A strange and probably insane light seemed to brighten Tammy’s eyes. “Maybe that’s it. Maybe this is God’s way of giving us purpose.”
“Say what?”
“Maybe we’re meant to undergo this. Like a trial. When I used to go to revivals, they talked about how God tested you. How the devil tempted . . . and you need to believe in Jesus’s power. That’s what we need.”
“Well, I guess being the Jew here, I’m outta luck,” Bronwyn said.
“No, just accept Jesus,” Tammy said. She had a weird little smile that Bronwyn wanted to slap out of her. “If you accept Jesus in your heart, it’ll be okay. We can get out of this. Through Jesus.”
“Oh Christ,” Bronwyn said. “Just keep drinking the Pearl Beer, Tammy.”
“It takes on the voices of the ones it skins,” Josh said.
4
Bronwyn said, “I say we start walking.” She pushed herself up from the ground. “We have fire. We have what’s left of that flashlight battery. If we walk fast, we can do more than three miles per hour. Tammy, you run cross-country.”
She nodded.
“We could even try to run,” Bronwyn said. “At least some of the way. Maybe Jesus will help you run.”
“Do not tempt the savior,” Tammy said.
“When did you get so religious?” Bronwyn asked.
“Since I saw that thing tear Griff open. Since all this,” Tammy said, still with that weird light on her face that made Josh and Bronwyn both think of the movie Song of Bernadette.
“Scratch moves pretty fast,” Josh said, then noticed Bronwyn’s arched eyebrows. “We’re on a first-name basis.”
“It might not even want us. But if we walk that-a-way,” Bronwyn pointed to the road, “maybe we stand a chance.”
“Not if it gets us,” Tammy said, keeping her eyes on the fire.
“It might be full,” Josh said, though he felt a little sick at the thought. “I mean, if I remember right, it said on those signs that it drank the blood and wore the skins and used the meat for food. I mean, when spiders eat one fly, they don’t always eat more.”
“Yeah, but they wrap them up for later,” Bronwyn chortled, and then covered her mouth. “I can’t believe I’m making a joke.”
“You feel that, too? That light-headedness?” Josh whispered as if it were a dirty secret.
Bronwyn nodded. “Yup. It must be shock.”
He got up and went to the outer ring of light and vomited. He came back, popped a beer open, and guzzled it. “I’m talking like a nutcase. Maybe it’s shock. Maybe it’s just insanity. Loony tunies. I got the loony tunies.”
“We all have them,” Bronwyn said. “What do we do? Sit here until it comes back?”
“The car,” Josh said. “It’s like a tank. We put a ring of fire around it, and we wait. That thing didn’t break out through the trunk. It can’t do that. We’re safest in the car. Someone will have seen the flare, and will see the ring of fire around the car. And they’ll come.”
5
Someone had seen the flare out in the middle of that desert hellhole: Billy Dunne. He and Dave Olshaker, whose ass still stung from rock salt shot out of Charlie Goodrow’s shotgun, were staying at a Motel 69 five miles out of a town called Naga. They were a good fifteen miles to the northeast, off the two-lane road that ventured off the highway that had ventured—via several other roads—off the main highway. Billy was just coming back from picking up some burgers and fries from a local drive-through, and as he drove down a desolate one-lane road back to the highway, he briefly saw in the distance a strange orange light. Back at Motel 69, he told Dave, who was in bed already watching Mork & Mindy. Dave went out to the parking lot, and Billy pointed to the general direction.
“It’s gotta be them,” Dave said, wolfing down his hamburger, with its sauce and mayo dribbling down his chin. “I know they’re up there. We know they’re outta gas. We gotta go find ’em, Billy.”
“What do we do with them?” Billy asked.
Dave snarled, “First, we just grab Tammy and get the hell out of there.”
“It was smart to siphon their tank,” Billy said.
“It was a stroke of genius if I do say so myself,” Dave Olshaker said.
6
Their evening had been none too pleasant. When they’d arrived at the Brakedown Palace, Dave had gone in after Tammy, and had left instructions for Billy to empty their gas tank so they couldn’t take off too fast. The place had been empty, so he followed the long corridor out into the long Quonset hut, along the creepy trail to the final room where, suddenly, all hell was breaking loose. Charlie Goodrow had begun shooting at everybody, Dave included, and got him right in the left butt cheek with a powerful spray of rock salt. At first, he thought he’d been hit with a real bullet, but then, with the stinging, he knew exactly what it was.
While Tammy and her jerk friends took off in their car, he was stuck behind with Charlie Goodrow, who had threatened to call the police.
“Go ahead and call ’em,” Dave had said. “They should be thrown in jail for everything they’ve done.”
Charlie Goodrow had looked at him long and hard, and set down his shotgun. “You’re not with them?”
“Not hardly,” Dave said. He pointed to Billy Dunne. “Me and him’s been tracking them, because the snake with the blond hair stole my girl right out from under me.”
“They stole my attraction,” Charlie Goodrow said. “But . . . well, I guess I shouldn’t call the police just yet.”
“Call ’em,” Dave said. “Please. They deserve arresting.”
But Charlie Goodrow, for some reason Dave couldn’t figure out, wouldn’t call the cops. He said something about things being better left alone sometimes. Something about worse things coming when good went after bad.
Instead, Goodrow told Dave and Billy to get the hell out of his gas station before he pulled the shotgun out again.
Then, Dave and Billy had decided they’d lost their classmates for good. They got the motel room and figured they’d better turn around that night. “You don’t need her,” Billy said, his arm over his buddy’s shoulder. “You can do better than her.”
“Yeah, she’s a bitch,” Dave said, shrugging off his friend’s arm. He didn’t feel comfortable like that. It felt wrong.
But now, looking out at the dark night, after midnight, the sting in his ass didn’t feel quite so bad. He thought of what he’d do to her if he had her. If he got her. First he’d tie her wrists to the bed, then strip her, using his teeth to tear her clothes off. Then he’d give her what she wanted most from him. He got hard, standing there, thinking about it.
He said, “Billy, let’s get on up to those hills up there. We gotta track ’em down.”
7
Billy Dunne felt like he was driving in circles for nearly an hour before Dave looked ahead in the dark and pointed to something off another road to the west. “Look, that must be them,” he said. Billy glanced over and saw what looked like a fire off the road. “This is too easy,” Dave said. “They’re stranded. They got nothin’. My dream’s coming true, Billy. Truer than true.”
Billy swerved and made a U-turn and then went west on a slender, barely paved road and then went north. He nearly hit a coyote as he drove, and he thought for just a second that he felt Dave’s hand on his knee.
8
Josh had just finished positioning some rocks and dry sticks about ten feet away from the Pimpmobile. Then he helped Tammy arrange some on the other side. She’d dressed again, at first scared to reach into the trunk, but he’d used the flashlight to show her that no monsters lurked there. Then they’d set to work, and in some respects, setting up the circle of fire as a perimeter around the Pimpmobile took all their minds off the terror that was somewhere out in the desert.
“Maybe it’s over,” Tammy said. She sat on the hood of the car, cross-legged. The fires comforted her.
“Could be,” Josh said.
“Someone has to feed the fire,” Bronwyn said.
“We’ll take turns.” Then he noticed the doubtful look on Bronwyn’s face. “Someone will see this. There’s a town within twenty miles of here. The flare went up. Now we have a large fire.”
“They may just think it’s a fire. Nobody lives up here. Nobody cares if there’s a fire,” Bronwyn said. “There’s not enough to burn.”
“That’s not true,” Josh said. “Fires on the desert can get out of control. It can be devastating if it spreads. Someone will see this from a distance. I bet you can see it for miles.”
“We can’t see a town. I’m not sure they can see us.”
“Someone’s driving out there. Someone’s on the roads. They’ll see it and stop somewhere and maybe call the police,” he said. “You have to believe.”
“I believe,” Tammy said. “I believe that Jesus Christ is my personal savior and is the son of the everlasting God.”
“Good for you,” Josh said.
“I’ll pray for all of us,” Tammy said.
When Josh went around to make sure there was some dry brush to toss in one of the fires, Bronwyn followed him. “I didn’t want to say this in front of her.”
“What’s that?”
“Josh. How can this be happening? Can you tell me?” She seemed like a little girl, even with the cigarette hanging out of her mouth. “How is this humanly possible?”
“I guess it’s not,” he said.
She smoked some more, and he almost thought he saw tears streaming down her face. “Can you hold me?” she asked. “Right now. I know it’s . . .” She was about to say “weird,” he was certain, but he didn’t let her get to that word. He went over to her and put his arms around her. She laid her head against his shoulder and began sobbing. “We’ll get through this,” he whispered, smelling her hair and feeling weak and strong at the same time.
9
Tammy was the first to get sleepy, and Josh promised her that he’d stand guard. He told Bronwyn to go sleep for a bit, also. “We have the fire, and we know it doesn’t like fire. It’s not going to cross over to the car. But if it did, you’re inside a metal cage in that car. I doubt even obsidian claws can get through a car door,” he said.
“Only if you sit in the car, too,” she said. “I want you safe.”
Tammy and Bronwyn lay together across the backseat, using blankets and rolled-up clothes as pillows. Josh sat up front, his one hand on the gun, his other on the Bic lighter as if this would help ward off Scratch. He kept looking around, feeling like he heard things. He didn’t know what good it would do, but he locked the doors. He felt sleepy, but fought it. All the beer had done a number on him, and he felt exhausted and drained on top of that—but he didn’t want to sleep. Not that night. He was going to stay awake. He could sleep all day long if he had to, once they got to safety.
Suddenly, without even thinking he’d closed his eyes, he was on a waterbed that undulated with gentle waves. Bronwyn and Tammy were there, too. They were both naked, kissing each other sweetly, nothing too dirty, and playing innocently with each other’s breasts. Tammy reached over and grabbed his hand and brought it down between her legs. Then they were not naked at all, nor were they the two women from his college. Instead, he was back home, and it was his mother and his aunt who grabbed his hands and were taking him to school. His aunt said, “You never told us that you didn’t pass your chemistry final.”
“But I did,” he said, or tried to, but no one seemed to hear him. His mother gave him a stern look, and she let go of his hand. Suddenly he was back in high school, but it wasn’t full of high school students—instead, the children looked as if they were nine or ten. He was in elementary school—he was sure of it. How had this happened? He tried to tell the teacher who came to get him that he was already in college, that he shouldn’t have to go back to the fifth grade, but the teacher—Mrs. Raleigh, who had once humiliated him in front of the entire fifth grade—told him that he needed to mind his P’s and Q’s. “But this isn’t right!” he shouted. “I’m almost twenty.” The other kids in the fifth grade looked at him funny, but paid very little attention to him. He noticed something even worse: He had no pants on. He sat there in his shirt, but no pants, no underwear. Hanging out. And no one said anything. Why hadn’t his mother noticed? How could she have let him leave the house without his pants on? He tried to pull his shirt down over his balls, but it wouldn’t go far enough.
And then someone began banging at the window of the classroom. Someone was yelling at him.
Josh opened his eyes, wrenched from the dream.
10
Tammy had already begun screaming—not just screaming, but it was like the sound cats made when they were in heat, a wail that barely sounded human. Bronwyn was up, and apparently had been shaking Josh.
“It’s gonna get us!” Tammy screamed. “Oh my God, it’s gonna kill us!”
But Josh saw headlights out the window. And then, like a nightmare come true, Dave Olshaker’s face suddenly appeared against the windshield. “Hey, you losers! How’s it hangin’?”
11
“Get out of here!” Bronwyn shouted.
“How the hell did they get here?” Josh said, still wondering whether this might be an extension of his dream.
Bronwyn had to slap Tammy to get her to stop screaming. Dave and his buddy were shaking the car up and down, trying the doors, running around the car.
“We should tell them,” Bronwyn said.
“Are you crazy? Keep your doors locked. That guy’s insane,” Josh said. He had already dropped the gun on the floor of the Pimpmobile.
Dave was shouting, “Tammy! You’re coming with me, baby! Do you understand?”
“Don’t let him take me,” Tammy said.
“They have a car,” Josh said. “Oh my God. We can get out.”
Bronwyn rolled her window down slightly. “Hey! Guys! We know you’re mad. We know it. But there’s some kind of . . .” She paused, unsure of what to say. “There’s a killer out here. We need help.”
“Griff is dead!” Tammy shouted. “Griff is dead!”
It probably was this cry that stopped Dave Olshaker in his tracks. He and Billy Dunne looked at each other for a second. Dave started laughing.
“Oh my God,” Bronwyn said. Josh looked back at her. She was looking toward the headlights of the pickup truck. “They ruined part of our fire. Part of the ring we made.”
“So?” He turned and saw the break in the circle of fire.
“What if it’s been out there? Waiting? Just outside the fire?”
“No, it’s not,” Josh said.
But just as quickly, they all heard a woman’s high-pitched scream. Josh looked at Tammy but her mouth was closed.
It was Billy Dunne.
Or rather, it wasn’t Billy Dunne.
He had been there, standing just in the headlights in front of the Pimpmobile, and suddenly, he was gone.
They heard a thud beneath the car.
Dave Olshaker glanced around the car, stepping back from it.
Inside the car, they were silent.
Josh said, “Just go away. Just go.”
“Billy?” Dave walked around the car. “Billy?”
“We’ve got to let him in,” Josh said, leaning over to unlock the driver’s side door.
“No,” Tammy said. “Don’t let him in.” She had a curious anger in her voice.
“Dave!” Josh shouted. “Dave, come around here, get in!”
But Dave Olshaker was looking around the car, crouching down as if looking under it.
“Don’t let him in,” Tammy said.
“Tammy?” Bronwyn asked, softly.
“He did something bad to me,” she said. “Maybe this is what happens to bad people. Maybe . . .”
“Dave!” Josh said, rolling his window all the way down, signaling for Olshaker to get over there. He was about to open his door to pull Dave in, when suddenly they all heard it.
The voice from under the car.
“Davy baby,” Billy Dunne’s voice rasped. “Sweetie, come to Daddy. You know you love me, Davy, all hidden away inside you. I love you, too, we can love each other here, down here.”
“What in God’s name?” Dave said, still crouching.
“Don’t let him in, Josh,” Tammy spat. “Let it happen to him. Let it. Maybe bad people get what’s coming to them.”
“Shut up,” Bronwyn said. “Just shut up.”
“Dave! Get in this car right now! There’s some kind of . . . some . . . that thing. That thing from the gas station. It’s there. It’s alive. It’s . . .” But even as Josh said this, he knew it was too late.
He looked out his window to see Dave, still crouching, glance up at him, his eyes wide with an emotion between fear and awe. Dave began stammering, and pointing underneath the car. It seemed to happen in slow motion, as Dave pointed and looked at Josh and his mouth began moving as if trying to get something out.
And then Scratch leapt out from beneath the car, its black hooks going to Dave’s eyes. In the car, everyone was screaming, and Josh reached on the floor for the gun hoping it would help. He tried to get his door open, but it was locked. By the time he reached around for the lock, Dave’s face had smushed up against Bronwyn’s window. The two women screamed again as Dave’s bloody face slid down the window to the ground.
Josh locked his door, rolled up his window.
And they waited. It was quiet for a long time.
The headlights from the pickup truck illuminated them as if it were nearly daylight.
They heard a thump or two beneath the car.
Tammy began praying softly, her hands pressed together, her eyes closed. Josh glanced at Bronwyn, but neither said anything.
They saw something come out from under the front of the car that sent shivers down Josh’s spine.
The creature emerged in the headlight’s beam. Billy Dunne’s face over its skull, his lips torn and flapping. It began a strange, slow dance that reminded Josh of an image he’d seen of Kali, the Indian goddess, who danced with skulls around her neck. The creature’s arms went out at odd angles, and its legs moved around in wide arcs.
It’s doing its dance, Josh thought. This is its ceremony. It drinks the blood and wears the skin. It dances in the skin. It makes the sacrifice dance for the gods.
Josh felt Bronwyn’s hand on his shoulder. It felt good, in the face of this. He needed her warmth.
They watched the strange, intricate, bizarre dance as the bloodied creature wearing the tissue-thin skin of either Billy Dunne or Dave Olshaker moved to the unheard music.
Then it stopped.
It’s watching us. It’s waiting for us. Why? What is it waiting for?
A sound came from it. Not Dave’s voice or Billy’s voice or Griff’s or even Ziggy’s.
It was a sound that seemed more wild animal than human, yet it had a human cast to it. The creature began singing, raising its skin-hung arms skyward.
“Dear God,” Tammy gasped. “Dear God.”
The creature sang a tuneless melody that consisted of mainly open vowel sounds of ohs and ows, a slightly musical howl and shriek, but Josh was sure it was saying something.
“Why is it doing that?” Bronwyn asked—as if any of them would know.
“It has a ceremony to fulfill,” Josh said. “A ritual. It dances in their skins, and then it sings to its namesake god. That’s what it said at the Brakedown Palace. On the signs. There’s the sacrifice, then there’s the ceremony.”
Even as he said this, Josh thought he heard the god’s name in the song, Xipe Totec, Xipe Totec.
What is it for? Why does it do this? For the first time, Josh wondered whether there wasn’t some insane logic to the creature’s ritual. It wasn’t just a monster from nowhere. It had been stolen from its resting place, somewhere in Mexico. It had been wrenched from its burial ground and brought up here by some moron who decided to make a buck off it—or seventy-five cents—and forget that it was sacred.
He said it aloud: “Scratch is sacred.”
“What?” Bronwyn asked, as if Josh were losing more marbles than he had moments before.
“That thing is a representation of a god. Xipe Totec. The Flayer of Men. We’re seeing an ancient ceremony.”
“Christ, you’re starting to make sense.”
“I don’t know what good it does us unless you can remember what was on those signs. What else was written there,” Josh said.
“We can make it to the pickup truck,” Tammy said. “If we run. We can.”
“No,” Josh said. “We can’t. It’s too far. That thing is right there, Tammy.”
“If all three of us go,” Tammy said. “It’ll only get one of us.”
“Who will it be? You? Me? Bron? You can live with that?”
“Either that or we all die sitting here.”
“We’re safe here,” Josh said. He reached back over his seat and touched her gently on the knee. “Tammy, just hang in there. I don’t think it can get in the car. It may need night for its ritual. It may not be after us during the day.”
“Or maybe it just doesn’t stop,” Tammy said. “What about that? Maybe it’ll be morning soon and that thing will still be waiting to get us. Or maybe it’ll figure out how to scratch its way through the car. Maybe.”
“Tammy, listen to Josh,” Bronwyn said. “We’ve all been through a big shock. But it hasn’t gotten to us here.”
“The battery in that truck is going to die. Sometime in the next hour or two,” Tammy said. “If we don’t get out and make a run for it, we may never get out of here. We are already dead, if you think about it. We just haven’t had our moment with that monster.”
The singing in front of the car continued, and the creature they had all begun to think of as Scratch waved its claws to the sky as if talking directly to its god.
12
Perhaps an hour went by before the headlights of Dave Olshaker’s truck flickered a bit. Then they dimmed. Scratch had gone off into the darkness somewhere, and Josh guessed that it was either under the pickup or under the Pimpmobile.
“We can sit here and die, or . . .” Tammy said, after they’d all been too quiet and too tense and too watchful for too long. It was a surprise to hear her voice.
More of a surprise, she opened her door, and jumped out in the dirt, slamming the door behind her.
Before they could say anything, she was running in the dimming headlights for the pickup truck. Josh held his breath, watching her, but he was sure he saw her open the driver’s door and slam it again. He heard her shouts of joy. “I’m inside! I’m inside!”
And then, she flicked on the truck’s interior light to see the layout of keys and pedals.
And Bronwyn said what Josh was thinking. “I can’t look. I can’t look. I can’t.” She repeated it over and over again, even while they both stared out at Tammy and her completely heroic and insane act to try and get out of this hellhole.
The truck was moving forward, toward them, and Tammy had a big grin on her face like all her prayers had been answered.
But Bronwyn and Josh both saw some little movement in the back of the cab of the truck.
It was in there, with her.
Josh opened his door, with Bronwyn shouting at him. He ran toward the truck. By the time he reached Tammy’s side, Scratch had already began throwing her around, and when Josh opened the door, it had dragged her out the opposite window, trailing blood.
The whole time, Tammy hadn’t screamed. He was sure that the last look on her face had been, not one of terror, but of submission.
She hadn’t even fought.
Perhaps she couldn’t have fought.
He’d never know.
Twenty minutes later, out in the darkness, they heard Tammy’s last shrill scream, although they couldn’t be sure whether it was actually Tammy or Scratch imitating her voice.
Josh ran back to the Pimpmobile and had to pull Bronwyn out of the backseat. “We can get out, let’s go,” he said. They ran back to the truck and climbed in. Josh put the truck in first gear, and it moved forward.
“It’s over,” Bronwyn said. “We can go. We can help. Oh thank God. Thank you, God. Thank you.”
They got just about a mile past the ring of fire they’d created, and the pickup truck died.
“It’s the battery,” Josh said.
The headlights dimmed to nothingness. They rolled up both windows, locked the doors, and checked to make sure everything in the cab was secure.
Exhausted, they folded into one another. Josh managed to close his eyes for a few minutes and not think of the horror.
Now and then, he awoke, because Scratch’s claws raked around the side of the pickup truck. They had no light. He’d left the gun and flashlight back in the Pimpmobile. Maybe the Bic lighter was something, but he didn’t want to waste it.
It was only two hours until dawn. He and Bronwyn sat up, and kept watch, but Bronwyn told him it might be better if they slept. “Maybe in our sleep, when it kills us, it won’t be so bad.”