Survive the Night

by Riley Sager

  In addition to the gun, Marge also sports a black parka thrown on over her uniform. Hanging from her shoulder is a bulky satchel. Whatever’s inside clangs together as they walk around the rear of the car. Charlie also hears a crunching sound beneath her feet. When she looks down, she spots bits of red glass scattered across the parking lot surface.

  “Get in,” Marge says as she opens the rear door on the passenger side.

  Charlie stares at the inside of the car and thinks about running. She knows it’s not possible. Not with her legs and arms tied like they are. Even if it were, Marge could easily put a bullet in her back.

  Yet Charlie considers it all the same.

  Just springing away from Marge, hoping the old woman is a lousy shot and somehow misses her as she hops out of the parking lot and into the road, not stopping until she reaches the highway. Surely someone would stop for her. A truck driver or a cop like Officer Tom or someone coming home from the late shift. Some Good Samaritan who’d slam on the brakes as soon as they spotted her hobbling along the road’s shoulder, panic writ large in her eyes.

  Charlie pauses beside the car, doing the math, gauging to see how quickly she might be able to do it.

  It doesn’t take her long to deduce that it’s impossible.

  Even if it takes her only ten seconds to get out of the parking lot, she knows Marge can use those same ten precious ticks of time to jump into the car, start the engine, and make chase. Even if it took Marge minutes—one, five, ten—Charlie would still be shuffling down Dead River Road, with no guarantee of stumbling upon a kindly motorist. Especially at this hour.

  “Get in,” Marge says again, this time nudging her with the gun barrel.

  Charlie does, with much reluctance and even more struggle. With her arms tied, she’s forced to turn around, bend at the waist, and slide inside. She then twists her legs until she’s completely in the car, leaning awkwardly against the back seat.

  Marge shuts the door, rounds the front of the car, and slides behind the wheel. Before turning the key, she hits the button that locks all the doors.

  Charlie is trapped. Again.

  They leave the parking lot quickly, tires kicking up gravel as Marge swerves onto the road, heading toward the highway.

  Charlie looks out the window, spotting the same scenery the Grand Am passed when she and Josh traveled to the diner from the opposite direction. That was two hours ago, and she’s now in a different car with a different captor.

  The only thing that remains the same is her fear.

  INT. VOLVO—NIGHT

  Robbie watches the dented Cadillac leave the parking lot. Since he doesn’t want the waitress to know he’s following her, his plan is to let her gain a little bit of distance before going after her.

  It shouldn’t be hard to keep up. There aren’t any other cars on the road, for one thing. Then there’s the fact that he knocked out one of her taillights in the parking lot, a trick he learned thanks to Charlie. It was in a movie she’d made him watch. A black-and-white one from the forties that mostly bored him. But he remembered the taillight trick, and the broken one now winks at him as the Caddy glides down the road.

  It wasn’t easy getting to the diner as fast as he did. After sprinting out of his apartment, Robbie got in his Volvo and hightailed it to I-80. On the interstate, he drove like a bat out of hell, not caring if he got pulled over. In fact, he hoped that he would, thinking he might get a police escort out of it.

  He didn’t know what to expect once he got to the Skyline Grille. He’d hoped to find the place open and bustling and Charlie enjoying a milkshake, the whole thing a complete misunderstanding. Instead, the diner was closed and the only person around seemed to be that waitress, who clearly had been lying. In the span of a few sentences, she told him that Charlie had said goodbye when she left and that she hadn’t seen her depart.

  So after breaking her taillight, he decided to drive a few hundred yards up the road and wait, the front of the diner still within view. He wanted to see the waitress leave. He thought he’d follow her, ask her a few more questions, get the police involved if necessary. Not that the police had been useful the first time he called them. Considering the way that dispatcher brushed him off, he doubted a cop ever stopped by the diner.

  Which is why he sat in his car, the engine off but the keys still in the ignition, watching for the waitress. What Robbie didn’t expect was to see Charlie with her, being led out of the diner like a death row inmate heading to the gas chamber. It was such an awful sight that he almost jumped out of the car and ran to rescue her.

  But then he saw the gun the waitress was pointing at her back and decided that running was the worst thing he could do at the moment. As Charlie got into the back of the car, Robbie tried to get a good look at her. Although it was hard to tell from such a distance and in the middle of the night, she didn’t appear to have been physically harmed.

  He hopes it stays that way.

  What he doesn’t understand—and hasn’t since the moment Charlie called him—is what the hell happened between the university and here. What little she told him on the phone suggested it had something to do with the guy Charlie had gotten a ride with.

  Josh.

  Robbie thinks that was the name she had mentioned.

  But he saw no sign of any guy when he peeked into the diner as the waitress was lying to him. Nor did it look like there was anyone else inside the Cadillac as it sped out of the parking lot.

  He can only assume that this Josh—whoever he is and wherever he might be now—is working with the waitress.

  What they want with Charlie, however, is impossible to know.

  Not until Robbie gets to wherever it is the Cadillac is heading.

  Up ahead, the broken taillight disappears below the horizon. Time to move. Robbie quickly starts the car, puts it in gear, and begins to follow.

  INT. GRAND AM—NIGHT

  He drives toward the diner, even though what he’s doing doesn’t really qualify as driving at all. It’s merely rolling and steering at the same time. And he’s doing a shit job of it. Moving down Dead River Road at a snail’s pace, he can barely manage to keep the Grand Am inside the lane.

  The stab wound is to blame. Each time he presses a pedal or shifts gears, pain flares along his side, making it feel like everything from shoulder to knee is on fire.

  At least the bleeding’s stopped, thanks to his stitch job, the gauze pad, and an abundance of medical tape. Crisscrossing the gauze multiple times, the tape has seared to his skin, pulling it whenever he moves and creating another, more pinching layer of pain.

  It’s still better than what he felt while sewing himself back up. He’s been stitched up plenty of times. That’s nothing new. And back when he was still on active duty and serving in Beirut, circumstances forced him to give stitches to others. But he’s never had to do both at the same time before.

  It wasn’t pretty.

  When you’re about to hurt yourself, your nerves send a signal to the brain that tells you to stop doing whatever it is that’s causing the pain.

  Simple.

  Not so simple is forcing yourself to do it anyway, no matter what your brain tells you, knowing you’re about to cause yourself a world of hurt. He paused as the needle went in and paused as it went out, repeating the process five times before the cut in his side was fully closed.

  Now he’s driving.

  Or trying to.

  Heading to the Skyline Grille instead of a hospital, which is where he really should be going. But he doesn’t like hospitals. He’s not a fan of all the questions they ask in the ER. And the first one he’ll get when they take one look at his amateurishly stitched, overly taped wound is “Who stabbed you?”

  Because of that, he’d rather skip the hospital for now.

  There may come a time tomorrow when he can’t avoid it. If that moment co
mes, he’ll be sure to make up some excuse as to how he took a steak knife to the gut. He has no plans to mention Charlie. That wouldn’t be wise.

  So it’s off to the diner, drifting out of the lane with each line of pain that burns up his side. He needs to get to the diner because that’s where Marge is. It’s also likely Charlie’s location, considering how there’s really nowhere else to go around these parts.

  Just the Skyline Grille.

  The place where Charlie was supposed to have stayed.

  That was the plan, at least. Find her, get her into the car by any means possible, and take her to the diner. Done, done, and done.

  Once at the diner, when Marge came to take their order, he gave the signal that Charlie, no stranger to code words herself, didn’t notice.

  What’s your blue-plate special?

  Translation: This is the girl.

  The rest depended on Marge’s response. If she had told him, “We don’t do that here. What’s printed on the menu is what we got,” it meant that everything was called off. Instead, she said, “Salisbury steak.” Which meant that everything was still a go and that he should leave Charlie at the diner.

  What definitely wasn’t part of the plan was Marge purposefully spilling tea on Charlie so the two of them could have a moment alone. He knows why she did it. She didn’t think he was doing a good enough job and that Charlie might act in unpredictable ways because of it.

  Turns out she was right.

  He certainly didn’t predict Charlie playing that damn song on the jukebox, revealing she knew if not everything, then at least enough. Nor could he have foreseen that she’d insist on getting back into the car with him. He only agreed to it because he knew he could easily bring her back in a few minutes. Besides, it seemed better than just taking off while she was still in the bathroom and never seeing her again. He thought it might be nice to drive a little and chat a bit more. A proper goodbye before he slapped on the cuffs.

  Then Charlie stabbed him and now he’s got five homemade stitches in his side, tape tugging at his skin, and a sweatshirt crunchy with dried blood.

  So much for a proper goodbye.

  When the diner comes into view a half-mile down the road, he sees that the place is dark and that the parking lot is empty. Yet there’s still an unusual amount of traffic for this road at this hour. About halfway between the Grand Am and the diner is a Volvo sitting on the road’s shoulder, its headlights off and the engine still. Far in the distance, a car with a broken taillight travels in the direction of the on-ramp to the interstate.

  He pounds the brakes and cuts the Grand Am’s own lights, curious to see what happens next.

  When the car with the broken taillight fades from view, the Volvo comes to life and edges onto the road. As it drives off in the same direction as the other car, he spots an Olyphant University sticker on the rear bumper.

  The boyfriend, he assumes.

  Here to rescue Charlie.

  Another assumption he makes is that this boyfriend of hers didn’t come all this way just to tail some random car. That means the one with the broken taillight is Marge, with Charlie in tow.

  He allows himself a pain-tinged smile.

  Maybe he’ll get his goodbye after all.

  He waits until the Volvo is a good distance away before flicking on the Grand Am’s headlights again. Then he resumes driving. For real this time, even though his rolling-and-steering approach hurt far less. He grits his teeth, grips the steering wheel, and endures the pain.

  There’s no other choice. He knows that he needs to keep up with the Volvo and that this night, already a clusterfuck to begin with, just got a lot more complicated.

  INT. CADILLAC—NIGHT

  Charlie’s world is still blurred at the edges, even though the chloroform has all worn off. The blurriness now is caused by the Cadillac’s speed. Everything out the window—trees mostly, but also occasional clearings and empty lots—passes by in streaks of gray.

  She doesn’t know where Marge is taking her. Nor does she know where they are anymore. Charlie thought they were headed for the highway, but Marge blew right through the interchange that would have taken them there, making it just another gray streak.

  Now Charlie is left to fearfully wonder not only where they’re going but what will happen to her once they arrive. It’s the same feeling she got during her first time riding away from the diner. Terrified and confused and almost ill with unease. Torn between wanting to keep driving forever and just getting to the ending.

  The main difference between the two situations, other than the person behind the wheel, is that then Charlie had a weapon. Now she has nothing.

  Charlie looks at her hands, stained pink with blood. Yes, she’s aware that Josh might still be alive and that she had acted in self-defense. It doesn’t change the fact that she willingly drove a knife into another living person, and she fears the memory of that action will stay with her for the rest of her life.

  Making it worse is knowing that a single flash of violence didn’t change a thing. She’s still being held captive, and Josh is still involved somehow. Marge never said more about that—and hasn’t said anything since getting into the car—leaving Charlie to wonder what that means. The scenarios she’s thought up are as plentiful as they are disturbing. Now she’s not sure which frightens her more: what’s already happened or what’s yet to come.

  In the front seat, Marge continues to drive in silence. She seems to be lost in her own world as she grips the wheel and stares out at the dark road ahead. She doesn’t even sneak an occasional glance in the rearview mirror to check on Charlie.

  Not that Charlie can go anywhere tied up like this with all the doors locked. All she can do is sit in fear, her arms and legs straining against their binds as she watches Marge drive them to only God knows where.

  “Where are you taking me?” she says, angrier than Marge probably likes. She can’t help it. A stinging sense of betrayal streaks her fear. She had liked Marge. She trusted her. Charlie had thought of her as kind and grandmotherly—not too different from Nana Norma. As a result, Charlie had gone out of her way to protect her when she should have been focusing on her own safety.

  When Marge doesn’t answer, Charlie tries again. “Tell me why you’re doing this!”

  Still no answer. The only sign that Marge can even hear her is a mean look she flashes Charlie in the rearview mirror. A scowl, but angrier.

  Another thing Charlie can see is a change in Marge’s hair. That high hairdo now sits slightly askew atop her skull.

  A wig.

  It shifts again when Marge abruptly cuts the wheel to the left, veering the Cadillac onto a side road half-hidden by trees. Up ahead, Charlie sees a large sign dominating the roadside. Two spotlights sit beneath it, both of them dark. Still, there’s enough moonlight for her to make out what it says.

  Mountain Oasis Lodge.

  Charlie recognizes the name. It’s the same lodge that was on the billboard they passed on the interstate. Like that ragged billboard, the sign has seen better days. The “O” in Oasis is missing, leaving only a phantom letter standing out against the sun-bleached paint around it.

  Beyond the sign, a chain lies limp across the road. Attached to it, lying flat against the ground, is another sign.

  NO TRESPASSING

  Marge keeps driving, tires crunching over the chain.

  The forest is thick here—a dense expanse of evergreens that climb the mountainside. Through the trees, Charlie gets glimpses of a large structure perched halfway up the mountainside. Accompanying them is the whoosh of rushing water from somewhere nearby. Soon the forest clears and the Mountain Oasis Lodge stands before them in all its decrepit glory.

  The billboard on the interstate didn’t do it justice.

  The lodge is big. An ungainly stack of windows, walls, and exposed timbers that stretches five
stories from stone foundation to slate roof. It sits atop a ridge, balanced precariously, like a set of Lincoln Logs about to crumble. Next to it, a wide creek flows past the eastern side of the lodge before tumbling over a cliff into a ravine fifty feet below.

  It was all probably beautiful once. Now it just looks eerie. Sitting dark and silent atop the ridge, pale in the moonlight, the lodge reminds Charlie of a mausoleum. One filled with ghosts.

  During the approach, the car crosses a bridge spanning the ravine at the base of the waterfall. The bridge is narrow, with only a low wooden railing to prevent cars from crashing into the drink, and so close to the waterfall that spray from the cascade spatters the windshield as they pass. Charlie looks out the window and sees dark water swirling roughly ten feet below them.

  On the other side of the bridge, the road begins its ascent, taking a path so twisted it might as well have been carved by an apple peeler. Taking turn after winding turn, the Cadillac slowly climbs the mountainside.

  Instead of another wooden railing, one bend in the road that comes close to the waterfall is lined by a fieldstone wall that follows the curve. When Marge steers through it, more spray smacks the windows.

  After two more sharp turns, the Caddy reaches the top of the ridge. There the road bends again, this time curving into a loop directly in front of the lodge. In its heyday, there must have been a constant stream of cars circling this roundabout. Now it’s just them, pulling under an entrance portico, where Marge slams the brakes and cuts the engine.

  “Why are we here?” Charlie says.

  “To talk.”

  Marge scratches her scalp, two fingers burrowing beneath the wig, making it slip back and forth atop her head. Rather than straighten it again, she yanks off the wig and tosses it into the passenger seat, where it sits in a furry clump like a dead animal. Marge’s natural hair is bone white and sprouts from her scalp in thin, thistly patches a millimeter high.