“I wish I was adopted,” Dakota said wistfully. “My parents are nothing like me.”
The front door opened. Trevor entered the diner with Ethan right behind him. Trevor was grinning.
Always the optimist.
Ethan looked like he’d just run a marathon and collapsed a foot from the finish line.
“Everything’s fine,” Trevor said, sitting down beside Claire in the booth.
Ethan sat down next to Dakota, and put his arm around her.
Dakota removed his arm. “You’re all sweaty.”
“Yeah,” said Ethan. “Doing man’s work, while you ladies cool your calluses in the air conditioning.”
“I don’t have calluses.”
“Exactly.”
Trevor said to Claire, “We should be on the road by dark.”
The waitress stepped up to the table and said in a solemn tone, “There’s a motel back the way you came. Not more than five miles. You could start out in the morning.”
Ethan pulled out a deck of SAT flash cards from his back pocket. “We have a funeral in the morning.”
He flipped through the cards, testing himself.
The waitress said, “You know there’s an eclipse tonight. Lunar eclipse.”
“Yeah,” Dakota said. “We heard it on the news.”
“There’s things they don’t tell you on the news…”
The old trucker set his beer down on the counter. He kept his back to the others. There was dust and gravel in his voice. “I wouldn’t drive Blood Alley tonight.”
Ethan looked up. The flash cards froze in his hands. “Blood Alley?”
“That’s what we call it,” said the waitress. “On account of all the accidents.”
She pointed to a wall with photos and news clippings.
The wall was twenty feet off, but Claire could make out a few words from the headlines:
ACCIDENT…
TRAGIC…
KILLED…
HORROR…
It was another memorial, an homage to gruesome events. Claire saw a dozen photos of car accidents, but couldn’t make out the details.
“The road is dry and thirsty,” the old trucker said. “It drinks blood.”
The room went quiet, and Claire’s heart stopped to listen.
The waitress started it up again with a laugh. “Oh, don’t mind old Joshua.” She waved a dismissive hand at the trucker. “He likes to scare the tourists.”
Claire heard the wind howl. A mournful sound for a mournful place.
“It’s a haunted highway,” said the trucker, Joshua.
“Haunted?” Dakota echoed.
“By the Highwayman.”
“Killed his family during a lunar eclipse,” the waitress put in. “Then killed himself. They say he comes back when the red shadow’s on the moon.”
“The Highwayman?” Trevor scoffed with amusement. “Never heard of him.”
“He’s heard of you. You’re on his road.”
“It’s a state road,” said Ethan.
Joshua shook his head, but kept his back to the group. “You kids know nothing. State road? In the daytime, maybe. But one night, when the dark is quiet and the moon is full, and your sins lay heavy upon your soul, you might just meet the Highwayman, riding his ghost car down Blood Alley. Lots of people seen him. Few live to tell the tale. Those what don’t...why, they’re still riding that road. Riding it forever.”
Dakota said, “But that’s just a story, right?”
Joshua answered low and mournful. “He gets inside you…deep inside your head…makes you do things…crazy things…”
“Like what?” Trevor asked.
“Take a turn too fast on a dead man’s curve…play chicken with a pretty pair of headlights…drive off a cliff to see if you can fly…but you gotta fight him off. Gotta know who you are—who you really are.”
The waitress leaned in toward Claire. “You see anything strange, Honey, you take the very first exit—”
“No exit,” Joshua said. “No escape. The only way off Blood Alley is through it.”
He set a twenty dollar bill on the countertop and stood up from his chair.
“You’ve seen him?” Claire asked. “The Highwayman?”
“Once.” Joshua turned to her. Burn scars covered his ruined face. “I best be going before it gets dark.”
16
Claire watched Joshua shamble to the door. He limped like a wounded knight-errant heading out for one last battle.
Joshua pushed on the door handle. The door seemed to fight him. He forced the door wide against a fierce wind that rattled the bell and riled the trinkets on the counter.
A souvenir display rack spun like a pinwheel and toppled.
Postcards fluttered to the floor.
Joshua passed through the exit, and the door threw itself shut, rattling the windows.
Claire looked out. She saw Joshua lean into the wind, a cruel sandstorm that nearly knocked him back, as if the desert were trying to keep him off the road. He reached the cab of his big rig and pulled himself inside, stepping into his armor.
Dakota said, “Let’s go back.”
Ethan smirked. “You don’t believe him, do you?”
He didn’t wait for an answer, but started flipping through his flash cards again.
“The funeral’s tomorrow morning,” Dakota said. “We’ll never make it, anyway.”
“We’ll make it,” Trevor insisted. “The car will be ready in a few hours.”
Dakota gave the window a worried look. “It’ll be dark in a few hours.”
Trevor dismissed it with a shrug. “We can drive all night if we have to.”
Claire heard the petroleum tanker truck start up its engine. She watched the big rig ease onto the road.
Blood Alley, she thought.
The old trucker seemed to believe the story, but that didn’t keep him off the highway. Maybe, like the waitress said, he was just trying to scare the out-of-towners. In any case, Trevor was right. They had to continue with the trip. The Fowlers lived up ahead, and Claire wanted to see that farmhouse.
She said, “I vote we keep going.”
“Great,” Trevor said. “Show of hands—who wants to stick to the plan and keep driving tonight?”
He held his hand up.
Claire and Ethan added theirs to the count.
Trevor stared at his sister. “And who wants to chicken out and go home?”
Dakota looked pissed, and stared right back.
“Three votes to one,” he said. “Cedarview, here we come.”
The mood at the table was a little tense. Claire excused herself to the restroom to fix her hair and makeup. Seeing Joshua’s burnt face had sent shivers through her soul. In the bathroom mirror, Claire’s own blemishes looked smaller now, but these imperfections were her own and she knew how to fix them. The routine of it calmed her nerves.
When she was done, she left the bathroom and wandered over to the memorial wall. It displayed dozens of photos of those who had died, mothers and fathers and children all struck down on Blood Alley.
She read a few of the articles. One was headlined, “LAST STOP FOR TEEN IDOL.” It told of Frankie Lamarque, a seventeen-year-old singer who wrecked his 1957 Chevy on the highway. He was drag racing with the drummer from his band.
The article focused on Frankie, the teen heartthrob. There was a girl with them, Samantha. The drummer, Darren, was her boyfriend. The article speculated about a love triangle, and quoted several friends of theirs. The singer and his drummer had gotten into an argument at a diner, then settled their fight on the road. The girl was the prize.
But nobody won the prize that night. All three had died. Frankie’s car overturned, and he was killed instantly. Miles ahead, Darren’s car went over a cliff.
Strange, Claire thought.
The article didn’t say why Darren drove his car over the cliff. It left the riddle unsolved. After Frankie crashed, why did Darren keep on driving? Did he know the
singer was dead? Was he afraid of being blamed?
His Deuce Coupe had smashed through the safety rail and plunged more than a thousand feet before hitting the trees below. Some said the driver lost control. Others said it was suicide.
There was one thing everyone agreed on: Frankie Lamarque died young and full of promise.
He had only one hit record, “Last Stop Car Hop.” Claire couldn’t remember if she’d ever heard it before.
Oddly, the diner where the drag race started was named after the song. Frankie had bought the Last Stop Car Hop with his own money. He wanted a place for him and his friends to hang out and escape the hustle and bustle of L.A. He was known to take girls for long drives in the desert. Frankie loved the desert.
And it killed him, Claire thought.
The article didn’t use the phrase “Blood Alley.” It didn’t mention “The Highwayman.” If there was a local legend about a ghost on the road, it went unreported at the time.
Maybe that’s how the legend started, Claire thought. With the death of a celebrity.
The idea made sense. Teenagers would trade stories, the stories would grow in the telling, and the legend of Frankie’s death would evolve over time into a myth about a haunted highway that took the lives of young drivers who crossed it at night.
Claire chuckled at the thought.
But as she scanned the other articles, her amusement died.
In 1972 there was a school bus accident. A girls softball team was traveling from Palmdale to Cedarview after a night game when the bus overturned. All the girls were killed. The article offered no explanation, but a photo showed the bus severed in two pieces. Black sheets covered a dozen corpses in the road.
A gruesome image. Bloodless, yet horrifying.
Claire thought of the girls under those anonymous black sheets. In their final moments, what had they been thinking? About the game, or boys, or school? Claire imaged them in the moment before impact: sleeping, reading, checking their make-up in the window. Gone now were their petty jealousies and their fondest dreams.
All gone.
Something had happened to those poor girls on that road, something sudden and terrible.
And then silence.
But why, Claire wondered, had they all died? Yes, the bus rolled over. One would expect severe injuries—perhaps a few fatalities. But no survivors? None at all? It hardly seemed plausible.
And what tore the bus in two?
The cause of the accident remained a mystery. Desert roads were full of animals crossing at night, rabbits and dogs and coyotes. Deer were common enough in the mountains. Big horn sheep were known to live in the hills.
Something made the driver swerve. A car or an animal or...
A ghost?
Claire imagined a ghostly figure standing in the middle of the highway, and the bleary-eyed driver catching a glimpse in his headlights. He turns to avoid the phantom in the road, and then…what?
The bus overturns?
Everyone dies?
Unlikely.
Claire read the other articles. They were long on tragedy and short on answers. A woman trapped in a car fire. A collapsed bridge, with two semi trucks down in the ravine. An overturned bank truck.
One headline read, “TUNNEL FIRE AT DEVIL’S PASS.” Nineteen people had died in the inferno. Horrific. Incomprehensible. Unexplained.
The most recent article was an op-ed piece that summed up the history of accidents and called on state officials to close the road. Next to the article was a color graphic illustrating the deadliest collisions over the past sixty years. All of them happened on the fifty-mile stretch from Dinah’s Diner to the Devil’s Pass, with most of the casualties in the tunnel itself.
There were no answers in any of the articles, none that would satisfy Claire. The answers lay on the road ahead.
I’ll be down that road soon enough.
17
Trevor wanted to be alone. His sister was getting on his nerves.
He went outside and stood on the porch, where a strong wind whipped at his clothes. Tumbleweeds rolled across the desert and over the road like soccer balls spinning out of bounds.
Trevor squinted against the angry dust, walked into the wind, and crossed the highway to check out the ghost bike memorial, but once there he quickly got bored. The dead kid meant nothing to him. It was someone else’s tragedy.
Returning to the garage he found the mechanic at his desk, writing up an estimate.
“You need a new timing belt,” the man said. “Lucky it didn’t damage the engine.”
Trevor didn’t feel lucky. “What’s the damage to my pocketbook?”
“Six-fifty for the timing belt. Another three-fifty for the water pump.”
“Water pump?”
“You need to get those replaced together. I got all the parts in the yard out back. Lucky thing about that. A car just like yours came in off the road last year. Totaled, of course, but the guts are good.”
“Anything else?”
“That’ll get you to where you’re going.”
“Cedarview.”
The mechanic punched some numbers into an ancient adding machine that spat out paper from a roll. “With tax we’re talking…twelve hundred, or near as makes no difference.”
Trevor nodded stoically. The cost was more than he was hoping for, but less than he feared. At least the car was fixable. The mechanic was quoting him high—Trevor was sure of that—but they were out in the middle of nowhere. Towing the Hummer back to Palmdale would take additional time and money, even if he could get a cheaper quote from a mechanic in town, which was by no means a sure thing.
Better to suck it up and get the job done now.
He could put the bill on his credit card and talk to his dad about it when they got to the hotel. The important thing was to get back on the road.
“How long?” he asked.
“Four, five hours. We’ll get you out of here today.”
The hours passed slowly.
There was little to do on this concrete oasis but hang out in the diner. They all had lunch, burgers and fries and a boxed salad for Claire.
Afterwards, Dakota and Ethan bought plastic water guns from the gift corner and ran around the gas station shooting each other.
Claire stayed inside and read some chick-lit novel she found on the paperback rack. On the cover of the book was a pink handbag. That was more than Trevor needed to know.
He spent most of his time with the mechanic, Darryl, who spun war stories of Iraq as he worked steadily on the car. When Darryl excused himself to go to the john, Trevor wandered out back to the auto graveyard.
The sun hovered on the horizon, casting long shadows. Trevor walked among the hundreds of wrecked cars. The strong wind whistled through twisted metal. He found a wrecked Deuce Coupe. Its frame was crushed and blackened by fire.
Peeking inside he saw a charred woman’s shoe with a broken heel.
He strolled around the front half of a school bus that had been ripped in two. The shell of the bus was rusted, but he could make out faint lettering on the side. It said PALMDALE.
That was Trevor’s high school. He had ridden in buses like this, on the road to away games and swimming competitions.
Trevor climbed onto the wreckage to watch the sunset. He stood atop the ruined hulk of the school bus, his back to the approaching darkness.
He heard the garage door open.
Turning, he saw Darryl step outside and glance around.
“Over here,” Trevor said.
The mechanic spotted him. “Whatcha doing up there?”
“Admiring the view. Quite a collection.”
Darryl nodded and looked at the colors in the sky.
Wind coiled around the wrecked cars in swirls and eddies. A dust devil formed, spiraled up over the graveyard, and was blown apart.
The mechanic said, “Gonna be a bad one tonight.”
“Yeah?”
“This devil wind. Screaming down the
mountain. I’ve seen it knock a big rig clean off the ridge. Bang two trucks together like toys. Wicked weather.” He leaned against a demolished semi truck. “I kinda like it.”
“Blood Alley,” Trevor said.
Darryl laughed. “You been talking to Joshua.”
“The old trucker.”
“This is his route. Only he won’t drive it tonight, on account of the moon.”
“He already left, a while ago.” Trevor hopped down from the bus. “You don’t believe in the Highwayman?”
Darryl laughed again and shook his head. He picked up a rock and chucked it across the highway. “A ghost that appears during a lunar eclipse? Listen, it’s a narrow two-lane road. People get a little reckless. Come up fast on a slow car. Take a chance. Try to pass. Bam! Another metal carcass for my collection. I don’t need any Highwayman to stir up business.”
He tossed Trevor the car keys.
They went inside and settled the bill. Trevor eased the Hummer out of the garage, honked three times to hurry the others, and gassed up for the rest of the trip. The next station was in Cedarview.
As the tank swallowed gas, Trevor leaned against his car on the leeward side. With the sun setting and the temperature dropping fast, the wind seemed even stronger than before.
The highway sign across the street shook violently. Something snapped. The gale ripped the sign off the post. The thin, lettered metal sliced through the air, hit the roof of the diner, and skittered into distance.
Trevor heard an unearthly screeching as the chained-up ghost bike rattled and railed against the bent metal post, which was now angled nearly forty-five degrees. The front wheel of the bike rose up, spinning. The painted-white bicycle frame, shoved by the wind, slid up the post and over.
Briefly it flew, then crashed down on the blacktop.
Bounced and flipped.
For a moment the ghost bike found its bearings and pedaled free on two wheels, as if ridden by a phantom. But the wind shifted and smacked it hard from the highway, crashing the ghost bike into a Joshua tree. The rear wheel spun for a while, then died.
Trevor returned the gas nozzle to the pump and got into the driver’s seat. He leaned on the horn. Ethan stepped out of the diner first, followed by Claire. Together they dashed across the parking lot to the Hummer and hopped inside. Claire rode shotgun.
Blood Alley (The Highwayman) Page 7
