by Vicki Grove
I must have passed out or something then, because the next thing I heard or felt was the car bumping along a rock road. We were climbing at a tilt that was crazy steep, which meant we must have been nearing the apex of our cruise up and over Seneca Bluff.
I cracked open one eye and saw that Steve was in the back with me, politely squeezing himself against the door since I was taking up most of the seat.
I forced myself to sit up and give him some room, but that turned out not to be a good idea. I jerked forward to yell into Trey’s ear, “Stop! Stop and . . . let me out! I gotta puke!” It came on really fast, like I guess it usually does.
Trey swerved across the road to get to the narrow left shoulder in about one second, screaming, “Don’t puke in my car! Don’t you dare puke in my car, Graysten!”
Then even as the Mustang still rocked in the loose gravel, I propelled myself out of the roofless car and into the ditch, vomiting at the same split second my knees hit the ground.
“Go on!” I yelled when I could get a breath. “I’ll catch you later, down at the party!”
I managed a good-natured wave and they drove on with a screech of fine whitewall tires. I was grateful to have the privacy to do my necessary heaving. I figured that later I could run the last mile or two of the road, where it went straight along the very top of the bluff, then veered around a final sharp switchback curve and started downward, toward the beach. There are times when being a runner comes in real handy, and this would be one of them.
But the heaving turned out to be the least of it. I kept trying to force the moonlit mud and brown grass to hold still and form some sort of sense, but everything just kept spinning around. I am completely wasted, I admitted to myself.
I sat down hard in the prickly grass and pulled up my knees so I could prop my elbows on them and weave my fingers through my hair to keep my skull from blowing off. I knew that two hundred feet below me, a large percentage of the junior and senior class was partying. The bonfire cast tall, flickering shadows on the thick oak trees that lined the side of the road where I sat. The other side of the road was spangled with scraggly little leafless bushes that disguised the edge of the bluff, the steep drop down to the lake. If I could somehow get the fifteen or so feet from where I sat over to that hazardous edge, I knew I could look straight down and see the reassuring sight of everyone dancing far below, their shadows gigantic on the rocky sand. The dark water would be tonguing at the shore mere feet from them in a friendly, mutt-like way.
I thought it was a bit strange that I was hearing no music, but I couldn’t hold on to that thought. What I did hear was plenty of raised voices, lots of shouting, lots of raucous humans being raucous humans on the last October Saturday night of the year.
I kept trying to stand and stay standing. That took a while, maybe a full five minutes, maybe even ten. Finally, I made it and started my run, lurching clumsily through the darkness with flickering bonfire shadows animating the trees on my left and party noise coming at me from far below, on my right. Party noise that surely didn’t, if I’d been sober enough to notice, sound anything at all like carefree and music-filled party noise.
Thinking back, I realize I was hearing screams.
The dark road undulated and heaved like some strange rug my stepmother, Janet, had taken in her strong waitress hands and was snapping viciously free of grime. The stars bore down on me like leaks in the black sky.
Then finally, I saw the markers for that last sharp switchback curve before the road began its downhill glide. The moon clearly picked out the series of thick and luminous white posts that marked that dangerous corner, but . . . something just wasn’t right.
I pushed closer, then stopped with my hands on my hips, bent forward and breathing hard. The white posts were splayed crazily apart, distorted somehow. I squinted. They were . . . broken or something. A couple of them might even have gone missing.
Then suddenly this huge, dark thing sailed across the road a few yards in front of me, blocking out the stars for maybe four seconds as it flew from high up in the trees on the left side of the road to land in a patch of darkness between two of those messed-up posts!
Was it some gigantic bird? A flock of big birds? The quick but loose way the thing had moved through the air was somehow unnatural, like a shadow or a dark mist.
I fumbled for the small LED flashlight I keep dangling from my belt loop. I focused its intense beam on the place between the two messed-up posts where I’d seen the thing land. At first there was nothing but bare, weedy grass with twinkling stars in the background. And then, as I watched in total disbelief, this . . . this dog began to appear. I mean, it just slowly, well, materialized there in the grass between those two posts!
The dog was large and sleek, a black dog about the size of Ringo, our old golden Lab. No, it was actually bigger than Ringo. Much bigger.
It looked straight at me with its tongue out in that eager way dogs look at you when they’re waiting for you to feed them or walk them or something. It seemed so friendly that I would have tried hard to chalk up all its strange actions to my being wasted. But there was one thing about it that would have been as hard for my aching brain to make up as it was for it to forget. The dog had too many heads. Two too many. Three in all.
I dropped to my knees, staring in openmouthed disbelief, confused and afraid. The dog took that as a gesture of friendship, grinned a doggy grin—three doggy grins—and began moving toward me in a sort of slow-motion lope.
It got so close I could see the details of its large, luminous eyes, and I heard myself give a little whimper. Something was swimming inside each of the six of them! I groped with numb fingers for my forgotten flashlight and dared to aim it directly at the right eye in the dog’s closest head. It had no iris. Instead, a tiny spiral was slowly whirling around the eye’s dark pupil.
This had to be a hallucination or something. I closed my own eyes tight as I could and hammered my forehead with my knuckles until I could feel those thuds through the numbness in my brain.
When I dared to open them again, the dog was gone without a trace.
But the posts hadn’t come back into the straight, even line they had to be in.
The moon came out from behind a cloud so suddenly that I almost screamed. It gave a blast of light to the white posts and I saw several loose and tangled lengths of the thick, corded steel wire that usually held the posts upright and taut, making them into a safety barrier it would be hard to break through.
Those pieces of useless, broken wire were now bobbing gently in the night air like the windblown stems of gigantic, flowerless plants.
I got up, stumbled to the nearest white post, held on to it and looked down.
Everything in me went electric and I dropped to a sit, pushed off and slip-slid down that nearly vertical limestone bluff. I got hung up two or three times on little trees that grew straight out from the stone. Maybe I felt my flesh ripping along the way, tearing like the denim of my jeans was tearing. Maybe I felt it, or maybe I didn’t. I can’t remember. All I remember is that my eyes stung with the rising smoke of burning gasoline when I was partway down but I couldn’t close them for even a second because I had to watch and watch and watch like in a nightmare you have to watch and watch and watch.
Directly below that switchback curve and down the beach a little way from the bonfire, the burning Mustang was planted up to its windshield in the gravelly sand.
III
The fire was more alive than anything I’d ever seen. It was a wildly beautiful creature made of flame and with the mindless energy of a demon, and it had pounced directly on Trey’s car and was sinking long claws and razor fangs deep into the steel and glass and the smoking tires.
When my feet hit the sand, I started running blindly toward the thing, screaming Trey’s name, yelling at him to throw it into reverse and give it the gas and get out of there. My legs were numb and uncoordinated and the sand got hotter the nearer I came until I could feel the soles of my fe
et blistering right through my boots. But I somehow thought that I could pry open the burning doors and pull them free so they could run clear of the fire, maybe bruised and bumped around a bit, but still . . . themselves. Yes, I pictured myself freeing my friends, then all four of us would run to safety, propping each other up and laughing in a horrified, slaphappy way about the too-close call.
For a while, the police didn’t notice me any more than I noticed them, I guess because they were busy keeping most of Clevesdale’s junior and senior class behind sawhorse barricades along the beach. I managed to get really close to the Mustang, so close it hurt to breathe. I put my arm over my nose and mouth and moved even closer, then through the wall of smoke I actually glimpsed Trey, his hands on the wheel. Yes, his hands on the wheel! He might yet give the engine some gas and get out of this. Trey was famous for successful last-ditch efforts. Eking out a D-minus on a final exam he couldn’t afford to fail. Charming some girl’s parents into believing he’d brought their daughter home two hours late because of a highway detour. Getting the very last tickets for a concert everybody thought was sold out. Trey’s luck was legendary.
“Hurry, man!” I screamed to him, though I couldn’t hear my own words. The fire itself was deafening, and there was a sort of high screeching sound coming from the car. “Trey, gun it!” I yelled. “Get out of there, man! Give it all you’ve got, do it now!”
The car began giving off puffs of fire from somewhere deep inside itself, protesting its death by spewing clots of solid flame. Blast furnace heat arose from all directions. I smelled my eyebrows and eyelashes scorching.
And then, just before the fire exploded upward to completely engulf the car, the black smoke around the windows became white and nearly transparent and I had a much clearer view of Trey.
But I couldn’t comprehend what I was seeing.
If I’d stayed a few seconds longer, I probably would have gone up in flames myself, but my shirt was grabbed from behind and I was yanked several yards backward by what turned out to be a policeman. “What do you think you’re doing?” he screamed when we were clear of the worst of the heat. “How’d you get over here on this side of the vehicle?”
He shone his flashlight in my face.
“I . . . came down the bluff,” I said. I doubted if he could hear me. All the sound in the world was being sucked into what had now become the death roar of the car.
“You’re making no sense, son. Nobody can come down that bluff! And look at your boots! There’s blood all over ’em.”
But I couldn’t look at my boots. Though I could no longer see anything of Trey through the new clouds of black smoke, I could see a bit of the trunk of the Mustang. I had to stand watch, to keep vigil, to keep my eyes on Trey’s fine car for as long as I could see any small part of it.
Another policeman came out of the darkness behind us and took my right shoulder while the first one gripped my left elbow. “The paramedics need to check this kid out,” the first one yelled across to the other one. “I’m pretty sure he’s in shock, and he’s bleeding from somewhere. I think his legs have been injured.”
They turned me toward the beach, which seemed almost like a carnival with its many flashing lights—yellow ones on the sawhorses, red ones and blue ones atop the ambulances and police cars. I watched over my shoulder as the fire exploded upward to become a towering monster with the Mustang lost somewhere deep inside its gut.
A distant siren quickly went from loud to deafening as Clevesdale’s yellow fire truck came speeding down the narrow beach road with its bells clanging and its lights whirling. It idled at the barricades just long enough for workers to scramble opening them, then it swept toward the burning car like a dragon with lidless halogen eyes.
I turned away then, from the car, from Trey. I had no choice.
“We found a second body,” said a man in a yellow raincoat who ran up to tell the two policemen. “Thrown from the car like the other one we found. Looks like they both went down the bluff headfirst. One’s probably the driver.”
I couldn’t feel my mouth, but I heard a strange version of my own voice saying to them, “The driver is still inside the car. His name is Trey.”
Two yellow rubber tarpaulins covered something on the ground right beside the first ambulance. A breeze from the lake came up and rippled them, made it look like the long, thin bodies beneath were twitching impatiently, trying to get up and call it all a joke.
Like Zero was about to untangle his legs and rise to do a little bobbing, bent-kneed dance with his cutoffs ragged around his knees and his elbows high and aerodynamic. I told you I could fly from this bluff like an eagle, dudes! Like Steve was going to sit up and push his hair into sweat spikes as he scouted around for his lost clarinet case. Hey, guys, doncha remember I told you to watch my instrument? He’d get up off the ground, surely, any second now, give the crowd a boyish smile, swat the dust from his jeans, and begin sauntering out of here with his well-worn Memphis cowboy boots.
One of the policemen stepped in front of me, blocking my view. When I tried to see around his shoulder, he took my arm and held it, hard, stopping me.
“You’re gonna have to come to the station to tell us what you know about this, son,” he said, quietly and gruffly. “But first let’s get those legs of yours cleaned up.”
A fireman ran up to talk to the other policeman. They were speaking in low voices with their backs to me as the first policeman led me away. I wasn’t supposed to hear what they were saying, but I heard all right. I could hear everything—some of the kids from my class acting hysterical, others acting like they were too cool to act hysterical, the yellow flashers on the barricades clicking on and off and on and off, the gravel squishing under the gum boots of the firemen and policemen, the lake moving, the fire moving, the stars moving in the faraway black sky.
“With a fire as hot as this one, glass and metals bond to other objects, including human remains,” the fireman was saying to that policeman. “When that thing burns out, it’ll be hard to tell who or what anything used to be.”
I closed my eyes and saw Trey against my lids, Trey as I’d seen him when the smoke had cleared for that half second, Trey’s head and arms flailing around like he was playing his drums at a gig with his band. He’d been blown into jittery mock life there behind the wheel by the force of those vicious flames. His long red hair had been a glowing halo around his face, but he’d only been a puppet, a dancing and lifeless puppet. His hair had been on fire and his flesh was already becoming . . . charred.
“Here we go, son,” the policeman said, and I jerked in a breath and went with him to the nearby ambulance, the one with the two yellow tarps on the ground beside it. A young guy with a fauxhawk jumped down from the back of it and headed toward us.
“I’ll be back,” that policeman said, then patted my shoulder and walked away.
“Hi, I’m Larry,” the paramedic told me. My eyes were on those tarps as Larry cut what was left of my jeans out of the way. He gave a grim whistle and started using some sort of longhandled something to pick out the stuff that was embedded in my legs.
“Bet this smarts,” Larry observed after a while. “You got enough cedar needles in you to go as a Christmas tree for Halloween next week, pal. Lots of dirt, rocks, and who knows what all. Expect a bunch of stitches when you get this all properly treated at the clinic, too. That better be tomorrow, by the way. I’ll give you some painkillers for tonight, but you don’t want this mess to infect.”
A real wind came up, and the corner of the tarp nearest the ambulance lifted and folded itself in a neat triangle that ran diagonally about halfway across Zero’s chest.
That’s when I saw Zero’s face. What was left of it. “Aw, crap,” Larry said, going to fix the tarp, this time battening it down at the corner with a heavy metal box from the ambulance. “Gross, huh?” he added as he walked back to me. “Just be glad it was him and not the other guy you saw. Nightmare stuff. You never really get all that used to it.”
Larry gave me a pair of navy blue sweatpants with POLICE printed down one leg and told me to change, and when I changed, he took my shredded jeans and put them into a yellow plastic bag that also had police printed on it and handed it to me.
Then the policeman returned and led me to his squad car. He put his hand on my head as I ducked into the car, just like in the movies. For a second I had a vague, hopeful notion that this was just a movie. I’d been sober since the moment I saw that car down on the beach, but I could barely walk or talk or remember to breathe every so often.
“Stop! I mean, we’ve gotta wait. We can’t go yet! Where are they?”
He turned to me with droopy eyes and a sad and exhausted expression. “Son, they’re not coming. Your friends aren’t here and you’re confused. Don’t think about it.”
I clutched the bag to my chest and tried to stop shaking. “But . . . where’s the dog?” I asked under my breath, turning to stare out the window while something chilly and dark started rising in me from the feet on up.
I hoped the police would leave Janet out of it, but apparently that’s not allowed when you’re seventeen. She was in the waiting room at the police station, dabbing her eyes and pushing back strands of her hair that escaped the bobby pins that hold back her yellowish ponytail. She was still in her waitress uniform, and when she saw me, she jumped from her chair and started crying for real, which is exactly what I was afraid she’d do. I tried to send her a reassuring smile, but the muscles for that wouldn’t work. She cried harder and moved to put her arms around me, but I sidestepped that. “I’m filthy,” I murmured.
Then they led us into this small green room.
They had my old DARE officer from fifth grade ask the questions. Officer Stephens asked me how it started and I thought about that awhile, then told him with Trey honking for me and me running to the Mustang like about a thousand times before.
