Chasing the Sandman

by Meyers, Brandon

  Headlights passed quickly as she put the pedal to the floor. After about a minute, the last of the tail lights were tiny red dots in her rearview mirror, and she brought the car to a slow. She left the Mazda’s headlamps on and they illuminated a toppled road sign as she hurried out of her car and around to the other side. By squatting behind the open passenger door, Liv was able to effectively hide herself from the road, even though there was no sign of any approaching traffic from either direction.

  “Good timing,” Liv said, particularly glad that she had not been forced to publicly expose herself. Even the bitter chill of early winter was unable to spoil her spirits, but only served to make her hurry. When she finished, her only thought (aside from relief) was that she would remember to put a roll of toilet paper in the glove box first chance she got.

  Liv sighed contentedly when she was again sitting in the warm leather bucket seat. She threw her car into gear and eased back onto the road. It was then that she noticed the object in the road. Or more accurately, she noticed that it wasn’t what her previously hurried mind had mistaken it for, which was a fallen road sign.

  “What the hell?”

  The reflection of her headlights was not cast back by a steel road marker, but rather by a very out-of-place piece of luggage. Curious, Liv pulled off the road again, her bumper stopping only a few feet away from a slick aluminum briefcase. The pale reflection of her lights shone back from its polished surface.

  Watching it through the windshield, she had a brief vision of herself opening the attache and finding it full of crisp, hundred-dollar bills. Things like that happened, didn’t they? Just a few months ago, she’d heard about a plumber who had found a million-dollar bag of cash just sitting inside a customer’s walls. Of course, the money had been disputed in a nasty court battle, but that wasn’t the point that her subconscious mind was trying to convey to her.

  And why couldn’t it happen to her? She needed money. In reality, she knew that the metal-clad carryall probably held a useless stack of papers, if anything at all, and had in all likelihood been left behind by some foolish businessman who had stopped to fix a flat tire. When she got out and lifted it by the handle, however, Liv’s heart fluttered at the weight. Whatever the contents were, they were anything but feathers.

  Something shifted inside the case, but Liv did not have time to make any further assessments, because it was at that moment that she registered the dark form on silent approach from her side. She uttered a brief scream, which was cut short at the same time she felt something heavy fall jarringly into the bones just above her shoulders. Then Liv saw nothing at all.

  When she slipped from unconsciousness into a groggy daze, the first thing Liv became aware of was that she was moving. Her body jostled gently, giving the impression that she was floating on a rolling wave. But with every slow loll, her head exploded in pins and needles that shot upward from her neck.

  She opened her eyes slowly, and the last events of her memory came rushing back. At first, what she saw was a little disorienting, but the tiny, glittering disco ball hanging from the rearview mirror told her that she was lying sideways across the backseat of her own car. Her pulse quickened when Liv looked to the driver’s seat.

  A lumbering figure sat behind the wheel, with a giant, shadowy mass so extraordinary that he hardly fit in the small car. Usually a quick-thinker, Liv found her normally sharp instincts dulled by the aching pain at the base of her skull. After a moment, she thought to twitch her toes. Luckily, although it hurt like hell, she had apparently not suffered any crippling spinal damage. As far as she could tell, she was not bound in any way.

  While her first impulse was to lash out and thrash the man driving her car, Liv had a feeling that it would probably be a bad idea to take action without assessing the situation first. The longer she could remain awake without her abductor knowing it was likely going to be to her advantage. And if she caused him to wreck the car, she would probably be killed without the time to fasten a seatbelt.

  Stupid, she berated herself. You stupid, stupid idiot. What in the hell had she been thinking getting out of the car to look at that briefcase? That thought, in turn, made her think of the bulking man sitting twenty yards away, watching her urinate in the bushes. The idea of it made her shiver. And she had to physically fight back a wave of nausea.

  “This is why we have come, father,” came a surprisingly high voice from the front seat. Its unexpected appearance forced Liv to bite her lip to keep from screaming. She dug her fingernails into the soft leather of the seat bench, arms tensed and quivering. Just knowing that the man had a voice—that he was an actual thinking being—brought the situation to horrific clarity. Liv had been abducted and was now being driven in the back of her own car to a destination unknown, where the devil only knew what lay in wait for her. How long would it be until they reached the place where the vehicle would come to rest? It could be five minutes, or even five hours. Was it possible that they were still on Interstate 9? If so, she could be well on her way back to her parents’ house. But she knew with darkening dread that the inviting warmth of the Dunmill homestead might as well have been a thousand miles away.

  “For you, we gather the pieces, father. The life,” the man insisted in his tinny voice. “This one is good, oh so good. Just your taste.”

  Liv’s breath caught in her throat.

  “I was afraid we wouldn’t find one in time…again. But not to worry, father. All will be well, soon enough.” As he spoke, the man sent an arm over to the passenger seat and patted the metal briefcase slowly and reassuringly. From the elbow down, the arm was a battered prosthetic. It was obviously a woman’s, and the thin, delicate frame of the appendage filled Liv with grotesque terror as it stroked the case. The man jerked his arm back sharply when the metal case jostled itself in the seat.

  “It’s alright, father. Be calm. Soon enough, soon enough…” When he turned his head to address the passenger seat Liv caught her first full sight of the man. In the glow of the dashboard, she saw that above a full, dark beard, he wore a large pair of aviator sunglasses. He turned back to the road and began to hum softly to himself.

  By shifting her neck slightly downward Liv was able to read the clock, which told her that it was a few minutes past ten. That meant that she had been riding unconscious for about half an hour. Didn’t it? A glance out of the windows was no help from her position, as only the motionless night looked back at her. She could not see out the windshield either, without giving away her alertness. One thing she was sure of was that there had been no passing headlights since she had awoken.

  Liv thought as carefully as she could about what possible weapons her vehicle could offer for her use. There was a pile of paperbacks scattered directly in front of her on the floor behind the driver’s seat. On the passenger side, she could make out the toe end of a pair of shoes. They were flats, of course, and would hardly be of any help. She squinted to see if there was anything else, but saw only crumpled papers that were gathering in wait for the cleaning the little Mazda received every month or two.

  A spark of hope lit inside her when she remembered the pepper spray in her purse. But then she remembered that the handbag was on the floor in front of the passenger seat. There was no way she would be able to get to it without being noticed.

  Helplessness began to creep in as Liv realized that there was nothing that would be of any use to her. Her hands started to shake, even gripping the edge of the seat. She bit her lip to help pull her thoughts from the depths of despair. The coppery taste of blood reached her tongue.

  At once, the briefcase rattled violently in the bucket seat. A series of sharp thumps came from inside its thin walls.

  “Please, father. Be calm.” Again the stiff arm moved to caress the case. “It’s almost time. Only a few more minutes.”

  Liv’s heartbeat quickened almost painfully. She closed her eyes and wished desperately that she was still at her parents’ house, where her family was probably sitting around
the table playing Euchre. If only she had left ten minutes earlier. Or, better yet, if she had not left at all, Liv would still be safe. With her thoughts on her family and the long lost safety of their home, Liv began to cry. A wet stream of tears trailed across the left side of her face and down her neck. And after a few moments she felt oddly relieved. Though there was certainly some level of fear present inside of her, the dread of hopelessness seemed to have subsided.

  It was very quickly replaced by a growing anger. The bastard in the driver’s seat had abducted her right from the side of the road. He was obviously unstable and had made vague allusions to whatever grim fate was planned for her. She thought about the advantage she had of his missing limb. She would have to exploit it. Imagining the unspeakable things that were probably going through the lunatic’s mind filled Liv with a raging desire to tear his eyes out. Yes, she thought, that’s where she would have to start. And she would do it the moment the transmission was put in park.

  Liv had taken Hapkido classes for about a year when she had lived in the city, and had learned that the emotion of anger was dangerous to take into a fight, as it tended to blind your thinking. The thought only barely crossed her mind. This was not going to be a street fight, and even with his handicap, the man’s sheer bulk was a major advantage. If anything, her anger in this situation would serve as fuel for self-preservation.

  Whatever she was going to do, the time in which to do it was drawing very near.

  Liv licked her bloody lip and tried to slow down her breathing, all the while thinking about what was going to be the fight of her life. And that was when she saw it. The sharp triangle of plastic protruded slightly from the top of the pocket of the driver’s seat. Excitement coursed through her and she could not keep from smiling as she eyed the ice-scraper that she had purchased the previous winter. It was one of the cheap ones: made from a single molded piece of black plastic, but it had a moderately sharp three-inch head. It wasn’t a gun or a knife, but it was a far sight better than a goddamn shoe.

  “So close, now, father. So close that you can nearly taste her.” The briefcase rattled in response, rough clawing sounds issued from within. What in the hell did he have in the case, Liv wondered, a ferret? Maybe even a cat? Whatever his cargo, the man was seriously disturbed, and dangerous.

  As slowly as she could, Liv pried her white-knuckled right hand from the seat and inched it forward toward her waiting weapon. The crunch of gravel under the tires told Liv that they had left whatever paved road they had been traveling on. She had to steady her hand as the car bounced over uneven ground.

  Her eyes darted back and forth between the scraper and her captor as she increased her reach. She felt the car begin to decelerate and hastened her movement. Had the one-armed man eased the car to a stop, things probably would have worked a little smoother for Liv. Instead, his sharp brake caused her to jerk forward and slam into the seatback.

  A number of things happened in the following moment, and somehow Liv’s senses slowed to register each of them. The first was that she had bitten her tongue quite severely when her head had hit the seat, and blood now gushed warmly down her chin. The next, was that the ice scraper had fallen down into the pile of books. Whatever was in the briefcase had decided that it was a good time to intensify its efforts to escape, and was now pounding at its prison furiously. And the final thing Liv saw when she spun her dazed head upwards was that her captor was looking back at her in surprise.

  Her left hand moved almost with a will of its own to where the sharpened plastic device sat on the floor, while she reached instinctively forward with her other hand and drove a fist into the man’s grizzly face. His sunglasses slipped askew and he wriggled pitifully in an effort to reach around himself and into the backseat.

  “Father, no—I’ve—No, stop it!”

  Blinded by adrenaline, Liv hardly realized that her hand had, in fact, found the scraper and brought it in a swinging arc into the back of the man’s neck. He was scrambling quickly at the door, and when Liv saw that he was trying to escape the tight confines of the car, she intensified her thrusts, pulling at the heavy fabric of his coat. He howled in pain, but had stopped all attempts at retaliating, instead focusing on the door.

  It only took him a few seconds to realize that the lock was built into the handle, and in a flash he was squeezing out of the car. He reached back in quickly to seize the handle of the briefcase before Liv dove into the front. As he stumbled to the ground holding his neck, she slammed the driver’s door shut and felt a rush of hope when the automatic lock clicked reassuringly. She moaned in horror when she found that the keys were not in the ignition. They must have fallen when she had attacked him.

  Immediately, Liv contorted her top half down in search of the keys. Her hands brushed against their cool metal beneath her seat when the glass of her door window exploded inward.

  “No!” she shouted.

  “It’s feeding time,” the man hissed, seizing her arm powerfully. The keys were now unquestionably out of reach as the man pulled her with unyielding force. She grasped out for the oversized purse that still sat right in front of the passenger seat beside the gearshift.

  She continued to moan in protest as she was hauled out through the window, her bag in tow. If she could just get to the pepper spray, she thought frantically. Liv was hurled to the scrub-grass covered ground. Only the car’s automatic headlights lit the deserted area near the edge of the forest.

  The man reached down for the briefcase and petted it gingerly, offering Liv a smile.

  “Look what you’ve done.” He wiped gushing blood from the back of his neck with his pale, tiny false appendage.

  Liv tore through her purse, finding the slim cylinder precisely where she always kept it in the large side pocket. She fumbled with the protective cap with shaking hands and watched as the man began talking to the briefcase.

  “It’s time, father. It’s the blood. I know you can smell it. But it’s not me that you want. I’ve brought you a delicious meal. Good, oh yes, so good.” He reached for one of the latches and flicked it upward. That was when the first foamy jet caught him in the shoulder. But Liv’s poor aim did more good than should have been expected. The deep lacerations she had made with the scraper were hit directly and caused the enormous man to tip backward, gripping his neck and screaming. That gave Liv an opportunity to take a closer aim for her second shot.

  His screams intensified.

  Liv screamed as well.

  Her abductor’s howls were not the only ones to be heard. One side of the briefcase was being pried open by a tiny black hand with claws that left gouges in the metal. A shrill screech unlike anything Liv had ever heard was coming from the widening gap. The case rocked violently in the dirt and Liv heard a metallic pop as some other part of the case gave way.

  She tripped backward and crawled away from the broken luggage.

  “No, father. Not my blood. Not this time,” the man moaned through a series of coughs. “Don’t let him out.” He tried to climb to his feet, but Liv kicked him in the head before breaking into a run.

  “Help me!” he shouted.

  “I don’t think so, asshole,” Liv said through the remains of her window, after she had retrieved the key and started the engine. She threw the car in gear and took one last glance at her attacker, who had clambered unsteadily to his knees. On the ground behind him, the second hinge of the briefcase gave way and the top was pried completely off.

  Liv saw something as dark as the night itself leap out of the case. She put the gas pedal to the floor, hearing the man’s desperate screams fade into the dark behind her.

  Marbles

  When the minute hand pointed precisely opposite its hour counterpart on the clock, and not a second sooner, Rick Wellington was officially on break. He set aside his pricing gun and slumped robotically down the over-buffed linoleum aisle. Reaching its end, Rick silently scorned the large dangling sign that obnoxiously proclaimed the existence of the Housewares depart
ment. He continued onward to the employee break room at the back of the store.

  In the smoking room, which was little more than a dingy closet attached to the main break room via a poorly sealed door, Rick sat at the end of the only table. Alicia and Marcee were blabbering away on the other side of the door. He was unfortunately privy to the full volume of their sniping conversation, due to the shoddy quality of the sound barrier. He himself had even been lucky enough to be included in Alicia’s list of verbal victims.

  “I bet that kid’s still a fucking virgin, Marcee. Just look at the way he walks. I’d be surprised if he’d even get turned on if I went in there and showed him my tits.” Marcee laughed awkwardly and cast him a casual glance through the window. She waved innocently. Rick glared back at her before looking away. That hurt. Alicia had always been a royal bitch, but Marcee had always been nice enough to him. In fact, Rick had imagined himself asking Marcee out every day that they worked together. He had masturbated to fantasies of her touching him just as often. Once, he had even fantasized about robbing the First National down the block and taking her on the road with him like a modern day Bonnie and Clyde.

  “Shit, you don’t think he can hear us, do you?” Marcee said.

  “Who cares? If there’s anyone in this place that deserves a little ass-kicking, it’s Rick. God, he is so slow at everything. And I don’t think he showers. I mean, I know the Tippy Mart isn’t friggin’ Wall Street, but even here that guy’s a loser.”

  Rick shook his head and shuffled around in his shirt for his smokes.

  “Damn,” Rick said, looking again. He searched a couple more times, just to be sure. Rick knew that he forgot things sometimes, which was why he carried his little reminder notebook to check the lists that his counselor put together for him.