Loud banging on the door.
You roll out of your too-small bed. Cheap plastic picture frames, empty of anything save a photo booth strip from six years ago, rattle over the water-stained walls with the force of the knocking.
“Alright, alright,” you grumble, shrugging on a ragged bathrobe. The townies at the bar last night were particularly loud, leering uncomfortably often and cracking jokes about fixing what’s about you isn’t broken, just far enough away that you can’t call harassment. The sun is pouring through your tangled blinds, dust motes dancing. As you swing open the door, more gray Oklahoma dust comes swirling into the grime-filled room.
“What, who is it?” you ask, shading your eyes and squinting against the glare of the sunlight beating down on the dust and the road. You sleep in a shed, really, just large enough to legally live in and just small enough to not require building codes. It’s behind the bar where you work, the only place that sells alcohol in this tiny, tired town you call home.
The girl standing in front of you is a blaze of color against the sunbaked, dusty ground and the black tarmac, bedecked in a loud orange blouse, complete with her usual pride pin, and riotous neon blue and black shorts. She’s got Jackie O sunglasses buried in her blooming cloud of hair, the white frames sharp against the black. Her mouth is swiped with vivid red lipstick; her eyes surrounded by streaks of yellow and blue and winged eyeliner sharp enough to draw blood. She saunters past you into the room, tossing a purse into your arms, and you swing the door shut behind her and turn to face your best friend.
“When did you get back in town?” you ask, surprised to see her at all. Last time she left, she vowed — screamed, at her parents — that the only time she’d be in the same zip code was when she was flying over it on her way to her next gig. Now that your eyes have adjusted from the switch from darkness to searing light to darkness again, you can see she has her guitar slung over her back, hands on hips as she surveys your room.
“What the fuuuuuuuck?” she says back, drawing out the word. “You live here?”
“Can’t all be stars like you, Atla,” you say, grinning in spite of yourself. “Thought you’d never come back here though.”
“Only came through for you, love” Atla says, eyes creasing as she smiles. “We’re goin’ on a road trip.”
“What? Now? I can’t, I have work, and—”
She’s grabbing things as you protest, toothbrush and medication and rumpled clothes, and shoving them all into a reusable canvas bag that appeared out of nowhere. Once she’s gotten several days worth of dirty clothes, she surveys the room again, pursing her lips, and grabs your well-worn copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, tossing it at you. Like her purse, you catch it instinctively, and continue to voice increasingly mumbled protests as she picks up your wallet and phone from the nightstand and pushes you out the door.
“Listen, Atla,” you say firmly, locking your knees. “I can’t—”
“How about my car?” she says easily, grabbing your cheeks with one callused brown hand and moving your head towards the road.
This effectively stops your stream of objections. The car is gorgeous, a powder blue 1960s convertible with the top down, idling on the side of the road. Even from here, you can tell she’s made adjustments, changing out the engine for one with better horsepower and gas mileage, resettling the frame, and almost certainly installed a better sound system.
“Like it?” she says, ducking around you and tossing the canvas bag into the tiny backseat, already loaded with snacks, a few bags, and assorted trash. “It’s all fueled up and ready to go.” She twirls her keys around a finger and looks at you expectantly. “I have an extra pair of sunglasses for yooooou.”
You walk out to the car, drawing a hand along the top of the passenger door. The paint is smooth and almost soft under your fingers, and you can feel the engine rumbling through the car. She follows you, in surprisingly sensible boots, and slides across the front hood to the other side. You’re lingering, feeling the pull of the road trip against the dull ache of routine, when the door to the bar slams open and your boss storms out.
“Where do you think you’re going?” he hollers, waving a spatula. He’s fat, as faded as the landscape, skin cracked and dirty, balding on top, watery eyes and a sneering mouth. He encourages the jokes. “Who’s that in that car? You steal that car? Listen you lesbian bit—”
As he storms towards you, you look back at Atla, who’s grinning like a cat. Her eyes are twinkling as she offers you a hand. You reach out and grasp it, warm and alive, and turn your head back towards your (former) boss.
“Consider this my resignation,” you say, cutting him off, and leap over the passenger door, your shirt slipping through his fingers. You hit the seat just as Atla stomps on the gas. It’s lucky her hand is holding you back, because the car leaps forward with a glorious growl, leaving another layer of dust over the swearing, raging man.
You’re out of town before the two of you stop laughing, the wind whipping through your hair and great empty plains stretching out before you.
“Settle in, love,” Atla says. “We’re heading for New York.”
* * *
Hours pass.
The sun sets gloriously, you twisting in your seat to watch the blaze of color that almost matches the girl in the driver’s seat. She’s singing along loudly now. No radio out here, none that works anyway, so she’s been playing her old favorites. The album winds down and she looks over at you.
“Get some other ones out of the glove compartment, yeah?” she says.
You click open the glove compartment. There, nestled among old receipts, an out of date driver’s manual, and assorted cracked cases covering Panic at the Disco’s entire body of work, you find a stunningly maintained, pristine .38 revolver.
“What the fuck is this?” you say, not daring to touch it.
“What, that?” she glances over, not at all bothered by taking her eyes off the road.
“Yes, that! Why the fuck do you have a gun?”
“Call it insurance.”
“Atla, answer me seriously. Did you kill a man?”
She laughs and turns up the music.
* * *
Around six in the morning, the stars are beginning to fade in the light of the rising sun, and she pulls over to a completely empty rest stop. You get out, and immediately an eerie feeling washes over you. The silence is complete.
“This is weird,” you say, staring out over the empty picnic tables. They’re gray in the pre-dawn light, or are they always that color? You hug yourself and decide you don’t want to find out.
“I gotta pee, go stretch your legs,” she says, waving a hand with supreme unconcern. Of course.
You ignore the bathrooms and start tracing a circle around the rest stop. Sometime during the night, you entered the endless cornfields of the Midwest, and there is no boundary between the end of the rest stop and the beginning of the fields. Just stalks and stalks of whispering corn. You stop right next to the edge of the corn and something on the ground catches your eye. You stoop to look closely; a smooth, gray-red stone, nearly perfectly circular. You pick it up and as you slip it into your pocket, you hear a rustling from the corn just in front of you.
Your head whips up, eyes frantically searching, but all you see are the green-yellow stalks, waving gently in the perpetual breeze. Nothing there.
You stare into the corn, hard.
Nothing.
You start backing away, back towards the car, and the rustling starts up again, slightly to your right. You keep backing up until your legs hit the door, and you scramble in without taking your eyes from the waving corn, wishing for the first time for a roof.
The rustling eases back into the whispering of the corn as Atla emerges from the bathroom, grinning.
“Ready?” she says, twirling her keys.
“Yeah,” you say, drawing a shaky breath and feeling unnerved for reasons you can’t quite articulate. “Let’s go. And Atla?”
“Hmm?”
“Drive fast.”
* * *
Late afternoon. The sun is moving in and out of clouds. You’re driving, as Atla drowses in the passenger seat. She wakes up blearily and stares around at the endless fields of waving corn.
“Who the fuck is going to eat all this corn?” she asks.
You don’t have an answer.
She goes back to sleep.
* * *
Twelve hours later, you’ve left the bulk of the corn behind, only to have it interspersed with wheat and soybeans, the occasional ruined barn sprawled out in crumbling glory, vines and weeds growing in around the weathered boards and debris.
You’ve entered Ohio.
So has it.
You hear the rustling in whatever trees or corn or wheat is nearby when you stop for gas, and every so often you swear you see glowing yellow eyes, watching as you speed away. Atla switches off driving with you, and you’re going faster than even she was. She loves it, of course, hands dancing through the air as she revels in the speed. But she doesn’t know what you’re trying to outrun.
You pull into a tiny diner around midnight, exhausted and ready for dinner. The owner, a fat, middle-aged woman named Kate, smiles like a grandmother without it reaching her eyes. She gives you apple pie and thick, rich coffee without asking for your order.
* * *
You’re driving near a collection of small towns, farmhouses really, in a loose configuration but apparently enough to be counted as a town. At least, it counts as a town by the standards of the enormous fold out map Atla’s been using since her data ran out. There are signs and arrows announcing a fruit stand coming up. They’ve been there for miles, steadily counting down.
“Let’s stop,” Atla says, throwing her hands up and almost chucking the map out of the car. “I’m dying for some fruit.”
You shrug and pull over into the dirt circle, a wide, weather-beaten wooden stand in front of you. There’s a small girl playing in the dirt in front of the worn sign, the letters washed out almost entirely, a near middle-aged woman behind the makeshift counter, and an old lady dozing in a fold out chair next to the stand. The girl looks up as you approach.
The woman greets you gently. “Looking for fruit, dears?”
“Yes please, ma’am,” Atla says politely. She takes the fruit, something red and ripe, but unfamiliar to you, and bites into it, the juices running down her chin. Her eyes close silently as she chews and takes another bite. The woman continues to pass her fruit as you feel a tug on your hand.
It’s the little girl. You follow her insistent pull over to the old lady. You thought she was asleep, but her eyes are open and sharp. You’re not sure what color they are in the shade provided by her wide, faded sunhat. Green, maybe, or a deep, deep brown.
“Be careful of what you carry,” the old lady says, voice unexpectedly crisp.
“Sorry?” you ask, startled.
“It’s following you,” the little girl says, eyes eerily knowing. Her ragged doll dangles from one dirty hand.
“What?” you demand, a sick feeling in your stomach.
The old woman doesn’t answer, simply tips her hat down over her eyes. Stunned, you let the little girl lead you back to the fruit stand, where juice is still dripping down Atla’s chin.
“We should go,” you say. “Pay for those and let’s get back in the car.”
“Don’t want to,” she mumbles around a mouthful of fruit.
You put a ten down on the counter and take hold of Atla’s arm. You pull her away, with mild protesting.
You’ve been driving for a few miles, Atla staring out at the flat scenery.
“Atla?”
“Hmm?”
“What kind of fruit were you eating?”
She opens her mouth to respond and then stops, dumbfounded.
You don’t talk for a while after that.
* * *
Eventually, the car breaks down near a rest stop when you’re in the middle of nowhere Pennsylvania, surrounded by thick wooded mounds of earth that are too big to be hills and too small to be mountains. The sky is swiftly darkening, and Atla reports, after an annoyed ten-minute phone call, that AAA won’t be there until morning.
“So we’re sleeping out here?” you ask.
“Looks like it,” she sighs. “We can always put the top up.”
“There’s a top?”
She glares at the car as you wander towards the bathrooms, these also housing vending machines under a small pavilion. If the hills were cornfields, it would be identical to the first rest stop.
As you stand between the bathrooms and the vending machines, a low rustling starts up in the trees ahead of you. The space where you stand is open on both sides, and as you stand, frozen in terror, a creature steps out of the trees.
“What the fuck is that?” Atla asks, suddenly next to you.
The thing is huge, antlers brushing the top of the pavilion, ten or fifteen feet tall at least. It’s skeletal, horribly stretched out, with clawed hands longer and wider than your head. Its own head is a strange mix of a cow skull, maybe, or a horse skull, and something wider and nastier, with sharper teeth. The thing’s eyes glow a dull yellow, the same flash you’ve been seeing at restaurants and gas stations for days now. It’s too thin to be healthy, or even alive.
“Should I get the gun?” Atla asks.
“Shut up.”
The three of you stand silent, and then the thing extends one slow, claw-like hand towards you. You can feel Atla looking at you, but your eyes are fixed on the creature.
Slowly, slowly, you take the stone out of your pocket.
The air changes, the tension deepening, as you take slow steps forward and hold it in your palm, your shaking hand hovering over the thing’s claw, your frail human body dwarfed by its terrible tallness.
You turn your hand over and drop the stone.
It falls into the creature’s palm without a sound, the red flashing dully before it disappears into the darkness of the thing’s body. It holds your eyes for another few seconds before it slowly backs into the trees. There’s more rustling, and once a hint of burning yellow.
And it’s gone.
Not just out of sight, but you can feel that it’s gone, back to whatever hole outside of this world it lives in until someone else trespasses on its property. You back up to Atla and you wordlessly grasp each other’s hands.
Back in the parking lot, the car starts.
Kathleen Myers (she/her) is a writer of short stories and novels. She graduated with a degree in English Literature from Juniata College, and has worked in St. Louis, Northern Iraq, and is now based in Denver, where she teaches full time. "Roadtrip" is her first published work.