“What the hell is that?”
The three of them stood around a hand thrust up out of the fresh asphalt. All four fingers and a thumb had the same dirty and semi-charred look to them as the hand to which they were attached. There was something almost artificial about the way they were posed as if reaching for heaven in a plea for mercy or escape.
“This is a joke, right? A hand in the middle of the road?” Brandon looked around at the green and brown grassland spread out flatly for miles around the highway. “We’re being punked. It has to be.”
Kathleen was retching. Her mouth twisted and contorted horribly as she heaved the remains of an hour-old McDonald’s Happy Meal on the side of the road. The cloudless sky wasn’t helping much either. The sun beat down on Kat’s back while the waves of heat coming up off the asphalt radiated back into her underside. She felt more like an overheated Dutch oven churning out vomit for the bugs to enjoy later. Kat felt another contraction in her stomach and vomited into the grass just missing a rusted shovel half-buried in the grass.
As she wiped the last of the bile and half-digested french fries from her mouth, she noticed the grass lining the road in both directions was incredibly green. Her first thought was that it seemed almost too green. As Kat took in the sight, she became aware that it was an oddly uniform strip of rich green—the color of vibrant, deep fertility—all the way down the shoulder of the road. This strip of grass was noticeably set apart from the dried-up scrub a mere six feet further out.
“You have some puke in your hair,” Anna said flatly.
“Bitch,” Kat snarled. “You could have helped and held my hair back.” She snatched the napkin Brandon offered her and started to wipe the ends of her hair.
Anna looked down at her fingernails she’d just had perfectly manicured that morning. “We’re not that close.”
“Thank God for small favors.”
Why they brought Anna along in the first place was still a mystery to Kat. It’s not like either she or Brandon were sleeping with her. Anna was just a snarling bitch that needed a ride from school to home for Christmas. She rubbed herself all over Brandon trying to ingratiate herself to him for a ride. Brandon was just too nice to say ‘no’ even if he didn’t want what she was offering. As for Kat, she would have tossed Anna to the nearest bus stop and called it a day.
Brandon stepped in the middle of the catfight in the making. “We need to tell someone about this.” He continued walking past the two girls with his cell phone lifted in the air as if it might catch a passing signal. “I’m not getting any service out here in be-ef’en-ee.”
“I haven’t had service for over an hour,” Anna retorted.
Kat shook her head. “Mine’s been dead. I forgot to charge it last night.”
“It’s thirty minutes back to that town—”
Anna’s laugh interrupted Brandon. “You mean that one where the McDonald’s chick asked if we were headed to Hell? That was funny.”
“Yeah, it was. Of course, each of us getting our picture under that sign a mile out of town that said, ‘Hell 65 Miles,’ was even funnier. I didn’t even know there was a town out here named ‘Hell.’”
Even Kat had to chuckle at the memory of the exchange back in town. It was a creepy little town. Not much traffic, which she thought was odd given it was at the crossroads of three different State highways and two Interstate highways. There seemed to be signs for more farm-to-market roads than she could remember. But she didn’t recall seeing all that many people around. The McDonald’s gave off the feeling of abandonment, though it was fully staffed, and orders could be heard coming from the drive-through window intercom.
“We’ve been seeing construction signs for a mile or two now. I think that’s just ahead of us. I would think a construction crew would have the ability to communicate with their bosses or a town or something, right?”
“Good idea, Brandon, but are we all going or is someone going to stay here with this thing?” Anna shivered at the thought of being left alone with this hand and the emptiness of the highway.
“I see no reason everyone has to go. My dad would kill me if I let anyone else drive the car, so why don’t you both stay here.” He smirked at the girls. “Can you two sit here without killing each other until I get back?”
Kat looked at Anna. “We’ll be fine. When the chips are all on the table, we girls end up sticking together anyway.”
Anna nodded but said nothing. It was obvious she was agreeing to be agreeable. But that was all any of them needed right now. It was an impasse of necessity.
“Alright then. I’m going to head up a bit and see if I can find that construction crew and get someone to report this. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
Brandon gave Kat a small kiss on the cheek. “Stay cool,” he whispered in her ear.
She blushed momentarily and turned away as he walked back to the car. She didn’t turn around again until she heard him put the car in gear and start to drive off.
The two girls stood watching the car fade into the haze of distance and eventually disappear over the horizon before either of them spoke.
“Well, that’s that, I guess,” Anna said, breaking the unnatural quiet that had infused the air in Brandon’s absence.
“He’ll find someone up there and bring back the cavalry. I trust him.”
“Are you two—”
“What? Oh. No! We’re not. No! Of course not!”
“No need to get defensive. I was just asking. I assumed that when a guy kisses you, that means something is going on between them.”
“We’re just friends. That’s all.”
Anne sat down on the side of the road. “I think you protest too much.”
“Bite me,” Kat said as she sat down beside her.
###
Brandon glanced back in his rearview mirror almost at a twitching pace and saw the girls getting smaller and smaller each time. He knew that might be dangerous to leave them alone together, but going a couple of miles ahead to find anyone that might be able to report this hand in the road wouldn’t take all that long. Once he got this down, he could go back, pick up the girls, and they could get back headed home for the holidays.
As he continued down the road, there was a desolate, empty feeling about the road. It was odd that it was so new. The fresh asphalt was three lanes wide in each direction. That too was odd. There was nothing out here. In all the time since they’d left the previous town, they hadn’t seen a single car in either direction. The only sign for another town was the one they passed that gave them the miles to Hell.
He didn’t figure there was anyone around to give him a ticket, so he pressed a bit more on the gas. He watched the needle on the speedometer rise to seventy, then eighty, and finally he settled out at eighty-five. That was fast enough, he figured, just in case there was a cop around a bend. Not that there were any bends. One could see for miles around in every direction. There was nothing out here.
Every couple of minutes, Brandon saw an orange construction sign that would offer up descending miles or feet until the construction zone. He strained his vision as much as possible to see anything, but the emptiness of the road ahead hid whatever construction crew was out in this ungodly heat.
Suddenly there was a line of orange traffic barrels slicing the road from the right shoulder up to the dividing line between the center and left lanes. Brandon stomped on his brakes to slow down at a rapid rate and swerved over to the left lane to avoid the barrels. Catching his breath, he saw the police car with its lights flashing just ahead and behind the row of barrels on his right.
Brandon pulled his car between two barrels and over next to the police car. The cop behind the wheel wasn’t moving. He got out of the car and walked cautiously toward the cop. Looking around, he noticed a road crew just ahead with several large roadbuilding trucks. He couldn’t make out any of their features—he was sure they were all illegals if they were working this far out in the middle of nowhere—but mentally calculated about a dozen or so men working around the trucks, moving dirt and asphalt with shovels and metal rakes.
Continuing his pace toward the police car, he saw the cop’s hat pulled down over his eyes and appeared to be taking a nap. Relieved, Brandon tapped on the passenger side window.
The cop lifted his hat, rolled down the window, and put a bullet through Brandon’s left eye. Brandon didn’t even feel his body hit the ground.
###
The oppressive heat baked the girls from the outside in. After an hour of waiting for Brandon to return, it was Anne who broke the impasse between them.
“He left us.”
“He wouldn’t,” Kat replied a little less convincingly. “He’s just trying to find help.”
The impasse didn’t last long as Anne scoffed at her. “Yeah. Your boyfriend is a real charmer.”
“Brandon is not my boyfriend.” Kat thought Anna’s voice was strange, almost insect-like, when she spoke. She ignored it since she was still irritated by the last exchange on this same subject. “And he’ll be back.”
It’s not that Kat didn’t have eyes for Brandon. He was everything she looked for in a guy. He wasn’t some muscle jock—though some thought he should be a model—but had a little extra padding that made him easy to cuddle with—in that ‘only friends’ kind of way—during movies at the frat house. He was smart, funny, and had this way with people that made him the life of every party they attended. Kat kept him close even when she wouldn’t let him in closer. Besides, she was fairly sure he liked guys more than girls anyway, even if she’d never seen him with a guy, and he’d never said anything to confirm her suspicions.
But the heat has a way of cooking all kinds of wild imaginations and paranoia into the brain. Kat’s brain was already working overtime. The air was suffocating her ability to think straight and all she could imagine was Anna’s moves toward Brandon when it came time for them to leave for the holidays.
Anna had walked up to Brandon and rubbed—quite literally, as Kat remembered—her ample breasts on his chest as she lifted up on her toes to pretend like she was trying to see eye-to-eye with him in her quest for a ride home. Kat couldn’t remember if he’d stepped back from her or stepped closer in to put his arm around her. Something in the details was a little fuzzy for her. She thought maybe he had stepped in closer. Yes, she remembered now that he might have even tried to kiss her. Kat couldn’t remember now. Had she slid her hands under his Harley Davidson t-shirt and tempted his flesh? She wasn’t sure.
Kat looked over at Anna and scowled. The more she looked at her, the more Kat thought she looked like one of those girls who always had daddy’s money to seduce the boys away from her. It was always one rich bitch after another that got in her way. It didn’t matter if Brandon was gay or not. He was Kat’s—he belonged to her!—and Anna would just have to get over it.
She shook her head. Her thoughts were grotesque. She wasn’t being rational. Something in the air was making her thoughts go crazy. There was no wind at all, so there was no dust blowing around, but every breath filled her lungs with something stale and dirty.
“Look!” Anna pointed down the road. “See that?”
Kat tilted her head at the vexatious sound of Anne’s voice but still looked at where she was pointing. There was a speck of movement in the waves of heat that slowly grew larger by the moment. At first, Kat only saw large grey forms with small figures of movement around them. As the forms got closer, she realized it was a construction crew headed their way.
“If that’s the crew Brandon met up with, where’s Brandon?”
All Kat knew was that Anna’s voice was grating her brain and causing it to explode with every syllable. She could only shake her head.
“Does it strike you as a bit odd? All this road and nothing driving on it?”
Kat didn’t think anything was odd except the scratching sound in her head that replaced Anna’s voice. Every time she spoke, it sounded like clicking noises instead of words. Kat shook it off. It had to be the heat talking.
Looking back up the road, Kat saw the hazy forms getting closer. They began to take on more definite shapes like asphalt pavers, bottom dump haulers, rollers, and the crews around them. There was something reptilian about the whole scene. The heat waves filtered any kind of reality out of her vision replacing it with a nightmare of serpentine proportions and lumbering shapes.
“Kat!” Anna was shaking her by the shoulders. “Kat! What are you doing?”
Kat stood there staring at the approaching doom. The buzzing sound of Anna’s voice sliced away at her sanity. How could one person be so annoying? The crew ahead just kept coming slowly closer.
Kat could see more details now. The lead hauler was equipped with a kind of digging device that scooped up the road in front of it and tossed the remains into the depths of its belly. Something dropped from the bottom dump on a regular basis into the ground while dirt and asphalt filled the road back in again. The crews smoothed out any anomalies and the rollers pressed the asphalt back down to flatten the road into the monotonous stretch of comforting blackness that had been there before.
Anna continued to shake Kat. When Kat finally turned to face her, Anna noticed her eyes were bloodshot and murderous with fear and feral hate. They hadn’t been the best of friends. They hadn’t even been friends at all except for the convenience of circumstances. This look frightened Anna in a way that she couldn’t have explained had she lived.
Kat looked over Anna’s shoulder and saw the shovel in the grass. Before Anna could react at all, Kat rushed past her, nearly knocking her to the ground, and wrenched the shovel out of the ground.
The connection of the shovel blade to Anna’s head made a crunching sound not unlike that of breakfast cereal in the morning. There was a slight snap of Anna’s neck at first that was followed by a crackle of the cheekbone and nose cartilage collapsing under impact. The pop of her skull as it caved in and turned the right side of her brain to mush gave Kat some measure of satisfaction the scratching sound of Anna’s voice would finally be silenced.
“That’s that,” Kat said to no one at all as she looked at the crumpled body of Anna lying at her feet.
Kat let the bloody shovel drop to the ground. The sound of metal hitting the asphalt punctuated the low rumbling hum of the paving trucks as they continued to get closer. She could feel the vibration on the ground. It grumbled inside her skin and made her want to puke again.
She watched the road crew close in on her. It was slow, and it almost felt like an eternity had passed. Kat looked at her watch and thought that it must have been only two hours more since she had silenced the screeching in her head. Everything had been quiet except the low hum of the trucks approaching her.
The road crew finally reached a distance where the heat didn’t warp them any longer. Kat looked at them, dazed, but still aware enough to know that something odd was going on. She could see the hauler in the front digging out the old road and dirt under the asphalt.
The hauler’s large scoops were lazily tossing debris into the long back of the truck. She could see the crew itself scooping and shifting and shaping the asphalt as it covered the road again. But it was the thing that dropped into the hole that caught Kat’s eye. It was a load of something the hauler unceremoniously dropped into the violated earth. The back of the hauler covered the hole and its package with dirt and asphalt. The smoother behind it crushed and set the asphalt on a flat surface. The whole entourage slowly moved forward and started the whole strange process over again.
The crew walked funny, she thought, almost as if they were dragging around weights attached to their ankles. Their lifeless eyes and hollow moans frightened her as they moved past her, ignoring that she even existed. As she watched, Kat could see the crew stop from their work just long enough to shuffle more roadkill into a fresh hole.
Just like they did with Anna.