I mentally braced myself through the drive back to the graveyard for whatever lie ahead. I didn’t care what I faced, I didn’t care if Mrs. Carol had moved on to another location, I didn’t even care if I survived this mess... I just needed to know that the others got out alright. After that, well.... We’ll see what the night holds, I told myself grimly.
The ride seemed like it was taking no time at all, even though when I looked at the tiny clock on Jim’s outdated radio a full half of an hour had gone by. A glint of light reflected off of the gun next to me caught my attention for a moment. I reached out and fondly stroked the revolver sitting on the seat next to me as I drove, feeling the cold steel and simple strength course through it to my hand. It almost seemed like it was imbueing me with power... The power to move on, the power to end Mrs. Carol. The power to end it all.
I looked up from the gun just in time to slam on the brakes.
The old lady had wandered in to the middle of the highway, seemingly lost and unperturbed by the near accident. I waited for her to pass by in front of me, impatiently drumming my hand on the steering wheel as she slowly shambled by. After waiting for a full minute, I started to get an uneasy feeling in my gut, and my reptilian brain shouted at me (in no uncertain terms) to run her the fuck over and keep moving.
When she got closer to the driver’s side of the truck, I got a closer look. Her hair seemed to be sticking out in multiple directions, her shawl was disheveled and trailing from her like a cape, and perhaps most alarming of all, she seemed to have no indication whatsoever of her surroundings. The uneasiness in my gut rising, I honked my horn at her, hoping to alert her to the fact that she was in the middle of the highway, with... wait, where are the other cars? The highway was too quiet, and now that I thought of it, no cars had passed me by or even been on the other side of the road that I can recall.
“This can’t be good,” I said out loud to no one in particular. The stress of everything, of losing Lilly and Jim, and now my growing unease with this unfortunate looking woman was making my stomache tie itself in knots at this point. Thinking it might help ease my tension a bit, I pulled a cigarette from my pack on the dashboard and lit it. The nicotine took hold once more, easing the headache I previously didn’t realize I had and gladly restoring the numbness to my hands.
I only got three drags off of the cigarette before I noticed the seemingly drunken old lady had dissappeared. I looked left and right, hoping to catch a glimpse of her on one side of the street or the other, to no avail. She was simply... gone. I added another knot to the collection my stomache was trying to accrue and took another drag. I was afraid of driving forward; what if she had fallen? Only one way to find out, I told myself calmly.
The truck reversed slowly, afraid as I was to hit or possibly injure the lady. I scanned the area around the front of the truck as I went, hoping to catch a glimpse of her dressing gown or shawl or anything relevant, but saw nothing. After backing up twenty or thirty feet (I never was good at distances), I took one last look around and, still seeing nothing, put the truck in drive and sped forward.
BANG.
The sound came from the bed of the truck as before. And this time, I didn’t question it. Pitching the cigarette, I reached for the gun sitting next to me. Bravado, that dumb sunuvabitch that’s led too many people to their graves, dictated my actions from this point. I pointed the gun over my shoulder, slammed on the brakes yet again, and double-tapped the trigger.
BLAM! BLAM!
The sound was deafening, and for a moment I thought I had permanently lost my hearing. I dropped the gun immediately, clapped my left hand to my hurt ear and howled in pain as the truck sat idling in the middle of the deserted highway. The pain lasted what seemed to be a near infinite amount of time, the thought of the old lady completely lost at the moment.
After a minute or two, I managed to pull my hand free of my ear, and I was startled to find my palm covered in bright red blood. Great, I thought, I’ve gone and blown out my fucking eardrum. Then a rattling sound from the trunk pulled me from my thoughts and brought me entirely back to reality. I hastily wiped my bloodied hand on the back of the seat next to me and undid my seatbelt, grabbed my (Jim’s, I thought briefly) gun, and jumped out of the truck.
It was the old lady, like I thought, sprawled out in the bed of the truck and writhing in agony. Her entire head was matted with a dark, viscous fluid that I guessed passed for blood. Perhaps it congealed, I wondered to myself while looking her over for any other damage. Then I saw it: Two large bullet holes, one on top of the other, going directly through her left eyebrow. And she was still fucking moving.
I backed off from the truck slowly, all thoughts of bravado and action movie heroism gone from my head. I turned to puke again, but accomplished nothing but dry heaves. It was then that I realized somewhere in the back of my mind that I hadn’t eaten since breakfast that morning, and what little there was in my stomache had been left artfully plastered on the lawn in the cemetary. My stomache and nerves didn’t know or even seem to care, though. They kept doing what they wanted, consequences be damned.
The dry heaves lasted longer than expected, notbeing helped at all by the miserable moaning recently added to the writhing sounds coming from the truck bed. After a few more minutes I (finally) stopped, gasping for breath and slowly pulling myself to my feet. The gun was still on the ground where I left it when I fell to my knees; I decided to leave it there for the time being and concentrate on one thing at a time. Then the noise died away all at once.
I peeked back over the side of the truck bed and had to do a double-take.
She was gone. In her place was a dress and a shawl, filled with a roughly-old-lady-sized pile of ash-like granules. The granules intrigued and repulsed me, and almost instinctively I reached out my right hand and stroked the top of the nearest pile. It felt almost like engorged sand with an airier quality, and had the delightful aroma of ten week old meat left in the Louisiana sun. If I hadn’t just been sick, this would’ve been the kicker.
Another thing caught my attention, too, when I looked over the pile again: Bits of flesh were left. It was not much, and certainly nothing large enough to even be considered “parts”, but they were there. Perhaps they were contributing to the aroma too? I pushed the thought out of my head before it took hold and forced another set of dry heaves on me. Too much today, come back tomorrow when the holding tank’s full again, I thought satirically.
After looking over the piles again, I found myself with a limitless amount of unanswered questions going around my head until it seemed fit to burst. I decided to put them off and simply go forward, and hopefully the questions will answer themselves with time. I was almost always the one with the patience. The questions can wait.
To busy myself from the thoughts in my head I laboriously lowered the tailgate. I didn’t have a broom on hand, but hopefully jetting forward with an open tailgate on an open highway would do a decent enough job in lieu. As I turned around to head back to the cab, my foot brushed the revolver on the ground, reminding me to pick it up. I set it delicately back on the seat next to me as I climbed in to the driver’s seat. One crank of the engine later and I was back on my way.
The rest of the trip went by relatively fast compared to the first half. My head was still occupied by questions, and with no one else on the road, I was free to put my driving on autopilot and do some much needed contemplation on the matter at hand. I started with making a mental checklist of questions surrounding the situation:
A, Is Mrs. Carol dead or alive? And if dead, why is she moving and killing people?
B, Who was that old lady, why did she suddenly go “Buffy” on me when I shot her, and was she already dead too?
And most importantly, C: Where the holy fuck is everyone else? I don’t even see police cars out and about, which is fairly scary on it’s own.
And as I thought of those questions, I realized with a fatally re-emerging sense of dread that I had been sitting in the cemetary’s parking lot for a few minutes now, with my headlights on and the engine running. So much for the element of surprise.
Damned autopilot.
I steadied myself against the steering wheel as I turned off the engine, taking deep breaths and trying like all hell to stop the shakes before their inevitable return. The wheel provided no comfort, and in near desperation I found myself reliving Jim’s words to me hours ago: Just calm down, baby. That seemed to work, and though I still felt two seconds away from a full-blown panic attack again, I felt my hands ease up from their white-knuckled grip on the molded foam. I slowly clenched and unclenched my hands in front of me, easing the tension and using the time to build myself up for what lies ahead.
After what seemed like another century, I ran my hand to the revolver next to me and found the grip, picking it up and feeling the reassuring weight once again. Strength and Power, I told myself over and over, mingling in with Jim’s words of comfort in my mind. I pushed the gun slowly in to my pants pocket, careful not to catch the trigger in the process, and swung open the truck’s door to enter the humid night. A rattling in the bottom of the door brought a stroke of revelation, and I hurriedly grabbed the Mag-Lite from his small holding area down there, not knowing if I’d need it but knowing it wouldn’t hurt.
Now I’m ready, I told myself Now I’m ready for the end game.
I strode forward, relying on my memory to guide me to the semi-secluded spot where Mrs. Carol was supposed to lay forever, checking the ground as I went for any signs of blood or a struggle or something. Instead, I found absolutely nothing. No bent grass, no blood pools, not even a dismembered finger to guide my path or provide hints of what happened in my absence. Nothing whatsoever. Which, naturally, only seemed to deepen the ever-growing sense of dread taking over my entire being.
I eventually reached Mrs. Carol’s grave site, still set up for her graveside service, with the chairs for the immediate family still arranged in a neat row and the Minister’s well-worn Bible sitting on top of the seat closest to where the struggle had taken place. I didn’t see the minister anywhere, though, and in my mind’s eye I saw the minister set the bible down as he walked to the group of people surrounding Jim and I when I first saw Mrs. Carol’s return. He probably ran for it when he saw the mayhem, I rationalized to myself. I shrugged internally, decided it made sense, then moved on.
I hadn’t taken more than two steps when I saw, just beyond the horridly bright green felt laid down on the ground, what I had been looking for. Mrs. Carol. Or, rather, her purple dress and the few assorted “parts” that hadn’t managed to disintegrate yet.
They seemed a jumble of ash-like granules and slime-ridden bits that wouldn’t make sense to anyone but those who knew of their true origins, all strewn on the ground before me with small condolence to any rhyme or reason, unlike the old lady earlier. I pulled the gun out of my pocket and bent down to inspect the remains, prodding piles of ash with my foot and pushing bits with the gun, until I found the biggest part of her I think I was going to find at that point: her eye. Prodding from the gun separated it from the pile of ash rather quickly.
Once separated, I looked down at it, and rather quickly noticed the back of the eye slowly starting to crumble into more of the ashy granules. I crouched down and watched it dissolve, from the back at first, then crab walked around and looked at it from the front. I looked deep, not expecting anything but secretly hoping in the last seconds I had left to find something. Answers, mostly. An answer to the madness, an answer to the litany of questions resurfacing in my head, an answer for everything that has happened to me in the last twenty-four hours.
I found it.
I wasn’t ready for it.
Idontwantitidontwantitidontwantitidontwantitidontwantitidontwantit
idontwantitidontwantitidontwantitidontwantitidontwantitidontwantit
idontwantitidontwantitidontwantitidontwantitidontwantitidontwantit
I felt tears begin to well up suddenly at the magnitude of what I saw. Before I knew what I was doing, I felt my hand grip the gun tighter and work the muzzle up slowly to the soft underside of my jaw. The barrel felt warm on my sk
-Fin.
