Crawl Page 3

  Juliet had her hand up, in the middle of a diatribe about something she would not remember later, when she saw the pinpricks of the headlights coming from the opposite direction. A grass median separated the eastbound lane from the westbound, and it was that fact that caused Juliet to pause. This stretch of Highway 96 was bolt straight for a good ten miles, curving only once, somewhere in the middle, and they’d already passed that. The pinpricks expanded quickly, as if someone were throwing two flashlight-tipped spears directly at her. Colton raised his arm, presumably to point at the oddity, and his lips set to work, forming words that he never had the chance to birth.

  The bodiless lights broke eye contact and seemed to look to their left. The fog acted as if it were a curtain slowly being pulled away to reveal the surprise waiting onstage. That’s when Juliet first saw the truck careening toward them, sideways, and the wide-eyed teenager clinging to the railing on the bed. The boy was redheaded and covered in freckles. She saw all this in terribly high definition because the Subaru was colliding with the truck’s passenger side rear panel and the teen was flying out of the bed, toward the windshield. The teen’s face connected with the upper right corner of the windshield as Juliet’s seatbelt caught, slinging her forward.

  The rest was a blur. When they finally came to a rest, Juliet noticed someone had painted a red bunny in the upper corner of her vision. She glanced up, and saw that the painting was dripping. The red bunny was hurt. It was all hurt. Nothing but hurt. She hurt. Her chest was on fire. No, not just her chest. A column of flame had been set down upon her—across her abdomen, between her breasts, up across her right collarbone. Even though her agony was a powerful drug, willing her to run away from the world, that red bunny seemed a more pressing issue. The painter had been important. Hadn’t he? A ginger teen with freckles as big as manhole covers flickered across her eyes, and Juliet was able to match his face with the shape of the bunny. Because it wasn’t a bunny. My God, it’s not a fucking bunny.

  “Colton?” she rasped, as she pulled the seat belt away from her abraded chest. “Colt?”

  Her neck worked on a rusty ball bearing, swiveling and creaking with solid effort. She could smell antifreeze and gasoline now. Neither odor bothered her; she simply noted them.

  Colton’s face rested in a pillow made of airbag. She watched her hand move of its own accord, pushing down the material, trying to find her husband’s face. Colton groaned as she unmasked him.

  “Wha-happen?” He coughed, sending up a white cloud of what looked like flour.

  “We hit someone.” She said it just like that. Not, that they’d hit something, but someone. The ginger’s face had painted that red bunny in her periphery, she was sure of it.

  Airbag. Why hadn’t the airbag saved her from her seat belt or, at the very least, the vision of the ginger flying toward her? Her eyes focused on the key slot on the dash beside the radio. Three words hovered above the slot: Airbag On/Off. The nail of her index finger slid into the opening, and she picked at it absently. The slot had been lined up with Off. But why? Why would Colton turn off the passenger side airbag?

  “Turn that thing off,” a younger version of Juliet had said once upon a time. “Have you seen what those things do to people’s faces? They peel them. Airbags peel people’s faces like oranges.”

  Colton had laughed. Why had he thought her face being scalped was an amusing concept?

  “Sure thing,” he’d said, not entirely done laughing. “Because you’d rather be dead than disfigured. Good job, honey. Way to be shallow.”

  But he’d done as she’d asked. That meant something, hadn’t it?

  Right now it meant fuck all, because she was alive, not disfigured in the least, and there was a bloody bunny lurking in the corner of her vision. All these things were far more important than Colton’s acquiescence to her shallow pleas.

  Colton came fully awake. At first, his face was placid, seemingly drunk, as it rose from the airbag. Then he was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. And screaming his head off.

  Why was he screaming?

  His strained voice finally formed words. “My legs!”

  She pushed the airbag away to reveal the messy amalgamation of plastic and flesh and steel and bone underneath. Was that the engine resting between Colt’s legs?

  Oh, Juliet thought, that’s not pretty. Fat lot of good that airbag did.

  She should have been more concerned. Somewhere in the depths of her mind, she knew this, but was still punch-drunk from the accident. Not really all there, was she? No. Not at all. For some reason, that bunny still bothered her. Sure, Colton screamed. He wailed and wailed, but that bunny was louder. Where had the artist gotten off to?

  Juliet shoved her door open, not surprised in the least when it gave no resistance. After all, the majority of the damage had been on Colton’s side. It was he who’d been trapped, not her. She spilled out into grass, her hands and jeans becoming instantly dew-damp. Crawled two feet forward before pushing herself up. Shuffled out into the road. Spun languidly, assessing the scene.

  The truck with the smashed in rear panel lay right-side-up in the culvert just beyond the breakdown lane. A vaguely human shape was hunched over behind the steering wheel.

  The Subaru sat at an angle in the median. The front of the car was nonexistent, looking like a cab-over big rig.

  No, she thought, that’s not right. It looks like an accordion that’s been put away for the night. Collapsed. It looks collapsed.

  Like the red bunny before it, something new sat in the corner of her eye. This time, to her left. She turned, numb all over.

  The ginger was approaching, head down, shuffling like—

  Dawn of the Dead. Colt hadn’t wanted to see it. He had strep. I wouldn’t kiss him.

  —a drunk after last call.

  “Hey,” she said, without much tone to her voice at all. “You… you all right?”

  The ginger stumbled forward, went sprawling, and pushed himself back to his feet. As he rose so did his head, and Juliet was allowed to look upon his face. Or what was left of it.

  The entire left side of his face had been crushed in; it looked as if he’d been punched with a flatiron. Juliet recalled the red bunny. Didn’t the ginger’s squashed face resemble that strange ruddy hare in the backward way a stamp will look before being dipped in ink? She thought so.

  The ginger reached for her, and she saw that two of the fingers on his right hand had been torn off—the pinkie and ring finger. She shuddered and was sick on the pavement. Wiping her gorge from her mouth, she glanced back up at the shuffling dead man. But he wasn’t dead. Dead men don’t bleed. And this poor boy was still bleeding. Fat drops of crimson spilled out of the mangled nubs where his fingers used to be and splashed down onto the street.

  The teenager glowed. Brilliant light enveloped him. Juliet tried to step right, to get a better look at the source of the illumination behind him, but stumbled and went to her knees. She relaxed back on her haunches, watching in stunned disbelief as the Mercury pulled to a stop behind the boy with the shattered face. The red priest stepped out into the fog, and the moisture in the air seemed to part before him, giving him free passage to the teenager.

  “Help,” Juliet asked quite calmly. “Help us.”

  “Jesus saves,” the red priest said. “I do not.”

  And Juliet had one thought before she passed out. A rational thought. A thought so unlike the ones she’d had up until then that it seemed ludicrous. That thought was: Why is he smiling?

  5.

  The first thing she felt upon waking was a piercing cold. Her arms were above her head, and her shoulders ached, as if she’d been sleeping in that position for some time. But she was upright, not stretched out on her bed, at home. A chilly wind blew against her exposed midriff and she shuddered under its touch. She looked down, finding that she still had on her blue blouse, but that it had pulled up because of her posture. She tried to reach for the fabric, to pull it back down, but realized she couldn�
�t feel her hands. Glancing up, she screamed.

  Everything came rushing back in a tidal wave of reality. The accident. The engine in Colton’s lap. That poor teenager with a face like a kicked-in watermelon. The Mercury—

  JXSAVES… I DO NOT

  —and the red priest. Her asking for help. Him smiling.

  After all that tragedy, someone had chained her to a post. Her hands had fallen asleep because they weren’t receiving circulation from the wrists. The cuffs were cutting off the supply of blood. They weren’t really cuffs, though, not really. More like shackles. The kind of things they used to use on witches before they burned them at the stake.

  She smelled smoke.

  Ten feet in front of her, a hunched figure worshipped at a campfire, his hands clasped together over the body of the teenager with the pushed-in kisser. He’s praying for him to make it, Juliet thought. She was well aware of how crazy that sounded.

  A thick wood surrounded her, seemed to press in from all sides. To her left, a road. The boughs of the trees came together over the damp red clay, creating a corridor. At the end of that tunnel was a light so beautiful and welcoming that Juliet thought she would cry. If she weren’t already crying, that was. Deep sobs racked her body, and it was the weakness of her knees that told her she was standing. Her feet burned, though. They burned so badly it felt as if she stood over an open flame.

  A witch set to burn over a bonfire repeated in her mind, and she glanced down. Her knees were bent and in her line of sight. She couldn’t see her feet. She tried to move them to the right, then the left, but they wouldn’t do as she told them. Finally, her knees parted, and she stared down between bare, milky thighs. She’d lost her pants, but that fact barely registered. At first the nails in her feet didn’t compute as such. The pain ebbed the more she gawked at the aluminum heads, ten in all, gazing back at her. She knew how many nail heads there were because she counted. Somehow, knowing how many had been driven into her feet helped ease her agony. The respite from the burning in her feet only lasted half a minute or so, before she remembered her aching shoulders and the shackles holding her arms above her head.

  So many things to focus on, so little time.

  “Why…” she blubbered, but her voice was barely audible, even to herself. The second time, she shrieked, “WHY?”

  “Shhhh…” the red priest hissed. “I’m sssspeaking with the Lord about our fallen brother.”

  “LET ME DOWN!” She sounded like a weak horror movie cliché, one of those useless bitches that tumble and fall on thin air with the killer right behind them. She hated the sound of that weakness. Hated herself for making it.

  “You’ll be allowed to leave,” the red priest said. “Shortly.”

  Juliet jerked her limp arms forward, expecting resistance but getting none, and began to tilt out over the ground below. Everything seemed to happen so slowly that she had time to think about the nails, those ten horrible nail heads and what they would do to her precious, fragile feet. She continued to drop, a scream vibrating her throat and painfully thrumming in her head. Then the nails caught. They tore, and she felt her feet coming apart, splitting, cleaving in two. The pain was transcendent. The pain was God. A fiery, torturous agony crippled every muscle in her body, and she slapped down, cheek first, onto the grassy clearing where she’d been trussed up like a biblical whore awaiting the first thrown stone. She lay there for some time, twitching and rolling feebly from side to side, bawling. Through her tears, she could see her hands out in front of her, the shackles still clasped around her wrists, the chain stretching out into the grass, a wooden peg impaling one link. Needing to take her mind off her cloven feet, she craned her neck and gazed up at the post. An empty notch, which had been drilled into the wood a foot below the top, stared down at her like some mocking cyclops. Two feet above the ground were the nails. Ten heads glistening with gore in the firelight, clumps of pink and purple flesh still clinging to the wood.

  Is that a toe?

  Juliet’s anguished cry exploded from her chest.

  Without thought, she pushed herself to her knees then attempted to climb to her feet. Something spread beneath her, like toes with no webbing stretching too wide. A wave of white hot needles pressed into her calves, pierced her thigh muscles, and threw her screaming to the grass.

  She flipped onto her back, howling her maladies to the canopy of gnarled tree branches overhead. She screeched, wailed, hollered, erupted, to anyone who’d listen. But, deep down, Juliet knew that the red priest was her only audience.

  “That was foolish.” His voice was somber, so low that Juliet could barely hear him over her own echoing shrieks.

  “FUCK YOU!”

  “So unladylike. I’ll let this weakness go, but I doubt He will.”

  Juliet didn’t care who He was, but could hear the inflection the priest put on the title, capitalized with emphasis. Her mind even highlighted the word and threw curses laced with middle fingers at it. If it were God the red priest spoke of, then God be damned. It’s not like God had helped her out. He’d let her pull that peg from the post and tear her feet all to shit. In regards to the titular He, God could take a flying fuck on a rolling doughnut in a field full of dandelions fertilized by baby tears for all the fucks given by her.

  “I guess I’ll leave you two alone. Oh, and I suggest you crawl.”

  Even over her pain-filled mumbling, Juliet heard the red priest’s soles squelching along as he left by way of the road domed by branches.

  Now, it was only her. Well, her and a young man’s corpse. But he was dead, and dead men carry no conversations.

  And, as the pain took over, and Juliet melted into the grass surrounding her, Colton flitted into her mind. That engine in his lap looked awfully dangerous. He might want to do something about that. She wondered if they’d ever hold another conversation.

  6.

  A shy young man in his last year of college, with dreams of building skyscrapers, and a young lady with a mind for teaching, converse in front of a fire at a rather banal Christmas party thrown by a mutual friend. This friend, William Beaumont, has recently moved to Mobile to attend college at Faulkner. Juliet has eyes for this young, wannabe doctor. Has eyes for his future success as well as his rumored prowess in the bedroom. Her bestie, Natalie, has been to the promised land before—twice—and was saved. So, why is it that she’s talking to this geekish boy with dirty blond hair, chubby cheeks, and a granite slab for a nose? He’s interesting. Too captivating for her to pull away from. What is this magic, she thinks, twinkling in his cinnamon eyes? What kind of dark sorcery has he cast upon her?

  Across the room and through the crowd, a bright woman is approaching. This woman looks like Julie sounds like her, too. The doppelganger is happy. Maybe happier than Juliet-by-the-Fire. This twin, this reflection of her, moves through the party, ignoring the geek by the fireplace. Juliet-by-the-Fire glances back to the architect-in-training and sees that he’s no longer interested in her. He wants the Bright Julie. Because the Bright Julie doesn’t hold grudges. She looks past symptoms and delves to the heart of what-ails-ya. And the problem is her—Juliet-by-the-fire. Bright Julie can’t have the geek. He’s the property of Juliet-by-the-fire. And she’s his. But he’s already getting up. And the fire at her back is too hot. It’s burning her. Burning… burned… burnt…

  7.

  Juliet woke with a snap, screaming and smoking. Her feet forgotten for the moment, she rolled back and forth, trying to put out the flames. Lying on her smoldering back, she dealt with the last embers by smothering them beneath her. Other than a sensitive spot or two, she surmised she’d missed the worst of it by waking in time. Somehow, she’d gotten too close to the fire. Or she’d been pushed.

  Colton always told her how soundly she slept. How she didn’t toss and turn and roll around like the women his buddies had married. She didn’t snore either, which Colton marked down as another blessing bestowed by the relationship gods. This didn’t mean, of course, that she was inca
pable of movement while asleep, only that Colton had never experienced it.

  Colton…

  No, she couldn’t think of him right now. She had to get moving. Find a way—

  (I suggest you crawl)

  —out of this mess.

  Biting her lip until it bled, she managed to roll over onto her knees. Her remaining toes grazed the ground, sending bolts of electricity up her hips and into her back. Moving on her knees wasn’t going to work. The action caused hamstrings to seize because she had to try and hold her feet out of the grass and clay. She dropped to her belly and army-crawled, using her forearms to progress, holding her damaged feet up by her butt. She had to round the entirety of the campfire before the domed trail came back into view. That brilliant white light still shone at the end, like a beacon meant to keep her from running ashore. The start of the tunnel was, at her best guess, thirty to forty feet away. The space between looked forever long, but the stretch of road beyond seemed longer by an eternity. How far was she from help? Would anyone be at the light when she got there? Where was she? What was the light? And, furthermore, was she headed toward more danger?

  That last thought stalled her engines, and she lay there, prone on the cold clay, breathing slowly, contemplating whether or not she really wanted to go near that light. It looked like salvation, but that could all be a less-than-subtle ruse. Hadn’t the red priest wanted her to leave the safety (maybe) of the campfire? Hadn’t he wanted her to (suggested she) crawl? What other way could she go?

  She glanced back over her shoulder, saw the post with the bloody, fleshy nails; the smoking campfire giving up its heat to the heavens; dark shadows, cast by the flames, flickering through the tree line, looking lithe and alive. But it was what she didn’t see that bothered her. What she didn’t see caused her heart to jam down on the accelerator, ramping its speed up until it seemed the speedometer would go full circle back to zero.