With her heart feeling like it was trying to jump into her throat, Bethany rolled her window down halfway and whistled. It was a quick, soft sound. It was also the first three notes of “It’s a Small World After All.”
After a few seconds, a frail figure emerged from behind the old filling tank. In the dimmed headlights, Bethany could see a tangle of blonde hair and a thin shoulder. As the woman stepped out of the shadows and made her way carefully toward the car, more of her came into view. She was thin almost to the point of being waifish and had a face that, though clearly dirty, was the stuff of movies. Even with a look of stark horror on her face, she was pretty.
When the woman saw Bethany through the windshield, she dashed for the car. She started crying instantly, perhaps in happiness. Bethany figured the girl was feeling almost the same as she was—a war between fear and relief waging inside of her.
The girl opened the passenger’s side door and practically fell into the seat. For a moment, it looked like she might reach over to hug Bethany but then thought better of it. “Thank you,” was all she said as she managed to bring her stifled sobs to a stop.
“Of course. I know you’re scared, but you’re okay now. I’m here for you.”
Even before she was done saying this, she was already backing out of the parking lot. Her mind was still on Marjorie Hikkum and how she had likely thought she was free as well. She’d gotten so close, after all. Just several more houses down and she would have made it…
But she had to push that away for now. This thin blonde woman was a new girl, a new chance.
“How long?” the woman asked. Bethany guessed her to be about twenty or so, surely no older than twenty-five, but she looked like a frightened little girl in the darkness of the car. “How far away?”
“About twenty minutes.”
The woman nodded and stared dead ahead, as if she was expecting some gigantic monster to come stomping through the forests.
They were quiet for a moment as Bethany turned onto the road and headed back toward the home she and Amy shared with another roommate. Really, she wasn’t even sure what to say. Yes, there were any number of empty encouraging remarks she could make, but she wouldn’t cheapen this woman’s situation with them.
But she did feel a responsibility to be human for her—to be caring. That was what allowed her to ask the one simple question she could think of.
“Are you okay? Are you…are you hurt?”
“No. I think I got out okay. I think—”
The back end of Bethany’s car felt like it exploded. The entire back shuddered, causing the car to skid. There was a thunderous noise which she did not recognize right away. But when she fought to straighten the car out on the road, she understood that she’d heard the bone-jarring noise of metal on metal.
She checked her rearview mirror and saw nothing at first. There was the night, the road, the shadow-strewn shapes of the trees.
But then she saw it. Something coming up fast behind her. And now that she could see the approaching shape, she could hear it, too. An engine, revving up as the shape got louder. All she saw were headlights, which were turned off, and a muted grille. And by the time she made sense if it, the vehicle was colliding with the back of her car again.
The girl beside her shrieked. She leaned forward, gripping the dashboard, as if willing the car to go faster. Of course, this did no such thing. Instead, the vehicle behind them—which Bethany could now see was a larger and older-model truck—seemed to be affixed to them. Bethany tried to speed up but could not distance herself from the truck.
Ahead of her, the intersection came into view. Her heart dropped into her stomach as she realized what this meant. She either had to slow down for the stop, allowing the truck to push her as it pleased, or she would have to speed straight across the intersection and into the waiting trees on the other side of the ditch. Neither option was appealing to her.
In the end, she opted for a bit of both. Beside her, the young woman continued to scream. They were tormented screams, the sort that would leave her throat feeling very sore tomorrow. Bethany let off of the gas and swerved hard to the right. She managed to snake into the opposite lane just a bit, but the truck followed right behind. Its bumper clanged against hers, causing the car to tremble and slide to the right.
Bethany righted it back and then, almost immediately, did the same thing again. The intersection was no more than fifty feet ahead and at the speed she was going—fifty miles per hour—she and her passenger were going to be rattled one way or the other. All of a sudden, that can of Mace under the seat seemed incredibly stupid.
This time when she swerved out into the opposite lane, the driver of the truck seemed to anticipate it. He not only slipped her bumper, but this time, he matched her angle and slammed into her. The car lurched forward and skewed slightly left. The back wheels cried out against the pavement and when she reached the intersection, the car was nearly horizontal across both lanes.
The woman beside her was shrieking now. When the car hit the ditch, went about two feet into the air, and slammed into two large pines on the side of the road, she was still screaming. Bethany could hear it even over the sound of the side windows and windshield being demolished.
Bethany was thrown forward, directly into the steering wheel. Her head went buckling forward but the glass of the windshield was no longer solid, so it did not do much damage. The steering wheel, though—it took the breath from her and she was pretty sure something inside of her snapped. She gasped and began to panic, dimly aware that the woman beside her was still screaming. It was dark and Bethany’s world was distorted with pain, but she was pretty sure the woman was trying to open the passenger’s side door to get out.
Bethany tried to say no, but forming the word seemed to create some sort of pinching pain deep within her chest.
Not that it mattered. While Bethany looked at the woman, trying to get her attention, a figure filled the shattered shapes within the window. It was too dark and the pain was too immense, so Bethany didn’t see what happened, exactly. She heard the young woman let out a sharp cry and then there was a quick, wet sound followed by silence. The woman stopped screaming, and she was no longer fumbling for the door handle. In fact, she was not moving at all.
Bethany leaned over to the left, desperately looking for the can of Mace as the figure on the passenger’s side moved toward the hood. For a moment, the shape of the killer was hidden in the trees and that was somehow even more frightening. Her hope was that she could blind the killer, then strike him with her door as she opened it and made her escape. It seemed almost impossible, but what the hell else was she supposed to do?
As she leaned for the little canister, the exploding pain in her chest made her realize that the little scenario she had played out in her head would indeed be impossible. She could barely lean over an inch, much less shove a door against a killer and run down a road…the same road Marjorie Hikkum had no doubt run down on the night she died.
When the driver’s side door was yanked open from the outside, Bethany screamed. It was a short scream, cut off by the horrific tearing sensation in her chest. She was barely aware of being hauled out of the car, a rough hand taking her shoulder and then the back of her head.
In the end, her last thought was that the pain in her chest likely spared her from the final pain that came when she was assailed against the head. The killer was holding something hard that slammed into her head once, twice, then three times. As the life faded out of her, she was pretty sure there was the feeling of being sliced and stabbed, but by that point, there was too much pain and an approaching darkness, swallowing everything, to really even care.