Four #2
“Sorry, I’m leaving!” I say.
She doesn’t say anything.
I should just keep going. I should drive faster, not let her see more of my face. Maybe she’s too tired to care.
But I give her one last look.
She doesn’t reply, her eyes trained on me in an unreadably neutral expression. Like I’m more fascinating to her than she is to me.
She’s not wearing a ranger uniform.
There’s a point in horror movies when characters realize they’ve left their reality where nothing bad ever happens, when suddenly they’re no longer a complex being but a delicate sack of meat.
And once the thought really sinks in, there’s no getting out of survival mode.
My anxiety usually wraps itself into my stomach and chest, but right now my torso feels hollow.
Anxiety hits me as coldness in my fingertips, an animal realization that something is wrong.
I shouldn’t be here, but this person really shouldn’t be here.
If we’re together in the same area any longer, something terrible will happen.
And then my body wakes back up. I speed off, blood pumping so heavy in my ears that I can hardly hear the navigation.
My heart doesn’t stop slamming until I’m back on the two-lane highway, the crowbar thunking in my trunk.
Who was that woman? A camper, right? If I weren’t a barely-Jewish atheist, I might’ve thought she was some angel trying to convince me to not mess with my friends.
The clock reads long after midnight. Mom will be home from her shift and will notice when I come in.
Maybe she’ll be so tired she won’t question the excuse that someone in my group got sick during the sleepover and we all went home.
I breathe again and change the music. Now the song is old and fast-tempoed. Something that would almost calm me down if I let it.
Then my Spotify clicks off. My navigation with it.
Service dead spot. In my panic, I didn’t notice my navigation taking me on a different route than the way I came.
My palms sweat on the wheel. I click every app I can, watch as I get screen after screen of error and page can’t load.
For the first time since I started driving, my throat tightens with the urge to call my mom for help.
Help with everything.
I swallow hard and take a swig of the Bob’s take-out soda I never finished. It’s flat and the artificial cherry flavor is all I can taste, but it’s the grounding I need.
It’s okay. I’m still going straight for a while, but the silence is like being strangled.
I’m alone. When I go to school on Monday, I’ll be alone. Driving down this road, I’m alone. I need to get off the road and sleep. This was all such a bad idea.
And then—I’m not alone.
There’s someone here.
They stand in the middle of the road. Their long hair whips behind them.
The brakes scream as I slam them on, jerking on the wheel as I do. The figure’s eyes shine white like a deer when my headlights flash over their face.
I don’t see them anymore when my car bumps over something in the road.
Oh my god. My lungs and heart stop; the only function left in me is to ease the car down from seventy to sixty to forty to twenty to a stop along the dusty shoulder. My stomach churns as I force myself to turn back. I’m already so far away from the person.
I step out of the car, out onto the road. My sneakers land in dirt as the smell of pine fills my nose. I shine my phone on the ground around the tires.
There are skid marks, but no blood trailing off my tires. This should fill me with relief, but it doesn’t feel like enough evidence. With how many rotations a wheel goes through in a second, that person’s blood could’ve spread onto the stretch of road that I can’t see.
I look back toward the impact site. Bile rises in my throat.
What if the grisliest images are hiding somewhere in the dark?
I want to let the panic overtake me and cry out for someone else to help, someone else to be the adult right now.
But I can’t. I’m not in a horror movie and that person could be seriously hurt.
Even if I didn’t hit them, I should make sure they’re okay.
I won’t let them in the car, but I have to know.
I need to call 9-1-1 for them. To be alone out on the road like that, they must be someone who needs the help anyway.
I return to my car, unable to get my thumbnail out of my mouth as I chew my worries away.
I drive under the speed limit as I return to the spot I first saw the figure. I pull over again and flash my light in the road. My tire skid marks are even more present here, but that’s all. When I turn to the forest again, I can just barely make out some disturbance in the trees.
It hits me all at once—standing outside of my car, I’m not the one with the weapon anymore.
Hell no. I’m not dying out here. I sprint back to my car and get a move on. Seventy this time. And as if the universe is listening, my navigation and music blast back to life. My maps app already knows what address I want.
Everything will be fine. I just need to sleep. That figure—even in the dark, I swear they looked just like the not-ranger from the parking lot. Someone who would have no way to get out here on foot faster than I drove.
It can’t be.
I imagine the woman as I drive, but the flash of the memory is already getting hazy. Like when you wake up from a nightmare and your brain deletes every scary image so you can go back to sleep.
I make it home without anyone commenting on where I was. Aemond curls into me as I drop into the kind of exhausted sleep that can only come when you realize you’re not going to die tonight.