Highways to Hell (2 page)

PART ONE: RIDING THE LONG BLACK SERPENT

The two-lane stretch of twisting rural blacktop looked distorted through the Chevelle’s windshield, not quite real, like something half-remembered from a dream, a rippling dark ribbon the night sometimes seemed to just swallow whole. Or maybe not. But the notion prompted a more disturbing possibility. Maybe the road wasn’t really a road at all. Maybe it was the long, unfurled concrete tongue of some great, unknowable beast, and the Chevelle was headed straight into its yawning, tunnel-sized mouth.

Or maybe
, thought Rick Prather,
I’m just really, really, drunk
.

As he thought this, Rick’s chin dropped toward his chest.

Out like a light.

For one second.

Two.

Three.

Four...

Rick’s head jerked up as he came awake with a gasp. He pushed the heels of his hands into his eyes and gave them a quick, hard massage. Then he blinked them open again and saw a pretty array of dancing, swirling colors. He stared at them for a moment and decided he could also be experiencing some sort of delayed effect from the lysergic acid he’d taken the night before. Yeah. Goddamn. He sort of felt like he was in a trippy early 70’s music video. Black Sabbath doing “Paranoid” on some forgotten TV show, the visuals all wavy and swirly.

He blinked his eyes again and let his head wobble to the left. “Dude, I’m sort of fucked up over here.”

Danny Spillane didn’t hear him say this. And it wasn’t because the Chevelle’s radio was blaring “The 19th Most Powerful Woman In Rock” by the Supersuckers. Nope, Danny was slumped over in his seat, temple pressed to the driver’s side window, mouth hanging slack, drool rolling down his chin.

Rick stared at his friend for a long, uncomprehending moment.

At last, a troubling notion occurred to him, slipping through the substance-induced fog engulfing his brain like a silent and insidiously patient Jack the Ripper moving through early morning White Chapel mist.

Danny was sort of passed out.

Rick stared at him a while longer.

Yeah. Passed out like a motherfucker.

Rick’s eyes went wide with alarm. “We’re gonna crash!”

He seized his friend’s shoulder and gave him a hard shaking. “Wake up!”

Danny groaned in his sleep, but remained insensible. He pushed at Rick feebly and said something that sounded like, “Lemme ‘lone.”

Rick dialed the radio’s volume down and summoned a scream from the bottom of his lungs, invested it with enough desperate, gibbering horror to shame a convention of scream queens, and let that bitch loose. It went off like a bomb in the Chevelle’s interior, a concussive, echoing explosion of sound that seemed to go on forever. The sound bounced and ricocheted in the closed space, sent razor-sharp shards of aural debris spinning through the air.

Danny woke up.

Looked at him.

Frowned.

And said, “Dude? What the fuck?”

Rick was beside himself with panic. He rocked in his seat and thrust a finger at the Chevelle’s windshield. “Get your eyes on the fucking road, motherfucker! Can’t you see we’re gonna fucking crash!?”

Danny straightened in his seat with a maddening degree of care and deliberation. He leaned forward and squinted at the dark road, propping his elbows on the steering wheel. His face was expressionless for a long moment. Or maybe not quite expressionless. He looked confused. Then the corners of his mouth began to tilt upward.

He rested his forehead on the steering wheel and began to laugh.

A surge of molten rage rendered Rick almost fully sober for the space of maybe three or four seconds. “WHAT!? STOP LAUGHING, YOU DERANGED PYSCHO MOTHERFUCKER!!”

Danny fell back against his seat, his body convulsing with laughter.

I’m gonna have to strangle him
, Rick thought.
Take the wheel myself and save our sorry asses
.

Danny wiped tears from his eyes and managed to say two words between peels of maniacal laughter. “We’re...stopped...”

Rick scowled at him. “What? No...that’s...” Rick forced his gaze away from his delirious friend and peered through the windshield at the road. Huh. The view beyond the curved glass did evoke a certain...stillness. He cranked the window on his side down and stuck his head outside. He stared at the unmoving landscape of towering trees beyond the road’s shoulder. It was a warm night. The soft breeze felt good on his flushed face. The terror-induced tension deserted him at once, and he again felt the mellow embrace of too much alcohol.

He settled back in his seat and stared straight ahead. “We’re stopped.”

“No shit.”

They both started laughing then.

It went on for a while.

Rick slapped his thighs and coughed, choking on too much mirth.

Danny leaned over the steering wheel, squinted again. “We’re sort of in the middle of the fucking road. Our lives have turned into a fucking Cheech and Chong movie.”

Rick hiccuped. “Better that than fucking Scarface or...I dunno...fucking Drugstore Cowboy. That’d be some grim motherfucking shit. Um...we should move.”

“Yeah.”

The laughter bubbled out of them again, went on for another indefinable period.

Then Rick said, “But seriously...”

“Yeah.”

“We need a kickstart.”

Danny was nodding by now. “Set us up.”

Rick opened the Chevelle’s glove box and sorted through the profusion of pill bottles and plastic baggies. Too many of them contained various strains of ganja, all of them super high quality, but not what they needed right now. He began to despair, thinking maybe they were out of what he was looking for. He began to panic again, but then he spied it, a nearly depleted baggie of white powder hiding beneath a much thicker, plastic-wrapped wad of green Indica bud. He snagged the bag of Bolivian Marching Powder from the glove box, fished a tiny spoon from the tray under the radio, and did a quick bump. He then passed the baggie to Danny, who did the same. They passed the baggie back and forth until the quantity of coke it contained had been severely reduced.

By then they were feeling much, much more alert.

Rick looked at his friend.

“Dude.”

“Okay.”

Danny started the car, put it in gear, and began to drive.

Rick was feeling a lot better now. He sat back, scrunched down in his seat a bit, and folded his hands over his early-stage potbelly. He stared at the dark road, deciding it no longer looked like the unfurled tongue of some great, unknowable beast. What kind of lunatic notion was that, anyway? That was the kind of thing crazy people thought, the kind of radioactive rumination that would leak through the cracks of a diseased mind. He pictured a legion of Day-Glo miniature skeletons scuttling through the crooks and eddies of his gray matter, planting seeds of insanity, and shuddered. It was padded room thinking. Straitjacket insight. Any rational person could see the black stretch of backwoods highway looked much more like the back of some monstrous hell snake. The asphalt did sort of remind him of scales more than concrete.

Ride the snake...

Rick shuddered again.

“I sort of want to hear The Doors.”

Danny shrugged. “No Doors on the Zune.” The musical portion of the evening’s entertainment was courtesy of Danny’s Zune. The MP3 player was connected to an adapter in the Chevelle’s tape deck, and contained nearly 80 GB of Danny Spillane’s favorite tunage. Everything worth hearing was on the goddamn thing. Motorhead, the Ramones, AC/DC. The Who, the Stones, Led Zeppelin. The Sex Pistols, Deep Purple, and Frank Sinatra. Bob Marley and Frank Zappa. The Pixies and Big Black. A shitload of Johnny Cash. Danny’s taste was pretty damn eclectic.

So...

“I can’t believe you don’t have any Doors on the fucking Zune.”

“Well, I don’t have any Doors on the fucking Zune.”

Rick shook his head. “Fuck.”

A moment passed. The only sounds were the hiss of tires on asphalt and the clamor of conflicting weird impulses and theories in his head. Decidedly non-mainstream notions about the first moon landing and the assassinations of Marilyn Monroe and Paul Wellstone. Except that these didn’t produce actual audible sounds. Or did they? Hold on now. Wait. Nope. That was all in his head. Jesus, that was freaky. He thought maybe he should snort some more coke. No. He wanted to get mellow again.

“Are we out of beer?”

Danny shrugged. “Might still be some in the back.” He frowned. “Any idea where we are?”

“Nope.”

“Huh. Guess I’ll just keep going this way then.”

“Whatever.”

Rick twisted in his seat and peered into the back, looking for beer.

And that’s when he saw her.

The dead bitch.

Rick’s second scream that night was louder than the one that woke Danny.

PART TWO: THE DEAD BITCH

The revelation that they were riding with a non-breathing extra passenger caused Rick to fall backward and crack his back against the dashboard. He pointed at the back seat and gibbered unintelligibly for several moments.

Danny looked at him, his expression remarkably similar to the look you sometimes saw on the faces of tourists upon being accosted by deranged street people. Wary and with a hint of pity. “Um...could you maybe stop whining like a bitch for a minute and tell me what the fuck your damage is?”

One last squeal caught in Rick’s throat, died there. He cleared phlegm from his throat and turned his pale face toward Danny. “You’re going to want to pull over. Right now would be a good time.”

Danny frowned. “Yeah? Why?”

“Because you’re probably gonna want to get rid of the fucking gorgeous but also very fucking dead woman in the back of your car.”

Danny didn’t reply immediately.

He locked eyes with Rick, took a moment to appraise the subterfuge-free look of somber sobriety, saw that his friend wasn’t pulling his leg, and promptly freaked the fuck out, unleashing an impressive scream of his own as he wrenched the Chevelle’s steering wheel hard to the right and slammed on the brakes. They came to a skidding stop on the road’s shoulder. Danny shifted in his seat and peered into the back.

He screamed again.

Rick and Danny locked gazes again.

They screamed some more.

“Oh, shit!”

“Oh, fuck!”

“What are we gonna do? What’re we fucking gonna do?”

Rick stared at the dead woman. It was real obvious she was totally fucking dead. No pulse check was necessary. Nor was the administration of CPR, or a desperate search for the nearest emergency room. The giant, ragged gash in her throat made that abundantly clear. She was dead. Lights out, sayonara, see ya fuckin’ later. But that left a bigger mystery to consider. Several of them, actually.

Including.

Who the fuck was this dead fucking bitch?

Who the fuck killed her?

And why was she in Danny’s fucking car?

For starters.

Rick looked at his friend. “Danny, man...you didn’t kill this chick, did you?”

Danny managed to sneer and look hurt at the same time. “What the fuck kind of monster do you think I am?”

Rick nodded. “Yeah.” He heaved a big breath and reluctantly looked at the dead bitch again. Christ, that big bloody hole. His stomach knotted. “Didn’t think so, bro, but kinda had to ask.”

Danny’s shoulders sagged, and he nodded wearily. “Yeah. Guess so. And I guess you didn’t kill her?”

Rick thought about it. It didn’t seem likely. Brutal murder wasn’t his bag at all. He didn’t even like to step on insects, normally. And he sure didn’t remember killing anybody tonight. Then again...he searched his memory...what little of it was available to him from the last several hours. He remembered drinking at various bars in Nashvegas over the course of several hours. Hanging with those chicks they met at the Gold Rush. Pretty young things. College girls. The dead bitch hadn’t been one of them, he was pretty sure. Things from later in the evening got fuzzier. Flashing images of dancing girls and strobe lights. Standard nightclub activity. Then things got even fuzzier. More dancing girls, except this time they were naked and strutting across a stage. And after that, he could recall nothing else.

He frowned.