Roadkill

There’s a legend in my town about the old farm road. Most people pay it no attention, but the old folks swear it’s true. “The Highwayman lurks there,” they say. We scoff and go on. After all, small towns like ours have a ghost story under every rock.

This summer, I signed up to work as a camp counselor for Camp Chesterton, which rests on the shore of Lake Winnifred near Walnut Brook. The quickest way to get to the lake from town, of course, is by way of the old farm road. Bags packed and goodbyes said, I hopped inside my hand-me-down car and took to the road.

An hour later, town was in my rearview mirror and the farm road stretched before me. I thought nothing of it as I headbanged to the metal blasting from the radio. It was a sunny day, so hot the air above the pavement sweltered like transparent flames. I cranked up the AC and hit the gas. The sooner I got to the campground, the sooner I could grab myself an ice cold drink. I could see the mile marker coming up ahead.

The moment I passed it, the mood shifted. The music seemed to fade into the background. The nape of my neck bristled, and I barely managed to stifle a shudder. I wasn’t sure where this sudden dread came from, or why. I felt exposed, overcome by the sense that I was being watched. I tried to ignore it. Out here, the only things watching me were squirrels, birds, and the occasional cow. My foot pressed lower onto the gas. My thoughts dipped to urban legends, tales of how the old, haunted farm road that almost no one dared to drive, lest they come face to face with the dreaded Highwayman.

And I laughed. I laughed loudly, thinking about how campy those stories were. People used this road all the time. Farmers, surveyors, even locals. I slowed down a little and kept moving forward, chuckling to myself. Maybe a good Highwayman story would be just the thing to entertain the campers next week. By the time I zoomed past the next mile marker, the odd feeling of being watched vanished completely. I cranked the music back to full blast and continued on toward the lake.

When the kid ran into the road, I slammed on the brakes as hard as I could. My car swerved, and I saw the ditch rise up to greet me. Then, darkness. Then, pain. My forehead throbbed, and my chest hurt. I opened my eyes, blinking away dirt. My windshield was shattered. Blood trickled down my brow. Well, up my brow. I was upside down. My hands clawed at the seatbelt, which thankfully popped free without too much persuasion.

My arms shook and my head ached as I crawled from the overturned car. By some miracle, I didn’t seem too hurt, just some cuts and bruises. The car itself, aside from having flipped over, wasn’t totaled. Fortunately for me, cars don’t explode like the movies in real life. I stood, dazed, looking around. Had I imagined the child? No, surely not. But what would a little kid be doing out in the middle of nowhere by himself? Perhaps one of the nearby farmers had a kid who, for some reason, wasn’t trained to not run out into the road?

I turned around and gasped. There he was, almost thirty feet away, standing in the ditch. He couldn’t have been more than eight or nine years old. His hair was sandy brown, and his face and clothes were filthy with grime and grass stains. I supposed he’d been playing in the pasture, but I didn’t give it much thought.

“Hey, kid!” I yelled, slowly walking towards the little boy. “You okay?”

The boy stood his ground as I approached. He watched with the kind of curiosity a stray cat watches a rat with. He didn’t answer right away. Just kept watching me as I got closer. I stopped about ten feet from him. Uneasy silence hung in the air as we looked at one another. Finally, he spoke.

“You almost killed me, Mister.”

My jaw twitched.

“I almost killed you? You ran into the road right in front of me!” I turned, gesturing to my upturned vehicle. “Just look at this! What are you even doing out here?”

The little boy just kept looking at me with that unnerving stare. Something wasn’t right with his eyes. They were vacant, uninterested, like he had seen this happen a million times already and was bored of it.

“You almost killed me, Mister,” he repeated softly. I sighed. Clearly, the kid was shaken, and I wasn’t going anywhere with my car lying on its back. I turned my back and took out my phone. I knew Benny, the tow truck driver back in town. He’d be more than happy to come pick up my car. I’d call the sheriff next, to report the accident and to make sure the kid got a police escort home. Maybe then he’d think twice about running into the road next time.

I’d just punched the call button when I heard leaves crushing behind me. I swiveled just in time to see the kid running away through the ditch.

“Hey, get back here!” I shouted.

“Riverside Towing, this is Benny,” said a familiar voice over the phone.

“Benny!” I answered. “This is Danny, Danny Walker. I’ve been in an accident on the old farm road.”

“An accident? Jeez, kid, are you okay?”

“I’ll be fine, but my car flipped over. Some little kid ran out right in front of me.”

“A little kid? Mother of Moses, Danny, is he alright?”

“He’s fine, too,” I told him. “Can you call the sheriff on your way here? I have to go.”

“Hang on just a minute — ,” was all Benny managed to get out before I hung up and took off after the little boy. He had a huge head start, and maintained a dead sprint. As a camp counselor, keeping up with hyperactive children is well within my element. I paced myself, keeping my stride long and my breaths deep. Still, the kid was faster. Up ahead I could see the mile marker sign I’d passed right before I’d swerved. Adrenaline took over, and I picked up the pace. Thirty feet away now, then twenty feet. The kid was slowing down. I’d nearly caught up to him when he changed directions and dipped into the woods off the road. I coasted to a stop, breathing desperately. The wooded areas between the pastures here were dense, full of brambles and other unpleasant plant life. The kid managed to slip through, apparently, but I was a lot bigger than he was. I stood, staring into the thick overgrowth.

Then that awful sensation returned, that horrible unease like I was being stalked. It felt like someone had dropped an ice cube down my back, freezing cold and utterly violating. I backed out of the ditch and stood in the road, trying to shake off the paralysis that gripped me. I’d never been one to scare easily, but that little stretch of road between the two mile markers was the last place I wanted to be.

I decided to keep walking, to leave that area and wait for Benny further up the road. The sun was starting to sink, and this place creeped me out enough in broad daylight. I kept myself neatly in the middle of the gravel, equally distant from either ditch.

About thirty yards of walking later, I heard a chilling sound. I looked around for the source and noticed something in the ditch, standing out from the greens and yellows of the grass and weeds. Reds and pinks, bundled together in a tight heap, and something else. As curious as I was cautious, I took a step closer to see what the sound and colors could be. I froze.

There in the ditch was a small cross decorated with a bouquet, and a petite woman stooped over it, sobbing. She didn’t react to my presence, if she even knew I was there. She was fixated on the little shrine, and I couldn’t bring myself to break the silence.

“You took him from me,” the woman sobbed. My throat felt sharp.

“M–ma’am,” I stammered out, “are you alright?”

“You took him from me,” she repeated, rising to her feet and turning to glare at me. I took a half-step back. She surged forward, eyes full of black hate, and grabbed my wrist with ice cold hands.

“You took him from me, you took him from me, you took him from me!”

“I didn’t take anyone!” I shouted, ripping my hand away from her. My body shuddered, shivering at cold that made no sense. Quickly, she turned away, and I watched her retreat through the ditch to the woods on the other side of the road from the shrine. My heart raced. What was going on here? Our town is small, so small that you tend to know who people are, even on the outskirts. But I had no idea who that woman was. I’d never seen her before in my life.

My neck prickled as the eerie sensation of being watched magnified. Something was rustling the undergrowth. Normally, I wouldn’t have cared. Small animals move through these woods all the time. Any other day, I would have dismissed it as an armadillo or a raccoon. But today, with my car lying upturned up the road, my nerves frayed from a series of abnormal occurrences, and the sun nearly set beneath the horizon, was not any other day. No reasonable explanation came to me. All that came was a half-processed fight or flight response. Like a fool, I chose neither option.

The sound of the critter walking through the undergrowth came closer. I watched and waited. It sounded close enough to reach out and touch, and still it approached. My muscles locked up despite subconscious orders from my brain to move. I saw the branches bend. I saw the old leaves and weeds part as something came through. The creature emerged from the treeline.

There was nothing there.

So when I felt the weight of a hand slam down on my shoulder, my mind shattered like the windshield of an overturned car.

I spun wildly, ready to start throwing punches. There behind me was a man dressed like a trucker, with red flannel and a worn-out net cap. His stubbly face was covered in streaks of scarlet. My stomach turned at the sight and the smell of him, like rotten meat and skunk musk. The look in his eyes was feral, like a man who’d seen himself die in a thousand grisly ways.

“I didn’t mean to!” he screamed at me, falling to his knees and holding onto me as if pleading for mercy. “God forgive me, I didn’t mean to!” I tried to tear my arm free, but his grip was far stronger than the woman’s. Terrified, I reared back and kicked him in the chest as hard as I could. He tumbled back. I ran like vicious hounds were after me. I ran blindly back the way I’d driven, back to town, back to the people I knew. My mind was blank, and all I wanted was to flee the old farm road forever.

Minutes later, I couldn’t run anymore. I had to stop. I had to breathe, or I was going to collapse. My hands braced against my knees, I sucked air like a fish flopping on a pier. My chest burned and my legs screamed. I just needed a moment.

As I looked up, I was greeted by something hatefully familiar. There, not twenty away, looming like a scarecrow in a cornfield, was the white mile marker sign. I stared at it as I gasped. My body on the brink of shutdown, my mind on the edge of collapse, and at that moment I wanted to rip that sign from the earth and throw it as far as I could. The sign that had signaled the start of all this madness regarded me with the cold indifference that only an inanimate object can. I walked toward the sign. Every step felt like lead moving through mud. I still felt watched, still felt the eyes of whatever cruel force of nature took amusement from my trial.

“What are you?” I said aloud through closed teeth. The sign gave me no reply. “Answer me! WHAT ARE YOU?!” I kicked the sign. Nothing happened but a flare of pain in my toe. I didn’t care. I stooped and picked up a rock from the ditch and threw it. It bounced off the steel plate, leaving a long scrape in the decal. I stepped forward ,grabbed the flat edges in my hands, and shook it back and forth in fury.

Then I saw them. Headlights, coming down over the hill. I squinted through hot tears. The lights belonged to a truck. For the first time since I crawled free of my overturned car, I felt relief. It was Benny! It had to be! Benny was here to pick up my car and take me home! I let go of the sign and waved both hands.

The truck stopped. Cold air rushed past me. I could see the silhouette of the driver through the windshield of the truck, a green pickup truck with no towing hook in sight.

It wasn’t Benny.

The truck’s high beams switched on, forcing me to shield my eyes. They’d barely had time to adjust before I caught sight of the driver’s face inside the truck. It wasn’t the face of a man, at least, not a living one. The driver sneered at me with a lipless face covered in ragged green flesh. Eyes that glowed like yellow fireflies regarded me the way a cat regards a mouse.

“My God,” I whispered. “The Highwayman.”

Then the truck surged forward with a terrible squealing of tires, and everything went dark.

I woke to the sound of cicadas and crickets chirping in the night. It was pitch black now, save for my immediate surroundings, which were lit by a lantern set on the ground. I sat with my back against the rough bark of a tree. Surprisingly, I didn’t feel sore. I looked down at my arms and legs. No bruises or scrapes. Hope crept into my chest. Had I dreamed the whole ordeal?

Then I saw the truck. Just a few feet away, parked on the grass in the middle of a clearing in the woods, was the green truck. Next to the truck was a rectangular hole in the ground, with someone throwing out shovelfuls of dirt from within. The Highwayman. I didn’t move. The monster from the urban legends stood barely eight feet from me, digging a hole in the earth for some sinister purpose.

Why was I unharmed? It didn’t matter. I needed to sneak away before he decided to finish the job. Slowly, I stood up and turned to go.

I came face to face with the little boy. He stood in the darkness of the forest, still covered in grime and grass stains, watching me with mournful eyes.

“You almost killed me, Mister,” he said. I lunged forward to shush him, only to be slapped away by an icy hand. There beside me stood the woman from the shrine, her eyes still wet with tears. She wasn’t sobbing now, just watching me with the same mournful gaze as the boy.

“You took him from me,” she whispered. I stepped back, right into someone else. There was the trucker, with his torn flannel and old net cap. He looked down at me now, the fear that had been in his eyes before replaced with deep sadness.

“I didn’t mean to,” he said softly. “God forgive me, I didn’t mean to.”

“The Highwayman,” I whispered, pointing to the figure in the hole. They nodded. I tried to tell them we had to go before he saw us, but the words couldn’t come. They didn’t seem afraid. I tried to shoulder past the trucker. He let me, didn’t try to stop me. As I did, I saw something from the corner of my eye that stopped me in my trucks.

The Highwayman rose from the hole he had been digging. Next to the hole was a large black garbage bag. I realized in horror as I studied the shape that it contained human remains. As he hefted the bag, I could see an arm hanging loose. He shifted, and the body inside rolled into the grave. I turned, peering into the hole to get a better look. The Highwayman looked right at me. He didn’t move. I ignored him. As I gazed at the corpse in the grave, I realized that the Highwayman, real though he was, couldn’t hurt me anymore.

The corpse in the grave was my own.

Credit: Mike Striver

Medium

Instagram